News

February 2023: LingComm23 and liveshow

gretchenassistant

This month was the second International Conference on Linguistics Communication, #LingComm2023. I was extremely delighted to not be on the organizing committee this time and to get to participate in the excellent panels and posters and meetups organized by Laura Wagner and the rest of this year’s organizing committee. They did ask me to give the opening keynote, which I’ve posted the text of as a blog post. Here’s a little bit from it:

People who are readers read more than one book a year — and they read way more than one article. People who like podcasts listen to more than one podcast. People who like video subscribe to more than one account. People who like museums go to more than one museum. When I look at topics like pop history and pop science, god, they have SO MANY books and podcasts and scicomm accounts and museums and documentaries. This is my 30 year goal, that linguistics has a thriving ecosystem of so many ways that people can engage with it. 

Our competition isn’t each other, it’s all the other things people could be doing with their time and not even necessarily enjoying them. It’s doomscrolling, it’s aimlessly opening Netflix, it’s playing silly little games on your phone. 

The goal of doing lingcomm isn’t about ego, in trying to make one person into a celebrity. Frankly, I just think there are far more efficient ways of trying to become rich and famous. You know, have you considered making some weird food videos? Maybe having a weird looking pet and posting photos of it? I think those do pretty well. And like, I know we could all be getting more attention right now if we were willing to spout hot takes about how Insert Group Here are ruining language. We’re here because we’ve chosen not to do that. We’re here because we’ve chosen service to the harder path, the ethical path, the more rewarding path, of feeding people with language information that liberates them, that challenges them, rather than the easy path of stoking their insecurities and validating their prejudices. 

I hope that one of the things that the lingcomm conference becomes known for over the next 30 years is as a place to find collaborators to join you in this ethos of serving the public with lingcomm, whether that’s students excitedly hatching ideas with each other like I did in my friend’s car, or journalists and linguists connecting with each other to publish really great news stories, or more established projects finally meeting other people in their niche and thinking about how they could collaborate. 

What we can accomplish in 30 years of lingcomm: Opening keynote of #LingComm23

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about How kids learn language in Singapore – Interview with Woon Fei Ting. The bonus episode was Singapore, New Zealand, and a favourite linguistics paper – 2023 Year Ahead Chat. We also did a liveshow through the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server about language and gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod.

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Here’s my little Gather avatar standing at a booth containing a miniature Because Internet at #LingComm23!

Image of virtual Lingcomm booth for Gretchen McCulloch. Blue background that mimics carpet and a blue square with pixel chairs and table. Displays QR codes and Because Internet and an avatar of Gretchen.

January 2023: Denver and deleted scenes

gretchenassistant

I started the year in Denver, Colorado at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, where I co-hosted the Five Minute Linguist competition with Jessi Grieser and saw many excellent linguist friends! It was so great to see people in person after several years of virtual events. I was also on a linguistics jobs panel organized by the student committee.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Where language names come from and why they change. The bonus episode was Parrots, art, and what even is a word – Deleted scenes from Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe interviews.

We announced another Lingthusiasm liveshow! February 18th (Canada) slash 19th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) We return to one of our fan-favourite topics and answer your questions about language and gender with returning special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod! (See Kirby’s previous interview with us about the grammar of singular they.)

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This month’s image is from while I was in Colorado: I dropped by Boulder Books with Janelle Shane and we found both of our books there and left them with signed copies!

Two closed copies of Because Internet (just signed!)

2022 Year in Review

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

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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.

December 2022: New Zealand and “Uzhe” in The Atlantic

gretchenassistant

This month, I wrote a piece for The Atlantic for the first time! It’s about when the connection between spelling and pronunciation breaks down.

You walk into your favorite coffee shop. You greet the familiar barista, who knows your daily order. You say “Hi, I’ll have the”—wait, I can’t figure out how to write the next word. You know, “the usual,” but shorter. Hip! Casual! I’ll have the … uzhe. I mean, the yoozh. The youj?!

Why does this shortened form of usual, which rolls off the tongue when it’s spoken, cause so much confusion when we try to write it down? When I offered my Twitter followers 32 different options for spelling the word, nobody was fully satisfied with any of them. Youge to rhyme with rouge? Yusz as if it’s Polish? Usjhe in a desperate hope that some letter, somewhere, would cue the appropriate sound? The only thing everyone could agree on was that all of them felt weird.

How Do You Spell the Short Version of “Usual”? (Gretchen McCulloch in The Atlantic)

I spent much of the month in New Zealand, also for the first time! I gave a talk about Using lingcomm to design meaningful stories about linguistics, co-authored with Lauren Gawne, at the New Zealand Linguistics Society annual meeting in Dunedin, then went to Christchurch to give a department talk (Data-driven approaches to lingcomm: A case study of internet linguistics) at the University of Canterbury, and then went to Wellington to visit a non-linguist friend and see some birds! It was really fun to get to meet lots of linguists and hear what people are working on!

Some of my ideas from Because Internet were featured in a Vox meme explainer, which was fun to see!

When people refer to “Gen Z humor” or “TikTok humor,” what they’re really talking about is the chaotic, meaningless-seeming mishmashes of various references that are impenetrable to anyone not chronically online. But that’s just an extension of what the Washington Post once dubbed “millennial humor,” which should actually be called “Gen X humor,” considering the ages of the first internet forum posters who realized that weird, meaningless references made for good comedy. Instead, in her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language, the internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch has what I think is a far better way of categorizing internet users: She divides people according to when they truly “got online.”

Toward a unified theory of “millennial cringe” (Rebecca Jennings in Vox)

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions. The bonus episode was Speakest Thou Ye Olde English? We also got some, ahem, entertaining end-of-year stats from Spotify.

Finally, look, I can’t take a whole lot of credit for these two excellent things existing, but I am very pleased to have played a role in connecting the two.

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Blog

This month’s image is one of the many examples of Māori language I saw on public signage, beginning with a user interface option on Air New Zealand in-flight displays.

The screen on the back of an airplane seat with widgets displaying in Te Reo Māori. In large letters: Kia whaka-ngahautia koe

November 2022: Melbourne and Mastodon

gretchenassistant

I spent November in Melbourne, Australia, where I gave a talk about linguistics communication at La Trobe University, did lots of hanging out and behind the scenes work with my Lingthusiasm cohost, Lauren Gawne, and met up with various other delightful linguists, including attending the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society at Melbourne University. All of which were extremely good, modulo a tiny bit of accent-based name confusion:

Also, this is what happens when you hang out with linguist friends from a variety of places: you can no longer trust that anyone’s linguistic forms are characteristic of where they’ve lived, because you’re probably picking up things from each other.

Twitter began getting weird and unstable, so if you want to make sure that you have linguistics in your feed wherever else you might end up, I’m also on Mastodon (which I’ve been on for a few years but a bit more active there lately), Instagram, and Tumblr. Plus, of course, this email newsletter, which you can read at gretchenmcculloch.com and/or get in your email if you don’t want to trust the vagarities of algorithms to put it in front of you. (If you’re doing that already, thank you!). Anyway, though expectations of twitter’s demise seem a bit premature, I did a greatest hits thread anyway.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Episode 74: Who questions the questions? The bonus episode was Bonus 69: 103 ways for kids to learn languages. Lingthusiasm celebrated our 6th anniversary of podcasting and got a Mastodon account this month, as did my cohost Lauren Gawne, so you can follow the whole trifecta there if you like. The Lingthusiasm listener survey is open until December 15, 2022 (and will run again next year if you didn’t get to it the first time around).

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This month’s image is from a cafe in Melbourne where I was getting coffee (well, a flat white and an iced tea) with Lauren Gawne, the beginning of a month of hanging out and scheming and considerably better weather than Montreal.

A flat white coffee and an iced tea on a green outdoor cafe table also featuring a vase of wildflowers, water jug, knives and forks

October 2022: Visiting Singapore and Linguist Halloween

gretchenassistant

This month, I went to Singapore! It’s the beginning of my multi-month trip that’ll also take me to Australia in November and New Zealand in December. I stayed with Suzy J Styles, gave a talk about linguistics communication at Nanyang Technical University, and met up with lots of lovely linguists who made sure that I tried many delicious Singaporean foods (thank you!). Also I got to hear people speaking Singlish, which is indeed as neat as everyone says it is.

This month’s shenanigans involved finishing my series of twitter polls in order to determine the least confusing way (okay they’re all confusing, but) to spell the clipped form of “usual”.

Also I wrote a double dactyl about celebrities with great names.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Episode 73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory. The bonus episode was Bonus 68: Linguistics and science communication – Interview with Liz McCullough. We also launched a Lingthusiasm listener survey to celebrate our 6th anniversary of making a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, which is coming up in November.

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This month’s image is a joke Halloween costume design that I made as part of a Halloween costume meme going around. But seriously if anyone does this for real please tell me, I want to know:

Halloween costume package with a photo of Amy Adams from Arrival in an orange spacesuit holding up a whiteboard reading "human" Captioned: Linguist "Human" Costume Included: Orange jumpsuit, helmet, whiteboard, marker Not included: Alien grammar, causality violation

September 2022: WorldCon, xkcd on Lingthusiasm, and IPA lens cloths

gretchenassistant

This month, I went to Chicago for WorldCon (ChiCon 8), in which I was on the panels Ask A Scientist, That’s Not How That Works!, and Using SFF for Science Communication, as well as doing a Table Talk (where a small number of fans get to hang out and ask questions). It was very fun to see and hang out with lots of interesting people!

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Episode 72: What If Linguistics, in which Randall Munroe of xkcd asked us his very good absurd hypothetical questions about linguistics. Here’s a completely real and normal photograph of what that looked like:

The bonus episode was Bonus 67: Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart – Interview with Lucy Maddox.

Speaking of which! We’ve heard excitement all month about the fun, minimalist design of the classic International Phonetic Alphabet chart which we released in August and which we’re printing on a massive order of microfibre lens cloths for Lingthusiasm patrons at the Lingthusiast tier or higher. (There’s still a few hours left to sign up for that from when this newsletter goes out, if that’s something you’ve been procrastinating on – it closes once it stops being October 5th, 2022 anywhere in the world, so a lot of folks may be able to sneak in a couple extra bonus hours.)

I also started a bracket on how people spell the clipped form of “usual” (spoiler: they’re all confusing)

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This month’s image is still the aesthetic IPA design because we’ve been doing a few final tweaks on it this month!

Demo of the minimalist lens cloth IPA chart by Lucy Maddox for Lingthusiasm's patrons. Blue background with green and white symbols in different combinations of green and white circles. Some are filled in blocks of color, some are just a line around the symbol. Lingthusiasm logo in bottom left corner.

August 2022: redesigning the International Phonetic Alphabet (to put in your pocket)

gretchenassistant

This month, we rethought the structure of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Okay, let me explain.

The IPA is typically presented in a chart that shows the sounds of languages of the world arranged in two dimensions: from top to bottom as the mouth is more and more open and from left to right as the sound is produced from the front of the mouth to the back. It’s elegant, it’s informative, it’s a highly familiar reference diagram for linguists. So my cohost Lauren Gawne and I thought it would be nifty to create a more aesthetically attractive version of this already really neat technical diagram which is typically presented in rather boring technical greyscale, as practical-yet-elegant merch for our podcast, Lingthusiasm. Almost a year ago, we sent off an email to our resident artist, Lucy Maddox….and now, finally, here we are.

In the process, we’ve learned a whole lot about the history of the International Phonetic Alphabet (longer version in the thread below!)

We’ve also realized that we have some questions about parts of the IPA chart layout that we’d been taking for granted. For example: why is there a third chart for the non-pulmonic consonants like clicks and implosives, when they have the same places of articulation as the main, pulmonic consonant chart and could surely just be rows there? And, wouldn’t it be sort of nifty to put the vowels back in the same chart as the consonants again, when they used to hang out there for decades? This started as an art project, but any good art also provokes…questions. Longer version and speculations in this blog post.

At any rate, here’s what it looks like when we put all of the symbols on the same chart!

An abstract, minimalist* rendering of the International Phonetic Alphabet as a grid of white, sans-serif letters on a midnight blue background, with no row or column headings. Bright green is used as an accent colour, for solid green circles around the voiceless consonants; white circles with green font for the rounded vowels, and narrow green borders around the lateral sounds. There’s a small lingthusiasm logo in the bottom corner and a translucent “demo” watermark splashed in the background. *Yes, we know there’s a syntax theory called Minimalism as well, which this has no real relationship to because it’s a different subfield. Consider it a bonus easter egg!

We also thought, wouldn’t it be ideal if this eclectic nerd art IPA design came in a convenient format for carrying around with you? One that might even be useful for other purposes? So we’re getting it imprinted onto microfibre lens cloths (useful for cleaning glasses, sunglasses, camera lenses, and phone/computer screens). The thing is, lens cloth printing companies only take orders in the hundreds or preferably thousands, so we’ve decided to place one massive order for everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast tier as of October 5th, 2022. This is our most popular tier, which also gets you our whole archive of monthly bonus episodes and access to the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server — if you’ve been on the fence about becoming a patron, now would be a really good time for it. (Higher tiers can get several lens cloths, if you want spares or to share with friends.)

Here’s more about the IPA redesign and here’s the link to get it by becoming a patron if you’re already convinced.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm this month was Episode 71: Various vocal fold vibes (curious about what some of those circles mean on the IPA chart? This episode will help you with that!). The bonus episode was Bonus 66: Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science.

Technically speaking, next month’s bonus episode is an interview with Lucy Maddox about the IPA chart redesign and being a linguist/artist but we’ve made that bonus episode free for a limited time until the IPA lens cloth special offer is closed on October 5th, so you should go listen to that now if you’re interested!

I also finished the #103papers project this month, reading 1 paper each for the 103 languages identified by Kidd&Garcia in the top 4 journals about child language acquisition. More on the big picture from what I learned later, but in the meantime, here’s a neat thing I learned:

LingComm, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication, has put out its participant/volunteer survey for the next conference in February 2023. I’m not organizing it this year, but this year’s committee is fantastic and I look forward to seeing there many linguists who do communication with broader audiences and journalists, podcasters, youtubers, and other communicators who do linguistics — if that’s you, do check it out!

At the end of the month, I headed to Chicago for a double feature: in August, participating in Ada Palmer’s Renaissance papal election simulation (description at Part 5) and in September, WorldCon/ChiCon8, about which more next month.

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This month’s image is a summary of what’s going on with the IPA lens cloth situation, for those who don’t like big blocks of text.

What if the International Phonetic Alphabet looked like weird nerd art? Get this design (arrow to previously-described abstract IPA demo) on a handy-to-carry lens cloth (image of those microfibre cloths you clean glasses with; these are not the actual cloths but just to give you an idea of the genre). (Tiny abstract drawing of Lauren & Gretchen silhouettes from the website.) We're placing one bulk order for everyone who's a Lingthusiast patron or higher as of October 5, 2022. Sign up at patreon.com/lingthusiasm

July 2022: In which I get my brain scanned!

gretchenassistant

This month’s Lingthusiasm episodes were a special double feature from my trip to Boston to get my brain scanned and finally discover whether I am one of the extremely special left-handed people who has their language centres on the right or both sides of the brain instead of the left. Spoiler: I am not, mine is on the right, just like most other people, left- and right-handed.

However! It was still really neat to take off all my metal items and go in the massive magnet that is an MRI machine and hear about language in the brain with Ev Fedorenko and what specifically was being tested in the experiments I participated in, with Saima Malik-Moraleda. (You can listen to the episodes in either order, depending on how much you like ~suspense~)

The #103papers reading project is still (still!) going on, in which I finally got through the enormous Indo-European section and learned some things about languages like Lazuri:

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This month’s image is a picture of my brain doing language!! Okay, admittedly, it looks a lot like all of the other brain scans that people get, but this one’s mine!!!

Left hemisphere of Gretchen's Brain from an MRI observing language and the brain. (Assorted red and yellow blotches around the top curve of the temporal lobe, on a grey brain scan image.)

June 2022: Modals and a cool linguistics paper

gretchenassistant

This month I attended a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation, where I was on panels about swearing in science fiction and fantasy and the delightful Steerswoman books, as well as doing a dramatic reading from Ryan North’s Romeo and/or Juliet book.

Some linguists got very excited about a very cool linguistics paper by the late Anne Cutler, which I won’t spoil (because it really does have spoilers, but trust me you don’t need any particular linguistics background to get why it’s cool) and as a result we also managed to track down Anne Cutler’s Christmas Letter, which is mentioned in the paper. (The full twitter thread, linked to from below, is also worth reading afterwards.)

The main episode of Lingthusiasm this month was What we can, must, and should say about modals. The bonus episode was There’s like, so much to like about “like”.

I did a thread about how we approach a topic like modals which traditionally has a lot of associated terminology for a Lingthusiasm episode:

I also spent the entire month in the Indo-European section of the #103papers reading project. (And then some – 39 Indo-European languages in this sample.) Here’s a paper about Italian with very charming examples:

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Written Chinese “Biang”

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This month’s picture is Because Internet hanging out at the staff picks section with some book friends at my local independent bookstore, Argo Bookshop! Argo’s owners were linguists in a previous life and it’s well worth a visit if you’re in Montreal.

A signed copy of Because Internet hanging out on the staff picks shelf of Argo bookshop.