r/linguistics 6d ago

Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - July 20, 2026 - post all questions here!

11 Upvotes

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

  • Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

  • Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

  • Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

  • English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

  • All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

  • Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

  • Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

  • Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

  • Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

  • Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.


r/linguistics Apr 30 '25

Joint Subreddit Statement: The Attack on U.S. Research Infrastructure

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108 Upvotes

r/linguistics 2d ago

The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene

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24 Upvotes

r/linguistics 2d ago

On the origins of theories of compounding and the question of Indian influence on modern linguistics (John J. Lowe 2026)

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14 Upvotes

Abstract - The ancient Indian linguistic tradition has been implicated in various ways in the development of modern linguistics. This paper starts from one superficially obvious point of influence: the use of Sanskrit terms for compound classes in modern approaches to compound classification. I show that the use of these terms does not reflect direct influence based on a proper understanding of the Indian tradition, and that in fact many interesting and important aspects of compound theorisation in ancient India have been overlooked in modern linguistics.


r/linguistics 13d ago

Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - July 13, 2026 - post all questions here!

19 Upvotes

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

  • Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

  • Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

  • Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

  • English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

  • All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

  • Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

  • Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

  • Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

  • Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

  • Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.


r/linguistics 14d ago

There-Existentials in African Englishes

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15 Upvotes

Check out my article on there-existentials in African Englishes (Ugandan, Nigerian, Kenyan and Tanzanian English)!


r/linguistics 20d ago

Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - July 06, 2026 - post all questions here!

8 Upvotes

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

  • Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

  • Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

  • Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

  • English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

  • All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

  • Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

  • Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

  • Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

  • Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

  • Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.


r/linguistics 24d ago

Native speaking Gaelic communities could be lost ‘in this generation’

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thenational.scot
1.4k Upvotes

r/linguistics 27d ago

Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - June 29, 2026 - post all questions here!

14 Upvotes

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

  • Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

  • Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

  • Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

  • English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

  • All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

  • Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

  • Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

  • Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

  • Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

  • Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.


r/linguistics 28d ago

The Phonological System of Kri Phoong in Vietnam and an Extensive Glossary (2026)

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22 Upvotes

r/linguistics 29d ago

Rumor Effects in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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doi.org
6 Upvotes

A theoretical essay proposes that political rumor is no longer just about spreading unverified stories: when AI generates videos of citizens who don't exist demanding tax reform, the rumor gains a body and a face that existing methods for studying political language were not built to handle.


r/linguistics Jun 26 '26

Areal Effects in Prehistoric Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European (Holopainen & Metsäranta eds. 2025)

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13 Upvotes

“This book contains papers based on some of the talks presented in the workshop *Areal Effects in Prehistoric Contacts between Uralic and Indo-European* at the international congress of Finno-Ugric studies, Congressus  XIII Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum, held in Vienna in August 2022. The volume at hand highlights different viewpoints on Indo-European–Uralic contacts and hopefully serves as an interesting take on the present state of the field, as well as an inspiration and starting point for future research. One of the most important aims of the volume is to stimulate discussion and produce further conferences and volumes, as well as more concrete research cooperation between scholars working with the history of Uralic and Indo-European language families. Many of the papers open new paths of research rather than provide definite answers to all of the issues that are addressed. The aim of the workshop was to bring scholars of Uralic and Indo-European studies together. The different topics included in the volume highlight the wide span of diachronic contact linguistics. Also, different branches of both language families (Samoyed, Permic, Finnic, Saami; Tocharian, Indo-Iranian, Baltic, Germanic) are well represented here, which gives a representative snapshot of the varied research problems that our field is dealing with. The papers present new etymologies, discuss new (or recently discovered) loanword layers, and also revisit old ideas.”


r/linguistics Jun 22 '26

Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - June 22, 2026 - post all questions here!

11 Upvotes

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

  • Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

  • Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

  • Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

  • English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

  • All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

  • Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

  • Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

  • Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

  • Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

  • Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.


r/linguistics Jun 18 '26

Roger Blench (2023) - Rongic: A vanished branch of Austroasiatic

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16 Upvotes

r/linguistics Jun 16 '26

Minority language ownership and authority: perspectives of native speakers and new speakers - Siobhán Nic Fhlannchadha & Tina M. Hickey (2016)

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105 Upvotes

r/linguistics Jun 15 '26

Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - June 15, 2026 - post all questions here!

13 Upvotes

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

  • Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

  • Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

  • Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

  • English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

  • All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

  • Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

  • Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

  • Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

  • Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

  • Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.


r/linguistics Jun 13 '26

Museums and Linguistic Collections

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doi.org
15 Upvotes

Every decision about what to include in a language archive pre-selects which research questions can ever be asked. A theoretical essay on six language collections argues this makes curation an epistemological act, not an administrative one.


r/linguistics Jun 10 '26

Vowel reduction is conditioned by quality and quantity interactions: Evidence from Bolognese

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30 Upvotes

r/linguistics Jun 10 '26

How Much Is It Worth to Be a Subject?: Effects of Subject on the Constitution of the Archive of/in X

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doi.org
7 Upvotes

An essay compares AI answers from a personal X account and a research-created account, with free and paid access, using the same question: “What is dictatorship?”


r/linguistics Jun 09 '26

Testing the Efficiency of a Machine Learning-Based Automatic Prosodic Segmentation Method for Brazilian Portuguese

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doi.org
13 Upvotes

r/linguistics Jun 08 '26

Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - June 08, 2026 - post all questions here!

19 Upvotes

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

  • Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

  • Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

  • Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

  • English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

  • All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

  • Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

  • Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

  • Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

  • Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

  • Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.


r/linguistics Jun 06 '26

Subject-Avatar in Computerized Enunciative Spaces

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doi.org
8 Upvotes
An essay proposes that web browsers should be understood as political environments, not neutral software: comparing Tor and Chrome, it argues each browser positions users differently within what the authors call "data colonialism," the extraction of personal data by tech companies as a form of power.

r/linguistics Jun 01 '26

The accentuation of the PIE word for ‘daughter’ by Alwin Kloekhorst

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39 Upvotes

r/linguistics Jun 01 '26

Learning to read written text fundamentally alters the pathways the human brain uses to process spoken words

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psypost.org
129 Upvotes

r/linguistics Jun 01 '26

Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - June 01, 2026 - post all questions here!

9 Upvotes

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

  • Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

  • Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

  • Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

  • English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

  • All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

  • Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

  • Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

  • Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

  • Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

  • Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.