Most popular questions

71 Why did Old English lose both thorn and eth? 2019-07-05T22:41:58.840

68 What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)? 2012-08-15T18:30:24.147

62 Why did early Indo-European languages seem to be morphologically complex? 2011-09-20T15:33:02.470

59 Why do we have interest in (dying) language preservation? 2012-03-03T06:33:35.110

58 When should one use slashes or square brackets when transcribing in IPA? 2011-09-20T02:12:44.443

58 Is there an online tool to convert IPA symbols into audio sound? 2014-10-20T22:56:46.120

53 Do unschooled people use cases correctly, e.g. in Germany and in Russia? 2014-12-09T04:45:46.763

52 Is there a linguistics term meaning "it's grammatically correct, but nobody says that"? 2020-01-27T04:06:03.933

46 Why do most words for "mother", across languages, start with an [m], and for "father" with [p]/[b], but not vice versa? 2011-10-21T14:57:43.727

46 Why do English transliterations of Arabic names have so many Qs in them? 2019-09-29T19:19:54.080

46 Could the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs have been deciphered without the Rosetta Stone with modern tech? 2019-11-03T19:21:08.453

44 Is there any language that uses different pronouns for "we" depending on whether the spoken to person is included in the group? 2015-09-23T20:15:21.830

42 What's the difference between phonetics and phonology? 2011-09-15T22:43:55.990

42 What's the difference between syntax and grammar? 2013-04-03T01:20:57.180

41 How do linguists place the vowels of a language precisely on the vowel trapezoid? 2011-09-14T19:53:05.890

40 What is word order used for in "free word order" languages? 2012-02-23T06:59:56.103

40 Is English tonal for some words, like "permit"? 2019-09-09T01:05:05.600

39 Languages that are gaining morphological distinctions 2011-09-14T17:36:21.640

37 Why is there (almost) no variety to the Hebrew accent in Israel? 2020-04-13T07:48:56.053

36 Why does speech speed seem to vary between different languages? 2011-09-29T14:50:30.377

36 Is there really a difference between agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages when spoken? 2011-11-25T05:51:31.247

36 Why isn't "I've" a proper response? 2019-08-22T15:50:45.143

35 Are there languages with other spatial deixis besides "here", "there" and "over there"? 2011-09-21T22:51:42.913

35 Why are certain there-sentences infelicitous in English? 2011-09-22T13:18:10.810

35 Are there languages that don't have this kind of ambiguity? 2020-08-11T05:10:04.853

34 Why is “ß” not used in Swiss German? 2018-12-16T19:13:43.423

34 Were ancient languages as sophisticated as modern languages? 2019-12-16T01:02:55.963

33 Why do the Romance languages use definite articles, when Latin doesn't? 2019-10-14T12:48:05.327

32 Is the connection between 'right' in the sense of direction and concepts like 'correct' limited to Indo-European languages? 2020-03-26T11:25:14.973

31 How do I format an interlinear gloss for HTML? 2011-09-13T21:04:33.437

31 What languages lack personal pronouns, and why? 2012-02-14T14:39:01.423

31 Why the prevalence of "ph" in transliteration? 2009-12-23T18:29:59.850

31 Is it unusual that English uses possessive for past tense? 2019-10-09T22:25:56.450

31 Is there any evidence to support the claim that English grammar is unusually straightforward? 2020-09-22T13:48:50.823

30 Can Modern Hebrew be considered an Indo-European language? 2011-09-14T08:52:35.437

30 Is there a difference between an affricate and a plosive+fricative consonant cluster? 2011-09-15T20:59:11.100

30 What meaningful distinction is there between morphology and syntax? 2011-10-17T18:26:46.247

30 What are the fundamental differences between Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics? 2012-04-16T11:24:37.907

30 Is it hard for software speech synthesisers to handle IPA? If so, why? 2013-01-05T14:56:27.227

30 Why do Japanese people have difficulties in pronouncing English? 2017-05-02T10:47:25.207

29 Lists of linguistic resources 2011-09-27T17:42:09.257

29 Why does English not have a cognate of words like heter, in Swedish, or llama, in Spanish, etc? 2015-02-19T21:51:44.890

29 Is future tense in English really a myth? 2019-09-05T14:23:50.503

29 Is there a language where there are personal pronouns for the first or second person that have gender? 2020-10-03T01:08:09.537

28 Articles before the name of a person 2011-09-13T21:11:08.183

28 Why do English verbs inflect so little, especially in regard to "person"? 2011-09-21T14:08:29.027

28 Why do so many core Romanian words with Latin roots come from different roots than in the other Romance languages? 2011-09-21T22:30:30.630

28 Do the Khoisan languages resemble the world's first language? 2011-10-03T00:09:09.420

28 Why is English classified as a Germanic rather than Romance language? 2014-06-10T04:52:45.227

28 Why don't you get back the original text when you use translation software to translate something into another language and then back into English? 2018-01-09T05:49:59.970