Global online game offers clues about why we get languages so very wrong

Think you could safely tell the difference between Russian, Hindi, Spanish and Telugu? The Great Language Game is the place to test that theory. 

The online guessing game has yielded a ton of data for academics to sift through, offering insight into just how good we are at telling Icelandic from Tongan.

In the game, developed by programmer Lars Yencken in 2013, players are asked to listen to an audio clip and select its language match. Hedvig Skirgård, a PhD student at the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language in Australia, has poured over 115 million guesses from the game, culled from 400 audio recordings of 78 languages. Read more...