I work as a farmer in Germany and most workers are Romanians. There is generally no common shared language, so me and the other German workers continously learn Romanian terms and the Romanian workers learn German words and everyone uses simplified Grammar/doesn't use specific grammatic endings and as many terms of the other language as possible and more or less manages to communicate everything that way. Sometimes internationaly well-known terms from other languages also got added into the shared vocabulary. Over time the way each group speaks has become more similar.

Not too long ago I spend a 2-hour car trip with one of the workers and we actually talked a fair bit about different pretty complex, non-work related topics this way (mental health issues in the family, future plans etc.).

I now learned about the term pidgin language and it made me wonder at what point it would be considered one? What would you call this kind of communication before it becomes a full-blown pidgin language? Are there any requirements that need to be met for something to become a pidgin language or is it enough for two groups of people with no shared language to just be able to communicate in a mix of both groups native languages?

I'm especially interested in any stories about confusion around this.

Greetings from Spain. I am starting to write my thesis on Celtic languages, and if possible, I would appreciate it if you could share any bibliography you consider good regarding syntax, the sociolinguistic situation, history, etc.

In words like echo, eco, and cocoa, are the /k/ sounds aspirated?

I’m asking because the flap /t/ usually happens in places where the /t/ would be unaspirated, especially in obvious cases with a schwa. However, I noticed it can also happen before the /oʊ/ diphthong, which made me wonder if this is a clue that consonants like /p/ and /k/ before /oʊ/ in unstressed syllables are also unaspirated.

For example, is the second /k/ in cocoa usually unaspirated in natural speech? What about the /k/ in echo and eco?

While reading about evolutionary cognitive science, I came across the idea that modern science no longer views the brain as separate layers stacked on top of each other, but rather as a system where ancient and new networks are constantly reshaped by evolution. Thus, the brain is a dynamic structure that has been reorganized over time.

​Still, language remains one of the most debated topics in cognitive evolution.

​My question is:

Is language itself an evolutionary adaptation or did it emerge as a byproduct of other cognitive abilities coming together?

​An ape might see fire and know it’s hot. A human on the other hand can say the word "fire" draw a symbol for it and tell a story about it. This is what we call symbolic thinking.

​Did humans need language first for symbolic thinking to develop or did symbolic thinking need to exist first for language to appear?

1. How valuable are achievements in linguistics competitions (such as winning at the national level or doing well in APLO) for US college admissions?
2. What majors do accepted applicants usually pursue? Where do the winners usually get accepted to at T20s: Linguistics, Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Math, AI, something else?

would love to hear some anecdotes, examples, or previous admits

Zipf's law (the frequency of a word's use in a sample/corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in that sample/corpus) holds for many languages, including English. It's occurred to me that the languages that I tend to see get used as illustrations thereof nonetheless seem to not be very synthetic. There are numerous languages whose typologies and what generally gets counted as a "word" are at the opposite end of the spectrum, where single words can express quite a bit, to say nothing of noun incorporation. I don't often see examples of such languages often in this context. (I was doing some cursory research into this and specifically sought information regarding Turkish out, but I kept getting results about population density and settlement distribution in suburban Türkiye and not the Turkish language.)

I am also aware that languages with extensive synthesis and/or noun incorporation nonetheless will have words that show up more frequently than others, including single-morpheme words. What I want to know is, how is Zipf's law applied to highly synthetic/polysynthetic languages? Does the nature of a "word", insofar as application of the law is concerned, differ from when looking at languages like English or Mandarin in any material fashion? Is the curve much steeper than in a language like English, owing to the nature of synthesis, noun incorporation, and/or pragmatics and realistic constraints with respect to English?

I was adopted from Thailand to Denmark when I was about 5 years old.

Unfortunately, I was not able to practice my Thai since I came to Denmark, so I quickly lost my ability to both speak and understand Thai.

However, I started relearning Thai last year at the age of 31, and I have often been told by native Thai speakers that I have a native Thai accent. Put a bag over my head and they would still think I'm a native Thai speaker. I do not have a Thai accent when I speak Danish.

I have met many adoptees who have been trying to learn their heritage language, but not one of them have had a native-like accent when they spoke. Even other adoptees that were adopted at the age of 6 did not have a native-like accent when they spoke their heritage language.

So is my accent retention just unusual?

Perhaps one of the most insane thing I have just learnt recently is the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act that was enacted in 2023, but only resurfaced thanks to a Chinese YouTuber living in South Korea mentioning this affair. This is, perhaps, one of the most insane acts in modern history of language evolution, when a state attempts to complete engineer the language of the common into a completely different functioning, especially when it is done under a totalitarian state; the attempt to even remove loanwords from English, Japanese, and even Chinese, is unusual to a widespread scale. That said, just how do linguists think about this?

So I've been working on a worldbuilding project whose conlanging section involves me evolving languages from PIE and I have noticed something weird with how laryngeals work near sonorants.

Take the word *sh2nktós for example as the thing that got me into posting this. From all I know about PIE this word should be pronounced with a syllabic *n, but paradoxically this word is where Latin sānctus comes from. It's as if *h2 were the syllabic consonant. I know this comes from H > ə > a / C _ C which is how we've got *ph2tḗr > pater, but considering that in this situation the laryngeal should be next to the syllables nucleus *n̥ would make it not reduce to a vowel. Going into *ph2tḗr again, based on my (lackluster) info on Indo-Aryan, I expected the p to get aspirated, as in *pl̥th2ús > *pr̥tʰúš, but instead it becomes *pHtā́, and that H would then become a vowel like in Latin.

Am I correct in thinking this could be some sort of syllabic laryngeal that follows similar rules to syllabic sonorants but instead turn into lone vowels? If so, why isn't it written down as such on the reconstructions? If not, why then are such laryngeals vocalized in most languages and prioritized when near syllabic sonorants? Did Proto-Italic have a sound change where h2R̥ > aR that I haven't heard about?

P.S.: After posting this I realized another example. Take PIE *kéh2ikos. You'd expect it to become something like /ˈkaːhikos/ after allophony, but its descendants are PGmc *haihaz and latin caecus, both with a non-syllabic /j/ and /e/. This could either be just a simple case of vowels diphtongizing, or it could be that PIE's *i isn't actually syllabic and the word could be better written as *kéh2ykos.

According to historical linguistics, r/AskLinguistics, why are adpositions generally almost always lexically idiosyncratic? I am especially interested in the English prepositions "of", "at", "in", "from", "for", etc.

How does it end up being the case that some contexts only accept some adpositions, and why do the context-adposition pairings seem arbitrary?

Why is the letter r phoneme in english /r/? Shouldn't it be /ɹ/, since the most common realization is [ɹ]?

I have a question for the language enthusiasts.

What is the ability that some people have of pronouncing almost perfectly the different language's accents?

I found myself pronouncing different languages's tones and words easily, but I want to know if this is genetics or something else. Is there a technique or just practice?

what do you all think?

Basically, the same question as the title

Seems like it could revolutionize methodology in certain subfields, as historical-comparative and phonology are basically pattern recognition. I've been out of touch with the field for almost a decade.

And has that happened before?

I’ve noticed that in American English, some speakers has the tendency to pronounce the “ing” sound at the end of words as “een”. I assume it’s only prevalent in certain parts of the country. I’ve lived in Michigan and I do not hear people making this sound, but people in eastern Nebraska tend to. I’ve also heard it from Ryan Alison as Deacon in Fallout 4, and the internet says he’s Californian, so perhaps it could be pretty common in the west coast

Every hunnish word I see on Wikipedia is disputed. If not, are there any that just might be?

Did Proto-Germanic have frequent use of */z/ outside of those noun endings that always got dropped right away?

I am a person of color but I am not black, and for some reason when I talk to people who are close to me, sometimes I have a blaccent and use AAVE. I grew up with AAVE being used in the internet a lot (correct me if I’m wrong but I’m gonna name some few examples I heard growing up: spill the tea, dab, on fleek, clapback) and a lots of kids near my age used what they assumed AAVE was a “cool people” terms (kind of like when your outfit gets called fire instead of nice?) when I was in middle school and high school (there were a lot of black people and people of color in my school), so I guess I naturally started speaking “it” too. Tiktok and Twitter (X) basically gave AAVE more popularity than most internet slangs are from black people. But like, now I sound like “I’m black” (I deeply apologize if what I said was racist and harmful - please educate me), when my brain naturally picked AAVE from the internet. I do think personality, race, and where you grew up influences whether you’d talk that way. I was a shy introvert, POC, and lived in a middle-income (maybe lower-income (i am NOT not trying to say that all black people live in that income status) neighborhood who wanted friends and I figured since there are people who used AAVE where and near I lived it, I figured I should speak AAVE to them and standard English to those who don’t speak it? It’s all confusing. I do know the double standards in this society - black people get seen as “uneducated” while non black people who use AAVE are “cool”. It also irritates me when non black people use AAVE wrong So should I just stop using AAVE at all even though a lot of internet terms come from it? Or am I just trying to “be different”?

(I apologize if what I said doesn’t make sense to some extent - English is not my first language and I was just writing this “as I go”).

I was going through the Wikipedia article for mandarin when I found this:

Phonological features that are generally shared by the Mandarin dialects include:
the [palatalization](app://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)) of [velar consonants](app://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velar_consonant) and [alveolar sibilants](app://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_fricative) when they occur before [palatal glides](app://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatal_approximant);

I would like it if someone could explain what this actually means.

Ok, so here's a question that I think could be really easy to answer or actually really hard.

People often talk about feeling like they are a different person when they speak a different language. There is a scientific hypothisis in linguistics called the Sapir-whorf hypothisis that says language influences the way we think.

I have heard that Japanese uses Subject-Object-Verb sentence grammar structure, so instead of saying "I eat sushi" you say "I sushi eat."

Do you think that this sentence structure offers speakers a stronger imagination for the actions of things?

I grew up in a household with “slang Spanish” (Jerga) & “Spanish Pig Latin” (Jerigonza) being the first language.

Although Puerto Ricans speak different Spanish than Spaniards the sound is similar when speaking. I’d personally say Im multilingual and I’ve heard a couple of different languages raw, with no context or prior knowledge, but ever since I started binge watching shows from Thailand, central and southern Thai reminds me so much of home???

Why do they just sound so similar? It feels like I know what they’re saying but like a baby: it just doesn’t click.

Does anyone know any historical connections? Or if they share any of the same phonetic lettering? I can’t help but feel familiar and comfortable when listening to them speak Thai even if it’s in a different dialect than the kind they speak in city.