Approximately 7,000 languages are currently spoken and signed across the globe. These are distributed across more than 100 language families—groups of languages that have descended from a common ancestral language, called the proto-language—which vary in size from two to over 1,500 languages. Certain properties of human languages have been argued to be universal, including their capacity for productivity and communicative efficiency. However, language is the only animal communication system that manifests in so many different forms. The world’s languages exhibit striking diversity, with differences spanning the sound inventories, the complexity of derivational and functional morphology, the ways in which the conceptual space is carved up into lexical categories and the rules for how words can combine into phrases and sentences. To truly understand the nature of the cognitive and neural mechanisms that can handle the learning and processing of such diverse languages, we have to go beyond the limited set of languages used in most psycho-linguistic and neuro-linguistic studies. This much-needed step will also foster inclusion and representation in language research.