linguistics

A note on what this is: this article describes an independent, self-run experiment, not a peer-reviewed study. The linguistic and marketing claims that come from published research are cited below. The claims about the question matrix, the categorization results, and the saturation curve are my own findings, based on a dataset and pipeline I built myself. I've tried to flag clearly, section by se…

This paper examines the concept of ignorance across seven independent linguistic traditions: Chinese, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Persian, and Arabic. It analyzes both the etymological origins of primary terms and their classical or contemporary semantic boundaries relative to neighbouring concepts such as foolishness, unintentional error, and negligence. Key Findings: Indo-European Inheritan…

Language documentation, vitality assessment, maintenance, revitalization, and reclamation address related dimensions of threatened-language futures. Their objects remain distinguishable: documentary resources may endure while learning pathways contract; programmes may attract participants while material barriers restrict sustained participation; standards may aid teaching while distributing lingu…

A 998-language analysis linked denser word-level encoding with faster matched speech and narrower semantic paths in a 14-language conversation subset, without establishing causation.

Contemporary work on minoritized languages has concentrated on documentation, digitization, lexicography, and heritage preservation. Recent Manchu research has expanded into low-resource historical OCR, orthography acquisition, bilingual dictionary structures, and speech synthesis, establishing a technical chain from preservation and machine readability to human learnability and computational gen…

UConn Linguistics will be represented at Sinn und Bedeutung 31, held at Nantes Université, France, September 1-4, by the following. Talks: Q. Wu – Let’s work and see if try is see: Varieties and composition of try in Mandarin see-as-try constructions. Y. Yagi (PhD 2025) – Selective quantification of dynamic alternatives. J. Gajewski & M. […]

Human migration and isolation appear to shape genetic and language diversity in opposite ways. The finding may seem counterintuitive at first. Regions shaped by migration and population mixing often have higher genetic diversity, so it might seem logical that their languages would be more varied too. Instead, the study finds the reverse pattern. “We were [...]

What does Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s political discourse say about the controversial US secretary of Health whose task is to make “America healthy again”?

Should language teaching describe how a language is used, or how it should be used?

In 1866, the topic became so controversial that the Société de Linguistique de Paris banned discussions about language origins altogether.

Linguists explain how a language built from musical notes could convey complex meaning and even support conversation