Linguistics (journal)

Linguistics was started in 1963 by Mouton Publishers in The Hague, apparently on the initiative of Mouton's Peter de Ridder as well as linguist C.H. van Schooneveld.^[1] In 1979, after Mouton had been bought by Walter de Gruyter, a new editorial board was established, consisting of Brian Butterworth, Bernard Comrie, Östen Dahl, Norbert Dittmar, Flip Droste, Jaap van Marle, and Jürgen Weissenborn. De facto, Brian Butterworth was editor-in-chief between 1979 and 1982. From 1982 through 2005, the editor was Wolfgang Klein, who was succeeded by Johan van der Auwera (2005-2019), and then Volker Gast.

A special feature of the journal is that originally the issues were not treated as part of an annual volume. As long as the journal was published by Mouton, only the issues were numbered, the volumes were not. In the sixteen years from 1963 to 1978, 214 issues were published, i.e. more than twelve per year on average. At Walter De Gruyter, volume numbers were introduced and the 1979 volume was numbered 17. Until 2009, also individual issues were assigned numbers.

The journal is abstracted and indexed in:

The journal has a Thomson Reuters 2015 impact factor of 0.763 and a 5-year impact factor of 0.872.