Balthasar Bickel

Speaking is a capacity that comes across as innate and effortless. Language, however, is what sets humans apart from all other animal species. How and why did humans acquire that capacity? And where does it come from? To what extent does new media modify it? There have been few answers so far and the few attempts have remained highly speculative. Launched in 2020, the NCCR Evolving Language aims to fill these gaps. To do so, it can count on the support of 38 research groups from all over Switzerland, from various disciplines: linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, biology, anthropology, medicine, genetics, computer science, geography, mathematics and philosophy. Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and hosted at the University of Zürich and Geneva.