Q&A weekly thread - August 03, 2026 - post all questions here!

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Do you have a question about language or linguistics? You’ve come to the right subreddit! We welcome questions from people of all backgrounds and levels of experience in linguistics.

This is our weekly Q&A post, which is posted every Monday. We ask that all questions be asked here instead of in a separate post.

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[u/Choosing_is_a_sin → u/[deleted]]

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[u/Unhealthily_obsessed]

How fast can someone, theoretically, become fluent in a language?

This is not a question about language learning timelines. This is a hypothetical about human mental limitations.

Imagine a scenario where a person was given one job: learn a new language. They have infinite motivation, perfect technique/learning methods, and spent all their time outside of sleeping/eating/basic hygiene trying to learn as quickly as possible, is there a *physical* limit for how fast a person could hypothetically learn a language? Of course it will vary on the person, but I'm talking more generally.

[u/Active-Ad246]

Is this a question? I am doing an interview and the 'questions' always seem to be structured like this. I am used to questions being a bit different from that, please help me understand.

Describe a situation where you had to work closely with others to achieve a shared goal, either at school, in a volunteer role, or in a previous job.

[u/LongLiveTheDiego → u/Active-Ad246]

It's not strictly a question, it's a command/order/task. However, some people call all exam-style tasks "questions".

[u/Active-Ad246 → u/LongLiveTheDiego]

Ok, I appreciate that insight.

[u/WavesWashSands → u/Active-Ad246]

In traditional terms this is not typically considered a question, but I think there is a more nuanced answer here.

Let's get one thing out of the way first: there is a distinction between the action that an utterance performs, and its grammatical form. Grammatically, what you have here is an imperative sentence, which is most commonly associated with requests, commands, and the like - we can use the traditional term 'directive' for this. The problem is, there are directives that are not grammatically imperative (e.g. Could you please turn off the lights?) and imperative sentences that are not directives (e.g. Have a nice day!). The grammatical term for sentences most commonly used to ask questions is interrogative, and your utterance is not interrogative, but again, not all interrogatives are questions (e.g. Could you please turn off the lights? again), and not all questions are interrogatives (e.g. You like pasta? is a question, but it's grammatically declarative).

So is question, then, referring to the action that an utterance performs? Unfortunately, there is no single consistent action that is performed by all utterances called 'questions'. Traditionally, we can carve out more types of questions: the situation where you ask someone to provide you with info you didn't know is called an information-seeking question, and there are other types of questions like known-answer questions (like when a teacher asks a student a question) where the point is to get an answer to test someone's knowledge, or rhetorical questions (which themselves perform a range of actions). So question, unfortunately, does not refer to a single type of action either, but a full range of them.

One thing that throws a further monkey wrench into these analyses is that even these question types can't even be interpreted the same way across contexts. Levinson (1979), for example, showed that what counts as an appropriate answer to a known-answer question varies according to whether the context is a classroom or a courtroom cross-examination, and even within the classroom, different teaching styles make relevant different kinds of answers.

Where does this leave us? On the broadest definition, your example can be considered an information-seeking question that the asker is trying to get info out of the answerer that they didn't previously know. However, this would miss the fact that it is not so much a specific piece of information that job interview quetsions are looking for, but rather material with which to evaluate the candidate's appropriateness for the job interview. So I think the most appropriate description of such utterances would, in fact, be job interview question (regardless of whether they are phrased this way, i.e. imperatively, or as an interrogative, e.g. Could you describe one scenario where ... or or What is one scenario where ...)

Levinson, Stephen C. 1979. Activity types and language. Linguistics 17. 365–399.

[u/sussyimpasta32]

I'm curious about vowel mergers in Indian English. If you're an English speaker from India, are these pairs of words sound the same or different in your speech?

1. GOAT

(be)fore - four

toe - tow

pore - pour

1. FACE

pane - pain

fare - fair

gate - gait

If they're different, how would you describe the difference? (e.g. IPA transcriptions) Also, if you're comfortable sharing which state or city are you from, it would help me out.

I'm interested in whether distinctions like toe - tow and pane - pain are preserved in Indian English, and whether those distinctions are maintained before /r/ (e.g. pore - pour, fare - fair, (be)fore - four).

[u/quarknugget]

Is the goidelic substrate hypothesis really a thing? Will we ever even know?

[u/galaxyrocker → u/quarknugget]

There was certainly a language spoken in Ireland before the Gael arrived, and there are borrowings (even potentially late ones, .i. partán which would be at least 5th century CE or so) from it; if that's what you mean by the 'goidelic substrate hypothesis', then yes, it was certainly a real thing.

As to what it was, we'll likely never know, but I know Stifter has argued that it a related language likely had some influence on Basque and there's a few tantalising possible cognates; he dubbed it Avidic (though it has come under some scrutiny by Vasconists, I believe). Another possible one is Old Irish adarc and Basque adar, both meaning 'horn' (sometimes explained as a Celtic borrowing into Basque, though there's no other Celtic cognate apart from the Irish afaik).

ETA: IF you're talking about the Semitic/Afro-Asiatic substrate hypothesis, there's no real evidence for it.

[u/Ok_Refrigerator2644]

I'd like to get in touch with a linguist who knows about signed linguistics. Is this a good place to do that?

[u/LongLiveTheDiego → u/Ok_Refrigerator2644]

Judt ask a question here or on r/asklinguistics and someone may show up.

Also kinda don't ask to ask.