Q&A weekly thread - April 20, 2026 - post all questions here!

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.