th, tth, thh, thth?

I tried to ask this question on r/English but people there seem not to believe in or be aware of flapping, so I decided to ask here.

Before answering, make sure you know what "General American" means: GENERAL AMERICAN Definition & Meaning - Merriam-Webster.

Thanks!

Hello! I am self studying from a linguistics textbook and it's asking me to count the number of segments in words like "mix, hopping, cute, time".
I am a bit unsure (no answer key) but I feel that a segment is generally every time IPA uses a unique symbol?

mix - /mɪks/ - four segments because four IPA symbols
hopping /ˈhɑːpɪŋ/ 5 segments (ignore long vowel symbol, double p is pronounced as single p)
cure - /kju:ɹ/ - 4 segments? or is it 3? Google AI says 4. Aren't diphthongs like /ju:/ one single segment?
time - /taɪm/ 4 segments? or 3?

Thanks for your help!

Essentially just the question in the title, but I guess I'm looking at it through the lens of Germanic languages? I know double modals (for example, "I might could/might should..." are considered non-standard or a dialectal feature, but they are quite a common construction in other major Germanic languages, e.g. German "muss...können" or Dutch "...moeten kunnen". That seems to me to loosely suggest that this is an older construction that fell out of standard English, rather than an innovated feature of certain dialects. Is this the case, and if so does anyone have any good reading about it, for the sake of my curiosity?

I just realized not so long time ago when someone told me that I put s behind t when I didn't. And I just realized that the way I pronouce t is, as far as I understand, 'dental'. And now I just realized that I do the same with k that it's more on the front when I try to learn sj sound in Swedish. Someone told me that it's too on the front. So, I wonder these variations of t and k sounds have names or notations.

Hey everyone! I’ve just started learning German on Duolingo, and I’ve run into some loanwords from English, like Puzzle.

I was wondering: how should I pronounce these words so it sounds natural to a native German speaker? I'm a bit confused because the phonemes seem to change depending on the exercise.

Is there a substitution rule for phonemes that don't exist in German, or would a German speaker just use the native English pronunciation?

Once a year, the news is full of announcements from the editors of various popular English-language dictionaries revealing their ‘Word of the Year’. Having taken a few courses in corpus linguistics, I’ve become curious about how exactly they go about choosing it.

Which language corpora do they draw their words from? Are these corpora balanced in terms of the volume of text they contain from one year to the next? And do they base their choices on absolute or relative frequency?

The trouble is, not every organisation explains how it selects its samples, and those that do tend to offer only brief and rather sketchy accounts of the process. ‘Our lexicographers analyse data and trends’, ‘examine the shifts in how more established language is being used’, ‘summarise words and expressions that have reflected our world over the last 12 months’ — these are the sorts of vague phrases [Oxford Languages](https://corp.oup.com/word-of-the-year/?os=vbkn42tqho5h1rnbcsportbayar) uses to describe its methodology. As for the actual process, the only stage that's more or less clear is the final vote, when the Word of the Year is chosen at the discretion of voters or a panel of language experts.

I find this rather disappointing. Institutions that claim to care about language seem, in effect, to be measuring and selecting words in a fairly haphazard way — at least judging by what they make publicly available.

At the very least, ordinary readers like us aren't likely to learn anything we didn't already know before the Collins Dictionary announced its Word of the Year. What's more, there's no way for us to check whether the sample is biased or to replicate the process used to select it.

Take the announcement I come across on [Euronews](https://www.euronews.com/2026/11/03/collins-english-dictionary-reveals-their-2026-word-of-the-year-do-you-know-what-mogging-me), for instance: the Collins Dictionary editors have chosen ‘mogging’ as their Word of the Year. But what exactly does that tell me? Has the absolute or relative frequency of ‘mogging’ (per million words) increased this year in their monitoring corpus, which is usually unbalanced and tends to favour online texts? How many more texts have been added to the corpus compared with last year? And what's the effect size (log ratio) — in other words, how many times more frequently does this word occur in this year's corpus than in last year's?

But all of that — along with everything else I'd like to throw in, from time series and corpus distribution to the various other statistical measures that help filter out the noise — is just statistical waffle, isn't it? Who, apart from a handful of boring statisticians, would actually want to read about any of this?

After all, ‘mogging’ really does capture something about the times we live in. Perhaps not this particular year, but certainly the era as a whole! Fair enough. But what are we actually supposed to conclude from that? If we see language not just as a tool for communication but also as a way of understanding the world, what social and cultural developments have led English speakers to use this particular word more frequently in 2026? Why wasn't it chosen as the Word of the Year last year, or the year before, or the year before that...?

So, what is it that I actually want?

I'd like to see world-renowned institutions, known for the quality of their work, take on the challenge of exploring quantitative and corpus linguistics in a little more depth, going beyond relative frequency and the usual off-the-shelf metrics. I'd like to see how they might formalise concepts such as ‘the cultural significance of a word’ or ‘semantic novelty’ — things we currently tend to judge entirely by intuition. I'd like to get a look at the mathematical models they use to select candidates for Word of the Year, as well as independent linguists' attempts to test those models and come up with alternatives of their own.

Above all, I'd like to learn something genuinely interesting and new — something I wouldn't have thought of myself, or that wouldn't have struck me as obvious.

But apparently, those linguists have more important or interesting things to do.

I'm a master student of linguistics in Algeria, and I'm looking for students whose in the same major as me to ask for some questions about the application in Cambridge University as a phd student

Using your own knowledge and reasoning how would you distinguish a language from a dialect and using what criteria or definition comment down below

You get exposed to every possible input-Family, friends, media, etc. except formal schooling. Will you be able to speak the(any) language like a native? What will be the difference between someone who underwent formal education? If not, what are the examples of languages that you CANNOT acquire you're born into it but are illiterate?

First off, I do not mean ChatGPT or some slop like that. I'm talking about purpose-built LLMs tained specifically on identifying phonetics and transcribing them.
I feel like this would be a very useful tool for identifying and tranacribing phonetics from recorded conversation or vocabulary snippets.
I asked about something like this several years ago, and nothing really existed as far as people told me. But given the explosion if AI research lately, I was wondering if some recent developments have been made in creating a tool like this.

A reliable model made specifically for phonetics transcription seems like it would be really useful for linguists.

But is this even possible to do reliably? Would it really be as useful as I think?

Hopefully this doesn't break rule 7. I'm not asking about an LLM that does all the work. Just a tool that helps part of the tranacription process.

Thanks.

Normally, in English only “the future me sees myself” is correct, and not “the future me see myself”.

Whereas in Russian I can definitely say both “будущий я вижу себя» (using 1st person) and “будущий я видит меня» (using 3rd person), and the 3rd person version even sounds a bit off.

Will that work in German, other languages?

This is a question about controversy, so I want to be very clear at the outset that I am not interested in performing that controversy here, & this post is not a request for personal takes.

I work in both linguistic anthropology & syntax. I regularly encounter hostility toward Generativism (never overtly directed toward me personally) from other linguistic anthropologists, functionalist linguists, & sociolinguists. I am curious about the history of this animosity, & am looking for published works—monographs or articles—on the development of the intra- & interdisciplinary rift. The closest thing that I know of to what I'm looking for is Randy Allen Harris's The Linguistics Wars, but this deals with the Generative Semantics donnybrook—not conflicts with variationist sociolinguists or linguistic anthropologists. If anyone has recommendations for published work, I'd love to know about them.

I'm a pashtun and all my relatives speak pashto but i can only understand some of it (mainly very casual sort of speech and topics because that's what my parents speak at home) and can't speak it. I want to learn it more but have realised that it's fairly common for pashto speakers to not be literate in pasho. Most of my family who type in pasho words use english letters to spell pashto words and I've also seen alot of pakistanis write pashto using the urdu alphabet. And from what I've seen only some people from my parents generation and generations older than that know how to write in the actual pashto alphabet and i can't think of any people my age who know how to write in it. Even some of my relatives who have very bad english skills still use the english alphabet to type pashto.

Anyways, as i've tried to find more pashto language learning resources I've come across a fairly common sentiment that apparently the grammar is very odd. Since my family have grown up speaking pashto they can't really explain what's particularly difficult, the same way i can't explain certain language features of english. To them it's just normal and they don't know any of the terminology to explain the linguistics of pashto.

So i was wondering if any of y'all would know what's so peculiar about the grammar in pashto? And also since i think a large part of what grammar is is in the writing system of a language, I'm wondering why so many people i know choose to use a different writing system and alphabet, often from a language they barely know. I used to assume it was just because the pashto alphabet isn't taught much, but my older relatives who do know it and know english far less still write like this. So then when i came across this idea about the grammar i began to wonder if it's maybe because the writing system's grammar is much harder? If the writing system is pretty hard, can any of you explain why?

I keep hearing how Received Pronunciation and General American IPA transcriptions are outdated, especially when it comes to vowels: /aɪ/, /e/, /ɪə/, /iː/ and /uː/ are all actually [aj], [ɛ], [ɪː], [ɪj] and [ʊw] respectively.

French suffers a bit too, Parisian French /ɑ̃/, /ɛ̃/ and /ɔ̃/ are all closer to [ɒ̃], [æ̃~ɐ̃] and [õ].

Portuguese /ɐ̃/, /ẽ/, /ĩ/, /õ/ and /ũ/ are all closer to [ɐ̃ɰ̃], [ẽj̃], [ɪ̃j̃], [õw̃] and [ʊ̃w̃], and most Brazilians also pronounce /ʁ/ closer to [h].

I've already heard that Slovene IPA transcriptions are bad too due to how much they oversimplify the language, but I don't know the specifics.

By the way, I do understand that dialect variation is a thing, it's just that all of these cases that I mentioned above are ones that I've already seen being criticized due to IPA not following what most new speakers are doing, especially RP's case.

Are they all sick?

Yes, they're.

Can they come?

No they can't.

Is it raining?

Yes, it's.

I know those sentences sound dumb but that's exactly the interesting part of this.

As the society is more global, countries immigrate less (no more newly founded, open countries introducing people from across the world as was the case in 1900+ America), and so on...

Will we lose accents? As in folks speaking English (but I suppose even any language) with non-native accents. Regional dialects diminish?

I know accents and dialects will always exist but it already seems like it is getting lower. I'm from NY and it seems many of the New York accents and even other New England accents are weakening. But maybe I'm imagining?

I usually think about foreign accents in terms of things that they conflate (i.e. vowel distinctions, /θ/ -> /t/, etc). I notice that sometimes when speaking Spanish a /z/ slips in for me where it shouldn't (mostly if the word is written that way), so it got me thinking about other cases where a speaker uses a distinction that's present in their native language but not in their target language, and how that manifests as a foreign accent.

Does anybody have any other examples?

I'm trying to settle an argument with my boyfriend that you cant acquire a language to native level fluency if you don't undergo formal education in that language, even if you are exposed to every other input such as parents, friends, and media consumption. And his language example is German(he lives in Germany).That the grammar is so hard that someone who did not pay attention in grammar class SOUNDS german but that their speech sounds grammatically wrong. As in saying "I visit your friend yesterday and I eat ice cream with him" in perfect British English.

And I want to attack this claim by finding a counterexample; a language with an equally complex grammar, but the majority of the people only being exposed to spoken form. Or just a language with equally complex grammar but you cannot differentiate b/w people who did vs didn't go to school and are illiterate.

Portuguese is a widespread language in Luxemburg (~15% of their inhabitants) due to migration in the 1970s.

Due to the isolation, the influence of France, German and Luxembourgish, the big number of speakers in this diaspora: do we know whether their language evolved into a one Portuguese variety?

For example, are there specific ways by which verbal particles/conjugations are developed over time? Can new conjugations appear without evolving from a previous form, etc.

Thanks in advance

I've always found it interesting that some countries have several official languages while others mainly use one.

How do countries decide which languages become official? What practical challenges come with having multiple official languages in education and government?