Get to the point, send flowers and don’t dilly-dally in the taxi line, or this city will eat you up

Staff who are asked to work in the language develop new hierarchies based on fluency

To kiss or not to kiss? London is a global city but it still has its own rules on how to meet, greet, drink and dress

A wave of training apps promise to improve on speed, focus, memory and sleep patterns. Rebecca Newman signs up for neurobics. Illustration by Miguel Porlan

A region long synonymous with exile and imprisonment is now attracting willing — and wealthy — visitors

Albert Costa explores how bilingualism remains freighted with prejudice

The culturally abundant Russian capital is welcoming to foreigners

Predictions for the year from the FT’s tech correspondents

They have millions of fans and big endorsements, but there’s a twist — these ‘virtual celebrities’ don’t actually exist

An endangered punctuation mark is being forced into extinction by the internet. Will it soon only exist in the pedant tense?