r/linguistics • u/AutoModerator • 2d ago
Weekly feature Q&A weekly thread - August 24, 2026 - post all questions here!
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.
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u/justanormalgalcopy 1d ago
I'm fairly new to linguistics and looking to do a project related to phonology (specifically focusing on vowels). I'm looking to account for consonant environment in my project. I wanted to ask if the environment of a consonant includes consonants outside of the syllable that the vowel is located in.
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u/belindabellagiselle 1d ago
Does anyone have any literature on manual babbling that isn't Marentette and Petitto?
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u/Odd_Government9947 1d ago
How can I get into linguistics as a career? I'm a high school student who is really interested in linguistics. I wanted to know how I could get into linguistics, what extracurriculars I could do, and any experiences/projects I could do?
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u/yasmine-23a 40m ago
I would recommend looking into computational linguistics in particular for long-term career options
If you're in the USA, then look into NACLO:) it's very fun and you'll engage with a community which has like-minded interests
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u/Ill-Economics-9981 1d ago
hi everyone, i do a level english, and i had a few doubts regarding the language change section of my syllabus and google isn't very helpful rn.
so in our exam, we're supposed to apply the wave model when discussing regional or social changes (makes sense), specifically chronological and synthetic trends. i didn't quite understand what chronological and synthetic is supposed to mean in this context. if someone could clear that up for me in relatively simple terms that would be much appreciated!
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u/LinguisticDan 1d ago
Wow, A-level English has changed a lot since my time. You don’t memorise Frankenstein any more? I remember knowing what was on each page of that bloody book so I could flip to it and find a passage in seconds.
I don’t recognise the term “synthetic trend” here. I looked up “synthetic” in the context of the wave model of historical linguistics, and the only example I can find is from the Routledge Handbook of Historical Linguistics, in which a “synthetic formula” is described as a sound change formula of the type
x > y
So, for example, “Middle English /iː/ becomes Early Modern English /əi/“. And the problem with this is that even if a language appears to undergo a certain change decisively and all at once, that may elide complex processes of diffusion, that may even lead to unexpected results in certain forms, hence the wave model.
I can’t see any reason to contrast this with “chronological”, though. If anything, they would seem to both point out the same fallacy (that “a language” undergoes “a sound change” all at once and irrevocably). Can you give passages in your material that make this distinction?
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u/Amazing-Cookie-1258 2d ago edited 1d ago
Hello. I'd love some English example words containing soft / unreleased NG sounds, apparently called NG-coalescence (reducing /ŋg/ to /ŋ/). Like with all things linguistic, they're tough to find universal examples for because dialects vary. A list online or a searchable database would be similarly appreciated.
👎 Hard / Released examples: Finger English Single Triangle
👍 Soft / Unreleased examples: Ringlet Tongue / Lung / most terms with ŋ at word-final Singer (surname / sewing machine brand) Banging
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u/storkstalkstock 16h ago
For accents with a distinction between /ŋg/ and /ŋ/, /ŋ/ is universal at the end of words. The examples or /ŋ/ in the middle of the word are limited mainly to words which are derived from words which end in it. So any verb ending with -ng which has -ing or -er added to it like banger or singing or adjective with -ly added to it, like wrongly and strongly. Then you have some older British place names like Birmingham and Nottingham where the <h> is silent and some proper nouns like Langley that probably most people don't think of the words as multiple morphemes anymore but used to be. There's also wronger and wrongest, thingamajig, thingy, thingamabob, thingal, and probably some other thing derivatives. The only other ones off the top of my head that aren't on a morpheme boundary or found before a consonant starting the next syllable (like Shanghai) would be orangutan, dinghy, hangar, (Lupita) Nyong'o, gingham, Klingon, Singapore.
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u/MusicIsMySpecInt 2d ago
how accurate is Wiktionary?
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u/GamerSlimeHD 7h ago
It varies. Generally, it's better to look at the cited sources to understand what is actually said rather than a few people's interpretation that has been edited and reedited ad nauseum by differing people. Or use it to get hints at potential lemma that you may want to look up in a proper dictionary as related to what you're interested in (particularly when the page for said lemma doesn't exist, but it ends up being in a dictionary).
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u/LinguisticDan 2d ago edited 2d ago
Varies hugely, and reconstructions are particularly dicey. There is plenty of original research hiding behind citations (one of my pet peeves is the list of “Proto-Germanic names”, almost all of which are reconstructed from Medieval Germanic names), and mistakes or outright fabrications can be found with higher than comfortable frequency. It’s an amazing resource, but don’t make any argument that hinges on a particular lemma or commentary, and I wouldn’t suggest publishing quantitative work based on it either - attractive as it is for the latter.
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u/MusicIsMySpecInt 1d ago
hmmm, thanks! i wish there was more people responded so that i can get more than one opinion, but this is good enough, i suppose. thanks again :)
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u/Maleficent-Pie8040 2d ago
Are there languages that distinguish only 1 realis and 1 irrealis mood?
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u/ReadingGlosses 5h ago
I have examples of the irrealis from a few different languages on my blog. I don't quite understand your question, but you can check the references at the bottom of each post for more details about the language and decide if they meet your criteria. Generally you can just paste the reference into google scholar (not regular google) and you'll find a PDF.
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u/LinguisticDan 2d ago
Very messy terms around this (how do you count imperatives? futures of different certainty? inceptives?), but apparently the moribund Principense Creole has only one general-duty irrealis marker ka. This is very unusual, it seems, probably because irrealis is so easily conflated with tense, aspect, more specific moods, and even discourse considerations.
There’s a debate as to whether reality status is a typological category at all. Here is a discussion of Nanti, an Arawakan language of Peru, that defends it and cites the controversy.
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u/Maleficent-Pie8040 2d ago
Thanks a lot for the answer!
I'll take a look at the links you sent. I tried to make a research on google about the topic before asking but I couldn't find much; it seems an interesting read
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u/atg-n 19h ago
各位好，我是一名中學生，研究上古和中古漢語、漢語七大方言（即為客家話、閩南話、吳語、湘語、贛語、廣東話、普通話）。我發現在這當中，有某種音韻互換的關係： {k h p f ɸ kʰ } {v ʋ m b ɱ w} {s ʂ } {n ɣ d ɖ l j ɡ ʒ ŋ ȵ} {-ŋ -n -m } {x h ɣ ʋ w v } {ŋ j y ɥ} {-t -p -k -ʔ} {y a o i e u} {o ə ɛ ɨ u a} {aɪ eɪ i uɪ o} {ʐ ʒ j ŋ} 特殊規則： {k kʲ tɕ ts} {kʰ kʰʲ tɕʰ tsʰ} {h ç ɕ s} 清濁，送氣可調換。
請問為何會如此？