Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic.
It’s my seven year blogiversary! Wow! Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts from the past year:
Wired Resident Linguist column
I started a column about internet linguistics at Wired this year! Here are my columns so far:
- Voldemorting: birdsite, cheeto, and other ways of hiding words in plain sight
- The widely-spoken languages we still can’t translate online
- Children are using emoji for digital-age language learning
- The predictive text meme presents the best version of you
- Coding is for everyone—as long as you speak English
Internet linguistics
- Emoji Grammar as Beat Gestures (paper by me and Lauren Gawne)
- Emoji as Gesture at the second EmojiCon
- I started fact-checking a book about emoji and the book was so hilaribad it turned into a thread-review (blog post summary).
- Internet linguistics reading list from Maria Heath
- Are emoji sequences as informative as text?
- Both pronunciations of “gif” are fine
- A thread on meme semiotics
- The role of capitalization in internet language
Other linguistics
- Affixes, explained by koalas
- A base-27 counting system on the human body
- An animation of what it’s like to have dyslexia
- How people with synesthesia map colours onto vowels
- Repetition can make sounds into music
- Verbing is a feature, not a bug
- The importance of mother-tongue education
- Guide to making alveolar trills (as in Spanish “rr”)
- Babies sometimes think that “you” means “me”
- All words are made up words
- The impact of climate change on language loss
- Why teaching phonics is an important part of learning to read
- Folks, there’s nothing left from the linguistics division. (On the Brazil National Museum fire)
- Crows with a human accent
- Debunking the idea that apes might have learned a sign language
- Using punctuation marks to help learn tones
- “I’ve never met anyone who regretted being bilingual”
- Yesterday’s syntax is tomorrow’s morphology
- Everyone has an accent
- What’s something that seems obvious within your profession, but the general public seems to misunderstand?
- You’re never too old to become fluent in a foreign language
Things about languages
- Heaven’s Vault, a videogame about decoding an ancient language
- Word length in Greenlandic
- Why some Asian accents swap L and R in English
- Historical English dialect differences: eggs and eyren
- The logic behind childhood spelling “errors”
- The injustice of the baby sign trend
- Generation poems for names in Korean and Chinese
- Mayan languages like K’iche’ and Mam in the US immigration court system
- Maps: history of British and Irish languages
- Language differences between North and South Korea
- On studying emerging sign languages
- Why sign languages need protecting
- The World’s Writing Systems website (which has posters!)
- Beowulf and discourse markers
- Court stenographers often misunderstand African American English
- Using machine learning to decipher ancient Sumerian cuneiform
- Why hearing people should not make up a new sign
- Star Trek takes on the Gavagai problem
- Pro-Tactile American Sign Language
- New Zealand government pushes for Maori in all primary schools by 2025
- Singular ‘They’ is 700 Years Old
- Indigenous sign languages
- This young girl uses “los,” “las” and the gender-neutral “les” — watch her explain why.
- How braille works (webcomic)
- Plains Sign Language
Memes and humour
- Symbols of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) as brands of IPA (India Pale Ale): a thread
- Linguistic prescriptivists make terrible zoologists
- Linguistics takes on the nobody/JK Rowling meme
- Linguistics takes on the Roses are red meme
- WUG is for the way you look at me
- Linguistics takes on the Wannabe meme
- Punctuation takes on the distracted boyfriend meme
- New favourite example of pragmatic ambiguity: have you seen my cat?
- Today’s Creative Use of English Swear Word Morphosyntax Award
- New favourite example of reduplication: moonmoon
- New favourite example of semantic ambiguity: let this be the hour that we draw swords together
- New favourite retronym: call-phone
- grendel grendel / yes mama
- Linguistics Sign Bunny
- Half of the students transcribed ‘marriage’ with a final [tʃ]; so I guess it’s true that 50% of marriages end in devoice
- Wug cookies and a 3D-printed wug cookie cutter and colourful IPA cookies
Linguistics jobs
- lexicographer
- journalist
- school linguist
- data scientist
- PR consultant
- freelance editor and writer
- working in tech and webinar about working in tech
- how to get into linguistics grad school
- language creator
- standards engineer
- translator
- conductor
- accent coach
- Linguistics + X career advice post (updated)
Lists and how to
- How to type the International Phonetic Alphabet on your phone (iOS or Android), newly updated
- How to teach yourself linguistics online for free, revised and updated
- 28 tips for doing better in your intro linguistics course, revised and updated
- Long list of pop linguistics books and lingfic, revised and updated
- A very long list of linguistics youtube channels and other free online videos about linguistics
- Linguistics Gift Guide 2018
Lingthusiasm
We had another year of Lingthusiasm episodes!
- What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles
- This, that, and the other thing – Determiners
- When nothing means something
- Making books and tools speak Chatino – Interview with Hilaria Cruz
- Every word is a real word
- Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization
- Words for family relationships – Kinship terms
- How languages influence each other – Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages
- The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on
- Why do we gesture when we talk?
- Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori – Interview with Ake Nicholas
- You heard about it but I was there – Evidentials
And another year of Lingthusiasm bonus episodes:
- Forensic linguistics
- Homonyms, homophones, and homographs
- Emoji, Gesture, and the International Congress of Linguists – behind the scenes on the linguistics conference circuit
- Hyperforeignisms
- Bringing up bilingual babies
- What’s it really like at academic conferences?
- Q&A about old words, ears, Australian English, and more
- Naming people (and especially babies)
- How the internet is making English better (liveshow from Melbourne)
- Adapting your language to other people
- How do radio announcers know how to pronounce all the names? With guest Tiger Webb
- Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals
We also released more Lingthusiasm merch: scarves with tree diagrams and esoteric symbols on them, all the scarf designs as notebooks and mugs, Space Babies, and linguist baby onesies!
Book: Because Internet
Many exciting announcements related to Because Internet, my book in defence of internet language, happened this year!
- The book is heading into copyedits!
- BECAUSE INTERNET is available for preorder!
- Galleys of BECAUSE INTERNET are arriving with reviewers
- An early review of BECAUSE INTERNET (“me reading this was basically galaxy brain”)
- Thoughts from reading the audiobook of Because Internet: on pronouncing gif, lol, and keysmash
Because Internet will be coming out on July 23 — that’s only 2 months away! You can make it appear as a delightful surprise for your future self (and signal to the publisher that people are interested in linguistics so they should print lots of copies) by preordering it here.
Haven’t been with me this whole time? You can see my favourite posts of year one, year two, year three, year four, year five, and year six. For shorter updates, follow me on twitter as a person or as my blog, or for a monthly newsletter with highlights, subscribe at my website.
Gretchen McCulloch 