An Answer from the Point of View of Language Alan Liu* University of California, Santa Barbara CA 93106-3170, U.S.A. Received 18.02.2016, received in revised form 24.04.2016, accepted 17.06.2016 This article reflects on the way apparently low-level linguistic variances in the way scholars write about the “digital humanities” point to overarching conceptual issues relating to the “DH” field. <...> These are some of the questions related to discipline formation and professionalization that digital humanists have recently asked. <...> Currently, their linguistic usage seems to signal a trend toward a unitary sense of field. <...> However, that sense is still being inflected by the larger conversation that the digital humanities field is having with overarching and neighboring fields of humanities scholarship with cognate linguistic usages. <...> These problems may be put in the form of two questions: is the noun phrase digital humanities treated as singular or plural? <...> And should we crown the phrase with the definite article (the digital humanities)?1 Of course, these are prosaic questions. <...> But the issues they represent have the unsettling habit of showing up in the most prominent places, such as in the title of an essay I published a few years ago in PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association of America) to explain © Siberian Federal University. <...> All rights reserved * Corresponding author E-mail address: ayliu@english.ucsb.edu – 1546 – [the] digital humanities to the journal's general audience of literature and language scholars (Liu, 2013b).2 The title of the piece as submitted was “The Meaning of Digital Humanities.” But the copy editor added the definite article, and the title as finally published was “The Meaning of the Digital Humanities.” Nor is it just in prominent places like titles that such issues arise. <...> Usage problems related to definite and indefinite articles, subject-verb concord (do/does digital humanities take the verb are or is?), and so on are sprinkled throughout writings on [the] digital humanities both in scholarship and in popular discussions. <...> For example, some writers split the difference between plural and singular uses of Alan Liu. <...> An Answer from the Point of View of Language digital humanities by simply ignoring the need for subject-verb concord. “Digital Humanities is not a unified field but an array of convergent practices that explore a universe,” the scholars behind the “Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0” proclaim in a wonderful piece <...>