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weird to think we're all on here interacting with australians. any given user on ur dash could be an australian, if you think about it

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There no shame in never becoming fluent in your target language(s). Learning a new language even a little bit is great. Having the ability to communicate even a little bit is great. Learning about the culture(s) is great. You're doing great. Enjoy the experience.

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mutuals can always dm me but be warned i talk like your coworker who is trying too hard to get to know you and my response times are akin to the response times you might get if we were communicating by letter

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Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

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good read for teachers.

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sign language & linguistics resource!

linguist Adam Schembri has been updating his amazing resource, What All Linguists Should Know (about sign languages). It's a really fantastic repository of info, including some really great basics that are great for students and non-linguists as well. Please share widely! I'll also copy a few links from his page, just as highlights:

What is sign language? (Schembri, 2013) https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-sign-language-21453 

How many sign languages are there? (Glottolog) https://glottolog.org/resource/languoid/id/sign1238 (short answer: at least 220)

How are sign languages acquired? (Lillo-Martin & Henner, 2021) https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-043020-092357

I recommend that anyone interested in or studying linguistics at any level (from hobbyist to professional!) ask themselves (and colleagues, instructors, students, etc), frequently: wait - is that true about languages in general, or just spoken languages? Have we done any research about how this works in other modalities? Keep asking the question!

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"can we normalize-" NO!!!!!! we do not need to expand whats considered normal!!! we need to teach people to stop reacting judgmentally when encountering something new and weird!!!! things dont need to be normal to be respected!!!!!!!!!!

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Lingthusiasm Episode 100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics

This is our hundredth episode that's enthusiastic about linguistics! To celebrate, we've put together 100 of our favourite fun facts about linguistics, featuring contributions from previous guests and Lingthusiasm team members, fan favourites that resonated with you from the previous 99 episodes, and new facts that haven't been on the show before but might star in one of the next 100 episodes in greater detail.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about brains, gesture, etymology, famous example sentences, languages by the numbers, a few special facts about the word "hundred" and way more! This episode is both a fun overview of the vibe of Lingthusiam if you've never listened before, and a bonus bingo card game for diehard fans to see how many facts you can recognize.

We also invite you to share this episode alongside one of your favourite fun facts about linguistics and help more people find Lingthusiasm in honour of our 100th episodiversary! Whether you pick something new that resonates from this episode, or share the fact you were sitting on the edge of your seat hoping we'd mention, we look forward to staying Lingthusiastic with you for the next 100 episodes.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn't quite have space to share with you! First, we go back to our interview with phonetician Jacq Jones, previously seen talking about how binary and non-binary people talk. Then, we return to computational linguist Emily M. Bender to talk about how Emily's students made a computational model of Lauren's grammar of Lamjung Yolmo and how linguistics is a team sport. Finally, we return to our group interview with the team behind Tom Scott's Language Files to talk about sneaky Icelandic jokes and the unedited behind-the-scenes version of the gif/gif joke.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links and citations mentioned in the episode:

Wikipedia entry for 'Writing system'

Wikipedia entry for 'Punctuation'

Wikipedia entry for ''Okina'

Wikipedia entry for 'Hamza'

Wikipedia entry for 'Glottal'

'Fneeze' blog post from EtymologyNerd

Etymonline entry for 'kn-' prefix

Calque is a loanword; loanword is a calque on Tom Scott's Language Files

'When You Think About It, Your Past Is in Front of You: How Culture Shapes Spatial Conceptions of Time' by Juanma De la Fuent et al

Wikipedia entry for 'Jabberwocky'

'Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages' by Damián E. Blasi et al

Wikipedia entry for 'Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den'

'Reading Senseless Sentences: Brain Potentials Reflect Semantic Incongruity' by Marta Kutas and Steven A. Hillyard

Wikipedia entry for 'Zeugma and syllepsis'

Pi(e) facts post on Bluesky from Gretchen

Glottolog entry for 'Family: Indo-European'

Glottolog entry for 'Family: Austronesian'

Wikipedia entry for 'Languages of Papua New Guinea'

List of the worlds languages on Glottolog

'How Many Stars Are There in the Sky?' by Megan Garber on The Atlantic

Glottolog entry for 'Pseudo Family: Sign Language'

'Biography of Laurent Clerc' post on Gallaudet University website

'Q&A: How Pro-Tactile American Sign Language — PTASL — is changing the conversation' by Jaimi Lard and Christine Dwyer on Perkins.org

'Feeling the signs: tactile Auslan' post from Australian Institute of Interpreters and Translators Inc

'How do we know if they could speak?' by Fran Dorey for Australian Museum

'If you say thee uh you are describing something hard: The on-line attribution of disfluency during reference comprehension' by J. E. Arnold, C. L. H. Kam. & M. K. Tanenhaus

'The effect of disfluency on memory for what was said' by E. Diachek, & S. Brown-Schmidt

Wikipedia entry for 'Gender Neutrality' and 'Neopronoun'

Wikipedia entry for 'Centum and satem languages'

Wikipedia entry for 'Long hundred'

Lingthusiasm episodes mentioned:

What it means for a language to be official

Writing is a technology

Word Magic

Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

Colour words around the world and inside your brain

Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization

What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles

Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

Bonus episode 'The episode-episode (Reduplication)'

Bonus episode 'When letters have colours and time is a braid - The linguistics of synesthesia'

Speaking a single language won't bring about world peace

How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Talking and thinking about time

This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

Bonus episode 'Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all'

Bonus episode 'LingthusiASMR - The Harvard Sentences'

Merch mentioned in this episode:

Space Pigeon and Space Babies merch

Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

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“they” (1 word) is shorter than “he or she” (3 words)

“they” is more inclusive than “he/she”

“themself” flows more naturally than “him or herself”

“they” is less clunky than “(s)he”

it’s time to replace the awkward “she or he”

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I have a lot of feelings on how indigenous groups who didn’t build permanent structures like cities aren’t seen as being as sophisticated as ones who built large cities, without accounting for the fact that maybe it’s in our values systems to leave as light of a footprint as possible and it’s important that our structures are easily taken down or fade with the passage of time because it’s easier on the landscape, but ya know.

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pssttt if you see this post tell me what your favorite bird is

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Ok I am once again liveblogging the Word of the Year vote

• For informal word of the year, multiple people have gone up to the mic announcing themself as “team rawdog”

• One respected professor threw his support behind “W”, saying (I’m paraphrasing) “double the u, double the pleasure”

• In lieu of an institution, one person announced themself as a “tumblr shitposter”. That person? Was me.

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Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: Imaging a Crip Linguistics

Manuscript authors: Jon Henner, Octavian Robinson

Read aloud by Mx. Vagrant Gautam.

Abstract

People use languages in different ways. Some people use language to help find other people like them. Many people use language in specific ways because of how their body and mind work. Sometimes a person’s environment and material conditions forces them to use language in a certain way. However, when someone languages outside of what people think is normal, others can think that they are bad with language or are not as smart or are broken. We are trying to point out that no one is actually ‘bad with language.’ Our goal with this paper is to help people understand that no language is bad. It is okay to want to change your own language use if it will make you feel better. But no one should make you feel bad about your language. We need a bigger and more flexible understanding of what language is and what it communicates about a bodymind’s capacity.

Manuscript link: https://criticalstudycommunicationdisability.org/index.php/jcscd/article/view/4

Citation: Henner, J., & Robinson, O. (2023). Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto. Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability, 1(1), 7–37. https://doi.org/10.48516/jcscd_2023vol1iss1.4

Social media: The authors can be found on Twitter at @jmhenner and @DeafHistorian. Read by @DippedRusk on Twitter.

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This is a fantastic linguistics paper – the researcher observed the artificiality and social pressure imposed on kids when they're asked to produce language on the spot, so instead had them talk to a rabbit in a room with a tape recorder. He found that when talking organically, without an adult authority figure around, their speech was exponentially more sophisticated, socially fluid, and creative.

As someone in the twitter thread points out, this has obvious implications for situations in which cued language production is used in diagnosis e.g. for autism. I'd add that (while this particular paper's remit is limited to children) it should also make us think about situations where adults are pressured to speak by authority figures: court hearings, police encounters, benefit assessments, asylum interviews, etc. If the presence of power hampers your ability to advocate for yourself, these are all rigged propositions.

Anyway, you can read the whole piece here (taken from a talk on his research, so it's very readable):

e: sorry, I should add the context that this is a language study situated in Hawaii in 1970 so there are also some very significant racial socio-linguistic politics discussed here that might be distressing to read about. I don't want to discount that aspect of the power dynamic studied here either.

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Happy New Year, everyone ❤

Wishing you success in your endeavours and joy in your days, and hoping that the year to come is kind to us all.

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Lingthusiasm Episode 99: A politeness episode, if you please

If it wouldn't be too much trouble, if you have a spare half hour, could we possibly suggest that you might enjoy listening to this episode on politeness? Or, if you've prefer a less polite version, "Listen! Now!"

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what politeness and rudeness are made up of at a linguistic level. We talk about existing cultural notions of "saving face" and "losing face", aka the push and pull between our desire for help vs our desire for independence, and how they've been formalized in a classic linguistics paper. We also talk about being less polite to show intimacy, addressing God in English and French, which forms of politeness are and aren't overtly taught, different uses of "please" in UK vs US English, levels of indirectness, email etiquette across generations and subcultures, rudeness and pointing, nodding norms in Japanese and English, smiling at strangers in the US vs Europe, and how a small number of politeness ingredients can combine in so many different ways that are culturally different.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about science metaphors and learning everything with Tom Lum and Caroline Roper, cohosts of Let's Learn Everything! We talk about whether programming languages should count as a language credit, numbers and ritual stock phrases like seventeen and "once upon a time", as well as etymology and metaphor in ecology, chemistry, and linguistics. We also talk about turning the "constantly trying to figure things out" part of your brain off, attending the word of the year vote, and how linguists have a tendency to be curious about language all the time, which... sometimes gets us into trouble.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. Looking for a last minute gift for the language nerd in your life? Or are you trying to get someone in your life to love linguistics as much as you do? Patreon have newly added a gift memberships feature! So if you'd be excited to receive a patreon membership to Lingthusiasm, forward this link to your friends and/or family with a little wink wink nudge nudge.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

'Politeness: Some universals in language use' by Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson

Wikipedia entry for 'Politeness'

Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'The Most Esteemed Honorifics Episode'

'Routine politeness in American and British English requests: use and non-use of please' by M. Lynne Murphy and Rachele De Felice

@killersundy video about the Irish offering cake to the Irish on TikTok

Lingthusiasm episode 'If I were an irrealis'

Lingthusiasm episode 'Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!'

'Nodding, aizuchi, and final particles in Japanese conversation: How conversation reflects the ideology of communication and social relationships' by Sotaro Kita and Sachiko Ide

'Why Americans Smile So Much' by Olga Khazan for The Atlantic

'Three-year-olds infer polite stance from intonation and facial cues' by Iris Hübscher, Laura Wagner, and Pilar Prieto

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

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William Labov, one of the single most influential linguists to date, passed away yesterday at the age of 97. His foundational work in sociolinguistics has rippled throughout the modern field. Virtually every working linguist today owes some debt to him for shaping not only our research but also a culture of kind and earnest inquiry. His legacy will continue to define linguistics as a discipline.

I never had the honor of knowing Dr. Labov, but I'm sharing here some tributes and remembrances from his colleagues.

Cynthia McLemore and Mark Liberman (Language Log)

Josef Fruehwald (Væl Space)

Betsy Sneller (Bluesky)

May his memory be a blessing.