January 2019: Emoji kids, book cards, and #LSA2019

I wrote an article for Wired about preliterate kids texting with emoji. Plus, some bonus adorable examples that didn’t fit in the article.

I wrote an update post about how my book on internet language is going! The book now has a publicist, Shailyn Tavella and you can email her at stavella@prh.com for questions about review copies and interviews.

I also dropped by the fancy new Riverhead office in the Penguin building, made a few comments about Unicode and capitalization, and did a late-stage book editing pass involving reading the whole book out loud to myself which made me feel like David Attenborough.

At the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (this year in New York City), I judged the 5 Minute Linguist competition (video of all the talks here) and did a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon with a focus on underrepresented language articles for the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages. Threads from the LSA about bimodal (signed/spoken) bilingualism, linguistics high school teachers, and the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages (kickoff events).

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was an interview with Hannah Gibson about language contact and Bantu languages, and the bonus episode was about naming people (and especially babies). Plus: when I found out that my cohost was embarking on a new longitudinal language acquisition project, there was only one gift I could give her.

Selected tweets:

• I really like the word “voker” from the Terra Ignota series
• Me in 2006 vs me in 2019, wug edition
• 10 years ago I did my very first internet linguistics study; this year I have a book coming out about internet linguistics
• Your favourite results you’ve gotten from those predictive text keyboard memes
• Ode to a Haggis Emoji
• Poetry on social media
• Facebook’s LOL app was doomed to failure as soon as they wrote lol in all caps
• Hi, I’m an internet linguist. You may know me from my greatest hits…
• Can otoh stand for both “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”?
• The most misleading/confusing bit of jargon in linguistics
• Some of you have never made a wug joke… and Some of you have never wondered whether a text came across as passive-aggressive…
• The World’s Writing Systems is a nifty little site that lets you interact with the 292 currently-known writing systems
• The confusion of what IPA stands for
• Deliberately lowercasing brand names for attitude
• “shitgibbon compounds”

Selected blog posts:

• Today’s Creative Use of English Swear Word Morphosyntax Award Goes To
• New favourite example of complex structure: oreo
• Do you like umlauts?
• Linguistics jobs: interview with a data scientist at Kaggle (Rachael Tatman) and PR consultant
• Using machine learning to decipher ancient Sumerian cuneiform
• Why hearing people should not make up a new sign
• The role of capitalization in internet language
• Linguistics takes on the Wannabe meme
• The World’s Writing Systems website (which has posters!)
• Beowulf and discourse markers
• Court stenographers often misunderstand African American English

This month’s image is the stack of cards with my book’s cover on them that I got from my publisher to give out at the LSA. If you see me at a conference between now and when BECAUSE INTERNET is out, I’m happy to give you one too! Or stop by Argo Bookshop if you’re in Montreal to get a card and/or preorder a signed copy.