I was listening to various versions of My Favorite Things, and I noticed that some singers clearly enunciate both of the "T"'s in mittens, and others don't. This led me to be curious about the question which is the title of this post, especially since my dad has sometimes corrected me when I elide the T in the middle of a word. For instance, I once said Newton in the t eliding manner, and then my dad insisted that I should say it with the t fully articulated.

I know a common response to "How many languages can someone learn?" is normally followed up with "Well what do you consider a language?" but I am trying to come at this from an angle like this:

Lets say you have a bunch of sliders, these sliders correlate to different variables that influence the outcome of the number of "languages" or topolects that people can maintain. I am not looking for a hard one size fits all number result, rather I am trying to understand the limits of what variables could result in what outcomes. But to determine that I need to figure out what variables have the biggest impact on the capability to learn and maintain language in general.

Here are some of my thoughts, but to be clear I am not a linguist, just a language learner, who like many, have pondered the question of "Just how many languages could a person actually hold on to?" I am making some assumptions as to what may be variables, but I have no idea how to weigh their importance, and I may be missing some variables that you all may be aware of.

So without further adieu, the Variables that immediately spring to mind for me are as such:

1. To what level of proficiency does the learner need to maintain a language to feel they have satisfied the requirement of being able to "Speak" the language. They may be able to learn languages to a level of proficiency beyond this level, but proficiency below wouldn't count. The levels I tend to see learners strive for tend to fall into three categories: Survival level (Just being able to get by, but not neccesarily being able to read books or watch movies), Conversational level (Being able to read books, watch movies, and talk about most topics), and Near native level (Trying to reach a point where they may be indistinguishable from a native in writing, or being able to produce high quality language content in their target language).

2. How much time does a learner have to dedicate to both learning but also maintaining the languages they have? Learning from the standpoint of, if it takes 10 years to reach a C2 level for a difficult language, but the learner is in their 80's, naturally that limits the amount of time they have to collect new languages, likewise they may already speak 6 languages at a level they feel satisfies their requirement to "Speak" a language, but how frequently do the languages at that level need to be used to maintain their fluidity? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Do they have time to dedicate that amount of time to all of them?

3. Where does the learner draw a line between a language and a dialect? Do they consider learning Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin as 4 languages, or as just mastering the dialects and accents of one language? Even if we include some highly divergent dialects, I imagine there is a limit on the number of accents and dialectical words that can comfortably and fluidly be switched between without consistent practice as well?

4. In line with the above, how much does similarity impact the ability to learn and maintain, specifically when it comes to Speaking as opposed to listening. Many polyglots will claim its best to focus on one language family (or sprachbund of languages) so you can pull upon knowledge from other similar languages to support learning every new language, but at what point does too much similarity across too many languages begin to just raise the chance of confusion, or at least greatly increase the time and maintenance it takes to keep them distinct and fluid in the learners mind?

5. I am sure that personal talent and motivation factor in hugely, but for the case of trying to understand the range of whats possible for an average person, I would assume the learner is not some kind of savant or mentally benefited by overfixation, but also assume that they are just generally motivated to stick with their studies given they have the time to do so, as being unmotivated obviously tanks study regardless of the rest of the formula.

To me, it feels like in theory, most people have plenty of time to learn 10s of languages, if all they are reaching for is a conversational level in mostly languages similar to ones they already learned. But we don't see a lot of people that speak 10s of languages even among hardcore language enthusiasts, which is why it seems maintenance seems to play a pretty big factor.

Sorry if this is a silly question that gets asked a lot, I just don't know where else to have a discussion with this nuance.

Is an app like duolingo good to teach children an endangered language? (Only speaking of languages that are on the verge of extinction or very underdeveloped, not french or something) ?

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I can make a sound but don’t know how to notate it. Basically I activate my vocal cords with all airways blocked off. Sound doesn’t change if I plug my nose or open my mouth, it turns into a short vowel sound it I take the back of my tounge off of the roof of my mouth. I think it’s used in beatboxing. Honestly not even sure if the IPA accommodates it…

Recording: https://voca.ro/1hEX8Nb5CMVu (four times voiced and four times unvoiced)

My understanding is that words have different ablaut patterns for, e.g. different verb conjugations and noun functions (kind of like vowel transfixes in Semitic languages?), but most of what Wikipedia says flies right over my head. Can anyone recommend resources explaining which ablaut grades are used in which situations?

It seems like a "dark L" pops up everywhere in Indo-European languages, from Latin's main allophone [ɫ] to Old English's vowel breaking to East Slavic and Goidelic [ɫ]. Is this any reason to suppose that pIE /l/ was realized as [ɫ], and has anything been written on the subject by someone more qualified than a random redditor like me?

Hello everyone. I am currently on the third year of a Modern Languages degree. I chose it because I like languages and I like the possible career options I have with it.

However, recently I’ve had a drastic change of heart. I now have a very specific career goal, which is researching autism spectrum disorders. This is a bit difficult to do with a Modern Languages degree so I am considering different options.

I would like to know whether getting a PhD in Linguistics would be a good starting point, or I should do a more scientific path (I don’t mind getting a new degree in something scientific). Thank you!

I have 3 older siblings. My oldest sister is named Gabrielle. The next oldest sibling is a year younger than her, followed by a five year gap, followed by another 5 year gap (me). I, as well as my brother and sister in the middle, all separately called her Deedee when we were very young (like 2-4). Our entire family has always called her by her full name, except for when we were very young children. According to our parents, all of us arrived at calling her Deedee without anyone encouraging us to do so, before switching to calling her by her full name around age 5-6. I think that tracks, as we are spaced out enough that none of us would have heard our siblings calling her Deedee.

Is there a linguistic reason for this? I understand that Gabrielle is a mouthful for a toddler, but why Deedee instead of something like sissy/Gabby? I remember my mom/dad referring to her as “your Deedee” when I was very young, but I was already calling her Deedee at that point. Was just curious!

We’re Americans and anglophone (grew up speaking Standard American English).

I've noticed smething odd regarding the pin-pen merger in my own speech. For reference I'm from the Pacific Northwest in the US. I've noticed that while I always seem to hear and vocalize a distinction between the pin and pen vowels, including of course preceding nasal consonants, the actual vowel used is often the pin vowel even in words spelled with an e. For instance been and Ben (the name) are a minimal pair with been using the pin vowel and Ben using the pen vowel. Additionally, at least in casual speech, when is often a homophone of win with the pin vowel. Is this something that's at all typical or expected?

This is pretty much just a thing I'm doing out of curiosity, I'm not expecting to actually be able to uncover anything, I'm just an undergrad whose interested in historical linguistics and is interested in just trying something to see where I get.

So to summarize *s in Proto-Iroquoian as well as Proto-North Iroquoian (of which there are far more reconstructions because Cherokee is the only attested Southern Iroquoian language) must be preceded by *h and this is a requirement often carried to modern Iroquoian languages. In Mohawk for example pretty much all instances of /s/ not preceded /h/ are either from loan words or (at least according to Julian Charles, the guy who reconstructed PI) historically deaffricated *ts.

Now something like /s/ only occurring after /h/ seems like a really weird constraint on such a common phoneme and made me feel like there's something else going on here, and that there may be an alternate way *s, *ts, and maybe even *h should be reconstructed in PI.

My first thought was that *s underwent fortition to *ts in all environments except after /h/. The PNI Iroquoian data has definitely disproven this, however weirdly there is only one instance of *h before *ts in PI (compared to 9 in PNI), additionally *s and *ts very very rarely seem to be in the same environment anyways and there seem to be no minimal pairs. To me at least this looks like possibly a newly phonemicized contrast between two former allophones but I don't know.

I also plan on sorting all the environments that I found, and then making a table of what the outcome of that environment is in the attested Iroquoian languages to see if this might uncover any possible alternative reconstructions or anything else. Overall I think that even if I'm wrong about a connection between *ts and *s I think *s requiring *hs is evidence that something happened to Pre-Proto Iroquoian *s that was blocked only after *h, this feels more likely to me than a shift of *s > *hs.

But yeah overall is this a good way of analyzing the data that I have? Are there other ways I could be analyzing the data I took? Is there other data I should be using? Is any of this actually anything? Genuinely asking.

So I have developed a near-Scholastic (eg Aquinas, Duns Scotus) type of obsession with the pronouns "here" and "there", and I am following this "Doikayt vs Dortikayt" (hereness vs thereness in Yiddish) strand of language in 1897 Germany that basically summarizes two opposite ideologies, that is, Bundism and Zionism:

• a human right "to be here [in Germany]"

contrasted with:

• a nostalgic feeling "to be there [in Palestine] aka Aliyah Eretz Yisrael aka Shivat Tzion, etc"

I am curious of any thought-provoking writers (paywalled or otherwise) who have explored these two concepts in Hebrew, Latin, Arabic or Greek (or any language really).

Overall my interests are in framing conflicts today around these simpler ideas of prounoun / language, and exploring this hereness/thereness further in a Scholastic type of way, and seeing whether any writers have explored these ideas creatively in language.

Sorry if this doesn't make a lot sense, but I see occasionally on social media some broader allusion to these signifiers, and I hope the community here can read me charitably in what I am asking for (titles of articles, authors, or any correcting of my phrasing so I know how to ask better questions next go round and search for my own resources). Maybe I need to study philology to help get to the gist of what I am saying.

BTW all the LLMs are absolutely atrocious with this type of exploration.

Thank you

why is the alveolar flap transcribed as /t/ (in words that the sound is written with t or tt), even though Americans perceive it as /d/ ? the only dictionary that use /d/ for flap is Oxford dictionary.

I'm specifically looking for one that is reconstructing for Proto-Indo-Anatolian: Wiktionary is proving itself to be more and more inadequate, the University of Texas and the American Heritage Dictionary are still using Pokorney's, the University of Helsinki's PIE lexicon doesn't include laryngeals, the Late Indo-European reconstruction is basically a conlang (again post-laryngeal disappearance), and the Leiden Etymological Dictionary series is focused primarily on the descendant languages.

Am I just out of luck?

I was wondering if anyone had any good ideas for learning new vowels.

I'm a native English speaker from the U.S. trying to learn Brazilian Portuguese, but learning vowels in general always seems to be tricky for me.

Specifically, at the moment, I am trying to learn how to pronounce /ɐ/ especially when it's nasal /ɐ̃/ or worse, part of a dipthong/ɐ̃w̃/. The closest I have in my native accent is /ə/.

I don't have a problem with other nasal vowels, so I am pretty sure I am nasaling it correctly, but when ever I try that sound specifically Brazilians tell it doesn't quite sound right.

In Spanish, it is not possible to have a consonant cluster beginning with /s/ at the beginning of a word unless a vowel comes first, and this didn't exist in Latin leading to the respelling of words. What caused this development? Googling the phenomenon turns up no answer.

I read some interesting papers by Johanna Nichols demonstrating that there are various typological similarities between the languages of the Pacific Rim that are unusual elsewhere in the world, extending from the western coast of the Americas all the way to the languages of Melanesia and Australia, indicative of the fact that both the Americas and Melanesia/Australia are known to have been colonized by populations that originated in East Asia. Are there papers discussing the typological similarities of these languages by other authors?

Before coming here I asked this same question to ChatGPT and this was its answer:

"From a purely historical and structural point of view, Galician and Portuguese both descend from the medieval “Galaico-Português” (Galician-Portuguese) spoken in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. This shared origin goes a long way in explaining why they remain very similar, even to the point of partial mutual intelligibility. Nevertheless, among linguists and philologists there is no single, universally agreed-upon verdict on whether Galician and Portuguese today are best seen as two distinct languages or as two codified varieties of one pluricentric language. The discussion—often referred to as the “reintegrationist” vs. “isolationist” debate in Galicia—remains somewhat open-ended, with scholarly opinion spanning a spectrum:

1. One Pluricentric Language View

   • Reintegrationists (and some comparative linguists) argue that contemporary Galician and Portuguese should be treated as varieties of the same pluricentric language, much like different national standards of English or German.
   • This viewpoint emphasizes their continued high degree of mutual intelligibility and historical unity, drawing on phonological, morphological, and lexical overlaps.
   • Supporters often cite parallels in how language standards can diverge over time for political or sociocultural reasons while still being classified as variants of one language.

2. Two Distinct—but Closely Related—Languages View

   • Other linguists, often supported by official language policy in Spain and Portugal, prefer to classify Galician and Portuguese as two separate Romance languages.
   • One argument is that Galician has undergone substantial Spanish influence in phonology, vocabulary, and orthography for centuries—enough to justify the label of a distinct standardized language.
   • In this framework, what began as a single medieval language has evolved into sister languages under different historical, political, and social pressures.

3. No Single Consensus, but Several Overlapping Positions

   • Many researchers adopt nuanced stances that lie somewhere in between a straightforward “one language vs. two languages” split.
   • For example, some see the spoken varieties of rural Galicia and northern Portugal as a continuum where linguistic boundaries blur, while recognizing that the modern standardized varieties (Standard Galician vs. Standard European Portuguese) are institutionally distinct.
   • Other scholars stress the political and identity dimensions surrounding language status in Spain, acknowledging that how one labels Galician vis-à-vis Portuguese can depend heavily on regional identity, cultural autonomy, and education policies rather than purely on linguistic measures.

In short, there is no absolute consensus, but rather a spectrum of views that partly reflect the different criteria linguists bring to the table—historical development, mutual intelligibility, socio-political recognition, standardization processes, and identity factors. If one takes a strictly historical-linguistic or structural lens, Galician and Portuguese often look more like two standards of a single historical language. If one emphasizes modern-day institutional independence, orthographic codification, and sociolinguistic identity, they are often treated as separate (though very closely related) languages."

All stuff I already knew, so it wasn't of much use lol

I know there's no "absolute consensus", but is there really no "clear winner" between these two views in regards to which one gathers more support among relatively reputed experts in the field of linguistics at the moment, even if just slightly?

I used to have a speech impediment whereby I could not pronounce /r/. It's in my L1. I fixed it myself eventually. But I'm wondering what I was substituting it with.

I know I used various fricatives. although for some reason they don't sound like the ones on Wikipedia, even when made non-sibilant. Regardless I feel confident I know what those are.

I do have one which I have no idea about. Feedback was thst people couldn't even hear it. Like it didn't exist at all. But it did. My place of articulation was either palatal or velar and I can still replicate the phoneme. I speculate it's also an approximant of some kind. Not /j/ though.

So naturally I thought about /ɰ/ (voiced velar approximant) but that one has a /ɣ/-like quality to it. There was also the bunched approximant, but that one sounds quite different to me. Unless the recording I heard was wrong.

Any ideas? Or any research on this kind of impediment that I could use?

Thank you

Just to give an example in the language I speak (Indigenous Fijian) New Zealand is translated as "New Siladi". Why not just change both words or neither?

Is there any sort of limit to how irregular a system can be? I saw a post here about Arabic plurals, and learned that eventually the system developed several pluralization paradigms. I just wonder how irregular a system can be before a new system or paradigm develops.

Honestly, I don’t feel like this is a very answerable question, and that I may be misunderstanding something. I assume a common enough irregularity just becomes the new regular, and too many unrelated irregular systems eventually end up competing until a select few win out. I guess the best question is if there’s a way to predict when things like that will happen in any given language?

i’ve noticed that some people will insert a schwa(?) sound into a consonant cluster at the beginning of a word. for example (sorry for the lack of ipa): sleep -> suh-leep, fry -> fuh-ry, stop -> suh-top, etc.

when i try it myself some sound more natural, like clusters with an l or r as the second letter, while others sound less natural, like clusters starting with s, or tr and dr (i think because i pronounce those like chr and jr, which inserting a vowel like try -> chu-ry and draw -> juh-raw highlights).

is there any term for this? is there a reason for it or why some sound more natural than others? or is it just a natural way to emphasize the word and i’m overthinking it?

I see that Japanese has a lot of loanwords from english and other languages. Sometimes they are for really common things and I wouldve figured they wouldve developed their own word for it. Especially because it was a society that was isolated for so long. They have loanwords for 'alcohol' 'clan' 'pen' 'button' 'erotic' 'favorite' and 'game center' (for an arcade building).

some of these are really suprising, especially 'alcohol' (because its common) and 'game center' (because the japanese helped popularize arcades).

does it have to do with the conveinience of writing english letters vs japanese ones? especially digitally?

sorry if any of my question seems ignorant or dumb, i am ignorant on the topic which is why im asking

They say that the letter v is the only letter in English that can't be silent, but I think there is one word that can have one. In AAVE, the word "everything" can be pronounced without /v/ and can be written as "e'rything"

Feel free to correct me if there's any inaccuracies

In general, as an English speaker, I've noticed that when I'm looking at text in French, I am able to see words that appear much more similar to English than if I am looking at a text in German. How is it possible that English (a Germanic language in the same sub-West-Germanic-branch of the Germanic language family like German) appears to have more lexicon in common with French (a Romance language)?

In addition, it seems weird to me because looking at charts/statistical analyses of the lexical origins of English words, we can see that around 26% of words are of Germanic origin while 29% are of French origin, which shouldn't make that much of difference in discernable cognates or the ability to comprehend text within French/German, if anything, it should be around the same level of comprehension via cognates, right?

I don't know if I am horribly misunderstanding my own (extremely limited) comprehension of French/German, but thanks in advance for the answers.

I saw a video a few weeks ago that claimed that almost every leanguages first makes words for black/white, them red, then green or yellow THEN blue and that this resulted in the oceans being called wine dark rather than blue by homer. Is this true? Both the homer part and the color part. He said that then stuff like Orange, Pink and Brown usually gets words.

For a long time I've had a fantasy setting which I have been carefully building up over time, developing culture, lore, wildlife, even starting to dabble in regional politics.

But this isn't a "human" civilization, so, they're not going to speak English, French, Spanish, no human languages. My question is: how would I go about creating an entire Language, Alphabet, and Accents? How long would it take? What are things I should take into account?

Generally: is a language too complex for one person to just make?

Hi, I've been wondering how many words of parthian origin armenian actually has and i had widely different over the last days from just around 400 to 500 words to 50% of the classical languages vocab being of parthian to "old armenian had a parthian borrowing of 30-60% but later all those words faded away" to "only the classical language had significant parthian influence"

Another question i have been asking to myself was the parthian language in court standardized meaning was it in some form slowed down from natural linguistic evolution so it the parthian language atleast in the dynasty would stay the same? Like how middle and new persian standardized as a speaker of both of those languages i understand early sassanid inscriptions, much later middle persian zoroastrian texts, early new persian texts and of course late and modern persian texts and speach, I was wondering if the sitiation of parthian was in a similiar position, like would a late parthian king be able to talk to the first parthian kings in a casually setting if they were in the same room for example - [If the parthian of early and late parthia are similiar enough to be mutually inteligible in a casual setting i take that as standardized in my book, im saying this because my later questions are also kind of further complicated if the parthian language roughly remained the same or not]

As middle persian and parthian were highly highly similiar how long would it take me to develope the ability to understand parthian from any period if i were to suddenly like spawn in the parthian empire

As parthian texts and sources are damn near exotic to find on the internet couldnt you technically grab the parthian loanwords in armenian and revert them back to their original parthian pronounciation, and if parthian was not a standardized language revert those loanwords back to the linguistic early and also late phases of parthian. And also get help from middle persian to more or less reconstruct parthian in any matter? - (With help from middle persian i mean [if its possible] applying the phonology / sound changes that were different in parthian, and thus reconstructing how the parthian word could have been [this would be much more complicated if the parthian language was never standardized)

Couldnt you technically reconstruct the entire corpus of old persian with the help of an PIE dictionary and then just apply the sound changes that occured from the evolution of PIE to PII to PR and then to Old persian?

If anyone has sources, links, sites or books for all the sound / phonology changes that happend from PIE to Old persian and any sources ... etc for the thing with the parthian reconstruction from the armenian and middle persian vocabularies let me know of them.

Thanks

I came across the fact that the Turkish word "tekrar" (meaning "again") and the Urdu/Hindi word "takrar" (meaning "dispute") trace back to an Arabic "takrar" which mean both of them. which means repetition.

Is this correct? If yes, is there history behind these two meanings?

I once argued that, because Japanese uses ā for borrowings containing lettER vowels rather than simply a, that it's not entirely based on RP and has a little bit of other influence. Someone then argued, showing some spectrogram stuff, that lettER and commA actually are distinct by length in RP, which goes against everything I've heard from phoneticians, but they did seem to have some evidence. Can someone with greater knowledge help out?