Tag: linguistics jobs

2023 Year in Review

gretchenassistant

In 2023, I switched to bluesky from twitter, which is still going strong. I also spent a month at the LSA summer institute, went to assorted other conferences, and kept doing the podcast. In other words, just like, a pretty normal year, which wasn’t nearly as shaped by the pandemic as the previous few years have been.

Conferences

  • 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! 
  • I attended the second International Conference on Linguistics Communication, #LingComm2023, which I was so pleased to see in the hands of a fantastic new organizing committee. They did ask me to give the opening keynote, which I’ve posted the text of as a blog post: What we can accomplish in 30 years of lingcomm.
  • I was on panels at Scintillation, a local literary SFF convention, one about magic words and one about reading Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books.
  • I went to UMass Amherst for Lingstitute 2023, where I did a talk on linguistics communication, emceed the Three Minute Thesis competition, recorded two interviews for Lingthusiasm, and did a talk at a workshop called Bridging fieldwork, corpus, and experimental methods to study sociolectal variation.
  • I also got a cool tour of the Merriam-Webster headquarters while I was in the area!
  • October: I attended NWAV51 in Queens, New York.
  • November: I attended Patreon CreatorFest in Los Angeles.

Other projects

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm, my podcast with Lauren Gawne, celebrated our seventh anniversary with a second listener survey and some new merch: the slogan Etymology isn’t Destiny and posters and other items with a colourful yet minimal layout of the International Phonetic Alphabet on them.

People often ask Lingthusiasm to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for Lingthusiasm’s free email list (which will otherwise send you an email once a month when there’s a new episode — this is something we’re doing to help continue to reach people amid the rising fragmentation of the social media ecosystem).

I did an experimental bluesky thread matching people with the Lingthusiasm episode that matches their personality best based on the vibes of their profile, which people were surprisingly keen on! Since I was eventually getting more replies than I could keep up with, this ended up turning into making a Which Lingthusiasm episode are you? personality quiz.

Lauren and I published a new open-access academic paper: Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study. It’s in Language and Linguistic Compass, an open access linguistics journal, and you can read it in full here.

Lingthusiasm episodes 

  1. Where language names come from and why they change
  2. How kids learn language in Singapore – Interview with Woon Fei Ting
  3. Bringing stories to life in Auslan – Interview with Gabrielle Hodge (our second bilingual video episode, in Auslan and English with an interpreter and captions)
  4. Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!
  5. Word Magic
  6. The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries
  7. Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences
  8. How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages – Interview with Pedro Mateo
  9. Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!
  10. Ergativity delights us
  11. Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns – Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez
  12. If I were an irrealis episode

Bonus episodes

  1. Parrots, art, and what even is a word – Deleted scenes from Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe interviews
  2. Singapore, New Zealand, and a favourite linguistics paper – 2023 Year Ahead Chat
  3. When books speculate on the future of English
  4. Neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists – Liveshow Q&A with Kirby Conrod
  5. 2022 Survey Results – kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji
  6. Linguistic jobs beyond academia
  7. LingthusiASMR – The Harvard Sentences
  8. How we make Lingthusiasm transcripts – Interview with Sarah Dopierala
  9. Field Notes on linguistic fieldwork – Interview with Martha Tsutsui Billins
  10. Postcards from linguistics summer camp
  11. Linguistic Advice – Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and more
  12. Frak, smeg, and more swearing in fiction – Ex Urbe Ad Astra interview with Jo Walton and Ada Palmer

Books

Selected posts from tumblr, twitter, and bluesky

General linguistics

General interest

Cool existing and hypothetical studies 

New favourite linguistics example sentences

Helpful threads and posts

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. If you’d like to get a much shorter quarterly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

June-July 2023: Lingstitute and Merriam-Webster

gretchenassistant

In June and July, I headed to Lingstitute 2023, the LSA summer institute, at UMass Amherst. It was great to get to hang out with old friends and meet lots of new people

While I was in Massachusetts, I dropped by the headquarters of Merriam Webster to say hi to the dictionaries and lexicographers! (In that order.) Thanks especially to Peter Sokolowski for the guided tour and to Stacy Dickerman for the ride. Here are some photos I took on the tour, including many different eras of dictionary and the “linguistics” entry in the card catalogue:

The main episodes of Lingthusiasm were The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries and Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences. The bonus episodes were Linguistic jobs beyond academia and a very silly special episode we called LingthusiASMR, in which we read a classic set of linguistics examples known as the Harvard Sentences in our most soothing, meditative voices (people have reported that it may not exactly induce the ASMR effect but it does indeed work to fall asleep to, and we’re still fans of the pun).

Selected tweets:

Blog posts:

This month’s photo is of the Lingthusiasm postcards featuring the circle IPA design that we printed out to give out at Lingstitute. People seemed to like the challenge of figuring out what features all of the circles stood for, and I gave away lots but still have some left, so if you see me at a future conference do feel free to ask for one so you can have a fun thing to stick up by your desk or on your fridge!

Left hand with rings holding blue cards with Lingthusiasm logo and green and white International Phonetic Alphabet.

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

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.

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.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

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

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:

Selected tweets:

Written Chinese “Biang”

Selected blog posts:

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.

May 2022: 10th blogiversary and Japanese translation of Because Internet

gretchenassistant

In May, I hit my 10-year blogiversary on All Things Linguistic. I celebrated with two linkposts, one of the usual highlights from the past year and another, shorter post of more zoomed-out highlights from the past decade.

I participated for the second year running as a contestent in Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.

Promotional graphic of Gretchen as a contestant for Webster's War of the Words virtual game show, including logo, headshot, and bio.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Tea and skyscrapers – When words get borrowed across languages. The bonus episode was What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow, an edited recording of our online liveshow from April.

It’s delightfully surreal when an author whose books you’re enjoying also likes your book!

The #103papers project continued, in which I read one paper per language for the 103 languages identified as having papers published about them in the four major child language acquisition journals, based on a survey paper by Kidd&Garcia. Here’s a bit from a paper about Greenlandic showing that kids love morphology!

Selected tweets

Selected blog posts

This month I received my author copies of Because Internet in Japanese, translated by Toshio Chiba, which kept the bright yellow/blue cover. You can get it at Filmart or Amazon.co.jp.

Image of Japanese editions of BECAUSE INTERNET on top of blue fabroc covered in symbols. One copy is in its yellow dust jacket; one shows the blue cover inside the jacket.

March 2022: PIE Day and Memory Speaks

gretchenassistant

Here are some Pi Day (3rd month, 14th day) facts about the PIE (Proto-Indo-European). Both of these guys were named William Jones, confusingly enough.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Word order, we love (transcript). The bonus episode was Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics. The deadline for the LingComm Grant applications was March 31st, so next month we head into reviewing the proposals!

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is of the excellent book Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy, which I greatly enjoyed reading! It’s a really interesting combination of pop science book and memoir, which we don’t see enough of in pop linguistics.

February 2022: Teaching with Because Internet survey and Lingthusiasm liveshow in April

gretchenassistant

I set up a survey for anyone who’s been using Because Internet for teaching – put in what you’ve been doing and I’ll compile and share it with other instructors!

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Knowledge is power, copulas are fun. The bonus episode was Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ – Dispatches from the Unicode Conference.

We also announced a Lingthusiasm liveshow in April, a sweary liveshow about swearing, taking place on the Lingthusiasm Discord. Plus: a longer descriptive post about the LingComm Grants, of which there are now several more thanks to people who supported them!

Selected tweets:

Selected tweets

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is brought to you by linguistics takes on the Roses are Red poem.

Valingtine Poem on a gradient green to blue to purple background. Roses are red Violets are blue Ideas are green And colourless too #valingtines

January 2022: LSA, LingComm Grants, and spectrograms

gretchenassistant

I started the year at a rather surreal LSA 2022, the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, which I’d hoped to attend in person in Washington DC but moved online at the last minute, along with what seemed to be most of the other attendees. It was nonetheless nice to see people virtually as well as help judge the Five Minute Linguist competition again.

This month we also announced the return of the LingComm Grants, small grants to help fledgling linguistics communication projects get off the ground, sponsored by Lingthusiasm and several other generous contributors. We first ran these grants in 2020, and it’s been great to see that people are still enthusiastic about them.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Making speech visible with spectrograms, for which we did a special video segment where you can see the spectrograms as we make them! The bonus episode was a chat where we interview each other about seasons, word games, Unicode, and more updates coming on Lingthusiasm.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo is Because Internet hanging out in the history and culture section of Librarie Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal.

BECAUSE INTERNET sitting atop display books.

December 2021: pigeon calls and a bookmas tree

gretchenassistant

This month, I did a virtual event with Argo Bookshop where I talked with Rosemary Mosco about her book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching (I am especially pleased with the “linguistic tie-in” portion of the event where I got Rosemary to teach me how to make various pigeon calls and the audience played along, very much vibes of intro phonetics class).

I did an interview on the Notion podcast with Devon Zuegel. Here’s a quote from that:

“If you see it as, okay, language is always a moving target, it’s a living thing that exists in the minds of living beings, and nothing about human life or human society, or human culture is exactly the same from one generation to the next, and language just comes along as part of that.”

Notion: Gretchen McCulloch talks about why we talk the way we do online

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was Where to get your English etymologies. The bonus episode was Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory.

I also went to WorldCon in Washington DC this December, which I didn’t join in time to be on any panels but I did meet several people who liked Because Internet and signed books for them!

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is a charming bookmas tree from Etat de Style, a bookstore in Montreal.

Stacked book tower covered in holiday lights, pinecones, and ornaments.