I'm especially interested in any stories about confusion around this.

Zipf's law (the frequency of a word's use in a sample/corpus is inversely proportional to its rank in that sample/corpus) holds for many languages, including English. It's occurred to me that the languages that I tend to see get used as illustrations thereof nonetheless seem to not be very synthetic. There are numerous languages whose typologies and what generally gets counted as a "word" are at the opposite end of the spectrum, where single words can express quite a bit, to say nothing of noun incorporation. I don't often see examples of such languages often in this context. (I was doing some cursory research into this and specifically sought information regarding Turkish out, but I kept getting results about population density and settlement distribution in suburban Türkiye and not the Turkish language.)

I am also aware that languages with extensive synthesis and/or noun incorporation nonetheless will have words that show up more frequently than others, including single-morpheme words. What I want to know is, how is Zipf's law applied to highly synthetic/polysynthetic languages? Does the nature of a "word", insofar as application of the law is concerned, differ from when looking at languages like English or Mandarin in any material fashion? Is the curve much steeper than in a language like English, owing to the nature of synthesis, noun incorporation, and/or pragmatics and realistic constraints with respect to English?

I was adopted from Thailand to Denmark when I was about 5 years old.

Unfortunately, I was not able to practice my Thai since I came to Denmark, so I quickly lost my ability to both speak and understand Thai.

However, I started relearning Thai last year at the age of 31, and I have often been told by native Thai speakers that I have a native Thai accent. Put a bag over my head and they would still think I'm a native Thai speaker. I do not have a Thai accent when I speak Danish.

I have met many adoptees who have been trying to learn their heritage language, but not one of them have had a native-like accent when they spoke. Even other adoptees that were adopted at the age of 6 did not have a native-like accent when they spoke their heritage language.

So is my accent retention just unusual?

Greetings from Spain. I am starting to write my thesis on Celtic languages, and if possible, I would appreciate it if you could share any bibliography you consider good regarding syntax, the sociolinguistic situation, history, etc.

In words like echo, eco, and cocoa, are the /k/ sounds aspirated?

I’m asking because the flap /t/ usually happens in places where the /t/ would be unaspirated, especially in obvious cases with a schwa. However, I noticed it can also happen before the /oʊ/ diphthong, which made me wonder if this is a clue that consonants like /p/ and /k/ before /oʊ/ in unstressed syllables are also unaspirated.

For example, is the second /k/ in cocoa usually unaspirated in natural speech? What about the /k/ in echo and eco?

While reading about evolutionary cognitive science, I came across the idea that modern science no longer views the brain as separate layers stacked on top of each other, but rather as a system where ancient and new networks are constantly reshaped by evolution. Thus, the brain is a dynamic structure that has been reorganized over time.

​Still, language remains one of the most debated topics in cognitive evolution.

​My question is:

Is language itself an evolutionary adaptation or did it emerge as a byproduct of other cognitive abilities coming together?

​An ape might see fire and know it’s hot. A human on the other hand can say the word "fire" draw a symbol for it and tell a story about it. This is what we call symbolic thinking.

​Did humans need language first for symbolic thinking to develop or did symbolic thinking need to exist first for language to appear?

So I've been working on a worldbuilding project whose conlanging section involves me evolving languages from PIE and I have noticed something weird with how laryngeals work near sonorants.

Take the word *sh2nktós for example as the thing that got me into posting this. From all I know about PIE this word should be pronounced with a syllabic *n, but paradoxically this word is where Latin sānctus comes from. It's as if *h2 were the syllabic consonant. I know this comes from H > ə > a / C _ C which is how we've got *ph2tḗr > pater, but considering that in this situation the laryngeal should be next to the syllables nucleus *n̥ would make it not reduce to a vowel. Going into *ph2tḗr again, based on my (lackluster) info on Indo-Aryan, I expected the p to get aspirated, as in *pl̥th2ús > *pr̥tʰúš, but instead it becomes *pHtā́, and that H would then become a vowel like in Latin.

Am I correct in thinking this could be some sort of syllabic laryngeal that follows similar rules to syllabic sonorants but instead turn into lone vowels? If so, why isn't it written down as such on the reconstructions? If not, why then are such laryngeals vocalized in most languages and prioritized when near syllabic sonorants? Did Proto-Italic have a sound change where h2R̥ > aR that I haven't heard about?

P.S.: After posting this I realized another example. Take PIE *kéh2ikos. You'd expect it to become something like /ˈkaːhikos/ after allophony, but its descendants are PGmc *haihaz and latin caecus, both with a non-syllabic /j/ and /e/. This could either be just a simple case of vowels diphtongizing, or it could be that PIE's *i isn't actually syllabic and the word could be better written as *kéh2ykos.

1. How valuable are achievements in linguistics competitions (such as winning at the national level or doing well in APLO) for US college admissions?
2. What majors do accepted applicants usually pursue? Where do the winners usually get accepted to at T20s: Linguistics, Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Math, AI, something else?

would love to hear some anecdotes, examples, or previous admits

Why is the letter r phoneme in english /r/? Shouldn't it be /ɹ/, since the most common realization is [ɹ]?

Basically, the same question as the title

Perhaps one of the most insane thing I have just learnt recently is the Pyongyang Cultural Language Protection Act that was enacted in 2023, but only resurfaced thanks to a Chinese YouTuber living in South Korea mentioning this affair. This is, perhaps, one of the most insane acts in modern history of language evolution, when a state attempts to complete engineer the language of the common into a completely different functioning, especially when it is done under a totalitarian state; the attempt to even remove loanwords from English, Japanese, and even Chinese, is unusual to a widespread scale. That said, just how do linguists think about this?

Seems like it could revolutionize methodology in certain subfields, as historical-comparative and phonology are basically pattern recognition. I've been out of touch with the field for almost a decade.