lingthusiasm:

lingthusiasm:

101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics

In honour of Lingthusiasm’s 100th episodiversary, we’ve compiled this list of 101 public-facing places where linguists and linguistics nerds hang out and learn things! 

17 podcasts about linguistics

1. Lingthusiasm — A podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! 
2. The Vocal Fries — Language discrimination and how to fight it
3. The History of English — From Proto-Indo-European to Shakespeare in 180 episodes (and still running!)
4. A Language I Love Is — Guests (some linguists, some not) talk about languages they love and why
5. En Clair — Forensic linguistics and literary detection
6. Because Language — New guests every episode discuss their linguistic interests
7. The Allusionist — Stories about language and the people who use it 
8. Subtitle — A podcast about languages and the people who speak them
9. Field Notes — Five seasons on linguistic fieldwork 
10. Tomayto Tomahto — Language meets cog sci, politics, history, law, anthropology, and more
11. Word of Mouth — A long-running and wide-ranging linguistics program on BBC 4.
12. Words Unravelled - A new and very well edited etymology podcast with popular creators RobWords and Jess Zafarris
13. Something Rhymes with Purple — Learn the background behind another word or phrase each episode
14. Lexitecture — A classic etymology podcast with a huge back catalogue
15. A Way with Words — A “lively and upbeat” public radio call-in show about language and culture
16. Språket — A radio program in Swedish answering listener questions about language. We don’t speak Swedish, but this was the most-mentioned non-English content in our listener survey!
17. Living Voices — A podcast in Spanish about endangered languages of the Amazon

12 nonfiction books about linguistics

1. Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch (Amazon; Bookshop) — A linguist shows how the internet is transforming the way we communicate
2. How Language Works: How Babies Babble, Words Change Meaning and Languages Live or Die (Amazon; Bookshop) by David Crystal — A journey through the different subsystems of language 
3. That’s Not What I Meant!: How Conversational Style Makes or Breaks Relationships by  Deborah Tannen (Amazon; Bookshop) — A pioneering researcher on conversations gives advice on how they can go wrong
4. Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self by Julie Sedivy (Amazon; Bookshop) — Scientific and personal reflections on nostalgia, forgetting, and language loss
5. The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves to Sand Worms, the Words Behind World-Building by David J Peterson (Amazon; Bookshop) — an accessible guide to making your own conlang 
6. Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language by Arika Okrent (Amazon; Bookshop) — The history behind English’s many oddities
7. Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell (Amazon; Bookshop) — A well-researched pushback on sexist language ideology
8. Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries by Kory Stamper (Amazon; Bookshop) — A lifelong lexicographer discusses the job and the things she’s learned along the way 
9. Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren (Amazon; Bookshop) — A quick, funny tour of the quirks of 60 European languages
10. Bina: First Nations Languages, Old and New by Felicity Meakins, Gari Tudor-Smith, and Paul Williams (Amazon; Bookshop) — The story of Australian indigenous languages’ resistance and survival
11. Says Who?: A Kinder, Funner Usage Guide for Everyone Who Cares About Words by Anne Curzan (Amazon; Bookshop) — A writers’ style and grammar guide focused on real usage, not made-up rules
12. The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book: A World Tour of Languages and Alphabets in 100 Amazing Puzzles by Alex Bellos (Amazon; Bookshop) — Solve puzzles about writing, grammar, and meaning drawn from real and fictional languages
13. Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (Amazon; Bookshop) — An anthology of poems in endangered languages, with commentary

6 linguistically-inspired novels

1. Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by R.F. Kuang (Amazon; Bookshop) — Imagine a world where linguistics was as vital — and as ethically compromised — as engineering is in ours
2. True Biz by Sara Nović (Amazon; Bookshop) — Love, friendship, and struggle at a residential high school for the Deaf
3. Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by by Mark Dunn (Amazon; Bookshop) — “A progressively lipogrammatic epistolary fable” full of wordplay and weirdness
4. Semiosis by Sue Burke (Amazon; Bookshop) — Human space colonists communicate with sentient plants
5. Translation State by Ann Leckie (Amazon; Bookshop) — What does life look like for a perfectly genetically engineered alien–human translator? (Spoiler: weird, that’s what.)
6. Stories of your Life and Others by Ted Chiang (Amazon; Bookshop) — Includes the long short story that became Arrival, plus other reflections on humanity and change

13 linguistics youtube channels

1. Crash Course Linguistics — A whole linguistics course in 16 videos
2. Tom Scott’s Language Files — Pithy language facts explained quickly and clearly
3. NativLang — Language reconstruction and the history of writing
4. Geoff Lindsay — Facts (and some scholarly opinions) about regional English pronunciation
5. The Ling Space — An educational channel all about linguistics
6. langfocus — A language factoid channel that digs deeper than many
7. K Klein — Language quirks, spelling reform, and a little conlanging
8. biblaridion — Teaching about conlanging and worldbuilding, with lots of linguistics along the way
9. RobWords — "A channel for lovers and learners of English"
10. Otherwords — "the fascinating, thought-provoking, and funny stories behind the words and sounds we take for granted"
11. LingoLizard — Widely spoken languages and their quirks, comparisons, and history
12. linguriosa — Spanish linguistics (in Spanish), including learning tips and linguistic history
13. human1011 — Quick accessible facts about linguistics (and sometimes other things) 
14. Simon Roper — Language evolution and historical English pronunciation

10 shortform video channels about linguistics (tiktok/reels)

1. etymologynerd — Internet speak, etymologies and more! (reels)
2. linguisticdiscovery — Writing systems, language families, and more (reels)
3. jesszafaris — Fun facts about words, etymologies, and more (reels)
4. cmfvoices — An audiobook director talks about the linguistics of voice acting (eels)
5. mixedlinguist — A linguistics professor comments on the language of place, identity, politics, technology, and more (reels)
6. landontalks — Linguistic quirks of the US South (reels)
7. sunnmcheaux — Language and culture from Harvard’s first and only professor of Gullah (reels)
8. dexter.mp4 — Talks about many branches of science, but loves linguistics enough to have a linguisticsy tattoo (reels)
9. danniesbrain — Linguistics and psychology from a researcher who studies both (reels)
10. wordsatwork — Quick facts on languages, families, and linguistic concepts (reels)
11. the_language — The Ojibwe language — plus food, dancing, and more

8 linguistically-inspired videogames and board games 

1. Heaven’s Vault (video game) — Decode a mystery hieroglyphic language as a space archeologist traveling with her trusty robot sidekick
2. Chants of Sennaar (video game) — puzzle your way through uncoding the language and world of The Tower 
3. Tunic (video game) — You don’t need to decode the writing system to enjoy exploring this video game as an anthropomorphic fox, but some people have enjoyed the additional challenge of cracking the writing system
4. Cypher & Epigraph (video game) — Test and grow your cryptographic skills with these increasingly feendish puzzles 
5. Wavelength (board game) — A relaxed and silly party game featuring comparatives and scales. Very fun for a flexible-sized group. 
6. Xenolanguage (board game) — An ethereal storytelling game about communicating with aliens featuring a unique ouija-board inspired gameplay mechanic 
7. The Gostak (interactive fiction) — A classic text adventure you need to decipher a secret language to play
8. IPA Scrabble (board game) — Do-it-yourself instructions for making your own International Phonetic Alphabet Scrabble tiles

7 blogs, newsletters, and magazines about linguistics

1. Nancy Friedman’s substack — A professional name developer (that’s a thing!) weighs in on trends
2. Language Log — One of the longest running linguistics blogs: a few professors discuss their interests
3. Separated by a Common Language — "Observations on British and American English by an American linguist in the UK"
4. Sesquiotica — Riffs on etymology and meaning
5. Language Hat — Another longtime classic, featuring literature, translation, and lexical curiosities
6. @official-linguistics-post — Sharing posts and conversations of linguistic interest from around Tumblr
7. Babelzine — A print magazine of language and linguistics, great for school libraries to subscribe to

8 linguistically-inspired movies and tv shows 

1. Atlantis: The Lost Empire — A linguist protagonist meets a conlang plot device
2. Arrival — The most linguistic fieldwork you’ll ever see in a sci-fi blockbuster 
3. Darmok — The Star Trek episode that launched a thousand linguistics memes 
4. CODA — The biggest names in ASL theatre in a multilingual movie
5. Avatar — The sci-fi epic that gave us Na'vi, one of the best loved conlangs
6. We Still Live Here: Âs Nutayuneân — A documentary about the Wampanoag scholar who revived her nation’s language
7. My Fair Lady — A classic musical about dialect, social class, and (of course) love
8. The King’s Speech — Based on a true story: a speech-language pathologist helps King George VI overcome his stammer
9. Talking Black in America — A documentary series on African American English, Black ASL, and more

6 linguistics-related events and physical spaces 

1. Planet Word (Washington, DC, USA) — An immersive language museum 
2. Mundolingua (Paris, France) — A hands-on museum with exhibits on many branches of linguistics
3. The COSI language pod (Columbus, OH, USA) — Participate in linguistics experiments inside this science museum 
4. The SLIYS summer camp (Columbus, OH, USA) — The Summer Linguistic Institute for Youth Scholars introduces high school students to linguistics
5. Kletskoppen Festival (Nijmegen, Netherlands) — A festival about language and language development for children, and their adults 
6. International Linguistics Olympiad (2025 in Taipei, Taiwan) — An annual puzzle-solving competition for secondary school students, with many national editions in various countries 

9 places to get even more 

1. r/linguistics — A subreddit for discussing linguistics; check out their reading list (Note that we singled out this one for being a big, public, high-traffic community — but if you’d prefer a closed Discord server or a Facebook meme group or any other platform-specific thing, ask other linguistics nerds on that platform and you’ll probably find one.) 
2. Bluesky linguistics starter pack — Some linguists who post actively about linguistics, several of which have also made starter packs for specific subfields 
3. conlang.org’s community list — Pointers to the many places conlangs are discussed
4. Superlinguo’s list of linguistics podcasts — Many more podcasts than we had room for 
5. A very long list of pop linguistics books on All Things Linguistics — Many more books, too…
6. Linguistic Discovery’s list of books — …and even more!
7. High School Linguistics’ books list for teens — Get started early…
8. Superlinguo’s list for kids — …and even earlier!
9. Mutual Intelligibility’s resource directory — Links on a wide range of subjects
10. linguistics humor tag on All Things Linguistic — Just the funny stuff

We’ve been doing lingcomm since 2011 and we’re astounded by how many more pop linguistics resources have come into existences since we started and how many difficult decisions we had to make to get it down to just 101 places  

If you’re more on the lingcomm creator side, check out the lingcomm website — we’d love to hang out with you at the LingComm Conference (it’s online!). 

Many thanks to the people who filled out the Lingthusiasm survey over the past 3 years for suggesting over 1000 places where you get enthusiastic about linguistics! Please feel free to highlight your favourites from this list or add further suggestions for the benefit of other people reading! 

All Things Linguistic - 2022 Highlights

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: inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia. 

Continuations of existing projects: 

• Return of LingComm Grants
• A survey for those using Because Internet for teaching
• 10 year Blogiversary of All Things Linguistic: highlights from the past year and highlights from the past decade
• 6 years of Lingthusiasm

Conferences/Talks

• LSA 2022 and judging Five Minute Linguist
• I was on panels about swearing in SFF and the Steerswoman books at a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation
• I was on panels at WorldCon (ChiCon 8) in Chicago: Ask A Scientist, That’s Not How That Works!, and Using SFF for Science Communication
• I was a contestant for the second time in Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.
• I attended the Australian Linguistics Society annual meeting in Melbourne and the New Zealand Linguistics Society annual meeting in Dunedin, where I gave a talk co-authored with Lauren Gawne called Using lingcomm to design meaningful stories about linguistics

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 notebooks, and Lingthusiasm is one of Spotify’s top 50 Science podcastsF/href.li/?https:/www.redbubble.com%2Fi%2Fmouse-pad%2FAesthetic-IPA-Chart-Square-by-Lingthusiasm%2F129215087.G1FH6&t=OTkxYjYxYjNmMzA1M2VhNGViOGIxZWIxOGI0NDRjYjE2YTIzYTE2NCw2YTgzNDQyZTM3MzY0YjRkNjc3NGJkNzhhYzJhMzk3ZjA2Y2NkYzIz&ts=1684794278">other all-time merch!

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?

Keep reading

A Decade of All Things Linguistic

When I started All Things Linguistic ten years ago, it felt a way of finally joining the linguistics blogosphere conversation that I’d been reading for the previous ten years or so. I didn’t expect that it would lead to me meeting and sometimes even collaborating with so many interesting people along the way, not to mention developing a whole career out of lingcomm. 

I’m now better known for many of these non-blog projects, especially Because Internet and Lingthusiasm, but for me, this blog is always where it began. So, here’s a few highlights from the past decade:

Linguistics-y series

I did a lot of these more in-depth linguistics-y series and posts in the early years of the blog, before I started writing for other places as well. To browse a longer list of them, see my favourites page.

• I relistened to the entire BBC radio comedy series Cabin Pressure and found amusing linguistics content in every single episode
• So you asked the internet how to draw syntax trees. Here’s why you’re confused.
• Linguist humour (currently at 44 pages!)
• Language on the interwebz (35 pages!)

Lists of resources

• A very long list of pop linguistics books and lingfic
• Linguistics and language podcasts
• A very long list of linguistics youtube channels
• Linguistic approaches to language learning
• How to teach yourself linguistics online for free
• Protolinguist - ways to do linguistics in high school

Meta series

• Linguistics jobs
• Grad school, undergrad, and intro linguistics advice
• Weird Internet Careers
• LingComm - workshop, conference and grants

Writing series elsewhere

• The Toast
• Wired
• Slate
• Mental Floss
• Full list of short-form writing elsewhere

Other projects elsewhere

• Because Internet, a book I wrote about internet language
• Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I cohost
• Crash Course Linguistics, for which I was one of the writers
• I’ve collaborated on many Language Files videos with Tom Scott
• lingwiki, a series of edit-a-thons to improve linguistics-related content on Wikipedia
• I’ve done many public speeches and media interviews. So many.

10 years of All Things Linguistic

I’ve officially been blogging on All Things Linguistic for ten years! This boggles my mind so much that I decided to also write a whole decade in review post for tomorrow, but let’s start with looking back at some of my favourite posts and other things that happened in the past year:

Projects

• I started a new project to read one paper per language of the 103 languages reported in a recent paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia surveying the languages represented in the four main child language acquisition journals.
• Peeking face, palm up, and palm down - the emoji I proposed with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel are now officially in Unicode 14.0 and will be coming to your devices in the next few years!

• Now that Because Internet has been out for two years, I can attest that people have successfully used it as a way of opening up cross-generational conversations about changing texting norms.
• 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!

Interviews and talks

• How Linguistics Can Help You Learn a Language - talk for Duolingo’s DuoCon
• I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period
• Keynote at the Unicode Conference in San Francisco on “Taking Playfulness Seriously - When character sets are used in unexpected ways” (slides here, video here for similar talk at Bay Area NLP)
• Keynote at Sotheby’s Level Up in Los Angeles (not online)
• Virtual talk for some internal folks at YouTube (not online)
• Back-to-school virtual talks: The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern and about Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma
• Guest interview about internet language on That Word Chat, an online talk show for editors and word nerds
• In conversation with Rosemary Mosco about her book, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching at Argo Bookshop
• Contestant on Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House

Conferences and events

• LSA 2022, the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (Washington DC but a last-minute pivot to virtual, judged the Five Minute Linguist competition again)
• WorldCon in Washington DC
• Dictionary Society of North America conference
• the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association

LingComm

The organizing committee of LingComm21, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication which I co-organized last year, wrote a six-part series on how we designed the conference last year, for anyone else who’s been trying to figure out how to do virtual events that are actually social:

1. Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
2. Designing online conferences for building community
3. Scheduling online conferences for building community
4. Hosting online conferences for building community
5. Budgeting online conferences or events
6. Planning accessible online conferences

I’m also very pleased to report that a new organizing committee is making the LingComm Conference happen again, in February 2023.

The LingComm Grants returned for 2022, giving out five $500 Project Grants and twelve $100 LingComm Startup Grants. These small grants to help fledgling linguistics communication projects get off the ground were sponsored by Lingthusiasm and several other generous contributors, and you can see the full list of grantees here.

Lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm hit its fifth anniversary! I’ve officially been making a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics with my cohost Lauren Gawne and our linguistically enthusiastic team for five years now!

In addition to releasing our usual 12 main episodes and 12 bonus episodes, some Lingthusiasm things that happened this year included: a redesigned Lingthusiasm website (I wrote an incredibly long meta post about the website design process), a Lingthusiasm crossover appearance on the NPR show Ask Me Another (featuring two fun quiz segments, one on accepted or rejected emoji and one on famous book titles), and a Lingthusiasm liveshow, a sweary liveshow about swearing, on the Lingthusiasm Discord. Also, Lingthusiasm now has a LinkedIn page, in case that’s somehow a thing you need in your life.

We also released new Lingthusiasm merch! You can now ask people which shape is kiki and which one is bouba from the comfort of your own scarf, tshirt, mug, and other items. And…did we do a whole episode on fricatives just so that we could release “what the fricative” merch? In the immortal sounds of another fricative: Shhhhhhh. Plus, we did a time-limited Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack special offer for people who support the podcast on Patreon.

Main episodes:

1. Making machines learn Fon and other African languages - Interview with Masakhane
2. A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip
3. Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind
4. That’s the kind of episode it’s – clitics
5. Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta
6. Cool things about scales and implicature
7. Where to get your English etymologies
8. Making speech visible with spectrograms
9. Knowledge is power, copulas are fun
10. Word order, we love
11. What it means for a language to be official
12. Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

Bonus episodes:

1. Gotta test ‘em all – The linguistics of Pokemon names
2. Language under the influence
3. Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication
4. Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word
5. Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia
6. Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️
7. Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory
8. We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more
9. Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference
10. Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics
11. Approaching word games like a linguist – Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular
12. What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow

Selected blog posts

Communication:

• It’s Complicated/Because Internet on why teens socialize online
• Conversation, cooperation, and dementia (from superlinguo)
• “old people really need to learn how to text”
• The origin of language and interspecies communication
• Reduplication Bread Bread
• Tumblr graffiti

Languages:

• The fight to save Hawaii sign language from extinction
• A McGill student and professor realized they both speak Mi'kmaq; it changed everything
• Pitch, intonation, and the role of technology in language description
• On standard dialects
• A list of the languages mentioned on Crash Course Linguistics
• Pronouncing words in English (by Chinese speakers)
• When your accent is better than your vocabulary

Linguist humour:

• The kiki to bouba pipeline
• Dinosaur Comics on the “I dunno” hum
• Kawaii Desu Innit Bruv
• ancient translation to badger
• xkcd: neoteny recapitulated phylogeny
• Experts in a Sci-Fi Fantasy Setting

General linguistics:

• I asked people for their favourite fun fact about linguistics and ended up with a delightful thread of replies
• Fictional Gestures
• Greenmeats
• Peanut cheese
• Finnish pronouns
• Stomach is the truest Sundial
• Eeyore Linguistic Facts
• The art and science of beatboxing
• Beatboxing in IPA

Linguistic jobs:

• Technical writer
• CEO of a SaaS company
• Impact Lead
• Social media lead (for NASA)
• Senior Analyst, Strategic Insights & Analytics
• Academic linguist
• Online Linguistics Teacher
• Customer Success Manager
• Performing Artiste and Freelance Editor
• I reposted a classic “how to twitter” (from a social perspective) post of mine from 2016, which people tell me they still refer to occasionally
• How to write a successful pop linguistics book (an extremely long advice post)

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, year six, year seven, year eight, and year nine.

For shorter updates, follow me as a person on twitter or instagram, follow Lingthusiasm on twitter or instagram, or for a monthly email newsletter with highlights, subscribe on substack.

All Things Linguistic - 2021 Highlights

2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)

I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.

Media and crossovers

• How Linguistics Can Help You Learn a Language – I did a talk for Duolingo’s DuoCon
• Why do adults…over 40….use ellipses…so much? Crossover with Tim Blais of Acapella Science
• xkcd Tower of Babel
• Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French (video with Tom Scott)
• PUZZLE SPOILERS: A quote from Because Internet in the New York Times acrostic
• Someone made a crossword puzzle of Because Internet!
• Peeking face, palm up, and palm down – the emoji I proposed with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel are now officially in Unicode 14.0 and will be coming to your devices in the next few years

Media

• BBC Word of Mouth – The Shipping Forecast
• I’m cited in a Wikipedia article about boomerspeak
• I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period.
• Lauren Gawne and I did a Lingthusiasm crossover appearance on the NPR show Ask Me Another, featuring two fun quiz segments, one on accepted or rejected emoji and one on famous book titles

Crash Course Linguistics

The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.

1. What is linguistics?
2. What is a word? Morphology
3. Syntax 1: Morphosyntax
4. Syntax 2:
5. Semantics
6. Pragmatics
7. Sociolinguistics
8. Phonetics 1: Consonants
9. Phonetics 2: Vowels
10. Phonology
11. Psycholinguistics
12. Language acquisition
13. Language change and historical linguistics
14. World Languages
15. Computational Linguistics
16. Writing Systems

Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!

Lingthusiasm

In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:

• Where to get your English etymologies (transcript)
• Cool things about scales and implicature (transcript)
• Corpus linguistics and consent – Interview with Kat Gupta (transcript)
• That’s the kind of episode it’s – Clitics (transcript)
• Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind (transcript)
• A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip (transcript)
• Making machines learn Fon and other African languages – Interview with Masakhane (transcript)
• Not NOT a negation episode (transcript)
• R and R-like sounds – Rhoticity (transcript)
• How linguists figure out the grammar of a language (transcript)
• Listen to the imperatives episode! (transcript)
• Writing is a technology (transcript)

And here are this year’s bonus episodes:

• Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory
• Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️
• Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia
• Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word
• Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication
• Language under the influence
• Gotta test ‘em all – The linguistics of Pokémon names
• Lingthusiasm liveshow: The listener talks back (on backchannelling)
• Talking to babies and small children
• The episode-episode (reduplication)

Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)

• Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language and Because Internet
• Slate’s Future Tense about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel.
• I moderated a panel for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on NLP Applications for Crisis Management and Emergency Situations.
• Contestant on Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House, and also attended online conferences,
• guest interview about internet language on That Word Chat (summarized in tweet form)
• The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern
• Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma
• Sotheby’s Level Up in Los Angeles (physical)
• Unicode Conference in the San Francisco Bay Area (physical), where I did a keynote called “Taking Playfulness Seriously – When character sets are used in unexpected ways” (slides here!).
• The Unicode talk isn’t online but a few days later I did a talk on the same topic for Bay Area NLP, for which the video is here.
• Virtual talk for some internal folks at YouTube
• Rosemary Mosco Talks to Gretchen McCulloch about Pigeons, a book event at Argo Bookshop

Conferences/events attended:

• Linguistic Society of America (LSA) – did a Wikipedia editathon
• American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
• Dictionary Society of North America conference
• Annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association
• WorldCon (physical)

LingComm and LingFest

In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.

LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events.

1. Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
2. Designing online conferences for building community
3. Scheduling online conferences for building community
4. Hosting online conferences for building community
5. Budgeting online conferences or events
6. Planning accessible online conferences

Keep reading

9 years of All Things Linguistic

This blog has been around for almost a decade now! This year, despite the global pandemic, it feels like a major theme was collaborating and working with people. Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts and other linguistics things I worked on this past year. 

Because Internet

Because Internet, my book about internet language, came out in paperback!

Here are some photos of the new paperback edition, same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people, which was featured in the New York Times Paperback Row. I also wrote an old-school reflexive blog post about what it’s like to hit the final milestone in a book journey that began in 2014.

If you’re a Lingthusiasm fan, and you’re considering reading the Because Internet audiobook but you wish Lauren was there too, not just my voice all by itself, we now have a solution to that problem! That’s right, we’ve made a clip of Lauren-backchannelling audio that you can now play on loop in the other ear while you listen to the Because Internet audiobook.

Wired Resident Linguist column

• Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge 
• A Mission to Make Virtual Parties *Actually* Fun 

My Wired article about preliterate children texting in emoji from a while back was translated for Wired Japan. Here it is in Japanese and here it is in English again.

Crash Course Linguistics 

I worked with a large team of excellent people, including linguists Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser, host Taylor Behnke, and the teams at Complexly and Thought Cafe on a series of 16 short intro videos for Crash Course Linguistics. We’re very proud of how they turned out and we’ve already been hearing from people who’ve used them in their intro linguistics classes and even discovered that linguistics existed because of them. 

1. Introduction
2. Morphology
3. Morphosyntax
4. Syntax
5. Semantics
6. Pragmatics
7. Sociolinguistics
8. Phonetics, Consonants
9. Phonetics, Vowels
10. Phonology
11. Psycholinguistics
12. Language acquisition
13. Historical linguistics and language change
14. Languages around the world
15. Computational linguistics
16. Writing systems

We also made supplementary posts with further resources and exercises to go with the Crash Course Linguistics videos through Mutual Intelligibility with Liz McCullough. Here’s a directory of all Mutual Intelligibility posts. 

Assorted interesting crossovers 

I was this year’s recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America. (My acceptance speech as a blog post.)

The latest set of draft emoji from Unicode include three emoji that I co-wrote the proposals for, along with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel. 

I made a cameo in an xkcd comic about Proto-Indo-European and also may or may not have been in a xkcd comic about the Tower of Babel. (I am choosing to consider it representation of curly-haired linguists everywhere.)

I late-night-wrote a parody version of “Jolene” but about vaccines (“Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaciiiiine / I’m begging you please go in my arm”) which someone made an excellent video recording of and then it got picked up by quite a lot of media outlets.

Someone made a musical tiktok video asking why adults over 40 use ellipsis so much, a lot of people tagged me in it so I tweeted about it, and then A Capella Science made an extremely catchy response video, also in music, featuring a cameo from Because Internet. 

Lingthusiasm was featured on the Patreon’s official accounts as part of #MadeWithPatrons, and Because Internet was featured on the official tumblr books blog. 

LingComm

After experimenting with lots of different styles of virtual events in the preceding months, I co-organized two lingcomm-related events in parallel weeks: 

#LingComm21

The first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, for practitioners of linguistics communication to meet and learn from each other, was organized by me, Lauren Gawne, Jessi Grieser, Laura Bailey, and Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!). 

We designed the schedule and the virtual conference space in Gather to facilitate social interaction between conference attendees, not just one-way attendance, and were delighted both that so many people were interested in the topic (200 registrants!) and to hear from attendees that we seem to have succeeded at the social side. Meta posts about how we planned it with tips for other virtual events are in progress.  

LingFest 

LingFest was a fringe-festival-style series of independently organized online events for linguistics fans, which featured 12 events that were attended by over 700 people in total, including a Lingthusiasm liveshow about backchannelling   from me and Lauren Gawne. 

Grants

We also announced the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants, a project that began last year, and later made a post with the completed 2020 LingComm Grantee projects for you to check out! 

Other virtual places I talked with interesting people 

Talks

• A chat at Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language
• Two panels for Predictive Text, a series with Slate’s Future Tense: about translation and the juxtaposition of historical texts with modern language  with Maria Dahvana Headley (translator of the new “bro” Beowulf edition) and Alena Smith (creator of the show Dickinson) and about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel from the Unicode Emoji Subcommittee
• Lauren Gawne and I gave a talk for Abralin, the Brazilian Linguistics Association, about emoji and gesture
  
• A Linguistics in the Pub panel about linguistics podcasting 
  
• The Cheese Plate Is A Technology - Interview with the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books podcast
  

Conferences

• Australian Educational Podcasting Conference: From mythbusting to metaphors - Learning from cross-disciplinary research to communicate complex topics better. 
• Online National Association of Science Writers (NASW) conference
  
• Virtual Word of the Year at the American Dialect Society annual meeting
• Annual meetings of the Linguistic Society of American and the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• An impromptu panel about linguistics in science fiction/fantasy at the online version of WisCon (#WisConline) with a fun group of linguists

Lingthusiasm episodes

We reached our 100th episode of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne! Here are the main episodes that came out this year: 

1. Tracing languages back before recorded history
2. Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics
3. The happy fun big adjective episode
4. Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates
5. How translators approach a text
6. Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P
7. Small talk, big deal
8. Writing is a technology
9. Listen to the imperatives episode!
10. How linguists figure out the grammar of a language
11. R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity
12. Not NOT a negation episode

And the twelve monthly bonus episodes: 

1. Doing linguistics with kids
2. Tones, drums, and whistles - linguistics and music
3. LingComm on a budget (plus the Lingthusiasm origin story)
4. The quick brown pangram jumps over the lazy dog
5. The most esteemed honorifics episode
6. Crash Course Linguistics behind the scenes with Jessi Grieser
7. Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster
8. Deleted scenes - outtakes from Lingthusiasm interviews
9. 100th episode Q&A about naming dogs, modifying English, linguistics research, and more
10. The episode-episode (reduplication)
11. Talking to babies and small children
12. Lingthusiasm liveshow: the listener talks back (on backchannelling)

Language Files videos

More videos from my ongoing collaboration with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl:

• schwa
  
• the Bouba/Kiki experiment
  
• Corpus statistics behind the pronunciation of “gif” 
  
• The complicated question of how many languages there are
• Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French 

Other blog posts

Linguistically relevant books I liked this year

• The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book by Alex Bellos
• Highly Irregular by Arika Okrent
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine 
• 68:Hazard:Cold, a short story by Janelle Shane which does interesting things with language
  

Linguist humour

• Scuba, an exotic English word meaning “to keep breathing even though the water rises all around you”
• The language after “Modern” English: English_final_FINAL?
• English’s avoidance register in front of certain animals: W-A-L-K
  
• xkcd does dialect quizzes (a parody)
  
• Ancient Sumerian meme dogs
  

General linguistics 

• An interactive visual database for American Sign Language
• The linguistics of hyperlinks
• Names in fantasy maps
• New kanji for social distancing
• Towards a new language of the global language crisis
• Gestural theories about the origin of language
• Indigenous activists are reimagining language preservation under quarantine
• What is a heritage language? Infographic
• The Scots Wikipedia saga
• “Language features are not neutral in the way that the calculator feature is neutral.”
• A video singing the names of the Indigenous languages of Australia
  
• Writing in ways that communicate our tone of voice
  
• The poetic process powering real-time language translation in Namibia
• How do you sign “Black Lives Matter” in ASL?
  
• A linguistic perspective: The harmful effects of responding ‘All lives matter’ to 'Black lives matter’
  

Linguistics jobs (mostly from Lauren Gawne)

• legislative drafter
• speech pathologist
  
• freelance writer (and creator of Dinosaur Comics)
  
• dance instructor and stay-at-home mom
  
• at the American Anthropological Association
  
• law student
  
• developer advocate
  
• metadata specialist and genealogist
  
• ESL teacher
  
• Full list of 60+ linguistics jobs interviews from Superlinguo to date
• Practical advice for if you want to start a podcast
  

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, year six, year seven, and year eight. 

For shorter updates, follow me as a person on twitter or instagram, follow lingthusiasm on twitter or instagram, or for a monthly newsletter with highlights, subscribe on substack.

A Teach Yourself Linguistics Linkfest from Mutual Intelligibility

Looking to teach yourself linguistics? Mutual Intelligibility was a year-long project to help curate free linguistics resources online for people who are trying to teach or learn linguistics, and now all of its posts are collected here for you. 

Crash Course Linguistics

A structured introduction to linguistics. Each post contains a 10-12 minute video from Crash Course Linguistics, plus supporting resources on the same topic including exercises with answer keys. 

• Week 0 - Preview
• Week 1 - Introduction
• Week 2 - Morphology
• Week 3 - Morphosyntax
• Week 4 - Syntax
• Week 5 - Semantics
• Week 6 - Pragmatics
• Week 7 - Sociolinguistics
• Week 8 - Phonetics, Consonants
• Week 9 - Phonetics, Vowels
• Week 10 - Phonology
• Week 11 - Psycholinguistics
• Week 12 - Language acquisition
• Week 13 - Historical linguistics and language change
• Week 14 - Languages around the world
• Week 15 - Computational linguistics
• Week 16 - Writing systems

Resource Guides

Longer, more comprehensive guides to a few common intro linguistics topics. 

1. Introduction to IPA Consonants - Resource Guide 1
2. Introduction to IPA Vowels - Resource Guide 2
3. Introduction to Morphology - Resource Guide 3
4. Introduction to Constituency - Resource Guide 4
5. Introduction to World Englishes - Resource Guide 5
6. Introduction to Languages around the World - Resource Guide 6

3 Links Posts

Quick highlights of three relevant links about a specific topic, with a short description for each. 

• 3 Links about Linguistics Teaching
• 3 Links for Second Year Syntax Videos
• 3 Links for Second Year Phonology
• 3 Links for Natural Language Processing
• 3 Links for Semantics and Pragmatics
• 3 Links for Sociolinguistics
• 3 Links for Second Year Psycholinguistics
• 3 Links for Field Methods
• 3 Links for Articulatory Phonetics
• 3 Links for Writing Systems
• 3 Links for Gesture Studies
• 3 Links for Linguistics Communication (lingcomm)
• 3 Links for Evidentiality
• 3 Links for Linguistic Discrimination
• 3 Links for Linguistics Careers Outside Academia
• 3 Links for Schwa
• 3 Links for the Linguistics of Emoji
• 3 Links for Proto-Indo-European
• 3 Links for Second Language Acquisition
• 3 Links for Zero Morphemes
• 3 Links for Internet Linguistics
• 3 Links for Language Revitalization
• 3 Links for Online Teaching

All Things Linguistic - 2020 Highlights

2020 wasn’t the year anyone was expecting, and I did much less travel than in previous years. But, while I was social distancing at home like everyone else, I did at least keep doing enjoyable linguistics things: Crash Course Linguistics videos went from early planning stages to nearly complete, Because Internet came out in paperback, and my podcast Lingthusiasm launched two other projects to contribute to the pop linguistics ecosystem: LingComm Grants and Mutual Intelligibility.

Because Internet

Because Internet, my book about internet language which hit the NYT bestseller list last year, came out in paperback this year! Links to get it in all of the formats, including how to get signed copies.

Here are some photos of the new paperback edition, same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people. I also wrote an old-school reflexive blog post about what it’s like to hit the final milestone in a book journey that began in 2014.

Crash Course Linguistics

I worked on these 16 fun intro linguistics videos, 10-12 minutes long each, along with a large team, including linguists Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser, host Taylor Behnke, the animation team at Thought Cafe, and of course the production team at Crash Course itself. Writing the scripts ended up being our first lockdown project in the spring, and then reviewing the filmed and animated episodes for accuracy a second lockdown project in the fall. The final few videos will be appearing in early 2021 – you can watch them all at this playlist.

• Preview trailer for Crash Course Linguistics
• What is linguistics? Crash Course Linguistics #1
• What is a word? Morphology, Crash Course Linguistics #2
• Morphosyntax, Crash Course Linguistics #3
• Syntax 2: Trees - Crash Course Linguistics #4
• Semantics - Crash Course Linguistics #5
• Pragmatics - Crash Course Linguistics #6
• Sociolinguistics - Crash Course Linguistics #7
• Phonetics 1: Consonants - Crash Course Linguistics #8
• Phonetics 2: Vowels - Crash Course Linguistics #9
• Phonology - Crash Course Linguistics #10
• Psycholinguistics - Crash Course Linguistics #11
• Language acquisition - Crash Course Linguistics #12
• Language change and historical linguistics - Crash Course Linguistics #13

Other Writing

Wired Resident Linguist column:

• Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge
• A Mission to Make Virtual Parties Actually Fun

Language Files videos, with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl:

• The sentences humans can understand but computers can’t
• Abso-b████y-lutely - Expletive Infixation
• the Hidden Rules of Conversation (about Grice’s Maxims)
• schwa
• the Bouba/Kiki experiment
• the corpus statistics behind the pronunciation of “gif”
• the complicated question of how many languages there are

Lingthusiasm

My fourth year of producing a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics with Lauren Gawne! Regular episodes:

1. Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane
2. This time it gets tense - the grammar of time
3. What makes a language easy? It’s a hard question
4. The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
5. Schwa, the most versatile English vowel
6. Tracing languages back before recorded history
7. Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics
8. The happy fun big adjective episode
9. Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates
10. How translators approach a text
11. Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P
12. Small talk, big deal

And 12 bonus episodes, with thanks to our patrons for keeping the show sustainable:

1. What might English be like in a couple hundred years?
2. Generating a Lingthusiasm episode using a neural net
3. Teaching linguistics to yourself and other people
4. When letters have colours and time is a braid - The linguistics of synesthesia
5. A myriad of numbers - Counting systems across languages
6. Doing linguistics with kids
7. Tones, drums, and whistles - linguistics and music
8. LingComm on a budget (plus the Lingthusiasm origin story)
9. The quick brown pangram jumps over the lazy dog
10. The most esteemed honorifics episode
11. Crash Course Linguistics behind the scenes with Jessi Grieser
12. Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster

We started a Lingthusiasm Discord server, a place for people who are enthusiastic about linguistics to find each other and talk! And we released new schwa-themed merch with the (admittedly aspirational these days) slogan Never Stressed.

Lingthusiasm also sponsored two other projects this year: LingComm Grants and Mutual Intelligibility.

LingComm Grants - We gave out four $500 grants to up-and-coming linguistics communications projects. Thank you again to everyone who applied, and do check out the projects of the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants.

Mutual Intelligibility - A newsletter to connect linguistics instructors with existing linguistics resources suitable for teaching online in a bite-sized, easy-to-digest fashion, with considerable help from the editing and organizational skills of Liz McCullough.

Keep reading

8 years of All Things Linguistic

It’s my eight year blogiversary! Wow! Let’s celebrate by looking back at some of my favourite posts from the past year:

Because Internet

My book about internet language came out in July 2019. Here are a few of my favourite blog posts about it:

• Because Internet hit the New York Times bestseller list its first week out
• that classic tumblr flowing jungle river post is now cited in a real book, like an actual paper book
• Linguistics jobs: interview with an internet linguist
• A very special leather-bound edition of Because Internet that my publisher had made just for me, in celebration of my book becoming a bestseller!
• A sample of me reading the Because Internet audiobook (previous thread about recording it)
• I now have a speaking reel, if you’re wondering what it’s like when I’m giving a talk about internet linguistics
• Someone dressed up as my book for Halloween!

I also did over 200 media interviews for the book, but I’ve already summarized those on my 2019 year in review post.

Wired Resident Linguist column

I kept writing my Ideas column for Wired, which included these articles:

• Fans are better than tech at organizing information online (about the Archive of Our Own)
• The meaning of all caps – in texting and in life (excerpt from Because Internet)
• New emoji are so boring – but they don’t have to be
• Boomerspeak is now available for your parodying pleasure

Other writing

• We Learned to Write the Way We Talk (New York Times Op Ed)
• How Can You Appreciate 23rd-Century English? Look Back 200 Years (New York Times Op-Eds From the Future - I was very proud that this op-ed got me no fewer than five (5!) entries in New New York Times, a twitter account that tracks words that appear in the New York Times for the first time.)
• We Will Have Meme Folklorists (New York Magazine)
• How to use irony on the internet (Wall Street Journal)
• The Big Idea: Writing towards the future  (John Scalzi’s Whatever)
• I also co-wrote an academic article with Lauren Gawne, Emoji as Digital Gestures in the journal Language@Internet [Open Access], for which Lauren wrote an accessible summary version for The Conversation.

Surprising internet crossovers

After 7 years of blogging, I thought I had pretty much figured out which sections go in this yearly summary post. But for year 8, I’ve found myself needing to add a delightful new one.

• I’m in an xkcd hovertext (about ok vs okay)
• Lingthusiasm’s tote bags are in an SMBC comic
• Because Internet is on the official tumblr books blog and tumblr’s twitter account
• A Because Internet cameo on the official Steak Umm brand account
• A Because Internet fact featured in the QI twitter account

Lingthusiasm

We celebrated our third year of making Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! This year we were recommended by Buzzfeed (!!), which called Lingthusiasm “joyously nerdy”.

The most exciting Lingthusiasm episodes this year were the ones where our guests helped me and Lauren Gawne push the boundaries of what a podcast typically is: this video episode in ASL and English interviewing Lynn Hou about her research on signed languages in real-world contexts and the one where Janelle Shane used a neural net to generate fake Lingthusiasm quotes based on our existing transcripts, and then we performed the best ones out loud (see also Janelle’s blog post about making this).

Here’s all twelve regular monthly Lingthusiasm episodes:

1. Why spelling is hard - but also hard to change
2. Emoji are Gesture Because Internet
3. Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger
4. Villages, gifs, and children - Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts (also a video episode!)
5. Smell words, both real and invented
6. Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals, and more
7. How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
8. Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane
9. This time it gets tense - the grammar of time
10. What makes a language easy? It’s a hard question
11. The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
12. Schwa, the most versatile English vowel

And the twelve monthly bonus episodes:

1. North, left, or towards the sea? With guest Alice Gaby
2. Words from your family - Familects!
3. Welcome aboard the metaphor train!
4. Behind the scenes on Because Internet (Q&A)
5. Jobs, locations, family, and invention - Surnames
6. Reading fiction like a linguist
7. The sounds of sheep, earthquakes, and ice cream - Onomatopoeia
8. What might English be like in a couple hundred years?
9. Generating a Lingthusiasm episode using a neural net
10. Teaching linguistics to yourself and other people
11. When letters have colours and time is a braid - The linguistics of synesthesia
12. A myriad of numbers - Counting systems across languages

We also started a Discord community that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, to solve the problem of “Your podcast got me (back) into linguistics, but now I don’t have people to fan out about language with! Where do I make lingthusiastic friends?”

Finally, we released more Lingthusiasm merch: schwa pins and more that say Never Stressed, greeting cards that say “thanks” or “congrats” on them in IPA; the pun-tastic “glottal bottle” and liquids for your liquids bottle/mug; and shirts/mugs/bags that say Linguistic “Correctness” is just a lie from Big Grammar to Sell More Grammars. (See photos of all the Lingthusiasm merch here.)

Keep reading

All Things Linguistic - 2019 Highlights

2019 was a very big year for me.

My book about internet language, which I’d been working on since 2014, finally came out into the world! Because Internet hit the New York Times bestseller list and was one of TIME’s 100 books of 2019, plus tons of other media.

I wrote two op-eds for the New York Times and continued writing my Resident Linguist column at Wired, and we made two special video episodes of my podcast, Lingthusiasm.

Book: Because Internet

There were around 200 media hits for Because Internet (I’m sure I’m missing a few). Here are a few highlights:

• Two (!!) reviews in the New York Times, by Jennifer Szalai (NYT Daily) and Clay Shirky (NYT Book Review)
• Two reviews in the New Yorker, by Katy Waldman and Mary Norris
• Reviews in: The Economist, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Science Magazine, The Times (of London), the Observer/Guardian, BBC Science Focus.
• NPR: All Things Considered and Science Friday 
  
• BBC World News  
• Trade reviews: Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly (starred), Booklist, and Library Journal
• Podcasts: The Cracked Podcast, The Allusionist, Grammar Girl, Slate’s “Lexicon Valley”, New York Times Book Review podcast, The Ezra Klein Show
• Lists: TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019, Goodreads Choice Award Semifinalist, an Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of 2019
• My publisher made me a special leather-bound version of Because Internet in celebration of it becoming a New York Times bestseller. It’s beautiful.
• I have a Wikipedia page now and someone dressed up as my book for Halloween!

Short-form Writing

• We Learned to Write the Way We Talk (New York Times Op Ed)
• How Can You Appreciate 23rd-Century English? Look Back 200 Years (New York Times Op-Eds From the Future)
• We Will Have Meme Folklorists (New York Magazine)
• How to use irony on the internet (Wall Street Journal)
• The Big Idea: Writing towards the future  (John Scalzi’s Whatever)

Wired Resident Linguist column:

• Children are using emoji for digital-age language learning
• Predictive text presents the best version of you
• Coding is for everyone — as long as you speak English
• Fans are better than tech at organizing information online (about the Archive of Our Own)
• The meaning of all caps — in texting and in life (excerpt from Because Internet)
• New emoji are so boring — but they don’t have to be
• Boomerspeak is now available for your parodying pleasure

I also co-wrote an academic article with Lauren Gawne, Emoji as Digital Gestures in the journal Language@Internet [Open Access].

Events, Talks, and Videos

In January, I did a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon and judged the 5 Minute Linguist competition, both at the LSA annual meeting.

In March, I gave a comic talk at the festival of Bad Ad-hoc Hypotheses (BAHfest) about why we should make English spelling more weird and confusing, which you can watch online. Recommended if you like Unicode jokes.

In May, I recorded the Because Internet audiobook! Here’s a thread with my linguistic thoughts about the process and an audio sample of me reading the audiobook.

In July, I went to the LSA Summer Institute in UC Davis, to do a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon focussing on articles about underrepresented languages, a talk about effective communication of linguistics to a general audience, and MC’d the 3 Minute Thesis event. Plus, I had book launch party in Montreal with Argo Bookshop!

In September, I did a book event in Toronto in conversation with Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame), featuring a packed house with many old friends at The Ossington with Flying Booksn. I also went to XOXO fest in Portland, and did two talks about the book in Seattle, with Textio and the Seattle Review of Books and Elliott Bay Books.

In October, I was on a panel about busting language myths through podcasting at Sound Education in Boston. I was also on panels about Using Language for Worldbuilding (moderator) and “What did we say before we said Cool?” at Scintillation, a small speculative fiction convention in Montreal.

I now have a speaking reel! So if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like when I’m giving a talk about internet linguistics, you can now watch a five minute highlights video here!

I collaborated on several Language Files videos with youtuber Tom Scott:

• why typing like this is sometimes okay.
• Why “No Problem” can seem rude: Phatic expressions
• The language sounds that could exist, but don’t
• Can the words you read change your behaviour?
• Why do we move our hands when we talk?

Lingthusiasm Podcast

We celebrated our third year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne. New this year were two video episodes, about gesture and signed languages, so that you can actually see them!

Here are all 24 episodes from 2019, 12 main episodes and 12 bonus episodes:

1. How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages
2. The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on
3. Why do we gesture when we talk? (also a video episode!)
4. Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas
5. You heard about it but I was there - Evidentials
6. Why spelling is hard - but also hard to change
7. Emoji are Gesture Because Internet
8. Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger
9. Villages, gifs, and children - Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts (also a video episode!)
10. Smell words, both real and invented
11. Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals, and more
12. How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Bonus episodes on Patreon:

1. Naming people (and especially babies)
2. How the internet is making English better (liveshow from Melbourne)
3. Adapting your language to other people
4. How do radio announcers know how to pronounce all the names? With guest Tiger Webb
5. Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals
6. North, left, or towards the sea? With guest Alice Gaby
7. Words from your family - Familects!
8. Welcome aboard the metaphor train!
9. Behind the scenes on Because Internet (Q&A)
10. Jobs, locations, family, and invention - Surnames
11. Reading fiction like a linguist
12. The sounds of sheep, earthquakes, and ice cream - Onomatopoeia

We also made new Lingthusiasm merch, including  items with the best esoteric Unicode symbols on them, adding socks, mugs, and notebooks in all our prints (IPA, tree diagrams, and esoteric symbols), onesies saying Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project. greeting cards that say “thanks” or “congrats” on them in IPA; the pun-tastic “glottal bottle” and liquids for your liquids bottle/mug; and shirts/mugs/bags that say Linguistic “Correctness” is just a lie from Big Grammar to Sell More Grammars. (See photos of all the Lingthusiasm merch here.)

Selected twitter threads

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