Word.ws English Dictionary

folk linguistics

folk linguistics noun: beliefs held by speakers about their language or language more generally; the study of these beliefs.

Noun

folk linguistics (uncountable)

  1. Beliefs held by speakers about their language or language more generally; the study of these beliefs.
    • In light of the findings from early research in social psychology, research in folk linguistics has also examined the social characteristics that non-experts associate with regional linguistic variation.2014, Susan Tamasi, Lamont Antieau, Language and Linguistic Diversity in the US, Routledge, →ISBN, page 56

Questions about folk linguistics

What does folk linguistics mean?
Folk linguistics means beliefs held by speakers about their language or language more generally; the study of these beliefs.
What part of speech is folk linguistics?
Folk linguistics is a noun.

Words near folk linguistics in the dictionary

  1. folk horror
  2. folk house
  3. folk houses
  4. folk illness
  5. folk illnesses
  6. folk linguistics
  7. folk magic
  8. folk magick
  9. folk medicine
  10. folk medicines
  11. folk memories

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: folk linguistics (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “folk linguistics.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/folk_linguistics. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.