Aims and scope | Editorial policies | Policy on prior publication | Language sections | Article types | Research and reporting requirements | Preparing your article for submission | Formatting and style guidelines | Overleaf | Competing Interests | Author affiliations | Authorship and contributorship | Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools | ORCiD | Supplementary materials | Author Hub

Aims and scope

Language is the flagship journal of the Linguistic Society of America. It publishes research articles dealing with linguistic theory, language and public policy, and the teaching of linguistics. It also publishes notes of interest to the academic and professional linguistic community, and reviews of recently published linguistic books.

Editorial policies

Presentation and intended audience 

Language is a general journal intended to serve the membership of the LSA. Thus, manuscripts should be made as readable as possible to non-specialists. We generally anticipate that readers will have some facility in all areas of linguistics, but papers that appear addressed to and understandable by only those in narrow specialties will likely be returned unreviewed with a recommendation that the paper be submitted to a more specialized journal.

Number of manuscripts that can be submitted to Language

At any given time, authors may have up to two papers in review, of which at least one must be co-authored. An author may not have two manuscripts of which they are the sole author in review simultaneously. 

Submitting to other journals at the same time

Following accepted ethical practice in academia, authors should not submit the same manuscript to more than one publication venue at a time (be that a different journal or an edited book). Papers submitted to Language and found to have been submitted elsewhere will be returned immediately without review, and the editorial team of the other publication will be alerted to the double submission. Papers submitted to Language at any stage of the review process, including “accepted for publication”, will be summarily rejected if they are found to be under consideration or previously published in another venue. Authors with submissions elsewhere that bear similarity to the submitted work are encouraged to send a copy along with the submission to Language.

Submission of previously published work

As a general policy, Language will not consider for publication papers that have been published elsewhere or that are currently under consideration for publication in a different venue. Papers submitted to Language that are found to be in violation of this policy will be summarily rejected, irrespective of the stage they are at in the review process. Submissions incorporating results that have been published elsewhere (e.g., in a working papers or conference proceedings volume) may be considered for publication in Language, provided that they build on those results and develop the ideas and evidence along new lines or in greater depth. Contact the Editor beforehand to confirm whether a submission incorporating components of previously published research will be eligible for review. The final decision about whether a paper will be considered for review rests with the editor. For more information, please see the Policy on prior publication section below.

Language sections

Each contribution should be submitted to the appropriate section for review. If you are uncertain about the appropriate section for your manuscript, please contact the Editor prior to submission. The Editor will not change the section designation of any contribution without discussing it with the author(s).

Language and Public Policy

This section publishes original, high-quality scholarship exploring and analyzing areas of public policy that benefit from the findings and methods of linguistics.
Submissions may deal with public policy concerns in the social sciences, education, medicine, and law, among other disciplines, from any level (local to international), that involve language as the topic (as in language policy itself), a focus (as in education policies), an instrument (as in legal policies), or a relevant variable (as in labor or civil rights policies). The section aims to highlight the relevance of language and linguistics to the policy arena through discussion of issues that bring them together. Multi-disciplinary and international contributions are particularly welcome.

Please contact the section Editors with any inquiries about possible article topics:

• Patricia Cukor-Avila (University of North Texas, USA): patricia.cukor-avila@unt.edu
• Vaidehi Ramanathan (University of California - Davis, USA): vramanathan@ucdavis.edu

Language Revitalization and Documentation

This section recognizes the central importance of research focusing on language documentation and revitalization. Prospective authors should consider implicitly what the article’s contribution would be to an audience of general linguists, as opposed to those working in language documentation and revitalization. The articles types considered for this section include:

• Traditional research articles - covering topics like research ethics and methodology (e.g., articles addressing ethics through discussions of different models; articles typifying methodologies via interdisciplinarity approaches from various disciplines, such as music, archival research, sociolinguistics, or ethnography; article bringing new methodologies, technologies, theoretical models, or other topics to a general linguistics audience etc.).
• Case studies and models of language documentation and revitalization.
• Corpus overview articles - i.e., articles including geographic and linguistic information about the language, existing resources, key linguistic features guiding the investigation, identification of the team involved in the project, recording formats, a description of methodology and the corpus content, and photographic documentation.

For more guidance on articles considered for this section, please review the Editorial (Fitzgerald, 2021) introducing this section and/or contact the section Editor, Colleen M. Fitzgerald: colleen.fitzgerald@ndsu.edu.

Teaching Linguistics

This section invites submissions of original, high-quality scholarship in the area of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL). Publications in the section focus not only on issues that relate to the direct teaching of linguistics, but also to the application of linguistic concepts and theories and the insight it provides about teaching and education more broadly.
The section Editors strive to facilitate conversations leading to a critical examination of teaching practices in our field, and are also committed to supporting linguists in seeing their role as advocates in their communities and institutions for addressing issues of justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI).

Topics for submissions 

Submissions may focus on the teaching of any area of linguistics at any level or may offer a broader perspective on teaching linguistics within higher education or the K-12 curriculum. 

Evaluation criteria

Potential authors are invited to meet virtually with the section Editors to discuss manuscript ideas prior to submission. This conversation can help avoid the need for major revisions prior to sending the manuscript out for review. Additionally, authors are highly encouraged to take into account the following evaluation criteria:

• Does the article address the teaching of linguistics or the use of linguistic concepts/theory in teaching?
• How clearly does the author describe the pedagogical issue under investigation?
• Does the author explain their positionality and institutional context and how that influences their approach to the pedagogical issue?
• In what ways does the author discuss the applicability of this approach outside of their own context?
• In what ways does the review of the literature situate the article in a broader pedagogical context, both within the field of linguistics as well as more broadly in the scholarship of teaching and learning?
• In what ways does the author provide support or evidence for their proposed approach to the pedagogical issue?
• How are issues of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) discussed and addressed throughout the article, as an integral aspect of the criteria above, when relevant?

Available article types

• Research articles. An original, empirical contribution that helps us understand and enhance teaching and learning via evidence-based conclusions. These manuscripts should not exceed 10,000 words (not including references, appendices, and supplemental materials).
• Innovations in teaching linguistics articles. An article that describes an innovative pedagogical approach. Innovations may encompass (1) novel topics in linguistics not traditionally included in the curriculum, (2) the implementation of novel pedagogical techniques in the linguistics classroom, or (3) novel collaborations for introducing linguistics in the K-16 curriculum. The purpose of this article type is to quickly and broadly share new approaches that can be adopted throughout the discipline. As such, these manuscripts tend to be shorter than research articles (10,000 words maximum) and include supplemental materials to allow readers to further explore the innovation.
  It is an expectation that contributors include relevant Supplementary Materials with their manuscripts. For more information, please read the Supplementary Materials section below.

For all article types, authors should explain how ethical practices were used in the collection of any data (e.g., assessment data, course surveys, interviews or focus groups). Papers in Teaching Linguistics are meant to serve as a useful pedagogical resource for linguists. As such, it is also an expectation that authors include relevant Supplementary Materials with their manuscripts. For more information, please read the Supplementary Materials section below.

For more guidance on articles considered for this section, please review the Editorial (Hiramatsu & Martinez, 2021) introducing this section and/or contact the section Editors:

• Catherine Anderson: canders@mcmaster.ca
• Ann Bunger: acbunger@iu.edu

Article types

Article type	Word length	Abstract	Keywords	Notes
General Research Article	18,000 words	Yes	Yes	Guidance for General Research Articles also applies to articles submitted as part of Language special sections: Language Revitalization and Documentation Language and Public Policy Teaching Linguistics
Research Report	9,000 words	Yes	Yes
Book Review	2,000-4,000 words	No	No	By invitation only
Review Article	5,000 words	Yes	Yes	By invitation only
Commentary	4,000 words	No	No
Perspective	5,000 words	Yes	Yes

General Research Articles

General Research Articles are in-depth articles in any area of linguistics, and are expected to make a contribution to the development of linguistic theory, broadly defined to include all theoretical models and approaches to language. Since Language is a generalist journal, General Research Articles should be written to be accessible to a general linguistics audience. Although it is expected that core aspects of the analysis may not be accessible to non-specialists, even non-specialists should be able to grasp the gist of the research and should understand why the research is broadly important to linguistics. A Language General Research Article is therefore different than an article written for a specialist journal where it can be expected that potential readers share the same technical area specific expertise as the author.

Word length. Submissions must not exceed 18,000 words (inclusive of notes, any charts and tables, and appendices, but excluding references).
Submissions that are within the word limit but otherwise quite long (over 12,000 words) will be assessed by the Editor for appropriateness of their length and may be subjected to a more stringent review process. If necessary, long manuscripts will be returned for revision before being sent out for review. Authors should also keep references within a reasonable limit, and should include only sources that are directly relevant to their argument. Upon acceptance, authors may be requested to shorten the list of references associated with the paper.

Research Reports

While a Research Report may appeal more to specialists, authors should still make every effort to make their manuscripts accessible to a general audience. The typical Research Report will make a smaller, more targeted contribution than a General Research Article (similar to the "squib" format in other journals). This section publishes primarily two kinds of articles:

• Data driven: Articles that report on interesting data that are relevant to current issues in linguistic theory, but that by themselves do not warrant development into a full-blown General Research Article. 
• Methodological innovations: Articles that report on methodological innovations that can enable researchers to investigate new theoretically relevant questions. 

Although the expectation for making a contribution to the development of linguistic theory is lesser for a Research Report than a General Research Article, articles in this section are still expected to engage with the relevant theoretical literature, and to clearly communicate to readers how the data or the methodological innovation is theoretically relevant. A Research Report should be thematically appropriate to this section (i.e., if a paper is submitted to this section it should be because the nature and topic of the paper make it unsuitable for development into a General Research Article). The Research Reports section is not intended as a publication venue for "work in progress". 

Word length: A Research Report should be less than 9,000 words in length (inclusive of notes, any charts and tables, and appendices, but excluding references). 

Book Reviews (by invitation only)

Book Reviews are reviews of recent linguistic books. Book Reviews are invited by the Book Review Editor, and unsolicited reviews are not accepted. For complete information about Book Reviews, please consult the Book reviews page.

Word length: 2,000-4,000 words.

Review Articles (by invitation only)

Review Articles are longer, more substantive Book Reviews. They are reserved for books that are likely to make a significant impact on the field, and are typically written only by invitation from the editorial team. 

For complete information about Review Articles, please consult the Book reviews page. Individuals interested in writing a Review Article should contact the Book Reviews Editor (jgrieser@utk.edu).

Word length: Maximum 5,000 words (excluding references).

Commentaries

Submissions to this section reflect on developments in linguistic research, without necessarily making a novel research contribution in the submission itself. This section includes Discussions, Replies, and Letters to the Editor.

Word length:

Perspectives

This section is aimed at publishing articles that generate written responses. Each contribution in this section will consist of a longer 'target article' and a collection of 'responses' to the target article. 

• Target articles. Target articles will be selected on the basis of quality, readability, and whether they are likely to invite further productive discussion of issues of general interest to the field. Submissions for target articles are often solicited by the editorial team. Although unsolicited submissions of target articles will be accepted, authors are encouraged to discuss any plans for submission with the Editor before submission.
• Responses. Responses in response to the target articles will be selected on the basis of whether they represent thoughtful perspectives that engage an issue raised by the article. Broadly negative responses are not encouraged; a discussion deepening our understanding of an issue should dominate the presentation. Responses are selected on the basis of whether they collectively represent an informative diversity of perspectives. A second round of briefer responses may be published in a later volume of Language is warranted.
• Submissions and pre-submissions. We encourage preliminary submission of commentary abstracts up to three pages, as well as full commentaries.

Word length: Responses should be maximum 5,000 words in length (including references and any appendices).

Research and reporting requirements

Author statements

All articles accepted for publication in Language should include the following statements:

• Acknowledgements (optional) – including a statement disclosing the use of AI during manuscript preparation, if relevant (see the Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools section below).
• Authorship contribution statement (optional) – see the Authorship and contributorship section below.
• Conflict of interest statement (mandatory) – see the Competing interests section below.
• Funding disclosure statement (mandatory).
• Ethics statement (mandatory) – all papers should be accompanied by a short ethics statement (50-80 words) referring to any external validation of the experiment design, volunteer status of participants, anonymity, competing interests, etc., in accordance with practices in their country and expectations in international academic publishing. For more guidance on what information to include within the Ethics statement, see the Ethical approval section below.
• Data availability statement (mandatory) – before submitting your manuscript, please review the Research transparency page for more information on the journal's research transparency requirements.

Ethical approval

Research involving human participants, tissue or data should be approved by relevant institutional ethics committee(s) and should conform to international ethical and legal standards for research. The name of the ethics committee that approved the research, the ethics committee approval number and the types of consent obtained should be included at submission, within the paper’s Ethics statement.

In cases where the need for formal ethics committee approval was waived, the name of the ethics committee that granted the waiver should be included at submission.

If the article does not require ethical approval, please include the following statement: “Ethical approval was not required.”

Data requirements and referencing

Authors, associate editors, and referees are asked to pay special attention to referencing and to how data is handled in the submission. Please see the Research transparency page for more information on the journal's research transparency requirements.

References should not only include the work that the author consulted, but if at all possible the original source as well. Data sources should be clearly referenced and, if publicly available, cited as such (e.g., with a URL, or appended to the article as Supplementary Materials).
Where the data is not publicly available (and there are often good reasons why it is not), authors should explain why it is not made available, within the Data Availability Statement.

• Empirical studies. Generally speaking, articles reporting results of empirical studies such as quantitative analyses or experimental results should allow replication by other researchers based upon the article's contents and references, and possibly Supplementary Materials.
• Field notes. Availability of field notes clearly depends upon circumstances, but if such notes are available they should be referenced and made available.
• Articles reporting judgements. Authors of articles reporting judgments (e.g., acceptability or meaning judgments) should be prepared to further substantiate their judgments if called into question by referees or Editors, and may anticipate the possibility of such questions for their most crucial examples.
• Original field work. Authors reporting original field work should be careful to report the appropriate metadata: where and when data were collected, how it was collected (in detail), and characteristics of those it was collected from (including age, education, gender, whether bi- or multilingual, etc.), along with a report on the general conditions of the language and community.

Preparing your article for submission

Main document file types

For the initial submission, articles submitted for review do not have to follow the Language style sheet.
Authors should upload their (anonymized) manuscripts in PDF, selecting the file designation 'Main Document' and embedding all figures and tables within the Main Document file. If composing your manuscript in LaTeX, a PDF of the LaTeX file should then be generated and submitted via the submission site. If not using LaTeX, authors should use double-spacing throughout. 

Upon acceptance of the manuscript, submissions will have to be revised to conform strictly to the Language formatting and style guidelines outlined below. When preparing your final manuscript, take particular notice of the requirements with regard to references. Unlike the APA format that requires only initial for first and middle names, the Language stylesheet requires full (customary) first names. 
Authors should submit their (de-anonymized) final files in PDF, as well as either MS Word or LaTeX. 

• If using LaTeX, the LaTeX source files, along with individual figure files and a PDF of the final version, will need to be submitted for typesetting purposes. You can use the style files available on Overleaf or linked below to prepare your manuscript:
  Language LaTeX Files
  
  
• If using MS Word, the MS Word manuscript file, along with individual figure files, will need to be submitted for typesetting purposes. You can use the MS Word template below to prepare your manuscript:
  Language MS Word Template

For more information about how to submit your manuscript directly via Overleaf, please see the further guidance in the Overleaf section below.

Manuscript requirements

All articles submitted to the journal should include:

• Abstract: Maximum 150 words.
• Keywords: 5-7 relevant keywords.
• Word/page count: See full article list above.
• Cover letter: Making, in brief, the case for your research and why it would be relevant for Language.

Please note that Book Reviews and Commentaries should not contain an abstract or keywords.

Peer review and anonymization

To ensure the integrity of the double anonymous peer review system, every effort should be made to prevent the identity of the authors and reviewers from being known to each other. Please note that submitted manuscripts and Supplementary Materials are made available to reviewers exactly as prepared by their authors. Should the editorial team notice that a document has not been properly anonymized, the document will be returned to its author for anonymizing before any further editorial action will be taken. 

The primary responsibility for ensuring anonymity lies with authors and reviewers (specifically those reviewers who opt to upload documents as part of their review). Please consult the Review process page for specific guidelines on how to ensure anonymity.

Inclusive language

Language supports the LSA’s inclusive language policy, both in general writing style and in choice of examples. Authors may be asked to revise nonconforming manuscripts prior to review.

Formatting and style guidelines

Referencing system

Language follows the LSA Unified Referencing Style.

Examples:

Book:

• In text citations: Akmajian et al. 1985
• Reference list entry: Akmajian, Adrian, Richard A. Demers & Robert M. Harnish. 1985. Linguistics, 2nd edn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Book chapter:

• In-text citation:
• Reference list entry: Roberts & Holmberg 2005 Roberts, Ian & Anders Holmberg. 2005. On the role of parameters in Universal Grammar: A reply to Newmeyer. In Hans Broekhuis, Norbert Corver, Riny Huybregts, Ursula Kleinhenz & Jan Koster (eds.), Organizing grammar: Linguistic studies in honor of Henk van Riemsdijk, 538-553. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Journal article:

• In text citation:
• Reference list entry: Murray & Vennemann 1983 Murray, Robert W. & Theo Vennemann. 1983. Sound change and syllable structure in Germanic phonology. Language 59(3). 514-528.

Formatting requirements

Author affiliations, where applicable, should adhere to the following conventions:

• Department/school, university/institution, city, state/province, country (abbreviate USA and UK)
• Use two-letter postal codes for state/province names
• If an author has multiple affiliations or if there are multiple authors, use superscript Arabic numerals to differentiate affiliations.

Spelling: either American- or British-English spelling can be used, but either should be used consistently throughout the paper.

Quotes: “double” quotation marks should be used, with periods and commas inside marks and ‘single’ quotation marks for quotes within quotes. Quotes of more than fifty words should be set as extracts with no quotation marks.

Title: the title should be written in sentence case, with subtitle run in and separated from the title by a colon.

Order of parentheses in text: ([])

Commas: the serial comma should be used. 

Abbreviations and acronyms: authors should spell out in full any abbreviations used in their manuscripts the first time that they use it.

Measurements and units: percentages should always be expressed as numerals, even when they are less than 10. However, you should spell out percentages if they begin a sentence. For example: Sales increased 5 percent. Fifty percent of this was due to Aitha. Only use the percent symbol (%) in figures and tables and parentheses.

Numbers: numbers less than 10 should be spelt out. Numerals should be used for numbers of 10 or larger. Exceptions to this rule:

• Numbers of years are always spelled, as in “two to three years.”
• Numbers beginning a sentence are always spelled out, as in “Fifteen different models were used…”
• When a number is spelled out according to one of the rules above and is associated with another number, that second number is also spelled out in order to maintain a consistent appearance. For example, “Fifteen of the twenty-two plans…” instead of “Fifteen of the 22 plans…”.

Punctuation: place punctuation inside the quote if the quote is mid-sentence. For example: “You may confirm this,” said Smith (2008).

Figures and tables: All figures must be called out in the body of the text, in sequential order. All titles and notes to figures and tables must be self-explanatory and sourced (with full references provided as outlined above). 

• Figures may have sources, and tables must have sources.
• Table column and row headings should be written in sentence case.

For more information on how to submit figures and artwork, visit the Cambridge's Journals Artwork Guide.

Note: If your article contains any material in which you do not own copyright, including figures, charts, tables, photographs or excerpts of text, you must obtain permission from the copyright holder to reuse that material. For more details, see the Cambridge's Guidance on seeking permission to use copyrighted material.

You can access the Language Overleaf template directly on Overleaf. There is a direct link to submit your manuscript from within the Overleaf authoring environment. Once you have completed writing your article, please use the "Submit to Journal" button and select the link for Language to be directed to the journal's submission system.