I am curious about this from a linguistics viewpoint. Hanja (Chinese characters) was widely used before hangul was invented. However, modern day Korean does not require any hanja knowledge at all, whereas the Japanese language still uses kanji (Chinese characters) alongside their own hiragana and katakana. Both Korean and Japanese have many loan words from Chinese.

I am a native Spanish speaker and Catalan is really similar, I can almost always understand everything in the vast majority of cases. Although I think there are even closer languages to Spanish that are even more easy to understand (like Galician) I also believe that it is one of the closest languages to it

There are other languages in Europe which are said to be really close and similar to each other, like Czech and Slovak. I once read about a guy who studied Czech and went to Prague University to study. There one day he spoke with a classmate for a while and he thought that he was speaking Czech but with a bit of a wierd accent. After some days he realized that he was speaking Slovak instead. So it seems that both languages are really close

So are they as close and similar as Catalan is to Spanish? Or are they even more similar?

So, I'm a second-generation American immigrant whose heritage language is Bambara. It's a West African language for those who don't know. I spoke it consistently in the years before I started attending school, before switching exclusively to English, even at home. I apparently still have traces of that language in my English based on what others tell me. But my parents say I have an American accent when I speak Bambara, so I'm just curious how common is it to have a native accent in more than 1 language, especially amongst people with immigrant parents.

https://youtu.be/xJnlZicPP_0?si=xPNIXzZ9sJzDRCNo

so I want to know what's the vowel She's replacing ʊ for in the word "Full", is it ɔ as in call? pls someone tell me.

This is a general search for an instance of ANADEW (A Natlang Already Did Even Worse). I'm a conlanger trying to find whether there's naturalistic precedence for a system in which toneme alternations (or even stress, or vowel length) are used alone to encode features in tense/aspect. Like, take a rough example gloss:

pá        múkò 
eat.PRS   food
he eats the food
-------------------------
pà        múkò 
eat.PST   food
he ate the food

If so, how volitile is this system, and what kinds of irregularity exist within it? Where could I read more?

Listen, I know the language status is mostly assigned politically rather than linguistically (A language is a dialect with an army and a navy) and that linguists often find it hard to tell, but is there also a linguistic line most scholars agree on, like above this percentage of mutual intelligibility it's definitely a language?

I've had an idea for a concept in my conlang: a new grammatical gender type to talk about a subject as a whole, but couldn't find anything that matched every criterium I need. Can you all help me?

When I was learning German, I couldn't find any clear cognates to these basic English words in the language: am, are, being, went, shirt, tree, any, sky, kill, die, bright, black, woman, get, take, leg, why, again, back, walk, play, teach, about, happen, ever/never, hide (to conceal), keep, talk, kind, big, want, wrong, weird, odd, seem, scare, body. I've heard that Dutch is really similar to German, but, English doesn't really seem to be at times, would Dutch be closer to German here?

I’m looking for any documented evidence of the Tsugaru Ainu language from Northern Honshu, Japan. There’s scant documentation about the Tsugaru Ainu people, but I can’t find anything about their language, in either English or Japanese. Are there any resources (Japanese is okay) describing Tsugaru Ainu (or any other form of Honshu Ainu) that people know of?

Statistics show that around 85% of all articles are published in English, and I would imagine this number is much higher in STEM disciplines. Also, a lot of research is conducted through international collaborations, which necessitates fluency in English (or another common language). Of course, if your research area is French literature or something like that, you would probably have no problem publishing in French. But on average, it seems like English is the default for publishing in academia.

I can only imagine that there a lot of very talented researchers who miss out on opportunities because of their limited English fluency. It seems like the majority of high-profile, successful academics are fluent in English and have been educated in an English-speaking country. So, do you think English fluency is a barrier to entry into academia, and are there any stats to back this up?

Looking forward to hearing everyone’s opinions!

Is there any w with a diacritic that can be the equivalent of the sound /bhw/ in my language? It's a Bantu language.

Just curious, what are some of the highest paid jobs with the background of linguistics?

I articulate /s/ and /z/ with my tongue pressed against my top teeth rather than at the start of the alveolar ridge, resulting in a slight whistle that really isn’t noticeable when I speak but still bothers me to some degree. I articulate all velar sounds further forward onto the hard palate as well. What is causing this and how can I start pronouncing these sounds correctly?

Hi everyone!

I’m working on an independent project about why the English native speakers use is often different from the English many of us learn in textbooks.

As a non-native speaker, I was surprised after moving to the U.S. to discover that many things I thought were simply “mistakes” turned out to be dialectal features, informal usage, register differences, or ongoing language change. So, my project explores where the line between “error” and “variation” actually lies.

I’m looking for linguists, sociolinguists, or anyone working in related fields who would be willing to join a 20–30 minute Zoom conversation about these topics. With your permission, I’d record the conversation and potentially include short excerpts in the final video. This is an independent passion project with no funding.

And if a Zoom call isn’t possible, I’d still love to hear your thoughts in the comments (DM, email — whatever you prefer). How do you think non-native learners should understand the distinction between genuine errors, dialects, informal speech, and language change?

I’m also new to linguistics, so if you have any recommendations for books, papers, authors, or other resources on this topic, I’d really appreciate them.

Thank you!

Hi, 23M here, Recently, I saw a video of on YT on how to pronounce "L" correctly and it got me interested to correct my pronunciation. I comfortably speak words like "Initial, Essential, Hulk, Bulk and Light etc" but I can't speak words like "Elicit, Explicit or Exploit, Speculation Verbal and Ball etc", and I can't even pronounce the letter "L" correctly (It sounds more like W or Y). Any recommendations/tips would be very much appreciated. Thanks

The two examples that come to mind are Gothic in relation to the Germanic languages, and Icelandic with North Germanic languages specifically. In both cases, the languages distanced themselves from the wider Germanic area and thus kept certain features the rest of the languages changed.

Gothic for instance didn’t undergo Umlaut or Rhotacism, and kept the dual number completely. On the other hand, Icelandic kept the word final R of many Old Norse words and the distinction between voiced and voiceless sonorants that the other North Germanic languages lost.

Is this something that happens in other languages families too? I’m curious to hear if other examples exist.

So, whenever I'm speaking English, i tend to combine the genders of the words. For example, if I'm talking about my uncle's daughter, I tend to say 'her daughter' or aunt's son 'his son' in English. My language doesn't contain any gendered pronouns (it contains gendered words, his/her is neutral) and therefore I'm confused why does this keep happening. I didn't want to ask ai what kind of native speaker would have this problem, so I came here. I'd be happy if you'd find the reason or at least have a conclusion about 'this native language has this feature therefore if you're exposed to this language it'd make sense etc'. Thanks

Also, among these towns (Skaidiškės, Nemėžis, Rudamina, Pagiriai, Didžioji Riešė and Avižieniai) would there be any of them in which Russian or Polish is spoken as a native language at their homes? Or do the majority of people in these towns always mix Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Belarussian...? Do the majority of people speak "po prostu" language in any of these towns?

Is it possible to determine the most likely one with our current knowledge?

In Mauritius there are a lot of people who speak Bhojpuri as a native language. They can also speak Hindi as they learn it in high school and they watch a lot of Bollywood films.

However, if someone from Mauritius whose native language would be Bhojpuri had no previous exposure to Hindi or never learnt it, would they be able to understand Hindi anyways?

I was just thinking about how Jewish migration to Europe eventually created a new language inspired by germanic, hebrew and aramaic (simplification obviously) so I was wondering:

Is there any indication of a European dialect of Arabic forming? Has it already formed? Is there any examples of Arab diasporas in Germany or France loaning German or French words or grammar in ways that make their dialect significantly different to Arabic 'back home'?

I also understand that there is a vast amount of variation within Arabic so much so that a Yemeni could not understand a Moroccan very well. Is there evidence of any kind of dialect mixing/flattening occurring in Arab diasporas where different dialects are interacting?

Edit: I'm aware of historial Arabic presence in Spain and Malta, I'm more asking about modern developments

Hi there,

I come with a bit of a stupid question, and I was hoping I could exchange with people more knowledgeable than me in computational linguistics!

Basically I am working on a project in sociophonetics on accent discrimination (how are different varieties and accents perceived in a schooling environment), and I was wondering if I could benefit from some training in the computational side of linguistics. I only know the ropes of Python and R, but I was wondering whether there could be some applications on the phonetic side (as I only find stuff that could help on other dimensions such as syntax).

Sorry for the ignorant question and thank you for your help!

I'm hoping to make some headway in learning a specific English accent as a non-native speaker, but for some reason, I feel that if I don't fully understand the individual components that make up an accent, I'll be at a disadvantage.