What linguists think everyone should know about language: on extracting salience from open-ended responses

The study reports on a global survey asking linguists what they think everyone should know about language. Specifically, we asked linguists to formulate questions that it would be important for the general public to know the answer to. We received 3,349 suggestions for such questions from 538 linguists from 49 different countries. The study undertakes a content analysis of these open-ended responses. We analyze the text data at three levels of abstraction: (i) the overarching themes that the responses represent, (ii) the general questions about language that the individual responses relate to, and (iii) the specific topics that are mentioned in the responses. Results show that Variation and (language as a) System are the most recurrent themes among the responses, that ‘How and why do languages change?’ is the most frequently provided question, and that Language learning, Language structure, and Comparing languages are the most prevalent topics in the data. We contend that these findings reflect what issues are the most salient to linguists when asked about language in general. However, we also show that there is considerable variation in the responses, indicating that not all linguists think of the same issues when asked what everyone should know about language. The study provides a foundation for discussions and further research on the practical value of language-related knowledge for the general public.