Cross-posted from All Things Linguistic.
It’s my third blogiversary! Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts:
Explanations
- Why the schwa is so great
- Why do we say “big red barn” but “red big barn” sounds wrong?
- How do you rhyme in a sign language?
- What is a word?
- Ikea’s bookbook, soy milk vs milk milk, and like-liking. What’s going on?
- The language of poetry (me on Schwa Fire)
- How does overtone singing work phonetically?
- Why swearing is just like saying “please” (sort of)
- A Linguist Explains the Syntax of “Fuck” (me on The Toast)
- Your mother tongue has a lasting effect on your brain — even if you don’t remember it
- Why lipreading is hard
- To what extent is music language?
Linguist Humour
- Highlights from a game of linguistsagainsthumanity
- this is a wuge.
- Linguistics Georg-ian
- One wug. Two ___. Red wug. Blue wug.
- A linguist walks into a bar. (More advanced version: A maximal projection walks into a v bar…)
- Nasal-ingressive voiceless velar trill
- All about that richness of the base
- Highly implausible vowel inventories, from least to most ridiculous
- xkcd on quotative “like”
- Linguistics Gothic
- IPA emoji
Anti-prescriptivism
- What we think of as “good” English is the English historically spoken by people with the most power.
- What makes a word “real”? (gif version)
- Did a key witness in Trayvon Martin’s case talk funny, or could we all use some education?
- Texting as amateur peer writing practice (xkcd)
- Why grammar snobbery has no place in the movement
- Young women shouldn’t have to talk like men to be taken seriously
- Language is open source
- Habitual “be” in African American English
Language activism
- Codeswitching is a sign of fluency, not a deficit
- “Children as young as five are punished for speaking African languages, indigenous languages and mother tongues at school.”
- Language revitalization and technology
- Britain’s first baby to be registered with a sign name
- Should people learn Indigenous languages that aren’t part of their heritage?
- Indigenous language dormant for more than 100 years revived
- Skwomesh language revitalized by First Nations youth through DIY immersion
Linguistics and pop culture
- Look at all these ducks there are at least ten (Gricean Maxims and duck gifs)
- Singing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song and trochaic tetrameter
- Free “tudoring” and a moist owlet: the 5 “t” sounds in English
- What tense should you use to talk about time travel in Back to the Future?
- I analyzed the linguistic aspects of every single episode of Cabin Pressure, a very linguistically clever BBC radio comedy.
- NPIs explained using Mean Girls references (follow-up on FCIs)
- IPA Scrabble pictures
Internet Language
- What’s up with exclamation!compounds?
- Final hanging “but”, final “but”, “so” and “or”, final comma
- (Problems with) Internet slang meets American Sign Language
- e.e. cumblr (tumblr-speak as postmodern poetry)
- That way we’re all writing now
- no punctuation is funnier
- When you can and cannot even
- NOPE, tildes, and twitter dialects
- Will we all be speaking emoji “language” in a few years? Nope.
- Internet language, pictures, and emoji
- Tweeting with an accent
- Some data on “u” vs “you” as a formality distinction
Gender pronouns
- A linguist on the story of gender pronouns (me at The Toast)
- Practice with pronouns
- Over half of languages do not have gendered pronouns
- Conjugating singular they
- If pronouns are a closed class, how is it that people are inventing new ones?
Things about languages
- Gothic katakana
- Why Hangul (the Korean alphabet) is awesome
- Linguistic tips for fake-pronouncing any foreign language
- Multilingual sign language dictionary
- Faire smashy-smash or fucking shit up? The complications of bilingual profanity
- Why are written French and spoken French so different? (follow-up on French fanfic)
- Ingressive “yes” in Swedish and some English dialects
- Why the English progressive is interesting
- Will linguistics help with language learning? / Will learning a second language help with linguistics?
Linguistics videos
- LingVids, a joint project between me and several other linguists
- The first video in my collaboration with Tom Scott
- This syntax series from University of Edinburgh and of course the ongoing videos from thelingspace.
#lingwiki
- Explanations of ergative/accusative, Optimality Theory, and perfect vs perfective
- How to participate in lingwiki editathons from afar, report from the first #lingwiki, report from the second #lingwiki (upcoming editathon on May 31st!)
Resources
- How to explain linguistics to your friends and family
- Linguistics jobs resource roundup
- How to find a topic for your linguistics paper
- List of linguistics conferences, especially those focussed on undergraduates/students
- How to type IPA on your phone (Android/iOS)
- Linguistics resources for high school teachers
- Teaching linguistics to 9-14 year olds: ling camp week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4.
- An eight-part series on teaching yourself to draw syntax trees: start here for an overview or here to dive right in
- Advice for writing pop linguistics articles and how pop linguistics differs from teaching and pop science
- I made an FAQ and did an interview with Unravelled
Haven’t been with me this whole time? It’s okay — you can see the highlights of year one and year two right here.