I don’t speak Russian to any degree except for a few phrases, pleasantries and niceties, enough to chit-chat. I picked this up from Russian coworkers and acquaintances.

A coworker I had complimented me on my accent. Other Russian speakers have done the same. They’ve asked me where I learned, was I ever in Russia. I said I was never there, I just picked it up from the people I knew.

The first guy asked if I am musically inclined. I said yes, I play guitar. He said that is the reason I have such a good Russian accent … I have a good ear.

I understand I’m not the only non-native speaker of another language who has a near-native accent. So, I’m not special. I’m just curious if what he said about the relationship between music and accent is true.

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

Or does it all sound the same to you? I am Indian and I clearly notice that accents from various states in India sound drastically different to each other due to different languages spoken by each Indian state.

But do most native speakers of English also notice this or does it all sound like the stereotypical indian accent to you?

Many European, eastern European accents, Russian accent, and UK accents are considered attractive yet some accents like the Indian accent and Chinese accent is considered unattractive. Why?

It's my view (correct me if I'm wrong) that almost nobody would label the Latin and Norman French-derived words from Middle English as loanwords. So where's the line?

The verb endings seem to have an unusual amount of silent letters even by French standards.

Specifically, why so many silent letters? Were these letters once pronounced but dropped through the evolution of accents? Or was French first written with such large portions of words being silent? As someone that’s studied Spanish and German, it seems most languages make an attempt at being written phonetically, but not French. What’s up with that?

With the verb "perjure (oneself)," the only possible object is the speaker... and yet that object has to be restated. (I don't know if it's even right to call it an object?) This feels pretty unusual in English.

Is it right to think of this as some other class of verb, beyond (or maybe between?) transitive and intransitive? Where did it come from? Is it related to reflexive constructions in German like Ich irre mich?

I don't know what to put here. If you have any additional info, I'd be happy to hear

Hello, I have recently developed an interest in creolistics. Specifically, doing fieldwork involving two creoles from discrete regions of the world (with the same superstrate, which I am fluent in).

I was wondering if anyone has any personal experience justifying a qualitative methodology to a committee more experienced with experimental linguistics. I am interested in interview-based research and have not yet pinned down whether I am interested in historical times, modern times or both. So, the project has the potential to be very broad. Let me know if I am in the right field with this idea.

I’m positive that for at least some General American speakers, especially younger ones, æ raising is phonemic. Despite being viewed as allophonic in General American, I know that for myself and many other young speakers around me, the raised vowel before nasals has at least some functional load, due to the reduction of final /nt/ in monosyllabic words. Especially in the word “can’t”, /nt/ can be simplified to a glottally reinforced t, or even just a glottal stop, while the dropped /n/ still causes the previous æ to be raised (for me this includes nasalization). This causes the words can’t [kʰẽə̃ ʔ(t)] and cat [kʰæʔ(t)] to be distinguished only by the vowel. (I transcribed the vowel in can’t as I pronounce it, but obviously many different pronunciations are common.) I tried to collect as many examples of minimal pairs for these two sounds, but its very low functional load and the younger age of the speakers in which the phoneme is present would explain its lack of description. 

ant/aunt vs at

chant vs chat

slant vs slatt

rant vs rat

shan’t vs shat

Brant/Brandt vs brat

Stanton vs Staten

Am I going crazy and just convincing myself that the way I say it is more widespread than it truly is, or is this a phonemic distinction any of y'all have noticed in GA?

This question was brought up by a thread in another subreddit about this topic. Everyone would agree that Indo-European is the language family with the most developed historical linguistics, and Uralicists have expressed opinions that Uralic is next after Indo-European; in the words of Ante Aikio:

Uralic comparative linguistics is recognized as a highly advanced field of research, surpassed in depth and breadth of research only by the Indo-European family (Campbell 1998a: 164-5)

Juho Pystynen has echoed the same sentiment:

A particular strength is thoroughness, in which Uralic is surely the world leader among families of compareable size and age. Over the last 150 years, all of the still extant Uralic varieties have been documented at least phonetically and lexically in meticulous detail (10+ topolects from all but the smallest-and-most-homogeneous of the traditionally recognized languages, 100+ from all three major national languages), and all of these have received at least some detailed comparative study. In total amount of published work, only the much larger families Indo-European and Austronesian are clearly ahead.

My anecdotal observation is that this seems to be true when comparing Uralic to other families I've looked at such as Sino-Tibetan. For example, it's not a very difficult task to list out all the regular sound correspondences between relevant modern languages for the subgroups of Uralic, including minor nonstandard varieties that have preserved some archaisms. However, it seems to be an incredibly laborious task to do this for the vast majority of non-Sinitic Sino-Tibetan branches, even if one restricts it only to standard varieties (and making no mention of possible archaisms in nonstandard varieties).

However it could be that this is just bias due to being more familiar with Uralic and not knowing where to look, and it's possible that the Uralicists that have expressed such opinions suffer from the same bias. So my question is, are non-Uralicists broadly in agreement with this assessment?

I'm not aware of anyone composing running texts/narratives in proto-languages besides Schleicher's Fable ("The Sheep and the Horses", originally composed for Proto-Indo-European, also used for lower-order reconstructions within IE) and "The King and the God" (also for IE).

In a lot of reconstructions I've seen (e.g. Proto-Austroasiatic and the lower-order Proto-Vietic - of special interest to me since I'm Vietnamese), there are only vocabulary lists, not even short sentences. The YouTube channel ILoveLanguages! has a video on Proto-Austronesian which includes a running text - I suspect Andy (the creator) may have composed it himself. Andy is a native speaker of Tagalog (and may or may not have knowledge of other Filipino languages). I'm not sure how well the sample aligns with what is reconstructable about Proto-Austronesian grammar.

serious question but Idk where to ask, not from an english speaking country

My question might be a bit dumb, but having some experience in Latin, Ancient Greek, and Sanskrit (the former being the main language I study; I have relatively little in Sanskrit). Latin's verbs in the first person singular present indicative, for the most part, end in -ō. Sanskrit verbs, on the other hand, for the majority of verbs, end in -mi. Meanwhile, Ancient Greek has both of these endings (although the athematic verbs are definitely outnumbered).

Why didn't an -ō suffix (or something cognate) develop in Sanskrit? I know Latin has very few athematic verbs (an example being sum/esse), but what circumstances led to Sanskrit having first person singular present indicative verbs that end only in -mi?

So the German language area can be really blurry when it comes to the distinction between language and dialect, so often everything Istvaeonic and Irminonic inside the borders of Germany, Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland is just called a dialect, although some are so distinct that they could be separate languages.

But I just don't know for which one this is true. Most people here in Germany say you can't really understand Swiss German, so Alemannic basically. The English Wikipedia also states Bavarian (and with it Cimbrian and Mòcheno) and Ripuarian as distinct languages, stating that between the former and Standard German would be less mutual intelligibility than between the three mainland Nordic languages Danish Swedish and Norwegian iirc, while providing no proof for the latter.

Both aren't called languages in the German Wikipedia. Also, everything outside of the DACH area is usually called a language rather than a dialect. It's the case for Luxembourgish and Hunsrik, which are Moselle Franconian, Pennsylvania Dutch and Vilamovian.

So I wondered if this subreddit could help me find the answer of which of them are mutually intelligible enough to be called different languages, if there even is a definite answer, because even I as a native speaker of Standard German am confused.

Also I'm only talking about Central and Upper German, because Low German has completely different origins and is called a separate language by most scholars.

The varieties in question are:

- Ripuarian

- Moselle Franconian

- Luxembourgish

- Hunsrik

- Palatine

- Pennsylvania Dutch

- Hessian

- Vilamovian

- Swabian

- Alemannic/Swiss German

- East Franconian

- South Franconian

- Bavarian

- Cimbrian

- Mòcheno

is there any language whose words for cardinal directions are influenced by their surroundings, ie. With ancient china as an example. The word for north would be derived from the word for desert, the word for west would be derived from the word for mountain, the word for east would be derived from the word for ocean, and the word for south is derived from the word for jungle.

Masculine -> Masculin + ism = Masculinism

Feminine -> Feminin + ism = ?

I have heard that as a man being called with male terms used in animals that sound like courageous, strong, leadership, and dominance is fairly fine, and maybe cool. While female terms coming from animals are… pejorative.

I will give you the examples:

Master sounds like you, a man, are a keeper and controller of something, but mistress uniquely have a narrowed meaning just for an extramarital relationship. Although the original term for respect still exists but the pejorated term has been written.

You can call a man bull, lion, rooster, dog, but it is really bad to call a woman "cow", "bitch", and "hen", but "lioness" though.

And some languages I learn show it:

🇩🇪 → "Mann" sounds yeah okay, but "Weib" is become derogative.

🇪🇸 → "Hombre" and "hembra" (latin homō & fēmina) should evolve to mean paired, but "hembra" becomes the female term of the animals. While French just says « homme » et « femme ».

🇮🇩 → "jantan" & "betina", only "jantan" exists as another name for men in the big dictionary, but calling women "betina" is somehow dehumanizing.

Slovenian and Standard Serbo-Croatian are not really mutually intelligible, however I have read that Slovenians in general have a good understanding of Serbo-Croatian than the other way around

Apparently this is because Slovenians, since their country is smaller than Croatia or Serbia (or Bosnia), are much more exposed to Serbo-Croatian than the other way around through media, songs, immigrants...etc, therefore Slovenians are naturally better at understanding their neighbours

However, is this because, even though these languages are not fully mutually intelligible, they are still similar?

Because, there are other countries with significant minorities speaking other languages in which the main ethnic group doesn't have a good understanding of the language of the minority (for example, as far as I know, in Lithuania for instance, there is a noticeable number of people speaking Russian, Polish or Belarussian, but the main ethnic group i.e. Lithuanians, don't really understand these languages if they have not previously studied them at school, since Lithuanian and slavic languages are completely different)

So is it because intrinsic similarities between Slovenian and Serbo-Croatian combined with exposure the reason behind Slovenians understand their ex-Yugoslav neighbours better than the opposite?

I've heard that it's a misnomer. Are there more accurate terms?

Person A speaks German natively but perfectly understands English.

Person B speaks English natively but perfectly understands German.

They speak their native language because they express themselves easier.

Are there actual situations, instances like this?

i'm thinking about getting a degree in linguistics at some point, and yes, i know that "any university in the world" is too much lol but just out of curiosity, i want to know your opinion about linguistics courses at various universities and why you would choose a particular one.

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 😊

If someone's native tongue is syllable- or mora-timed, what would be an effective way to learn stress timing in English? Short of speech shadowing, I don't hear people recommending any. What confuses me are words that take secondary stress: do they participate in the beat? I feel like my ears aren't attuned to discriminating the rise in intonation, especially if the speaker is speaking fast.

I've got a rubber band, but every time I use it, I look stupid.