170 Fun Facts About Linguistics

Roughly how many living languages did Ethnologue count worldwide in its 2026 edition?

About 7,000: the 2026 edition lists 7,170. The figure shifts every year as field surveys redraw the line between a language and a dialect, and Ethnologue rates roughly 44% of the total as endangered.

Ethnologue, the annual catalogue of the world's living languages, is published by which organization?

SIL Global, a Christian nonprofit in Dallas that began as the Summer Institute of Linguistics, builds the catalogue from its field linguists' reports and notes for each language whether the Bible has been translated into it.

Which country, with about 840 known spoken languages, is the most linguistically diverse in the world?

Papua New Guinea has about 840 living languages, so many that Tok Pisin, an English-based contact language, became the common tongue that lets neighbouring villages talk to each other.

Which language of the western Pyrenees is the only one in its continent with no known relatives?

Basque is the only remnant of the languages spoken in south-western Europe before the Romans arrived; its neighbours all adopted the conquerors' tongue, which is why it has no living relatives.

Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian are the three most-spoken members of which language family?

Uralic takes its name from the Ural Mountains, the family's hypothesised homeland; alongside Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian it includes the Sámi languages of northern Scandinavia.

Malagasy, the language of Madagascar, belongs to which family that reaches east as far as Easter Island?

Austronesian reaches from Madagascar to Easter Island; its deepest diversity lies among the Formosan languages of Taiwan, which is why Taiwan is regarded as the family's homeland.

Burmese and Cantonese both belong to which language family, second only to Indo-European in native speakers?

Sino-Tibetan has hundreds of member languages, yet the Chinese varieties, Cantonese among them, supply the vast majority of its speakers; most of the others are small languages of the Himalayas and nearby highlands.

Which proposed African language family, home to the Bantu languages, would be the world's largest by number of languages?

Niger–Congo would top every family for number of languages, well over a thousand, but linguists still argue over which outlying branches belong; its core, which includes Bantu, is widely accepted.

Manuscripts found in desert oases of western China revealed which extinct branch of the Indo-European family?

Tocharian surfaced in the early 1900s in manuscripts from oasis towns of the Tarim Basin; finding an Indo-European branch that far east overturned the old picture of a neat east–west split in the family.

Which extinct Bronze Age language of what is now Turkey is the earliest attested Indo-European language?

Hittite stayed unread until 1915, when Bedřich Hrozný met a sentence about bread containing the word 'watar' beside a verb that looked like 'eat'; the echo of 'water' told him the language was Indo-European.

Which judge told the Asiatic Society in 1786 that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin sprang from a common root?

William Jones, a judge on Bengal's supreme court, took up Sanskrit so that he could compile a digest of Hindu law; its likeness to the classical tongues he had learned as a boy prompted his famous remark.

The widely accepted Kurgan hypothesis places the original Indo-European homeland in which region?

The Pontic–Caspian steppe, north of the Black Sea, was home to herders whose burial mounds, called kurgans, name the theory; ancient-DNA studies have since traced a mass migration from there into Europe.

Grimm's law describes the consonant shift that produced which branch of Indo-European?

Grimm's law is the First Germanic Sound Shift: inherited p became f in Germanic, so Sanskrit pitā and Greek patḗr correspond to English father.

Which linguist set out the sound correspondences now called Grimm's law in 1818, four years before Jacob Grimm?

Rasmus Rask, a Dane, set out the correspondences in a prize essay on the origin of Old Norse; Jacob Grimm, who turned them into a system in 1822, got the naming rights.

The Great Vowel Shift began changing English pronunciation around the time of which poet's death?

Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400, just as the shift was getting under way; English spelling was then standardised while pronunciation kept moving, which is why the two so often disagree.

Which 1957 book by Noam Chomsky is credited with revolutionizing the scientific study of language?

Syntactic Structures (1957) launched generative grammar and contained the sentence 'Colorless green ideas sleep furiously', built to show that a sentence can be grammatical yet meaningless.

Which argument holds that children hear far too little input to learn language from data alone?

The poverty of the stimulus argument holds that children's input underdetermines the grammar they acquire, so innate constraints must limit what a possible human grammar can look like.

How did Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) come to be published?

Posthumously, from students' lecture notes: Saussure died in 1913 without writing the course down, so two colleagues, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, pieced the book together from what his pupils had taken down in class.

Benjamin Lee Whorf of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis made his living in which profession?

Whorf was a fire prevention engineer for a Hartford insurer; on inspections he saw workers grow careless around 'empty' gasoline drums still full of explosive vapour, which convinced him that words steer behaviour.

The International Phonetic Association was formed in 1886 under which linguist?

Paul Passy, a French phonetician, founded the association in Paris in 1886 as a teachers' group promoting phonetic notation; its first standard alphabet was published in 1888.

Two words such as 'tip' and 'dip' that differ in only one sound are called what?

'Tip' and 'dip' form a minimal pair, the standard test that two sounds such as t and d are separate phonemes; sign languages have minimal pairs too, differing in a single parameter such as handshape.

The Wug test, in which children pluralize a made-up creature, was created by which psycholinguist?

Jean Berko Gleason's 1958 paper introduced the Wug test, showing that small children apply the plural rule to words they have never heard, saying 'wugs' with a voiced z.

Paul Broca's 1861 patient 'Tan' had a lesion in which lobe of the brain?

Frontal: Tan's surface lesion lay in the left inferior frontal gyrus, the spot later named Broca's area, but a 2007 MRI of his preserved brain found the damage ran far deeper than Broca had been able to see.

Damage to which brain region in the superior temporal gyrus produces fluent but meaningless speech?

Wernicke's area, tied to comprehension by Carl Wernicke in 1874, lets us make sense of words; when it is damaged, people keep talking fluently in jumbled sentences and are often unaware that anything is wrong.

Swapping the first sounds of two words, as in 'blushing crow' for 'crushing blow', is called what?

A spoonerism takes its name from William Spooner, an Oxford clergyman and don so noted for such slips that the word was in print by 1900, three decades before he died.

Deaf schoolchildren in which Central American country created a brand-new sign language among themselves from the late 1970s?

Nicaragua opened a special-education centre in Managua in 1977; its deaf pupils, taught only lip-reading and Spanish, pooled their home gestures in the schoolyard and on the bus until a full language of their own emerged.

The sign language of the United States is unintelligible to British signers and descends mainly from that of which country?

France: Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher trained in Paris, sailed to America with Thomas Gallaudet and co-founded the first permanent American school for the deaf at Hartford in 1817, where his signing mixed with local sign languages.

What term describes a stable contact language that has acquired native speakers?

A creole, in the classic account, is a pidgin that became a community's mother tongue as the children of its speakers expanded it into a full language; some scholars now doubt that every creole began as a pidgin.

L. L. Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, practised which profession?

Zamenhof was an ophthalmologist; growing up in multi-ethnic Białystok, where Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews each spoke their own language and quarrelled, convinced him that a neutral tongue was needed.

The Rosetta Stone carries the same decree in hieroglyphic, Greek and which third script?

Demotic, the cursive everyday script of later Egypt, fills the middle register; the priestly decree of 196 BC differs only slightly across all its versions, which made the stone the key to reading Egyptian.

Which philologist is credited with deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs in the 1820s?

Jean-François Champollion announced his breakthrough in an 1822 letter; a priest in Paris had taught him to speak Coptic, the last descendant of ancient Egyptian, and he used it to work out the sounds of the signs.

Cuneiform, the earliest known writing system, was originally developed to write which language?

Sumerian was first written as little pictures for bookkeeping; pressing a blunt stylus into wet clay turned the pictures into wedges, which is what the word 'cuneiform' means, and Akkadian scribes later borrowed the script.

The Greek alphabet was adapted from the consonant-only script of which seafaring people?

The Phoenicians wrote only consonants; when the Greeks borrowed the letters, they turned the signs for sounds Greek lacked into vowels, creating the first alphabet to write vowels and consonants alike.

Hangul, the Korean alphabet published in 1446, was created under which king?

Sejong the Great wanted commoners who could not master Chinese characters to be able to read, so the new consonant letters were drawn to mimic the tongue, lips and other speech organs shaping each sound.

Sequoyah's Cherokee writing system, completed in 1821, is what type of script?

A syllabary gives each character a whole syllable. Sequoyah could not read or write any language when he began, yet his system proved so easy to learn that it spread through the Cherokee nation within a few years.

Which self-taught linguist and architect deciphered Linear B in 1952?

Michael Ventris heard Arthur Evans lecture on the unread script at 14 and resolved to crack it; for years he expected it to hide Etruscan, until his own grids forced him to accept it was an early form of Greek.

The ogham alphabet, carved on stone monuments from about the 4th century AD, mainly wrote which language?

Early Irish survives on the stones in its oldest known form, though they say little: nearly every inscription is just a name and a father's name, probably commemorating the person the monument was raised for.

Mkhedruli, the youngest of three historic scripts from one nation of the Caucasus, is the modern alphabet of which language?

Georgian is written in Mkhedruli, a name meaning 'military' or 'of the horseman': it began as the lay script of royal charters, while the two older scripts were kept for the church.

In Mandarin, the syllable 'ma' can mean 'mother' or 'horse' depending on which feature of its pronunciation?

Tone: said high and level, 'ma' means mother; with a dipping pitch it means horse. Standard Mandarin has four such tones and Cantonese at least six, so a slip of pitch changes the word.

Which South African language, known for its click consonants, was the mother tongue of Nelson Mandela?

Xhosa has three kinds of click, written c, x and q, so the language's own name begins with one; its speakers borrowed the sounds long ago from the neighbouring Khoisan peoples.

Taa (ǃXóõ), spoken mainly in Botswana, is often credited with which linguistic record?

The biggest sound inventory: one survey of Taa lists at least 87 consonants and 20 vowels, by many counts the most of any known language, because its clicks alone come in dozens of distinct varieties.

Who was the last fluent speaker of Ubykh, the consonant-rich language that fell silent in 1992?

Tevfik Esenç spent years helping linguists such as Georges Dumézil record Ubykh, so the language of a people driven from the Caucasus to Turkey in 1864 was thoroughly documented before it died with him.

Which law, named for an American linguist, says a language's second most common word appears about half as often as its first?

Zipf's law shows up in real text: in a classic million-word sample of American English, 'the' made up nearly 7% of all the words and 'of', in second place, about half that.

Which word, used in the Book of Judges to catch fleeing enemies who mispronounced it, now means a test of belonging?

Shibboleth was the word Gileadite guards made strangers say at the fords of the Jordan; fleeing Ephraimites could only manage 'sibboleth', and the story says each one who did was killed.

Morris Swadesh's glottochronology assumes basic vocabulary is replaced at a constant rate, by analogy with what?

Glottochronology borrows the logic of radioactive decay: if core vocabulary is replaced at a steady rate, the share two languages still have in common dates their split. Many linguists reject it because the rate is not steady.

A whistled register of Spanish, inscribed by UNESCO in 2009, is used on which Canary Island?

La Gomera's whistle, Silbo Gomero, carries messages across the island's deep ravines; the first islanders whistled their own language, settlers adapted the technique to Spanish, and it has been taught in schools since 1999.

The word 'salary' goes back to the Romans' word for which commodity?

Salt was sal to the Romans and a salarium was something 'of salt', probably money for soldiers to buy it; the popular story that legionaries were paid in salt itself has no ancient evidence behind it.

The Aṣṭādhyāyī, an ancient eight-chapter grammar of Sanskrit, is the work of which grammarian?

Pāṇini packed Sanskrit into terse aphorisms that generate its correct forms, the oldest grammar to survive whole; when Europe met it in the 19th century it helped shape modern linguistics, influencing Saussure and Bloomfield.

What alignment, seen in Dyirbal and the Mayan languages, treats an intransitive subject like a transitive object?

Ergative–absolutive alignment marks the subject of 'she arrived' the same way as the object of 'I saw her', and gives the doer of a transitive verb its own case; it is as if English said 'her arrived'.

Under which anthropologist did Edward Sapir study at Columbia?

Franz Boas, the founder of American academic anthropology, supervised Sapir's Columbia doctorate, completed in 1909; Sapir went on to document California's indigenous languages with Alfred Kroeber.

Which branch of linguistics studies how context contributes to meaning?

Pragmatics studies how context shapes meaning — for example how 'It's cold in here' can work as a request to shut a window rather than a report on the temperature.

Which branch of linguistics studies the internal structure of words?

Morphology was a biologist's word for the study of living forms until the linguist August Schleicher borrowed it in 1859 for the shapes words take, as when 'walked' splits into walk and -ed.

Phonetics is traditionally divided into articulatory, acoustic and which third sub-discipline?

Auditory phonetics studies how listeners perceive speech, and perception can be fooled: in the McGurk effect, hearing 'ba' while watching lips say 'ga' makes most people hear 'da'.

Unlike the abstract sound units of phonology, what is an individual speech sound as actually pronounced called?

A phone is any speech sound as physically made, whether or not the difference matters: the t of 'top' comes with a puff of air and the t of 'stop' doesn't, two phones that English speakers hear as one sound.

Between which symbols are phonemes conventionally written?

Forward slashes enclose a word's phonemes, so 'pin' is /pɪn/; square brackets record the sounds actually made, so the same word becomes [pʰɪn], with the puff of air English speakers never notice.

Which of these words is built from three morphemes, the smallest units of meaning?

Unbreakable has three: the prefix un-, the root break and the suffix -able. Chimpanzees has two, the animal plus the plural -s, while Mississippi and crocodile, however long, are single morphemes.

The plural -s in 'cats' is what kind of morpheme?

Bound morphemes cannot stand alone: the -s of 'cats' needs a noun to lean on, while 'cat' is free. Even some roots are bound, like the cran- of 'cranberry', which means nothing on its own.

Which philosopher first introduced the distinction between sense and reference?

Gottlob Frege drew the distinction in his 1892 essay 'Über Sinn und Bedeutung', using the morning star and evening star, which share a reference but differ in sense.

Paul Grice's theory of how speakers mean more than they literally say is called what?

Conversational implicature rests on the assumption that speakers cooperate: in Grice's own example, a reference that praises only a philosophy candidate's English and attendance tells the reader he is no good at philosophy.

Which philosopher developed Speech Act Theory in the 1950s?

J. L. Austin noticed that some sentences do things rather than describe them: to say 'I promise' is to make the promise. His lectures on the idea were printed after his death as How to Do Things with Words.

Who is regarded as the founder of variationist sociolinguistics?

William Labov spent a decade as an industrial chemist formulating printing inks before he turned to linguistics, where his 1966 study of how New Yorkers really speak gave the new field its methods.

Historical linguistics is also called what kind of linguistics?

Diachronic linguistics follows a language through its history; Saussure, who set it against the synchronic study of a single moment, held that the two must be kept apart and that only a language frozen in time forms a system.

Which principle, borrowed from geology, holds that languages changed in the past just as they change today?

The uniformitarian principle came from Charles Lyell's geology, where slow forces seen at work today explain ancient rocks; linguists adopted it so that sound changes heard in living speech could explain those of the past.

Which English physician, also known for the wave theory of light, coined the term 'Indo-European' in 1813?

Thomas Young built the name 'Indo-European' from the family's geographical extremes, northern India and western Europe; the same restless doctor compared the vocabulary of 400 languages for the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Which German linguist's 1816 study of Sanskrit conjugation helped found comparative grammar?

Franz Bopp went beyond matching words: he compared the verb endings of Sanskrit with those of Greek, Persian and other languages to trace their grammar to a common origin, something no predecessor had attempted.

In which 1822 book did Jacob Grimm set out his famous sound law?

Deutsche Grammatik first appeared in 1819 with only inflections; for 1822 Grimm rewrote it, saying he had to mow the first crop down to the ground, and gave 600 pages to sounds, his law among them.

Which Danish linguist explained the exceptions to Grimm's law?

Karl Verner saw that the exceptions followed the position of the ancient accent, so the law held after all; he set the idea out in an 1875 letter to a friend before it reached print.

In August Schleicher's 1868 fable, written in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, a shorn sheep meets which animals, one pulling a wagon?

Horses: one pulls a heavy wagon, one carries a load and one a rider. Schleicher was the first to compose a text in the lost language, and scholars have rewritten his fable ever since as reconstructions change.

Which lost Indo-European sounds did Saussure deduce at 21, decades before deciphered texts confirmed them?

Laryngeals were pure deduction when Saussure proposed them to explain odd vowel patterns; in 1927 Jerzy Kuryłowicz found a matching consonant in a newly deciphered ancient language, just where the theory predicted.

In Saussure's model, the linguistic sign unites a sound pattern with what?

The signified is the concept, not a thing in the world; Saussure held that nothing natural ties it to its sound, so the bond is arbitrary and kept in place only by social convention.

In which city was Ferdinand de Saussure born in 1857?

Geneva was home: born there in 1857, Saussure left at 18 to study in Leipzig and taught in Paris for about a decade before returning to a chair at its university, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

The IPA writes the first consonant of 'think' with which Greek letter?

Theta already stood for this sound in later Greek, so the IPA simply borrowed it; such sounds turn up in fewer than one language in ten, and learners of English often swap in s, t or f.

How many segmental letters did the IPA contain after its 2005 addition?

Tone letters and diacritics augment the basic set of 107 letters.

The original IPA was based on the Romic alphabet, a spelling reform by which English phonetician?

Henry Sweet also left a mark on the stage: Bernard Shaw's preface to Pygmalion says Professor Higgins is not a portrait of him, yet admits there are touches of Sweet in the play.

Which Danish linguist coined the term 'Great Vowel Shift'?

Otto Jespersen named it in 1909 and was the first to chart it in a diagram; the same Dane later worked on the invented language Ido, then launched a rival of his own, Novial, in 1928.

The Great Vowel Shift altered the pronunciation of which class of Middle English sounds?

The Great Vowel Shift raised or diphthongised Middle English long vowels: the vowel of 'bite', once like modern 'beet', became a diphthong, and 'beet' itself rose from a sound like 'bait'.

In which city was Noam Chomsky born?

Philadelphia kept him through college: bored at the University of Pennsylvania, Chomsky thought of dropping out to live on a kibbutz until meeting the linguist Zellig Harris drew him into the field.

Chomsky's famous 1959 review attacked which behaviourist's account of language?

B. F. Skinner's 1957 book Verbal Behavior was the target; Chomsky's review in the journal Language argued that reinforcement learning could not explain how children acquire grammar.

What term did Chomsky use for a speaker's tacit knowledge of their language?

Competence was Chomsky's name for the idealised knowledge he thought linguists should study, because real speech, which he called performance, is muddied by distractions, slips and the limits of memory.

At which university did Chomsky spend almost his entire academic career?

MIT hired him in the 1950s to spend half his time on a machine-translation project, though he told the lab's director it was pointless; he stayed for decades all the same.

The Chomsky hierarchy ranks four types of what?

Formal grammars, sets of rules for rewriting strings of symbols, fall into four nested types in Chomsky's 1950s scheme; the simpler types now describe the structure of most programming languages.

Soldiers on whose Egyptian campaign unearthed the Rosetta Stone in 1799?

Napoleon Bonaparte's engineers pulled it from an old wall, but he never got it home: the British seized it when his army in Egypt surrendered, which is why it has been in the British Museum since 1802.

The Rosetta Stone is a stele of which rock?

Granodiorite is a grey, granite-like rock, here with a pink vein; the stone was long described as black basalt because of the dark wax that coated it until a cleaning in 1999.

The Rosetta Stone's decree was issued on behalf of which ruler of Egypt?

Ptolemy V was a boy king facing revolt when a council of priests met at Memphis in 196 BC; their decree thanks him for cutting taxes and favouring the temples, and orders copies set up in shrines across Egypt.

The Rosetta Stone was found at Fort Julien near which Nile Delta town?

Rashid is the Arabic name of the port Europeans called Rosetta; the stone had been reused as rubble in an old wall there, and soldiers rebuilding the fort pulled it out in 1799.

The first Esperanto textbook (1887) asked readers to sign and return what?

A pledge to learn the language, binding only once ten million people had signed the same promise; that way, Zamenhof argued, nobody risked wasting time on a language no one else spoke.

The word Esperanto, taken from Zamenhof's pen name on his first textbook, means what in the language itself?

One who hopes: Zamenhof signed the 1887 book 'Doktoro Esperanto', and early speakers soon used the pen name for the language itself, which he had only called the international language.

Esperanto largely displaced which earlier constructed language among auxiliary-language enthusiasts?

Volapük, launched by the German priest Johann Martin Schleyer in 1879–80, had hundreds of clubs within a decade; then Schleyer fell out with its academy over reforms, and many enthusiasts moved to the newer rival.

Pasporta Servo was launched for Esperanto speakers in 1974 as what kind of service?

Pasporta Servo is a free-accommodation network: hosts in its directory put travellers up without charge, on the understanding that guests speak Esperanto with them; its first list named about 40 hosts.

Tok Pisin took shape in the late 1800s among Pacific islanders brought to work where?

On plantations in Queensland and the Pacific islands, labourers who shared no language built a common one from English words; it is now an official language, and many children learn it as their first.

The word 'creole' descends from the verb criar, which means what?

To breed or raise: Portuguese crioulo first meant someone raised in the master's house, then anyone native to the colony; the idea is home-grown, not mixed, and the label later passed to languages born there.

The Greek root étymon, behind the word 'etymology', means what?

True sense is what étymon meant, from étymos, 'true'; yet a word's origin rarely reveals its present meaning: 'nice' comes from the Latin for 'ignorant'.

Which 7th-century archbishop compiled the Etymologiae, an encyclopedia that served as a textbook across medieval Europe?

Isidore of Seville packed everything from grammar and medicine to animals, ships and tools into 20 books, explaining each thing through the origin of its name; it stayed a standard textbook for nine centuries.

What is a writing system whose letters generally represent only consonants called?

An abjad leaves readers to supply the vowels from context; Arabic is written this way, with full vowel marks kept mainly for religious texts, children's books and learners.

Writing that reverses direction at the end of each line is called what?

Boustrophedon is Greek for turning like an ox while ploughing: each line doubles back from where the last one ended, and in ancient inscriptions the letters themselves are often flipped to face the new direction.

Which of these is a language isolate of Japan?

Ainu is related to no other known language; assimilation policies after Japan colonised Hokkaido drove it close to extinction, and only in 2008 did parliament call for the Ainu to be recognised as an indigenous people.

By the UN's widely quoted estimate, how often does a language die out somewhere in the world?

Every two weeks is the UN's estimate; it says each loss takes an entire cultural and intellectual heritage with it, and has named 2022–2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages.

Which language did Eliezer Ben-Yehuda's generation turn from a language of prayer and books into an everyday mother tongue?

Hebrew had been a language of prayer and books for some 1,700 years when Ben-Yehuda resolved to speak nothing else at home; his son, kept away from other languages, became its first native speaker of modern times.

Damin, the only non-African language with click consonants, was a ritual code from which continent?

Damin was taught to Lardil men at their second initiation on Mornington Island, Australia; its speakers credit it to a Dreamtime ancestor, and it fell out of use once the ceremony lapsed in the 1950s.

The English disapproving 'tut-tut' or 'tsk tsk' is which type of click?

Dental clicks are made with the tongue against the upper teeth; English uses one only as a noise of disapproval, but in Zulu the same sound is an ordinary consonant, spelled with the letter c.

Edward Sapir ended his career as professor of anthropology at which university?

Yale brought Sapir from Chicago in 1931, and there Benjamin Lee Whorf became his student; Whorf's development of his teacher's ideas is why linguistic relativity is known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

Which of Jakobson's language functions covers small talk that keeps the channel open?

Phatic talk, such as checking that a bad line still works, tests the channel rather than passing on news; the label goes back to the anthropologist Malinowski, who coined 'phatic communion' in the 1920s for small talk that bonds.

Jakobson left Moscow in 1920 for which city, where he helped found a famous linguistic circle?

Prague became Jakobson's base once a Soviet mission brought him there: he was a founding member of the Prague Linguistic Circle in 1926 and left Czechoslovakia only after the Nazi occupation of 1939.

Young children's clipped two-word phrases, such as 'more juice', are known as what kind of speech?

Telegraphic speech keeps the nouns and verbs and drops little words such as 'the' and 'is', much as people trimmed telegrams when they were charged by the word.

A toddler who says 'goed' for 'went' and 'gooses' for 'geese' is making which kind of error?

Overregularization applies a regular pattern, such as adding -ed or -s, to a word that changes irregularly; since no adult says 'goed', the slip shows a child applying a rule rather than copying.

Nim Chimpsky was the subject of an attempt to teach a chimpanzee what?

Nim Chimpsky, named as a pun on Noam Chomsky, was taught American Sign Language at Columbia; the project's leader, Herbert Terrace, concluded that Nim mostly imitated his teachers rather than building sentences.

Which German loanword names pleasure taken in another person's misfortune?

Schadenfreude joins Schaden, 'harm', to Freude, 'joy'. The first English writer to cite it, Richard Trench in 1852, took the mere existence of such a word as grim proof that the feeling exists.

The word 'tea', borrowed by languages worldwide, originated in which Chinese variety?

Hokkien tê reached Europe on Dutch ships, giving English 'tea', French thé and German Tee, while the rival form chá spread by other routes, which is why so many other languages say cha or chai.

A word borrowed by translating it piece by piece, rather than adopting its form, is called what?

A calque translates a foreign term piece by piece, as 'flea market' does French marché aux puces; neatly, 'calque' is itself a loanword from French, while 'loanword' is a calque of German Lehnwort.

The term 'cognate' comes from a Latin word meaning what?

Blood relative is what cognatus literally means: cognate words share an ancestor, as English night and German Nacht do. Looks can deceive, though: English much and Spanish mucho are unrelated.

The word 'onomatopoeia' comes from a Greek compound meaning what?

Name-making is all the Greek says: onoma, 'name', plus poiein, 'to make', with no mention of sound. Even imitation is convention: a clock goes tick tock in English but kachi kachi in Japanese.

What playful name is given to a word like 'stressed' that spells a different word, 'desserts', backwards?

A semordnilap is simply 'palindromes' spelled backwards, a joke name that surfaced in a 1961 book of word curiosities; 'stressed' and 'desserts' are the classic pair.

'Tattarrattat', the longest palindromic word in the Oxford English Dictionary, was coined by which author?

James Joyce coined it in Ulysses (1922) to mimic a knock: 'I knew his tattarrattat at the door.' Finnish goes seven letters further with saippuakivikauppias, a soapstone seller.

Which five-word Latin word square, found in the ruins of Pompeii, reads the same in four directions?

The Sator Square reads SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS across, down and backwards; Christopher Nolan's film Tenet takes its title from the middle word and names a villain, a forger and a security firm after others.

The catch in the middle of 'uh-oh' is an example of which consonant?

A glottal stop is made by briefly closing the vocal folds. English has no letter for it, yet speakers use it constantly: Cockney puts one at the end of 'cat', and standard British and American speech has one in 'button'.

Which apostrophe-like letter of the Hawaiian alphabet appears in the spelling Hawaiʻi?

The okina, written ʻ, is a full consonant, a catch like the one in the middle of 'oh-oh', so leaving it out can change the word: Hawaiian koʻu means 'my', while kou means 'your'.

Ethnologue's three-letter language codes, such as 'eng' for English, became the basis of which international standard?

ISO 639-3 gives every known language, living or extinct, its own three-letter tag; the catalogue's publisher keeps the register, and the codes now feed the language tags used across the internet.

After losing his New York teaching post in the Red Scare, the linguist Morris Swadesh rebuilt his career in which country?

Mexico took him in: fired by City College in 1949 as a Communist, Swadesh went on to teach there and study the indigenous languages of the Americas, and he died in Mexico City in 1967.

Which 2016 film takes the Whorf hypothesis as its premise?

Arrival (2016), directed by Denis Villeneuve, adapts Ted Chiang's 'Story of Your Life'; learning the aliens' circular script reshapes the linguist Louise Banks's perception of time.

Which invented language in Orwell's 1984 shrinks vocabulary to shrink thought?

Newspeak, designed to make thoughtcrime impossible by eliminating the words for it, is Orwell's fictional test of linguistic relativity; the novel's appendix explains its shrinking vocabulary.

Which 19th-century German thinker argued that every language embodies its own view of the world, anticipating linguistic relativity?

Wilhelm von Humboldt came to linguistics from a career as a Prussian diplomat and education reformer, in which he founded the University of Berlin in 1810; it now bears his and his brother Alexander's name.

Which former missionary spent years living among the Pirahã of the Amazon to study their language?

Daniel Everett went to Brazil in 1977 to translate the Bible for the Pirahã and convert them; instead he lost his own faith among them, a story he tells in Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes.

What is the standardised form of Euskara developed in the late 1960s called?

Euskara Batua, 'unified Euskara', was drawn up by the language academy from 1968, when Franco's Spain barred the language from public life and a single written standard seemed its best chance of survival.

Which ancient language, known from Roman-era names in Gaul and Navarre, is thought to be an ancestor or close relative of Euskara?

Aquitanian survives only as names of people and gods in Roman inscriptions, mostly of the 1st to 3rd centuries AD, yet many can still be read: cison matches gizon, the modern word for 'man'.

The roughly 4,000 terse rules of the Aṣṭādhyāyī, the classical Sanskrit grammar, are known by which Sanskrit term meaning 'thread'?

Sutras, literally 'threads', pack each rule into a few syllables so that it can be memorised and passed from teacher to student; they are so condensed that they are hard to follow without a commentary.

Which Persian-born scholar wrote Al-Kitāb, the 8th-century book regarded as the founding text of Arabic grammar?

Sibawayh left his grammar untitled, so it became known simply as Al-Kitāb, 'The Book'; an early biographer says he fell out with the grammarians of Baghdad, went home to Persia and died still young.

Which hypothetical macrofamily, proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903, links Indo-European with Kartvelian and Dravidian?

Nostratic was coined in Danish from the Latin for 'belonging to our country or people'; more than a century later it is still listed as a hypothetical family, not an established one.

The relation by which the article 'the' is followed by a noun belongs to which plane of analysis?

Syntagmatic relations link items in sequence, like the courses that make up a meal; choosing among the dishes that could fill one course belongs to the other axis, a comparison semioticians borrow from menus.

Kavi, the subject of a foundational 1836 study of language structure, was the old literary language of which Indonesian island?

Java's poets wrote in Kavi, or Old Javanese; the 1836 study of it is remembered for its long introduction, which argued that a language shapes the way its speakers think.

What is the study of handwriting in historical manuscripts, used to date them by their letterforms, called?

Palaeography can date an unsigned manuscript because each style of handwriting, such as Carolingian minuscule or Gothic script, belongs to a known period and place.

The creator of Visible Speech, symbols for mouth positions, fathered the inventor of which device?

The telephone was patented by Alexander Graham Bell, whose father Alexander Melville Bell published Visible Speech in 1867 to help deaf people learn to speak.

Which 1964 film about a phonetics professor hired phonetician Peter Ladefoged as a consultant?

My Fair Lady used Ladefoged's own voice in the scenes where Higgins describes vowel pronunciation, and he wrote the transcriptions seen in the professor's notebook.

Which phenomenon makes a filmed 'ga' dubbed with the sound 'ba' seem to be a third syllable, 'da'?

The McGurk effect shows that watching lips changes what people hear, and it was found by accident when a technician dubbed a different sound onto a video.

Which part of the throat vibrates during a 'z' sound but not during an 's'?

The vocal folds buzz only for voiced sounds, so fingers resting on the Adam's apple feel a vibration during 'z' that vanishes for 's'.

Which weak vowel, spelled 'a' in 'about' and 'o' in 'harmony', is English's most common reduced vowel?

Schwa has no letter of its own in English: any vowel letter can spell it, and in 'medium' the job falls to the 'u'.

Which of these words has the vowel that most English dialects make with the greatest lip rounding?

Too has the most rounded vowel in most English dialects, while the vowel of 'see' sits at the other extreme, with the greatest lip-spreading.

Which of these English words begins with the voiced 'th' sound heard in the middle of 'mother'?

Those belongs to a small set of function words, with 'the', 'this' and 'then', that open with the voiced sound, while other English words start with the voiceless 'th' of 'thin'.

Which pair of English consonants is made by pressing the lower lip against the upper front teeth?

F and V are sounds with a history: their frequency in the world's languages has been argued to be linked to the Agricultural Revolution.

Which term names vowels that glide from one sound into another, as in English 'cow', 'boy' and 'high'?

Diphthongs pack two vowel qualities into a single syllable, and in most accents the phrase 'no highway cowboys' contains five different ones, one per syllable.

Which term describes accents, like most American ones, that pronounce the 'r' in 'hard' and 'butter'?

Rhotic accents keep every historical 'r', as in Scotland, Canada and most of the United States, while most accents of England, South Africa and New Zealand drop it unless a vowel follows.

The English consonants that begin 'pie', 'buy' and 'my' share which place of articulation?

Bilabial consonants are articulated with both lips, and they are very common across the world's languages; English has a nasal and two stops of this kind.

To make English 't', 'd' and 'n', the tongue tip touches which part of the mouth behind the upper teeth?

The alveolar ridge takes its name from the alveoli, the sockets that hold the upper teeth, and English speakers meet it with the very tip of the tongue.

The consonants that begin English 'chin' and 'jam' are the language's only two members of which class?

Affricates begin as a stop and release as a fricative, which is why the 'ch' of 'chin' sounds like a 't' sliding straight into 'sh'.

English 'p', 't', 'k', 'b', 'd' and 'g' briefly block the airflow entirely; what are such consonants called?

Plosives are named for the plosion, the small burst heard when the trapped air is released; the same sounds are also known as occlusives.

Which term names the puff of breath after the 't' in English 'top' that is missing from the 't' in 'stop'?

Aspiration is strong enough to make a flame held before the lips flicker, yet English speakers treat the two kinds of 't' as the same sound.

Which of these words ends in the velar nasal, one sound that English spells with two letters?

Sing ends in the sound phoneticians call eng, which English allows only at the ends of syllables and never at the start of a word.

Which pair of English words differs only in the voicing of the first consonant?

Fan and van match in every gesture of the mouth except voicing, one of four such fricative pairs in English alongside 'sip' and 'zip'.

Which English consonant is a lateral, made by letting air flow along the sides of the tongue?

L comes in two versions in many English accents: a clear one before vowels, as in 'fly', and a dark one at the ends of words, as in 'tell'.

In American English, the 't' of 'butter' usually becomes which quick sound, making 'latter' sound like 'ladder'?

A flap is a single brief tap of the tongue, and in North American speech it can also turn 'winter' and 'winner' into soundalikes.

Which British phonetician devised the cardinal vowels, reference points for describing the vowels of any language?

Daniel Jones recorded his eight primary cardinal vowels on gramophone disc in 1917, and phonetics students in the British tradition were taught them systematically for many years.

Which rare word order, the default in only a handful of languages, is famously used by Yoda in Star Wars?

Object–subject–verb is the neutral order in only a handful of languages, most of them in the Amazon basin, such as Apurinã and Nadëb.

Which grammatical voice makes the receiver of an action the subject, as in 'The tree was pulled down'?

Passive sentences let a speaker leave out who did the deed, and English builds them from a past participle plus the auxiliary 'be' or 'get'.

In 'The quick brown fox jumps', which syntactic unit is 'the quick brown fox', replaceable by the pronoun 'it'?

A noun phrase can be swapped for a single pronoun, and noun phrases may be the most frequently occurring phrase type across the world's languages.

In English, pronouns such as 'him', 'whom' and 'them' are the only words still marked for which grammatical case?

Accusative forms survive in English only on pronouns, which is why 'the dog' looks the same as subject or object while 'he' has to become 'him'.

In 'The person whom I saw yesterday went home', the words 'whom I saw yesterday' form which type of clause?

Relative clauses modify a noun, here 'person', and English can leave the pronoun out altogether: 'the person I saw yesterday' means exactly the same.

Which word for military manoeuvring shares the Greek root 'taxis', meaning arrangement, with the word 'syntax'?

Tactics and syntax both go back to the Greek verb for arranging: 'taxis' could mean the battle array of an army as well as order in general.

Which idea, usually credited to Noam Chomsky, holds that innate constraints shape every possible human language?

Universal grammar has been called a placeholder: it names whichever language-specific features of the mind turn out to be inborn, whatever they prove to be.

Which word class, named by Leonard Bloomfield in 1933, groups 'the', 'this', 'my' and 'many' together?

Determiners take in articles, demonstratives, possessives and quantifiers, and Bloomfield coined the label after observing that English nouns often require a qualifying word.

Hindi, Japanese and Korean all share which basic word order, the most common among the world's languages?

Subject–object–verb narrowly beats the English pattern as the commonest order, and together the two account for more than 87% of languages with a preferred order.

In a German declarative main clause, the finite verb must occupy which position, a rule English has largely lost?

Second position belongs to the finite verb in German main clauses whatever comes before it, and the same inversions are regular in Dutch and the Scandinavian languages.

Which kind of sentence, named after a saying about being deceived, lures readers into a misreading?

Garden-path sentences borrow their name from being led up the garden path, and one famous five-word example about crewing a boat uses 'man' as its verb.

'John saw the man on the mountain with a telescope' has several readings; which kind of ambiguity is this?

Structural ambiguity comes from how the words group rather than from any one word, and the telescope sentence can be read in at least five ways.

In 'boiling hot water', the word 'water' fixes the category of the whole phrase; what is such a word called?

The head decides how its whole phrase behaves, and languages differ on where it sits: English mostly puts it early, while Japanese word order is in a sense the opposite.

In 'The dog chased the cat', the words 'the cat' behave as a single unit; what do syntacticians call such a unit?

A constituent can be confirmed with tests such as coordination, fronting or swapping in a pronoun, though syntacticians warn that the tests often contradict each other.

Verbs such as 'give', 'grant' and 'tell', which take a subject and two objects, are described by which term?

Ditransitive verbs hand a theme to a recipient, and English can reorder the pair with a preposition, so 'give me a break' could also be 'give a break to me'.

In English questions such as 'How did you find it', which operation carries the question word to the front?

Wh-movement is named after English question words such as who, what and where, although 'how' counts as one of them as well.

Chomsky's early transformational grammar derived a sentence's surface form from which underlying level?

Deep structure was popularized by Chomsky in the early 1960s, but his own framework moved on, and since the mid-1990s the level no longer features in it at all.

Which 1970 proposal by Noam Chomsky, developed by Ray Jackendoff, gives every kind of phrase one shared template?

X-bar theory replaced the many separate rules that earlier analyses needed for each kind of phrase with one schema, and takes its name from the bar drawn over the letter X.

In the Minimalist Program, which basic operation combines two syntactic objects to build a new, larger unit?

Merge only ever joins two items at a time, so every sentence it builds has strictly binary branching, however long it grows.

Which term, taken from chemistry and established by Lucien Tesnière, names the number of arguments a verb requires?

Valency starts at zero: the verb in 'It's raining' needs no real participant, while the verb in 'he sleeps' needs exactly one.