28
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Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
After researching this a bit, I'm posting an answer to my own question, but I want to say that I welcome more answers, especially if they bring other pieces of evidence.
A 2008 Gallup poll asked ...
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27
votes
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Is pronouncing loanwords according to their "native" pronunciation stigmatised across most cultures and languages?
I'm not familiar enough with other cultures to answer the question but I have a perspective that I haven't seen expressed in the comments or answers. The other answer also proposed a predictive system ...
- 386
19
votes
At what point does a language become its descendant?
This is a difficult question. Greek is perceived as one language despite the fact that Classical Greek is no longer intelligible for a native speaker of Modern Greek without exposure to the classical ...
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17
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How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?
Yes, your assumption on a correlation between pitch variance and vocabulary size is wrong. The use of pitch you speak of is called "prosody" in linguistics; different speaking groups in society may ...
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15
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How does ghetto talk work in tonal languages?
Lexical tones and prosody peacefully co-exist in these languages. The speakers intuitively use only those pitch contours that do not overlap with the lexical tones.
Even more, sometimes an exaggerated ...
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14
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Why did the pronunciation of the rhotic phoneme /r/ change after the 2ndWW in public speech?
The short answer to your question for both English and German is early twentieth century stage pronunciation, an artificial, overarticulated accent designed to project to the back rows of a theater ...
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14
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Do any languages mark social distinctions other than gender and status?
One interesting marker of social distinctions is an avoidance register, a special way of speaking to certain family members. You might also hear this called mother-in-law language or hlonipha/...
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13
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Are there languages with no euphemisms?
Their presence across all known world languages constitutes a linguistic universal according to research from Allan and Burridge (1991)
Refer to this article here. And to this paper, here
As @Wilson ...
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Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
Looking at this from a software developer's perspective, there's a significant factor here that you may have overlooked. Translating a program or a website is a significant amount of work, testing, ...
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Is pronouncing loanwords according to their "native" pronunciation stigmatised across most cultures and languages?
The linguistic phenomenon that you are speaking of is in large part due to English spelling conventions being so far off from normal phonetic values for the Latin alphabet, and secondarily is due to a ...
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11
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Do any languages mark social distinctions other than gender and status?
Niger-Congo languages tend to have a system of noun classes, somewhat similar to gender in Indo-European languages (in terms of adjectives having to agree with nouns, for instance), but consisting of ...
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10
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Are there languages with no euphemisms?
I feel like this is more of a cultural question than a linguistic one.
Euphemisms do not require the currently spoken language to accommodate them. Euphemisms rely on a person's understanding that A ...
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Is pronouncing loanwords according to their "native" pronunciation stigmatised across most cultures and languages?
No, it isn't a cross-linguistic phenomenon.
For example in German language, people are expected to use foreign pronunciations for foreign words from English and (less so) French. These languages are ...
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9
votes
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Plural form as respect form - based on what?
Wikipedia has a good summary of the T-V distinction & the various strategies used across different languages. The singular-plural distinction is just one strategy, and not the most common one.
...
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9
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Rejecting writing down a language for various reasons
You may have heard this about Turoyo, though the situation is slightly different from what you describe.
Turoyo is a Neo-Aramaic language, mostly spoken by Syriac-Orthodox Christians. In the 1970s, ...
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9
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Is there a tendency to name money after other things?
Although anecdotally the answer to the question is a confident "yes", there is a big complication: the many concepts of economic value that are bundled into the Western European concept of "money". ...
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9
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Do any languages mark social distinctions other than gender and status?
Analogous to the word "maestro" in Western classical music to refer to conductors, Hindustani Classical music has "ustad" and "pandit" to address virtuoso performers. While either of them can be ...
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Do any languages mark social distinctions other than gender and status?
English "honorifics" can denote marital status (for women only) - Mrs. vs Miss. (The newer Ms. marks the addressee as a woman without specifying marital status. All men are Mr. regardless of marital ...
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Are the vast majority of Ukrainians more proficient in Russian than Ukrainian?
The answer is certainly no.
We cannot say that this is true for the "vast" majority (say 80%), but maybe this is 50/50. In the south and east, people speak better russian due to their roots (...
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Are there languages with no euphemisms?
It's hard to answer a question with a definite negative, since that leaves the possibility open for someone to come along later and say, "I know an example which disproves your position".
But I think ...
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Sociolinguistics of pre-handover Hong Kong cinema and dialogue in non-Cantonese Chinese “dialects”
Subtitles are an integral part of the film- and TV-viewing experience in the late 20th century in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, multi-topolectal or not. They essentially became ubiquitous in ...
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7
votes
why did the Franco-Provençal language decline in Switzerland?
The marginalisation of Franco-Provençal in favour of Standard French predates the modern French state. Franco-Provençal was coextensive with the Duchy of Savoy, and the Duchy adopted Standard French ...
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Charles Hockett - 'F' article?
Here's the citation:
Hockett, C. F. (1985). Distinguished lecture: F. American Anthropologist, 87(2), 263-281.
The link is here, but it's also behind a paywall.
Google Scholar profiles, personal ...
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Difference between dialect levelling and pidgin formation?
In the process of dialect levelling, the grammatical system of the dialects (tense, nominal case systems, other complex features) usually stays intact. The dialects undergoing dialect levelling are ...
- 31.1k
7
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Is pronouncing loanwords according to their "native" pronunciation stigmatised across most cultures and languages?
Argentinian Spanish native here. Context is everything but as a general rule, yes, it is stigmatized here. I'd only use the original pronunciation of that word if I'm speaking to people who are fluent ...
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6
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Do languages tend to lose the distinction between formal and informal language?
I think you are mixing different things.
One is that a stratified society has different degrees of formal education for different people. There consequently is a tendency for the upper layers of such ...
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6
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How can a Language or a Dialect be incorrect or inferior than some other one?
When you study linguistics, you learn about two approaches -- prescriptive and descriptive. Modern linguistics tend to prefer the descriptive approach, whereas early linguistics were often done in a (...
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How would a trained linguist describe this hypothesis of Symbolic Leverage
"Be brief" is the 3rd Gricean manner maxim of conversation. See Gricean maxims.
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Why did the pronunciation of the rhotic phoneme /r/ change after the 2ndWW in public speech?
For the two quoted speakers of German, dialect is an explanation. Brecht is Born in Augsburg (Bavaria) in an area where r's are rolled, and Brecht used Süddeutsche Umgangssprache (Southern colloquial ...
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Why did the pronunciation of the rhotic phoneme /r/ change after the 2ndWW in public speech?
There is an interesting discussion of Hitler's speech in Hubert's contribution to this thread: https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/40864/gab-es-einen-deutschen-posh-accent
What is significant ...
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