One year of Linguistic Discovery

Happy New Year! 🎉

2025 was the official first year of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter! In this issue I’ll show you some fun stats from this year and tell you what’s coming up for 2026!

Launching this newsletter was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It allows me to explore ideas in more depth than short videos on TikTok/Instagram, and helps establish me as a public intellectual so that I can pursue my dream of publishing a pop linguistics book in the near future. (More on that in a bit!) Newsletter subscriptions also finally give me a path to financial viability for Linguistic Discovery. Even though my social media posts sometimes get millions of views, the earnings from them are paltry at best, or nonexistent depending on the platform. Plus, consistently churning out that much social media content is simply unsustainable, and I’ve experienced extended burnout from it on more than one occasion.

So while 2025 served as proof of concept for the newsletter, 2026 is the year I go all in! I’ll be shifting my primary focus from social media to weekly articles exploring the incredible diversity of the world’s languages and how they work instead.

Of course, none of this would be possible without you, my dear reader. Thank you to every single one of you who took the time to subscribe, read my articles and the digest each week, and reshare issues of the newsletter on social media. An especially huge thank-you goes out to my paid subscribers, who have now made it possible to cover the most important bills associated with Linguistic Discovery (website hosting, social media scheduling tools, etc. etc.) instead of paying for them out of pocket like I had been for years. If you’re not yet a paid subscriber and would like to support my mission to educate the world about the science and diversity of language, you can subscribe here:

I’d also like to thank those couple hundred readers who have been following my intermittent blog posts since before I even launched the newsletter: if you’ve been subscribed to these posts since early 2024 or before, you were part of the reason I felt like producing this newsletter was possible. Finally, a special thank you to my fantastic copyeditor Amy Treber, whose keen eye has greatly improved a number of my articles this year.

Now for the fun stuff! Here are some neat stats from 2025:

📊 Stats

Newsletter Stats

Top Articles

Do Inuit languages really have more words for snow? And why does it matter, anyway?

A new study shows that Inuit languages really do have more words for snow, but what does that tell us about language?

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

Did Kanzi the bonobo understand language?

Kanzi the bonobo, who learned language, made stone tools, and played Minecraft, dies at age 44. What can his remarkable linguistic abilities teach us about language?

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

From counting to cuneiform: How writing was invented

The earliest version of cuneiform wasn’t used to write language at all—it was used to count! And that Sumerian system of counting still influences our counting systems today. Here’s the story of Sumerian numerals.

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

The etymology of ‘one’: From Proto-Indo-European to Modern English

There are over thirty English words that derive from the Proto-Indo-European word for ‘one’. This is the story of how they came to be, and what that story teaches us about how language works.

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

Why English needs “y’all”

Why doesn’t English just have a plural “you” like other languages?

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

Social Media Stats

These stats are an aggregate across all the social media platforms I post to (Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, X, YouTube).

🏆 Milestones

• At various points throughout the year, the Linguistic Discovery newsletter was featured as a Rising Newsletter in the Science category on Substack, reaching #33 at its peak!
• Reached 1 million followers across platforms. Here’s what my follower growth looks like each month since I started Linguistic Discovery in December 2020.

2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣6️⃣ 2026

My mission with Linguistic Discovery has always been the same: to educate the public about the science and diversity of language. To me, that means focusing on how language works, and the principles and processes that shape language—cognitive linguistics, social dynamics, language change, etc. It also means showcasing the wonderful diversity of the world’s languages, and highlighting indigenous, endangered, and minority languages whenever possible. I try not to focus on trivia, current fads (like slang), or artificial languages. However, I haven’t always lived up to this mission. So in 2026 I hope to embody that mission with a more focused set of topics in the newsletter.

I’ve also been inspired by Erik Hoel, author of The Intrinsic Perspective:

if I write at least an essay a week as I’ve been doing, and continue this for 20 years, I will have written more than 1,000 essays in my life. The more I think on it, the more this seems a worthy goal. If I could accomplish 1,000 good essays, perhaps even a few great ones, touching at various points on every topic of my age about which I have something worthwhile to say, I could die with dignity. With a mind finally, after all that time, spent and at rest. ~ Erik Hoel, “Goodbye academia, hello Substack”

The newsletter gives me a chance to make a real intellectual contribution to the world, so I’m excited to start making that vision reality with more articles in 2026.

Here’s what’s changing (or not changing) in 2026:

• I’ll continue publishing a digest of the latest news and research in linguistics. Many of you told me in your responses to the reader survey how much you value this, so I’ll keep it going! However, the digest will probably be shorter going forward, if only because I’ve now worked through my backlog of content for it. (There simply isn’t that much new linguistics stuff to talk about each week!) I may also experiment with a biweekly posting schedule (every other week).
• I’ll aim to publish one new longform article each week. Each week I’ll publish an article about grammatical diversity in the world’s languages, how language works, explainers of terms and concepts in linguistics, or profiles of specific languages. You told me through the reader survey that you’re especially interested in the first two topics, so most of the articles will be in those areas.
• New publishing schedule. You also told me in the reader survey that you’re a bunch of morning birds! A majority of you prefer to have the newsletter delivered in the early morning before work, so that’s what I’ll do: I’ll aim to have the newsletter in your inbox by the time you wake up (probably 4am ET). The weekly digest will now be delivered on Tuesdays, and articles will be delivered on Saturdays. (These times/schedules are subject to change if I notice significant changes in open rates etc.)
  • Digest: Tuesdays @ 4am ET
  • Articles: Saturdays @ 4am ET
• I’m starting a book project! And paying supporters will get early access! The working title is The Linguarium: A field guide to the world’s languages. The book is a tour of the diversity of the world’s languages, from click languages to reconstructed languages to whistled languages to secret languages to the language of thought to animal languages to the very first human language, and many more. I’ll syndicate the book so that each section/chapter is an issue of the newsletter. But because I want to pitch the book to a traditional publisher, those issues will be paywalled and only available to paying supporters.

• More articles will be paywalled. I expect about half of the articles in 2026 will be paywalled as part of the book, and the other half will be free. Some paywalled articles may also be behind-the-scenes content about my work documenting and revitalizing languages, or deep-dives on special niche topics.

• The price of paid subscriptions will increase to $10/mo. (USD). In 2025 I published 26 articles, including one bonus article (The Boasian Trilogy for Chitimacha) and one early access article (Inuit words for snow) for paying supporters only. Going forward, I plan to publish twice as many articles each year (~50), and significantly more bonus articles. Because paying supporters will now be receiving drastically more bonus content (~25 articles per year instead of 1–2), I’ve decided to increase the price of a monthly subscription to $10/mo. (USD). Free subscriptions will remain free, and free subscribers will still have access to all my regular articles (~25/yr.). The new pricing model will go into effect on February 1, but if you’d like to lock in the old price of $5/mo. (USD) for another year, you can purchase an annual subscription for $50 now and avoid the price increase until 2027.

To recap, here’s the new pricing structure:

Thank you again for an incredible first year of the newsletter! I hope you’ve enjoyed reading each of these issues as much as I have writing them. Here’s to a language-filled 2026! 🥂

~ Danny