Progressive as Linguistics sometimes thinks it is – it’s still rather formal.  All of the major journals are online, but none are open-access, and all are double-blind peer reviewed, and EXTREMELY expensive (which is funny since linguists are supposed to study language – a freely available object of study).  Note: I’ve only looked at American Journals – there are lots of European journals, a couple Canadian, but they follow a different kind of linguistics (Chomskian vs. non-Chomskian) , and the African journals are split between open databases and closed publications – somehow following the American model.

Anyhow, there is one open access American (Chomskian) journal, Snippets.

Snippets is an open-access, online journal with a 3-6 month turn around for publication.  Snippets isn’t exactly for full length articles – it’s for what linguists call a SQUIB.  SQUIBs are very elaborate footnotes, thoughts, interesting points that contradict the theory or should be investigated with respect to the theory as “the theory” is being developed today.  It’s interesting if only because the biggest collection of open-access material in Linguistics is actually the questions – not the solutions.

The best, most fun linguistics resource, though, is Language Log.  This is where many Lingusitics teachers take examples from because it’s not exactly formal and too often turns towards grammar (which is NOT language as defined by linguistics – grammar and punctuation are a social construction quite separate from human language), but is fun and interesting observations about language.