I'm not complaining but I've been in the U.S a while and still have my accent to an extent. Whenever I'm at a restraunt and ask for water politely, it's like I'm speaking dutch. Yes, I know the british dialect for pronouncing it is different but it is so similar. The same for half. It's not hard to put two and two together and assume what I'm referring to.

I’m originally from Northern California near Sacramento, and I now live in Orange County in Southern California. So lately I’ve been realizing my family and I say “egg” very differently from a lot of my friends in Southern California and most of The US it seems.

I say ayg and layg (I believe it’s eɪg/ ayg) and most people I know say Ehg and Leh (Ɛ)

I asked all of my friends from Northern California and they all say it like I do too.

I don’t say bag like baig though and I don’t say beg like baig. Does anyone know where this came from? Like maybe what languages had an influence on it? I wonder if part of it could be the influence of “oakies” people coming from the Midwest to work in the great depression? I obviously don’t have much technical knowledge of linguistics but i’ve always found it so fascinating and plan to study it further someday. :)

Hey all, so this is something my gf always pokes fun at me for, and now I really want to know why I do it. I'm from new england born and raised, but many people have commented that they think I have a little bit of a british accent. The word ugly is supposed to be 2 syllables, but i say it with 3 more often then I don't. Is this a regional dialect? I couldn't find answers with a quick google search.

I remember having a talk with a colleague who mentioned that in some signed languages, co-indexation, of the kind abstractly represented in the syntax-semantics of spoken languages shown in (1), gets "phonologically" realized, ie. exponed, in some signed languages. As in, there is a piece of morphology that is not agreement, which overtly shows this type of a relation.

(1) a. I(i) saw myself(i/*j) in the mirror.
b. I(i) saw him(*i/j) in the mirror.
c. He(i) knew that he(i/j) is smart.

Could anyone point me to some literature talking about this phenomenon, if it is indeed real?

I'm familiar with the Italy-Celtic theory and am aware of a theory linking Greek and Armenian, but are there any academic theories trying to link other branches of the family together? Like is there an academic who believes in a Germano-Slavic typology or a link between Indo-Iranian languages to the existing Greco-Armenian hypothesis?

If we imagine a hypothetical Proto Indo European word like *meh₂liHnóHeh₂, how would the resulting *oā be handled? Unlike something like *CeHiC which would become *CeiC, an acceptable Proto Italic diphthong, I'm not sure what would happen with *oā. I tried checking Sihler 1995 but couldn't find anything unfortunately.

Could someone give me a basic rundown of how the split between using "to have"/"to be" as an auxiliary verb in the near past (in Germanic and Romance languages) developed?

What confuses me most is 1) why is this feature present in Germanic and Romance languages despite having no equivalent in Latin? (i.e., did it develop independently? was it borrowed from Germanic languages?); 2) why is not a strict transitive/intransitive split? (or rather, was it once a strict split? are there some European languages that have a strict split?); 3) is it not odd that certain intransitive verbs in the past look like the passive? (I guess it doesn't matter because those are verbs that cannot exist in the past tense? might this point towards the form being borrowed from Germanic given the Germanic passive looks different?)

Sorry that was long but any thoughts or explanations much appreciated!

You know the sound you make following the U in 'ugh'? That growl sound in the back of your throat.

Expressions whose meaning change if you remove the space

I’ve seen a lot of presumably native speakers writing words that are typically two words into one: for example, “work out” “hang out” “break up” “stand out” “each other” become “let’s workout” “want to hangout?” “they are going to breakup” “she really wants to standout in the show” “they like eachother a lot.” Would you notice this and still be able to understand it if you’re a native speakers?

To me (i am not a native english speaker) this looks really wrong and i couldn’t tell why. I googled it and it turns out it’s because in most cases, the mashed-together word becomes a noun if it’s written without the space (i’m doing a workout versus i’m going to work out.) However for some words it seems ok? (e.g. “pop star” as “popstar”). Why does it seem like so many people get this wrong? Is it considered a big mistake and would come across as incorrect or off to a native speaker or fluent english speaker?

How come that words that describe things that I would find basic (from a necessity viewpoint, not a philosophical one) i.e. food, help, water, body could be extremely different in different languages? Of course I get that numbers, clothing, writing, while being necessary for civilization are different words because the civilizations sprung up at different times, but did people really decide that the current word for 'milk' needs to change, and why?

I've noticed a non-standard, plural use of "was" with some AAVE speakers. For example, "Jenny, Sam, and I was going to the store" instead of "Jenny, Sam, and I were going to the store."

Is there a term for this kind of usage? Does it convey additional meaning in any way (such as the way habitual be conveys unique meaning) or is it just accepted as a plural conjugation?

So one of the basic assumptions of the comparative method is that sound changes are regular and predictable given a phone's environment. But looking at the history of English phonology, you seem to have a ton of inconsistent shortenings, laxings, splits that don't seem predictable or are only predictable with grammar. How can we assume that unatested languages had regular sound changes when we see attested irregular changes frequently?

In proto Germanic, the preterite-present verbs were morphologically basically just verbs that were present in meaning, but followed a past tense ablaut paradigm, as far as I can gather. For example, the past tense of \*winnaną had the same ablaut pattern as \kunnaną* in the present tense (e.g. wann ~ wunnun, kann ~ kunnun). So theoretically one would expect the present tense of können to conjugate identically to the past tense of gewinnen, or rinnen; which would have yielded \konnen* as the infinitive, just as rinnen yields (ge)ronnen. sollen also originally had the same ablaut pattern, and thus I would have expected it to yield \sall* instead of soll in the 1 and 3sg, e.g. \ich sall, similar to *rinnen > rann.

Similarly, wissen should theoretically have had the same ablaut pattern as the past tense of reißen or beißen, which would have resulted in \wiss* in the 1 and 3sg, i.e. \ich wiss* instead of ich weiß, just like you say ich riss. In English, you can still see the correspondence between wit ~ wote and writt(en) ~ wrote. So what was the cause for these sound changes in German?

Not an English native speaker, so I need some help here:

In the new Chevelle single Rabbit Hole, at the start of the refrain (ca. 32 seconds in), the singer sings "I heard", and it sounds like he is adding an "L" before the "I". I've never heard this before. Is this a dialect thing? Is he approximating a "well" (as in "Well, I heard")? Is this only a singing phenomenon in order to better hit the correct note? Is it not there at all and it's only in my head? What's going on?!

Any ideas appreciated!

I will never be able to pronounce th, so I don't understand how there was a day when no one pronounced this sound and then it came into existence.

So I'm learning Dutch and a native Romanian with a love of linguistics (but coming from someone in computer science).

Why is the word "oare" considered an adverb by romanian linguists and not a modal particle even though it clearly is one? It cannot be translated, its dictionary entries specifies how it affects the mood, etc.

ESL here (AE specifically). I've been using an online English-[My native language] dictionary for years, it uses IPA for phonetic transcriptions which has helped my pronunciation tremendously as I've found I can't trust my ears. The only downside is, I have to look up each word for which I want to check/learn the pronunciation.

I'll be in the US soon and I want to buy a "real" (as in a book, not online) AE dictionary so I can learn and memorize the pronunciation for every word more easily and faster than looking up every word on an online dictionary.

I'm looking for an AE dictionary that uses proper IPA instead of its own transcription method (which I hear is very common in the US). Any advice?

There's been an explosion of interest in Japanese poetic forms in the languages of the world since the start of the 20th century, but it got me wondering why similar forms didn't develop in similar languages. At first I thought maybe it was a combination of mora timed rhythm within agglutinative languages that resulted in such poetic forms, but Eskaleut and Austronesian languages share these features, and whilst they're not entirely mora timed, there are elements of mora timed rhythm in Uralic languages (I'd imagine this is why Estonian has developed their own take on haiku since the global explosion in popularity of haiku) so this has made me wonder what features could have lead to the development of poetry as it did in Japan and Korea and seemingly nowhere else until people began consciously imitating Japanese poetry.

Hi all. For years, family members have been debating why my dad pronounces certain words in a way we haven't heard before, and I was hoping to call on you experts to finally put this to rest. The main "unique" pronunciations we hear from him are as follows (apologies for not knowing IPA, I hope my explanations will still be clear).

-Wash pronounced as why-sh

-Days pronounced like Mon-dee, Tues-dee, etc.

-Partner pronounced like pard-ner (this one I've actually heard before...from TV cowboys)

In particular, I've never heard a single person say wash the way he does. He's lived in the same town for most of his life, other than 6 or so years in a neighboring state for college. I've never heard anyone else in these regions pronounce these words like this. We jokingly call it his cowboy accent. I'd love to hear any insight you have into these pronunciations! I didn't mention where he's lived to avoid biasing responses, but I can share if people think it's necessary. For extra context, he's a native speaker of American English and doesn't have a brain injury or anything like that that would affect his speech.

ETA he spent the majority of his life in Boise, Idaho with a couple years in Oregon in his 20s.

Both Spanish and Italian shorten "grande" to "gran" in certain contexts. Is this a case of convergent evolution or was this already present in Vulgar Latin?

Hey been wondering this for awhile and I've been wanting to ask. In English Left and Right refer to both directions of literal movement but also to the figurative positioning of beliefs on the political spectrum; but I wonder if this phenomenon exist in other languages? And if so which ones share this notion and how common is this amongst various languages?

Thanks for any answers

My guess is that since /i/ to /e/ is a common sound change ahuacamolli just went through the same process. Also wouldn't this mean that the English/American pronunciation of guacamole is closer to the OG Nahuatl than the Spanish one?

this is probably a question about biology but this is still interesting from a linguistic perspective

I took a couple linguistics classes in college and was fascinated, but went in a different direction altogether professionally. I'm wondering what you linguistics majors went on to do for work.

I saw a post about something similar before on here but the situation was different. For context I was born in Lithuania, and moved to Ireland when I was four and have lived here my whole life, My accent ended up american (califorian according to some) (probably because of TV shows and music I listened to) but every other lithuanian I know adopted a more Irish accent and had the same amount of screentime as me, if not more. And now my accent is shifting again to a more new York-ish accent and I'm beyond confused. 💀 I rarely consume media with that kind of accent aside from clips on tiktok, and I'm never around people who speak this way. Is there an explanation for this? Might just be a weird me thing but I figured I might aswell see if anyone's dealt with this before.🙏 (Sorry if this isn't the right Subreddit to ask this in)