Conlangs
Language Families
Writing Systems
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Linguistics on the Internet
100
This auxiliary language is the only auxlang to have a native speaker population (~1,000).
What is Esperanto?
100
This language in France and Spain is famously unrelated to other languages (i.e. it’s a language isolate).
What is Basque?
100
This is the most widely adopted writing script in the world.
What is the Latin/Roman script?
100
This professional helps actors master accents for film and TV.
What is a dialect coach?
100
Some consider GIF, LASER, TBH, and BRB to be acronyms and "TBH" and "BRB" to be this other category because you just say the letters out loud.
What are initialisms?
200
This kind of auxiliary language specifically refers to a conlang designed for communication between people of different nations.
What is an international auxiliary language?
200
Romanian, Sicilian, Irish, and English are part of this language family.
What is Indo-European?
200
Logographs, like Chinese characters, don’t represent units of sound, but rather units like these.
What are semantic units (words/morphemes)?
200
If you want to develop a spell-checking system for a low-resource language, you may want to call this kind of linguistics professional.
What is a computational linguist?
200
Lowkenuinely is a _________ of ‘lowkey’ + ‘genuinely’.
What is a portmanteau?
300
This family of conlangs in J. R. R. Tolkien’s world of Middle-earth is spoken by the Elves; they’re noted for sounding pretty beautiful.
What are the Elvish languages?
300
This language family contains Akan, Swahili, Wolof, and Yoruba.
What is Niger-Congo?
300
Cherokee polymath and linguist Sequoyah developed this kind of writing system for his language, where characters represented entire syllables instead of sounds.
What is a syllabary?
300
Noam Chomsky, often dubbed the father of modern linguistics, is a famous example of this profession in linguistics.
What is a syntactician?
300
We can say 'nonchalant', but it's harder to say 'chalant', because 'chalant' is this kind of root.
What is a bound root?
400
This philosophical conlang was intended to be easy to learn and to promote positive thinking.
What is Toki Pona?
400
Turkish, Mongolian, and even Japanese were sometimes grouped under this now-discredited language family.
What is Altaic?
400
Every letter in Korean's alphabet hangul matches the shape of the mouth when you pronounce it. This is known as this kind of script.
What is a featural script?
400
Noah Webster, who helped standardize American spelling, is a famous example of this linguistic profession.
What is a lexicographer?
400
In his viral video, the 'Six-Seven' kid Maverick Trevillian pronounces /sɪks ˈsɛ.vən/ with these tones across the three syllables:
high tone, ______ ____ , falling tone
Rising tone
500
Used by a utopian community called the Eskaya since the 1900s, Eskayan is a naturally occurring conlang that combines Boholano vocabulary with Visayan grammar and is written using a (Latin) alphabet, an abugida, and a syllabary. It is spoken in this country.
What is the Philippines?
500
This technique has been used to reconstruct extinct languages, like Proto-Indo-European, from the surviving members of their language family.
What is the comparative method?
500
This refers to writing systems that alternate between writing left to right and then right to left on the next line, once used in both Europe (Etruscan, Ancient Greek) and the Arabian Peninsula (Old Sabaean, Old Arabic).
What is boustrophedon?
500
The 2010 historical drama The King's Speech follows the journey of King George VI and this kind of linguistics professional.
What is a speech language pathologist?
500
This problem was named by a Tumblr user to refer to the ambiguity of who “he” and “him” are in a sentence like "He likes him." This name is now used by actual linguists (thanks @humanteneleven).
What is the Gay Fanfiction Problem?