2022 Year in Review

Posted on by Gretchen McCulloch

2022 was a year of opening up again and laying foundations for future projects. I spent the final 3 months of it on an extended trip to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a delightful reason to have a delay in writing this year in review post. 

Interesting new projects this year included my first piece in The Atlantic, why we have so much confusion on writing the short form of “usual” and 103 languages reading project: reading one paper per language for all the languages represented in the major child language acquisition journals, inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia. 

Continuations of existing projects: 

Conferences/Talks

Lingthusiasm

In our sixth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did a redesign of how the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are layed out in a chart, in order to correspond more closely with the principle that the location of a symbol is a key to how it’s articulated. This involved much digging into the history of IPA layouts and back-and-forths with our artist, Lucy Maddox, and we were very pleased to make our aesthetic IPA design available on a special one-time edition of lens cloths for patrons as well as our general range of posters, tote bags, notebooks, and other all-time merch. 

We also did our first Lingthusiasm audience survey and Spotify for some reason gave us end-of-year stats only in French, which I guess is on brand, but we were pleased to see Lingthusiasm is one of Spotify’s top 50 Science podcasts!

Main episodes from this year

  1. Making speech visible with spectrograms
  2. Knowledge is power, copulas are fun.
  3. Word order, we love 
  4. What it means for a language to be official
  5. Tea and skyscrapers – When words get borrowed across languages
  6. What we can, must, and should say about modals
  7. Language in the brain – Interview with Ev Fedorenko
  8. Various vocal fold vibes
  9. What If Linguistics
  10. The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory
  11. Who questions the questions?
  12. Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

Bonus Episodes

  1. We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more
  2. Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ – Dispatches from the Unicode Conference
  3. Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics
  4. Approaching word games like a linguist – Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular
  5. What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫&
  6. There’s like, so much to like about “like”
  7. Language inside an MRI machine – Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda
  8. Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science
  9. Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart – Interview with Lucy Maddox
  10. Linguistics and science communication – Interview with Liz McCullough
  11. 103 ways for kids to learn languages
  12. Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?

Selected Tweets

Linguistics Fun

General Fun

Books

Helpful Threads

Studies

Selected blog posts: 

Linguistic Jobs

Linguistics fun

General Fun

Language

Meta/advice

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

Published by Gretchen McCulloch

Internet Linguist, author of Because Internet