June 2016: Old English & Emoji on The Toast, #lingwiki at #CoLang2016 in Alaska

In June, I had two new articles that I wrote go up on The Toast before it closed:

Two Linguists Explain Pseudo-Old English in The Wake (co-written with Kate Wiles)
A Linguist Explains Emoji and What Language Death Actually Looks Like

I’m sad to say goodbye to The Toast, but was rather amused to notice that I now get a very oblique claim to fame: my last article seems is up on the front page in perpetuity, alongside Hillary Clinton.

I did an interview with The Ringer about the AP Stylebook’s decision to lowercase “internet”, which turned into a sneak peak from my book proposal and why I’d always intended to keep internet lowercase in the book.

Other media:

This is where the word “dad” came from (TIME)
In Defense of Comic Sans (Washingtonian – I feel obliged to note here that *I* am not defending comic sans, merely being quoted about laconic internet voice)
Translating the rise of city-specific emoji (Next City)
My tweet about the copyright page in Ryan North’s new book got picked up by Quartz.

I spent the latter two weeks of June in Fairbanks, Alaska, at CoLang, the Institute on Collaborative Language Research, where I co-taught a weeklong mini-course on Wikis and Wikipedia for Endangered Languages with the fantabulous Lauren Gawne (aka Superlinguo).

Day 1 slides – getting started with Wikipedia
Day 2 slides – making your first edits on Wikipedia
Day 3 slides – using wikis for your own projects
Day 4 slides – Wikipedia in your language using Incubator
Lauren’s summary blog post about CoLang
My summary blog post, with stats (18 participants; 39 or 218 articles edited)
My grant report about CoLang for Wikimedia
Livetweets from CoLang at #colang2016
Midnight sun, birch syrup & other tourist pictures

I also found out that I’m officially going to be teaching a course about linguistics outreach at the 2017 Linguistic Summer Institute (Lingstitute).

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts from All Things Linguistic:

This month’s bookshelfie was taken at Gulliver’s Books in Fairbanks, Alaska. It didn’t have a proper linguistics section, but it was still a lovely bookstore, so here’s the languages section and some bikeshare Fairbikes with books outside.