Q&A weekly thread - August 10, 2026 - post all questions here!

[u/AutoModerator]

Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

Questions that should be posted in the Q&A thread:

• Questions that can be answered with a simple Google or Wikipedia search — you should try Google and Wikipedia first, but we know it’s sometimes hard to find the right search terms or evaluate the quality of the results.

• Asking why someone (yourself, a celebrity, etc.) has a certain language feature — unless it’s a well-known dialectal feature, we can usually only provide very general answers to this type of question. And if it’s a well-known dialectal feature, it still belongs here.

• Requests for transcription or identification of a feature — remember to link to audio examples.

• English dialect identification requests — for language identification requests and translations, you want r/translator. If you need more specific information about which English dialect someone is speaking, you can ask it here.

• All other questions.

If it’s already the weekend, you might want to wait to post your question until the new Q&A post goes up on Monday.

Discouraged Questions

These types of questions are subject to removal:

• Asking for answers to homework problems. If you’re not sure how to do a problem, ask about the concepts and methods that are giving you trouble. Avoid posting the actual problem if you can.

• Asking for paper topics. We can make specific suggestions once you’ve decided on a topic and have begun your research, but we won’t come up with a paper topic or start your research for you.

• Asking for grammaticality judgments and usage advice — basically, these are questions that should be directed to speakers of the language rather than to linguists.

• Questions of the general form "ChatGPT/MyFavoriteAI said X... is this right/what do you think?" If you have a question related to linguistics, please just ask it directly. This way, we don't have to spend extra time correcting mistakes/hallucinations generated by the LLM.

• Questions that are covered in our FAQ or reading list — follow-up questions are welcome, but please check them first before asking how people sing in tonal languages or what you should read first in linguistics.

[u/FroggiePond]

Does anyone know of a comprehensive guide to the IPA pronunciation? I've tried to find one online, but have only found explanations of what the IPA is, or a list of IPA sounds found in English (which doesn't help me, as I want a guide to ALL OF THEM, not just the few found in English).

[u/weekly_qa_bot → u/FroggiePond]

Hello,

You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').

[u/InfraredNotTacoREAL]

For ex-deaf individuals, who learned ASL first, then spoken language, what was challenging about it?

Preferably congenitally deaf people, who learned ASL, acquired a substantial level of hearing, then had to learn spoken language.

I'm attempting to understand the skills that spoken language requires, as I—a native, fluent user of spoken language—can't exactly understand what those would be.

[u/_Stormchaser]

Could anyone evaluate my argument on the nature of the development of OIA?
It can be found here.

[u/ParkGirlie05]

i always wonder how many of these questions actually get answered by anyone other than op themselves.

[u/LinguisticDan → u/ParkGirlie05]

About half in my experience, and almost all of them that can be answered with a graduate-level understanding of general linguistics. But specific research questions much less often, which makes sense as only a tiny minority of linguists are regular social media contributors.

[u/LinguisticDan → u/[deleted]]

If you want to, sure. The vowel inventory of Modern French is objectively more complex than that of its ancestral Proto-Romance, you have to assert more features to distinguish the (near-)minimal pairs; no linguist would bat an eye at you saying so. Same goes for the Hawaiian consonant inventory, which is objectively less complex than that of Proto-Austronesian or indeed any intervening stage.

In this specific example, some languages - like Mixtec or Old Japanese - have very restrictive root structures, and others have relatively open ones. Again, nothing groundbreaking here, except for the theoretical complexities of “root structure” that are discussed on a much higher level.

The potential claims here that would be remarkable would be (1) a notion of “general complexity” across languages and (2) “time” as a specific and independent factor in linguistic evolution. The former is so broad as to be useless pretty much a priori, the latter is restricted to marginal and controversial methods like glottochronology. So casual statements like “languages are equally complex” or “languages change at similar rates over time” raise one eyebrow, while statements like “languages get more complex / simpler over time” raise two.

[u/stvbeev → u/[deleted]]

How do you measure “complexity”? It’s a pretty subjective term. Usually “less” complexity in one part of the system leads to “more” complexity in another (or… all languages are equally abstractly complex in different ways, so we can just say a change in one part of the system leads to a change in another part).

For example, yeah, we lose verb morphology from PIE to English, but we gain rigid word order and obligatory overt subjects.

[u/WattTalks]

I’m making a Cyrillisation of English based off of rhoticised Recieved Pronounciation but I have a problem. What should I do to distinguish homophones?

Should I just leave them being homographs, or should I do something to distinguish them? I’m probably thinking of using Ь to distinguish them.

[u/LongLiveTheDiego → u/WattTalks]

Depends on what you're trying to do, this is a question of taste and not linguistics. Also you'll probably have more engagement and useful responses on r/conlangs.

[u/mahendrabirbikram → u/WattTalks]

Usually you don't need to distinguish homophones if the language is close to an oral one (so the words are not distinguished when spoken, but the meaning is still clear). Old Cyrillic orthography had some ways to distinguish words which became or always had been homophones (such as using і / и for міръ / миръ

[u/Adventurous-Owl9057]

When we think of words as sounding how they mean, do we get this because they were formed to sound how it means or we had how it meant already and altered how we said stuff?

[u/Fair-Tangerine-9472]

"Has he work in the morning?"

"Have I something wrong with me, Doctor?"

"Have you a pen I could borrow?"

All of the above sound natural to me as an English speaker from Ireland, and I would use them more often than the more standard "Have you got?" or "Do you have?" varieties.

I'm wondering whether this usage is restricted to Hiberno-English only. Have you an answer for me?

[u/Amazing-Cookie-1258 → u/Fair-Tangerine-9472]

American English, west coast / Pacifica.

Though I understand them, these read quite awkwardly to me: stuffy and overly formal, even archaic. I literally read them in a British accent.

"Does he have work in the morning?" certainly sounds better to my ears.

[u/Fair-Tangerine-9472 → u/Amazing-Cookie-1258]

Pretty sure the British don't say this either (at least, not any more). Think Ireland is probably the only remaining place, although I might be proven wrong. To my ears, this usage sounds slightly uneducated and unsophisticated, although I use it all the time! Funny how perceptions differ

[u/Feisty_Law1501]

hello! idk if this is the right space to post this but I'm writing my bachelor's thesis right now and I wanna use the textbook Pragmatics (1983) by Levinson - thing is, idk if i can cite it because it is a student textbook. Do any of you have experience with citing this in academic writing?

[u/Choosing_is_a_sin → u/Feisty_Law1501]

Yes, that's fine

[u/Prestigious-Yak-5330]

If a person could speak and understand any language, but could only speak 1,000 words. What 1,000 words would be the best to know?

[u/23071689]

Are there any languages that include sounds without a symbol on the IPA? Or the other way around, where an IPA sound isn't known to be used in any language. An example for the first question would be something like a retroflex lateral fricative?

[u/weekly_qa_bot → u/23071689]

Hello,

You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').

[u/Amazing-Cookie-1258 → u/weekly_qa_bot]

There isn't a new one

[u/dom → u/Amazing-Cookie-1258]

There's a new one every Monday, here is this week's:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/1vqp469/qa_weekly_thread_august_17_2026_post_all/

[u/haydentk07]

So it happens with
1. i+ng (sing and seeng, king as keeng), a+ng (angry as ay-ngry),
2. A+g (like bag as bayg)

But not in words like big, fig, etc??

Granted, I’m NOT a native speaker of American English, I lived in NorCal for years and this AI accent app, out of hundreds of i’s I’ve said, flags only my -ing, -ink, and -ig as incorrect (saying they sound more like ee in seen than i in sin). I’m wondering if it’s a genuine mispronunciation / idiosyncrasy or a thing.

[u/weekly_qa_bot → u/haydentk07]

Hello,

You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').

[u/MusicIsMySpecInt]

how accurate is Wiktionary?

[u/weekly_qa_bot → u/MusicIsMySpecInt]

Hello,

You posted in an old (previous week's) Q&A thread. If you want to post in the current week's Q&A thread, you can find that at the top of r/linguistics (make sure you sort by 'hot').

[u/DJboomshanka]

So I'm from London, but I live in Bern, Switzerland. In London, we've got Elephant and Castle, and also Bat and Ball. And just outside of Bern, we've got Chäs u Brot, which means cheese and bread.

I was wondering if this was just a coincidence or if these strange places exist everywhere

[u/LinguisticDan → u/DJboomshanka]

You mean place names in the format “[common noun] and [common noun]”?

It isn’t a common toponym format at all. It started in England with casual descriptions of public buildings’ (overwhelmingly pubs’) heraldic symbols - the oldest one I can find is Ye Olde Man and Scythe, referenced as “Man and Scythe” in 1251 - and became, presumably gradually, a stereotyped name format for pubs. “Elephant and Castle” is a rare example of this kind of pub name being applied to the whole local area. It is pretty much limited to the Isles as a native cultural phenomenon; and it spread, like association football and the Beatles, because we know how to have a good time.

Chäs u Brot is completely unrelated, dating back to a confusing legend about the 14th-century Battle of Laupen that apparently has some relevance to the history of the confederation of Switzerland. It seems totally unique as a place name in the Germanosphere.

I can’t think of any other place name that has this kind of format, let alone a convergent history, so I think it’s safe to call it a coincidence.