Linguistics

Helen Lewis, "How one woman became the scapegoat for America's reading crisis", The Atlantic 11/13/2024: Lucy Calkins was an education superstar. Now she’s cast as the reason a generation of students struggles to read. Can she reclaim her good name? Until a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, […]

Xi Jinping is celebrated as the first national leader of thePeople's Republic of China who speaks Modern Standard (MSM) rather than some heavily accented Sinitic dialect / topolect. That is basically true, though he slurs and swallows his words, and is (in)famous for his numerous verbal gaffes (see "Selected readings" below). Now the pseudoscience and […]

The protean particle zhī 之 (3 strokes, classifier / radical 丶) has more grammatical functions than you can shake a stick at, e.g.: (literary) genitive or attributive marker indicates that the previous word has possession of the next one indicates that the previous word modifies the next one particle indicating that the […]

The title of this video is "This Is Not Korean But It Is [recte Is It] Cantonese!? | Can We Use the Korean Alphabet to Write Cantonese?" Well, if you can use Hangul for an Indonesian language, as with Cia-Cia (see "Selected readings" below), why not Cantonese? As for the problem of tones, in my […]

New article in Antiquity (05 November 2024): "Seals and signs: tracing the origins of writing in ancient South-west Asia", by Kathryn Kelley, Mattia Cartolano, and Silvia Ferrara Abstract Administrative innovations in South-west Asia during the fourth millennium BC, including the cylinder seals that were rolled on the earliest clay tablets, laid the foundations for proto-cuneiform […]

In this newsletter: Join LDC for membership year 2025 Spring 2025 data scholarship application deadline New publications: LORELEI Yoruba Representative Language Pack Samrómur Synthetic ________________________________________ Spring 2025 data scholarship application deadline Applications are now being accepted through January 15, 2025, for the Spring 2025 LDC data scholarship program which provides university students with no-cost access to LDC data. Consult the LDC Data Scholarships page for m

The editors of Word Structure are pleased to announce that as of late 2024, the journal has shifted to a "Subscribe to Open" funding model, to promote Open Access. Subscribe to Open is a model that converts a journal’s gated content to Open Access (OA) through using existing library payments and relationships. Institutions subscribe to journals in the usual fashion, and as long as sufficient revenue for the year is reached, the journal’s volume for the current year is published OA. This therefo

We are inviting proposals for chapters to be included in an edited volume entitled 'Using Multilingual Approach to Diversity in Education (MADE) in educational research and practice'. Editors: Eliane Lorenz, Justus Liebig University Giessen Anna Krulatz, Norwegian University of Science and Technology MaryAnn Christison, University of Utah The full CfP can be found here: https://t.co/v01a78aLqN The primary purpose of this volume is to offer a collection of empirically- and practice-based paper

The Boston University linguistics department will be holding an information session about its MA in Linguistics. Please join us at 10am Eastern on November 21, 2024 to find out about the linguistics faculty at BU, program courses, research opportunities, and any other questions you may have. Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/686nvj5z Find out more about the MA program here: https://ling.bu.edu/graduate/ma-linguistics/ If you cannot make it, but you have questions about the program, please email

Other video angles and edits are available on YouTube. Among many mass-media stories, we could start with one from Qasim Nauman, "Why New Zealand’s Maori Lawmakers Protested With a Traditional Dance", NYT 11/15/2024: New Zealand’s Parliament was temporarily suspended on Thursday as Māori lawmakers performed a haka, a traditional group dance, demonstrating their community’s anger […]