This Pacific archipelago of about 300,000 people is home to more than a hundred languages, all of them Austronesian. No country on Earth has more languages per head. Some islands have several, a few spoken by only a few hundred people. To understand one another, ni-Vanuatu use Bislama, an English-based creole that serves as the national language, alongside English and French, which are also official.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.