What does the general public want to know about language?
Abstract
Abstract This study investigates how nonexperts conceptualize linguistics and what they most want to know about language. We recruited 812 English-speaking participants from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom via Prolific to complete four open-ended surveys (N = 406 on perceived professional foci; N = 406 on desired research topics). All responses were segmented into 2,684 statements and analyzed with unsupervised natural language processing: sentence embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2) followed by k-means clustering, yielding 29 topic clusters. Results show that respondents broadly recognize core subfields (e.g., syntax, phonetics/phonology, morphology, semantics, historical linguistics) and also reproduce familiar misconceptions (e.g., linguists as translators; linguists as language or literature teachers). Public curiosity, however, concentrates on applied and experiential themes – language learning and learnability, bilingualism, dialect differences, and the origins, spread, and loss of languages. Topics linking variation, cognition, and development (sociolinguistics, acquisition, psycho-/neurolinguistics) form shared ground. We discuss how these high-interest domains can serve as entry points for communicating foundational linguistic concepts.