Language

Language is a defining property of the human mind, and it closely interacts with other cognitive capabilities such as emotion and reasoning.

The Berlin School of Mind and Brain has been a particularly well-suited location for fostering language research, and recent appointments have made it even better. The School is embedded in a fertile research environment consisting of the linguistic departments at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, and Universität Potsdam, the psychology departments at Humboldt-Universität and Potsdam, the philosophy department at Humboldt-Universität, the Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS) in Berlin, and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science in Leipzig.

Special Newsletter issue on language research: view or download pdf here

This page last updated on: 06 November 2026

How many sentences does a language have?
Difficult to tell! The linguists hold that the number of sentences is infinite. The argument goes like this: Take any sentence. There is not one to which you cannot add another word. The intrinsic fascination, however, lies in the nature of the human language faculty. It is a powerful cognitive mechanism for information processing implemented in the brain. It takes thoughts and sensations as input and translates them into vibrations in the air – and vice versa.