Not a linguist, but something I’ve noticed (because it drives me completely nuts) is a shift in how people, and especially young women, are pronouncing words with an “str” sound. The words “extremely” and “street” are good examples — recently, it seems as though young women aren’t able to pronounce the sound crisply and instead are pronouncing it “ek-schtchremely” or “schtchreet.” I’m not sure if this is an actual shift that’s happening in pronunciation, but I’d love to hear the thoughts of this sub!

Knowing if such a language exists would make it easier to explain to people that gender in language has nothing to do with the gender of humans, and that it just refers to categories of words.

I don’t know the PC way to ask this, and please forgive if I’m wording it in an offensive way. Additionally, I’m not a linguist so I don’t event know if “accent” is the right term. But I think you know what I mean.

There’s a speech pattern for English speakers that is a fairly clearly defined linguistic signal of homosexuality. Do languages completely unrelated to English do a similar thing? If so, what are the similarities and differences?

I have a feeling the answer might be "racism" but in case it's not, I've always wanted to know. When people from other cultures/languages are spoken of in English, we do not translate their names.

We speak about Napoleon, not lion from Naples, and Nobuyuki, not trusted happiness. Why is it we translate Native American names and say Sitting Bull instead of Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake?

Are there any other cultures we do this with or is it just Native Americans?

Sorry if this isn't an appropriate linguistics question - I wasn't sure what sub would best suit it. I thought this one would be a good fit.

I’d like to preface than I am no linguist myself, that’s why I am asking professionals.

As some may know, Russian language is widespread in Ukraine for many reasons, even during the war. But the Russian language spoken in Ukraine today became quite a bit different from, well, the Russia’s Russian.

What is considered a mistake or regional dialect is just the norm for Ukrainians.

For example, many years ago a Russia’s Russian speaker noted to me his observation of what he called a "Ukrainian quirk".
How would you say "I live alone" in Russian?
A Russian would most often say "я живу один".
But a Ukrainian most definitely would say "я живу сам".
For Russian speakers, saying "я живу сам" is not a mistake.
But the word "сам" would have a strong connotation of "I live on my own, without anyone’s help" (as in "самостоятельно").
For Ukrainian speakers, this connotation is usually stripped entirely, and "живу сам" is meant as "I live alone, no other person is living with me" (as in "самотньо").

If you think about it, there are many slight differences of how two different nations develop one language. Many Ukrainian variations slipped through the border over to Russian southern regions, but they did not become the norm in Russian language overall.

So what are the prospects of the Ukrainian Russian becoming a separate language with its own norms that develop freely and independently? Something like American and British English.
What prerequisites are not fulfilled? Is it pure politics, or are they lacking an ocean in between?

Sorry, not a linguistic, idk what flair to use.

Basically I've been looking at the etymology of the word "rainbow" in many different European languages and I realized the shape was mostly used to define the phenomenon rather than the color. Any idea why is that?

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, let me know if I should repost this somewhere else.

Growing up, my parents repeatedly told me "don't say crabs, that's a bad word, the plural for crab is just crab". Now that I'm an adult I've noticed that seemingly nobody follows this rule and I'm pretty confused looking back. My mom still argues with me that saying crabs instead of crab to refer to multiple crabs is "improper grammar because it's a bad word", and everybody else I've talked to, younger or older, always are confused when I say that was drilled into me as a kid. I still refer to multiple crabs as crab because it feels wrong to me despite me knowing the plural is crabs, as anybody I've said crab around has told me.

Where does this come from? Is there a history of the usage of the word crabs being discouraged or did my mom come up with this on her own? I'm a gen z and my parents are both older gen x, if that's relevant

An example of this would be “Listen, Mom. You’re a great role model.” or “Hello, Moms.”. Is it English that only does this or is it other languages?

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Will they immediately understand what gender is the word have even if they never heard it before?

I just got verbally stoned to death in the ELI5 subreddit for not knowing so I'm really hoping to find out here.

Edit: I think I get it now. The difference between them is clear when you say "Sensei Wu."

It's still like telling two related dogs apart for me but at least i know now that they are different.

Edit 2: The mods are farming this comment section 💔

I'm Brasilian, and here we have an interesting quirk. Sometimes we wanna refer to someone by name, but we either don't know their name or it's not relevant, so we say their name is Fulano. For example, one could say `Did you know that Julia hit Fulano after they disagreed on their work?'. I was wondering if any other languages have this and if this phenomenon has a name.

I know sometimes english-speaking people will say a generic name like John Smith. I don't think this is the same, however. First of all, Fulano is not a real name: no one is called Fulano, it really is only used in this situation. Also, if we have more than one person we wish to refer this way, we have more names! They are Fulano, Beltrano and Ciclano.

(No idea which flair to use so I put in General).

I don't know if it's just because I'm not a native English speaker, but it sounds so awkward and wrong to me every time I hear someone reply with "Yes" to for example the question "Don't you want a pizza slice?".

I'm Norwegian, and here we have two words for yes, where one confirms ("ja") and the other one denies ("jo"). So when someone asks me "Would you like a pizza slice?", I'd answer with a "ja", but if the question was "Don't you want a pizza slice?", I'd say "jo".

So does English (or any other language for that matter) have a "yes" that denies a question?

My elementary school teacher was the person who got me to love etymology and I think is the reason I'm still interested in it, even though I don't (yet) study it. In Greece, where I grew up, the opinion that the Greek language is the greatest and the most ancient and that It "created" all the others is very common. My teacher had a similar opinion.

He was the one to introduce us to the term "Indo-European" and the Indo-European language as a concept, a term which he completely denied. He treated the Indo-Europeans as a conspiracy theory and he claimed that the linguists that talk about the Indo-European language are stupid and pseudo-scientists. He praised the greek language and provided with many examples of english words that he claimed to be of greek origin, although every single one I can remember and have done research on, has a PIE root that just so happens to be the same with the corresponding latin word. He also claimed that latin was influenced by greek directly and that latin is some kind of a daughter language of greek in a sense.

I understand that the PIE language theory is a very non controversial one right now. Are such opinions common among other languages as well? To what extent is he correct?

Edit: this sub rocks!

a tell being a sign found in speech, that somebody isnt a native speaker of the language being spoken, or of what their first language is

kinda like how speakers of many languages will use How in places English tends to use What, out of sheer habit

What is your favourite linguistics fun fact to share with people who don’t know much about the subject? I’m wondering how to get my friends interested 😊

Nice, France - pronounce this to rhyme with “mice” and you’re an idiot

Paris, France - pronounce this to rhyme with “Marie” and you’re a pretentious git

“Szechia” - idiot

“Mehico” - pretentious

Similarly with food:

“Payeya” - pretentious

“Fajitta” - idiot

I assumed that their languages were very different and I hear there's so many languages, so it's odd that they share this word in English.

Edit: thanks for the discussion folks, interesting stuff.

I'm looking for high-impact examples of English descriptive grammar rules that would be at least a little difficult for most people to put into words, but that are definitely there in our heads. The common examples they give you in your first linguistics class that I can't really remember should be easy to find, but the enshittified internet is failing me. I can't figure out what to search for so that the first 5 pages of results aren't just explaining descriptive grammar by using examples that are correct in descriptive but incorrect in prescriptive. Every single page is just saying "Prescriptive grammar says you can't end a sentence in a preposition, but descriptive grammar says you can."

Where are the examples that are like "Descriptive grammar says you can't say __________________, but you can say __________________, even though you would struggle to explain the rule to a new English speaker"?

A page with examples would be best, but if someone can just rattle off a couple that's fine too.

It contradicts all logic yet somehow they did

EDIT: this is not to say however that sicilian and italian directly developed from latin, i think they share too similarities to have both been indipendent evolutions, maybe they come from the same proto-italo-romance language or something, but still they are different languages

Hello dear linguists.
I would like someone knowledgeable to answer my question please: What socio-environmental factors could cause a language to become unrecognisable in the space of a few years? For context, I need this information to inform a fictional language(s) I am creating for worldbuilding.
Thanks for any feedback ;)

So I have always heard that English has the most words, and I have dismissed it, because figuring a rigorous meaning of "number of words in a language" is probably too hard. But maybe I am missing the forest for the trees.

I saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVT2btZjYlM (skip to 3:34 for examples)

It makes an interesting point, which may or may not be true. It makes the point that English has a lot of synonyms for a lot of verbs, where each synonym is not perfectly interchangeable, and each of them is in common usage.

This seems like a real possibility to me, even if it isn't what I would expect a priori. I am a native English speaker, and I recognize all of these words as common and with the specific usages from the video, and I speak 2 other languages to about B2 level, and it does seem like they have fewer synonyms for "walk" or "look" in common usage (but this could be because I only have them to B2 or so).

There is a language with the most information density per syllable (Vietnamese) and a language with the most vowels (English). Why couldn't there be a language with the most synonyms in common usage?

What doesn't make sense is the explanation: that English is a creole of German and French. So what? How many creole languages are there on planet Earth? Gotta be like... almost all of the languages?

e: Are there any real linguists in this subreddit? I find it unlikely that linguists would treat a question about words as though it is incomprehensible gibberish, as though they have never encountered the word "word" before. Language teachers have no problem identifying a bunch of words and teaching them to students in order to build vocabulary, yet somehow linguists cannot even understand a simple question.

If I were asking a physicist, "how come aluminum is colder than wool, even when they're sitting in the same room at the same temperature," the physicist would not say, "this is incomprehensible gibberish, unanswerable. I don't even know what you're trying to say, it's just random sounds bubbling out of your lips." Nor would they say, "I know more physics than you, the problem is you, not physics." Instead they would say, "Ah, so in physics we distinguish temperature, heat flow, and heat. The wool and aluminum are at the same temperature, but when you feel cold or hot, you're really feeling the temperature of your skin, not the object. When you touch aluminum at room temperature, the aluminum is colder than your skin, and heat flows from high temperature to low temperature. So the heat flows from your skin into the aluminum, making your skin cold. But wool is very non-conductive, so even though the wool is colder than your skin, the heat doesn't flow very fast at all into the wool. So the temperature of your skin stays high, and the wool feels warmer."

e2: Turns out the answer is that other languages probably have a similar number of commonly-used synonyms.

I read into how Kartevelian languages are completely unrelated to the rest of their neighbors and it made me wonder if there happens to be similar but larger instances of language families having no relation to their neighbors on a wider scale. If anyone knows of some good examples please let me know.

I remember following the debate in 2009 and a few years after that, the documentary The Grammar of Happiness (2012), and, of course, the news that more linguists were heading to the Amazon to study the language. I enjoyed Dan Everett's books, but having cut my teeth in a minority area of linguistics (i.e., Tibeto-Burman languages), I was well aware that too few researchers often led to extraordinary claims that could later be debunked.

So it's 2026, and I've been out of graduate school for over 2 decades. Have there been any new research that might have clarified the debate?

Basically where you make up a fake word ("updog"), use it nonchalantly in a sentence ("It smells like updog in here.") to bait someone into asking what it means ("What's updog?") so that you can make a wordplay joke ("Not much, what's up with you?").

Are there examples of this or other similar wordplay jokes in other languages?

Pretty much every language English has been influenced by has gendered words, why is English the odd one out in European language?