Language genes may be much older than previously thought

Welcome to this week’s edition of the Linguistic Discovery digest, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and media on language and linguistics!

🆕 New from Linguistic Discovery

This week’s content from Linguistic Discovery.

🔓 Unlocked: The Ass Camouflage Construction: What this African American English expression teaches us about the world’s languages

This article is now available to all subscribers, free or paid. So if you weren’t able to read it when it came out, have a read now!

African American English (AAE) has a cool expression called the Ass Camouflage Construction:

• They done arrested her stupid ass.
• I’m gonna sue her ass.
• Get your triflin’ ass out of here.
• I saw his ass yesterday.
• His ass is gonna get fried.

It turns out this fun expression can teach us a lot about how the world’s languages work! Learn more in this issue of the newsletter:

The Ass Camouflage Construction

What this African American English expression teaches us about the world’s languages

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

Shortform Video: Pre-Greek

As part of my collaboration with St. John’s College, I created a 3-minute video about the Pre-Greek language that influenced Ancient Greek. So if you want a condensed version of my longer article on the topic, have a watch!

And if you haven’t read (or haven’t finished) the article itself, I definitely recommend doing so! I’m very pleased to report that this is my best-performing article yet, so readers seem to be really enjoying it.

Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek

Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

📰 In the News

Language and linguistics in the news.

California’s indigenous communities reclaim their languages

The Breath of Life institute brings California tribal members to California Language Archive at UC Berkeley for a week each summer to train them how to access and read archival materials about their languages.

• Berkeley: California’s indigenous communities reclaim their own language—and pieces of their history (SFGate)

ConlangCrafter: The AI model that invents languages

A new AI model called ConlangCrafter is capable of generating new languages, including ones with unconventional communication systems such as a language for cephalopod species that uses colors and gestures instead of sounds.

• ConlangCrafter turns AI to imagining languages (IEEE Spectrum)

A recent article in Science also looks at whether ConlangCrafter is truly creative—does it produce genuinely novel tongues, or does it simply spit out a remix of existing languages?

• An AI can invent entirely new languages—but is it creative? (Science)

The model was published in a research paper:

• Alper et al. 2026. ConlangCrafter: Constructing languages with a multi-hop LLM pipeline. Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Vol. 1: Long Papers, pp. 9318–9349. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.422.

🗞️ Current Linguistics

Recently published research in linguistics.

What linguists think everyone should know about language

A recent study asked linguists around the world what they thought everyone should know about language. Here’s a write-up of the findings:

What linguists think everyone should know about language

157 questions. 538 linguists from 49 countries.

Connect’s SubstackConnect Linguistics

Here are the most common macro-questions among the responses, ordered by frequency:

• Lehecka & Östman. 2025. What linguists think everyone should know about language—on extracting salience from open-ended responses. Folia Linguistica 60(1): 497–530. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/flin-2025-2020.

Genes controlling language may be much older than previously thought

A new study links language to genes that predate the divergence of modern humans and Neanderthals, suggesting that Neanderthals too had some form of early communication.

How did humans evolve language? It may be far more ancient than scientists realized

A new study links genetic regions that predate the divergence of modern humans and Neanderthals to language

Scientific AmericanJackie Flynn Mogensen

• Casten et al. 2026. Ancient regulatory evolution shapes individual language abilities in present-day humans. Science Advances 12(17). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aed5260.

📃 This Week’s Reads

Interesting articles I’ve come across this week.

Inside the creation of Project Hail Mary’s musical alien language:

Inside the creation of Project Hail Mary’s musical alien language

Linguists explain how a language built from musical notes could convey complex meaning and even support conversation

Scientific AmericanRachel Feltman and Allison Parshall and Fonda Mwangi and Alex Sugiura

For my own take on the linguistics of Project Hail Mary, take a look at this issue of the newsletter:

Project Hail Mary - Linguistic Discovery

Linguistic Discovery

Here’s a review of Sophia Smith Galer’s forthcoming book, How to kill a language: Power, resistance, and the race to save our words (Amazon | Bookshop):

What happens when we lose a language?

A staggering 44% of human languages are endangered – with culture, tradition and whole ways of understanding the world at stake

The GuardianSophia Smith Galer

Sramcbled wrods: the real reason you can still read jumbled text

‘Typoglycemia’ is often shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work. But this viral claim is only part of the story.

The ConversationKaren Stollznow

The Fates of the Dual

The status and story of Indo-European’s (mostly) lost alternative to singular and plural words.

Danny Bate, Wanderer in Language HistoryDanny Bate

Speaking of Words: How City People Insult Country People - InDepthNH.org

For hundreds of years we English speakers have come up with countless terms of abuse for each other—one of the more fertile sectors of the language—and a surprising number of them are based on urban scorn for rural folk.

InDepthNH.orgMichael Ferber

📚 Books & Media

New (and old) books and media touching on language and linguistics.

The Book: A cover-to-cover exploration of the most powerful object of our time

This was such a neat book! It’s a history of not just the book but writing technologies in general, from papyrus to parchment to paper to the printing press and much more. It got me thinking a lot about how the mediums used to write affected the writing systems themselves. I also highly recommend getting the hardcover version pictured here, which is gorgeously bound and illustrated.

• Amazon
• Bookshop

Why is a tiger a tiger?

I recently learned about this fun etymology book for kids from Lauren Gawne’s blog Superlinguo. I’ll quote from her post:

There are many books with etymological stories for adults, but why should adults have all the fun? Dave Buchen has been created illustrated books for children with short, accessible etymology stories.

Why is a Tiger a Tiger? is full of animal etymologies with playful black and white illustrations. I counted around eighty pages of illustrations. Buchen is a self-published author, and the print on demand copy I received has the perfect paper to make this a fabulous linguistically-informative colouring book.

Get your own copy here:

• Amazon
• Bookshop

👋🏼 Till next week!

In my article on the Pre-Greek substrate that influenced Ancient Greek, I likened contact between languages to geographical strata, i.e. layers of linguistic history. Ryan Starkey of Starkey Comics illustrates this nicely with a map of toponyms (place names) of Old Irish, Norse, Brittonic, and Old English origins across Britain and Ireland.

Read his full description here:

• Major placename regions of Britain & Ireland (Starkey Comics)