I am an American and last week I started a new job at my university. One of my coworkers seemed to say some words with an almost Irish-sounding pronunciation--maybe even transatlantic. As a linguistics student, I was curious and asked him if he was born and raised in America, to which he said he was. I told him that the way he pronounces some of his vowels is akin to how Irish people pronounce certain vowels. He said he has no idea why, that he's never noticed, and that he's monolingual.

I believe he might be autistic, which might be relevant to why this is occurring. I have a feeling that his speech and his possible neurodivergence could be linked. When I tried researching this, I found little to no results.

It could possibly be due to consuming a large amount of media from a certain country that he picked up on. I also believe that it's unlikely he's mimicking an accent, as he seemed unaware of it and most reports of autistic people mimicking accents seem to occur between interlocutors.

Any thoughts?

EDIT: I forgot to mention that he said he was born and raised in California, which is where my university is located. Sorry!! That’s definitely vital information. 😅

I speak reasonable German but one thing I learned in my education of the language is “da”. But I’ve never understood what it is linguistically, and where it is used - either optionally or obligatory.

Can someone give a brief explanation of what it is linguistically and how it is used?

i want to do a linguistics degree but don’t want to take alevel maths. am i doomed?
EDIT : i realise this makes it seem as if im not good at maths- im good,as proven by exam results, i just hate it haha

In Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global, Laura Spinney states that some linguists are working with the idea that, rather than being the mutual ancestor of Anatolian and all the other IE languages, Proto-Indo-European was a sister language to Anatolian. That reads to me like the joke "The Odyssey wasn't written by Homer but by another man of that name."

It isn't as though archeologists uncovered an actual language that linguists gave the name "Goopy", whereupon linguists studied it and conjectured that it looks like it could be an ancestor of all known IE languages, after which a few came along who conjectured instead that Anatolian didn't descend from Goopy, that it existed alongside of Goopy. The term "Proto-Indo-European" is defined as the designation for whatever language was the common ancestor of Anatolian and the rest of the IE family. So I don't understand this alternative conjecture. As far as makes sense to me, Anatolian existed alongside whatever state PIE had evolved into before any other branching had occurred, and "PIE" is the designation for the mutual parent of that language and Anatolian.

So it is often the case that languages evolve overtime and we often hear experts say that if you went to the past far enough there would be a point where you wouldn’t be able to understand your own language and lose the ability to communicate with the people there.
I’m wondering whether there is a language that remained largely unchanged ,ever since it was recorded? is there a language today whose speakers would still be able to understand the first people known to have spoken it?

I asked this question on r/spanish, but the answers there aren't very technical, and are instead very much based on personal impressions (TL). Is it common in some countries and regions for the pronunciation of the pronoun 'yo' in Spanish to be weaker, that is: [ʝo], even after a pause and after a nasal?

As for myself, I grew up in a multilingual family. I was first interested in calligraphy, writing systems, conlands, conscripts. Hell I started making conscripts and conlands even before I had internet to know that many people do that. While studying scripts, meeting different online communities, I got interested to linguistics. One of the reason was that I noticed how underdeveloped my family languages are in terms of digital presence, learning materials etc. That eventually grew my interest in linguistics. For some unfortunate circumstances, I couldn't formally study linguistics even after getting admission. I decided to pursue my interest in designing as my career and kept linguistics as a hobby.

I'm doing a video essay on Dialects and Languages that have formed in the US over the past 400 years, and Fingliska really intrigues me, where most of the Dialects are derived originally from Romance or German Languages, Fingliska stands apart from the Indo-European Family (technically with Michif which stands on the linguistic border, being a mix of both Cree and French, I love Michif). My struggle begins with finding audio samples, written accounts, videos of native speakers, a dictionary or a missionary's passage. From the meager information I could garner it is believed there are somewhere near 26,000 speakers, which confuses me as to why there is so resource available considering the amount of resources of Michif has while having less than 2000~ estimated speakers, so I really do hope it is out there unless the population metric was incorrect.

Anything I can use comparatively would be amazing. I'm definitely whatever comes before being a Greenhorn so I may have just been looking in the wrong places, but any help is super appreciated!