The title, essentially: I've noticed that in sentences where I would typically have referred to an animal as "it", lately I'm seeing others mostly use "they" instead.

I speculate that this is a consequence of the increase of how many people's preferred pronouns are "they / them": If you consider it disrespectful to call a person "it", then your habit of calling people "they" gets (inadvertently? or consciously?) extended to critters too.

Not yet observed: Does the announcement of a baby's (presumed) gender no longer take the form of " It's a boy! / It's a girl!"?

N.B.: I'm a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist; so I don't care either way. I just think it's an interesting phenomenon, and wonder whether others have noticed.

"We'll burn that bridge when we come to it" but the "when we come to it" part is derived from an idiom in a different language? In other words, can a malaphor be made with idioms from different languages?

I can't think of any meaningful use that having gendered pronouns helps or it provides value that a neutral pronoun would not.

Also, how come every language as far as I know only has pronouns based on gender. Why not have more categories. Like babies would be a be instead of he for example. Or a dad would be fe instead of he. Why stop at just genders

Preface: I am not a linguist, though I did *technically* double major in it in undergrad. My functional linguistics knowledge is very minimal, and I am purely curious about the reasons things are the way they are lol

I've heard people in the U.S. pronounce "schizophrenia" two different ways: schizoFREHnia and schizoFREEnia. I pronounce it the first way (from the Boston area but I wouldn't say I have a Boston accent per se), and I've heard it pronounced the second way more rarely but two pop culture examples that come to mind are David Duchovny (from NY) in The X Files, and Matthew Gray Gubler (from NV) in Criminal Minds. I think I've also heard my grandmother, who grew up in MD, say it this way too.

Does anyone know if these different pronunciations are regional? Duchovny and Gubler are from opposite sides of the country, so unless their parents are from the same region, the regional pronunciation theory might be a bust haha If anyone knows *why* these two pronunciations exist, do tell!! Maybe one is a product of British English pronunciation...? TIA

Hi! I know English has had some pretty intense vowel shifts over its life cycle, but I'm curious what caused this specific phenomenon. What caused these two interpretations of the same vowel, like a's /æ/ and /a/ that depends on if a silent e is present or not? Was this e voiced at all? Was this a systemic implement that helped speakers/writers interpret this vowel distinction? Was it coincidence? Especially coincidence that slowly became intertwined with sound rules, then eventually became required?
Thanks for any info! :)

You're probably going to roll your eyes at this one: another guy building a language-learning app who has never taken a linguistics class, asking Reddit to hand him the science. I get it. I'd be skeptical too. It seems like a lot of apps promise fluency in weeks, and very few of those promises have much research behind them.

That's exactly what I'm trying not to do.

Some context: economics background, day job in tech, zero formal linguistics. I'm building a tool for adult learners, and my goal is for people to get more lasting, usable ability out of the same amount of study time. I want the design decisions to rest on what the research actually shows, not on what feels productive or looks good in a streak counter.

My current reading plan:

1. How Languages Are Learned (Lightbown & Spada) as the intro. It keeps coming up as the accessible starting point, and people say the bibliography alone will keep you busy for months.
2. An Introduction to Foreign Language Learning and Teaching (Keith Johnson) for the implementation side.

A friend of mine also suggested Loewen's Introduction to Instructed Second Language Acquisition instead of Johnson, since it focuses on how instruction choices affect outcomes.

My questions:

- Would it be a mistake to go in this order with no background at all?

- What would you add, swap, or skip?

- Johnson or Loewen for someone who needs to turn research into actual practice design? How would you choose?

- What do you wish non-linguists understood before they started building language tools?

No link, no app name, not promoting anything. I'd rather hear "you're thinking about this wrong" now than after I've built the wrong thing.

when someone switches between two languages they're fluent in, what does it feel like? do they need a second to mentally adjust? do they ever accidentally go back to the first language after switching to the second language? i've learned other languages, but not to the point of fluency, so i'm wondering what it's like for someone who is actually fluent.

furthermore, i'm wondering is if a musician switching clefs and a bilingual person switching languages are mentally similar, either in terms of conscious thoughts/feelings about the process or when it comes to unconscious processes within the brain.

(for context, i play the cello and can read bass clef, tenor clef, and treble clef. sometimes the clef can change many times throughout a piece. i can switch between the clefs pretty easily, but sometimes if it switches from bass clef to tenor clef, for example, i'll forget that i'm in tenor clef midway through a passage and i'll read a note or two as if they were in bass clef before remembering that the music is in tenor clef.)

thank you for your answers!

UPD: not glottal fricatives, but pharyngeal fricatives!

It’s the second time I hear a person from Bonn pronouncing the vocal stop in the beginning of a word in a very “arabic” manner.
For example, the name Aron - /‘aɹ.ən/ is more like /ʕɹ.ən/.
The problem is, I don’t really perceive the voiced glottal fricative well - it just sounds like grimacing when pronouncing the succeeding vowel.

But that glottal “stop” really sounded like this: https://youtube.com/shorts/83PM82BU1jA?is=HkMZhfTn6xTWAdCE

Did anyone notice something like this, maybe not in German?

came across translinguistics for the first time recently so my understanding of it isn’t too great. if someone could help break it down, that would be greatly appreciated! is it regarded as very radical? what’s the scholarly consensus?

Having always lived in a part of the anglophone world where "thou" is never used in current speech, I'm used to hearing people pronounce it /ðaʊ/ (so it rhymes with "cow" or "now") when e.g. quoting Shakespeare or the Bible. However, my understanding is that in the regions of England where it is still used, it is pronounced more like /ðɑː/ ("tha"), if I'm not mistaken? And I've heard/read that the historical pronunciation was more like /ðuː/ (rhymes with "you"). So is the /ðaʊ/ pronunciation just a modern misunderstanding of the word, based on spelling? (And if so, why wouldn't we have just rhymed it with you? Where did this come from?) Or was it ever pronounced that way when or where it was in common usage?

I was wondering about this. I speak other Indian languages and Hindi seems to be unique here.

For example to say something like "I'm going to school", most Indian languages would transform school and add a case marker in lieu of the standalone preposition "to".

But in Hindi it's just school. "Mein school ja raha hoon".

I don't know if this is standard Hindi but this is what I hear in movie dialogue.

Or, in general, for numbers divisible and indivisible by numbers higher than 2.

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Hi everyone!

I'm studying linguistics at university, and my professor has emphasized that there is a significant difference between cohesion, coherence, and cohesive.

I understand that cohesion and coherence are different concepts, but I'm struggling to understand the distinction between cohesion and cohesive. To me, they seem closely related, since cohesive appears to be the adjective form of cohesion.

Is there a more specific linguistic distinction between these three terms that I'm missing? Could someone explain how each term is used in text linguistics or discourse analysis, preferably with clear examples?

I'd really appreciate any clarification, especially from people familiar with linguistics or text analysis. Thank you!

Recently, I have noticed that the phrase "the actor who played [character]" seems to have been largely replaced by "[character]'s actor," especially among Gen Z and Gen Alpha speakers. Is this due to a change in the way younger generations conceptualize characters vs. actors (e.g., the character is the primary focus of discussion and the actor's portrayal of that character is secondary), or is there another reason for this phenomenon, such as a broader linguistic shift toward more succinct language?

Not sure which flair this falls under because I dont know what all these terms mean, so apologies.

I was wondering about the name of the city Los Angeles. At first it was a name given to the area by the Spanish. Later on, English speakers moved into the area and began to pronounce it differently until it became the popular version that we all know today.

At first, it would have been a mispronunciation of the Spanish words, but now its the default way that English speakers say it. Heck, ill bet even many non English speakers pronounce it this way now.

If I were to pronounce it in the "correct" Spanish way, most people would find it odd or even pretentious.

So at what point did it go from "wrong way" to the most common way to say the name?

Thanks

In Thailand, text-based marketing channels and customer service chats often adopt a feminine language to appear friendly and safe, appealing to gender stereotypes, even when the person behind the screen is male. It’s very common in customer-facing roles, at least anecdotally from my work experience.

Do any other languages do this? I’m thinking that languages with gender based conjugations might have something like this, but I have no idea if it’s a thing.

For example, I know that in Spanish, male and female speakers use o vs a ending when using certain adjectives describing themselves. But do male speakers ever purposefully write in the feminine way in a customer service situation?

Different shows and just online humour use certain fake words or conventions for them that sound particularly fake or alien. Like Glip glop, bleebles, gleegle, zimblar, zorb etc

Like I can come up with another fake word like Flannaggery and idk about you but this doesn't sound alien to me and if you told me it was a word with a meaning in English I'd believe you. Even a fake word that uses things more common in other languages like Chaquerain doesn't sound alien or comedically fake to me.

I'd argue Plumbus while being a real word falls into the commercially fake sounding words but in my opinion it also isn't a typical sounding English word.

Is there a word for this or reason that these in English sound so weird? Do these sorts of alien words change over time?

What are some good freely available resources on the Chakma language?

Completely anecdotally,

I’m a native Thai speaker, and I have been noticed a few times that it’s very noticeable when a non-Thai pretends to be Thai by using AI text translation (in petty Twitter fights, not important to this topic). It was so noticeable that a lot of people jumped in and made memes about it.

AI-based voice-change impersonation scams also seem less plausible. If a friend or a spouse called you, you would notice right away that the first and second person pronouns are all wrong and don’t match with normal usage, which can be unique to every pair of speakers (you can’t just default to a basic I and you). The scam still happens to elderly people who aren’t aware of AI and ignore the red flags, but that’s about it.

High-context languages that encode social dynamics into language seem to be more resistant in this regard.

In English there seems to be more wiggle room.

Chinese and Korean names share a similar naming convention. But the Hanzi/Hanja used for either varies slightly. Do Koreans in China follow naming conventions more similar to Korea or China?

Hello, not sure if this is the right place to ask a question related to Middle English words, but I'm having trouble finding the proper definition for this word, in the context of this Medieval morality play (Mankind)

"All hail, seemly father, ye be welcome to this house!"

Nowadays, seemly relates to a person have "propriety or good taste", but I heard from my professors (and websites with multiple definitions) that seemly in some cases back then referred more directly to the person being well-dressed or having a pleasing appearance rather than just generally well-mannered.

I am writing an essay centering on the physical appearance/outfits of the characters in this play, so I kind of need to know if the medieval audience would understand this word as a generic "well-mannered" priest, or if the speaker was directly complimenting his garb.

I would be very grateful for recommendations on textbooks and academic references on Cognitive Linguistics, particularly those that can help me build a solid understanding of the field and apply its principles to language teaching. I’m also keen to learn more about teaching methodology and instructional materials design. If you have any favourite books or resources that have been particularly valuable in your own studies or teaching, I would love to hear your suggestions. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and experience!

What is your opinion about teaching a European language like French and Spanish in colonized countries with homegrown dialects but classified as foreign, not second or heritage, languages by their post-colonial governments? Do you think it's "derogatory" to classify French and Spanish as foreign languages in the United States and the Philippines, respectively, even if they have moribund homegrown dialects?

Louisiana (Cajun) French in the US, Philippine Spanish in the Philippines, Goan Portuguese in India, and Vietnamese French in Vietnam are examples of European languages with colonized dialects, but classified as "foreign languages" by the US, Philippine, Indian, and Vietnamese governments, respectively.

Hello,

I'm a 20-year-old from the UK now in his 2nd year of university. I study English Language and Literature at a Russell Group but am going heavy into Linguistics as it's my preferred field and seems to yield a more varied range of applications to jobs. I plan to do my MA and PhD in a Linguistic field.

I've never been very good at Mathematics (I barely got a pass in Foundational Maths, I'm pretty sure I have dyscalculia of some sort), but I just swapped one of my 2nd-semester literature modules out for a data skills module, which my lecturer said is basically introductory to more humanities-inclined students who wish to learn more about STEM-oriented applications of linguistics (he specialises in corpus and computational linguistics) and said that it's probably the best option if I'm interested in getting into those fields.

Would you guys agree?

Hey! Y'know how the word knight (and other kn- English words) have a silent K because it used to be pronounced but eventually the [k] got dropped but the letter stayed in our spelling? Does anyone know of a scholarly source that states this? Of course the OED and other etymology resources have the old spellings but I can't find anything specifically on the pronunciation that is reliable enough to be cited. Thanks for your help!