General Linguistics

Language Families

10

This language family has around 3.2 billion speakers

Indo-European

20

This language family contains many liturgical languages for three large religions

Semitic (Afro-Asiatic is also acceptable since Semitic is a branch of it)

30

This hypothetical language macrofamily encompasses nearly every language on Earth, except for the middle parts of Africa

Borean

40

This language family has most of its languages concentrated in Alaska/Northwest of Canada but also some in the south US

Na-Dene

50

This language family has its accusative case be marked with primarily nasal consonants

Uralic

Specific Languages

10

This language is known for its unusual single letter representation for the sound /ʃ/

Hungarian / Magyar

20

This language is the most spoken (mother) language in Pakistan

Punjabi

30

In 1975, Peru recognized this language as one of its official languages

Quechua

40

This language is an Austronesian language spoken in Madagascar

Malagasy

50

This Australian language was originally classified as a language isolate, but later classified as a Pama-Nyungan language

Yanyuwa

Phonological Changes

10

This is a regular system of replacing vowels, most commonly an /e/ with /e:/, /o/, and /o:/

Ablaut (in PIE)

20

This sound change inserts one or more sounds to a word

Epenthesis

30

This sound change swaps two phonemes' positions in a word

Metathesis

40

This process is the loss of a word initial vowel

Apheresis

50

This is the pronunciation of (typically) a sibilant with a deep groove running along the back of the tongue, causing a more intense sound.

Sulcalization

Syntax / Grammar

10

In some languages, the head of a phrase precedes its compliments

Head-initial

20

The rarest word order

OSV

30

This field of linguistics studies how context relates to meaning

Pragmatics

40

This third grammatical state in Arabic grammar is not definite or indefinite

Construct state

50

This type of morphosyntactic alignment is the reconstructed alignment system for the Proto-Austronesian language

Symmetrical voice

Random

10

This type of writing system tends to not write vowels

Abjad

20

The negation particle in many Indo-European languages starts with this sound

/n/

30

This is the oldest script that was once used to write the most spoken language in the Kartvelian language family

Asomtavruli

40

Most IE languages are in this branch of IE

Indo-Iranian

50

This language isolate has 1 native speaker

Kusunda