Linguistics

Friday's On The Media, "Deep Fakes, Data Centers, And AI Slop — Are We Cooked?" has some linguistically-interesting discussion, especially the part about the rise of AI-generated trolling — more on that later. But this post is just a quick note on a widespread symptom of current end-to-end speech-to-text technology, where the text end of […]

This past semester, the lectures for ling0001 took place in a classroom located in Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, and one of the students in the course asked me something that I've wondered about myself from time to time: Why is it "The Annenberg School for Communication" rather than "The Annenberg School of Communications"? There […]

This morning I received the following link without any accompanying explanation: link is embedded here. As soon as I started to read through the text, it seemed as though it were Hindi-Urdu, or some other northern Indic language, but it was so jumbled with English and jargon that I couldn't really make full sense of […]

Some might regard it as ‘brain rot’, but the first word of the year just for tweens and teenagers could be the most hopeful development of 2025What connects the word “vape”, the crying-laughing emoji and the phrase “squeezed middle”? No, it’s not just a biting crossword clue for “millennial”: they have all previously been crowned word of the year. Admittedly, there are now so many “words of the year” that, if they were physical objects, they could make a decent-sized museum collection. Which, as it happens, is exactly how I like to imagine them – artefacts of their time, telling a story of a changing society.This year’s winners – from “parasocial” (Cambridge D..

Several of my PRC M.A. students have told me that the following tool for the computation of dialect closeness has become quite popular in China: fāngyán yīnxì xiāngsì dù cèshì方言音系相似度測試 ("Dialect phonological similarity test"),V3.2.358 (source) It became popular and widely spread in Chinese social media recently, as a simple tool/quiz that helps you to […]

Aufzeichnung der Buchpräsentation mit den Autor*innen Stefan Dollinger, Anneliese Rieger-Roschitz und Simon Schwaighofer (9. Dezember 2025, Universitätsbibliothek Wien, FB Linguistik, Sensengasse 3a) Moderation: Herbert Schendl Videolink: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MV8W2dRkXA Zum Buch Dieses beschwingt und pointiert geschriebene Buch beschreibt die 300-jährige Romanze der Österreicher mit „ihrem“ Standarddeutsch. Das österreichische Hochdeutsch, so das Argument, ist der passende

Esol education has become politicised as part of the wider discussion on migration.

Following up on Diana Shuheng Zhang's notes on forty Northeasternisms (11/12/25), Yizhi Geng gives us another helping. While Diana's collection is based mainly on Dalian city, Yizhi's comes from Changchun. "mǎ húlu马葫芦": "manhole" (lit., "horse gourd / calabash / cucurbit"), where "mǎ húlugài马葫芦盖" refers to "manhole-cover". According to older generations, this word came from Japanese, […]

The Linguistics Section of the Department of Humanities at the University of Pavia (Italy) (https://studiumanistici.dip.unipv.it/it/ricerca/le-sezioni/linguistica-teorica-e-applicata) encourages expressions of interest for applications alongside a local research supervisor to the Horizon Europe Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme (MSCA PF) financed by the European Commission from excellent postdoctoral researchers in the fields of: - Historical linguistics - Indo-European s

Cascadilla Press is now selling sets of mini-posters for linguistics adapted from vintage propaganda poster designs and old WPA poster art. These are 5.5" x 8.5" (140 x 216 mm) mini-posters printed on a premium matte 16 pt cover stock as a set of 9 different designs. You can see the set and order at: https://www.cascadilla.com/miniposters.html

This is the 1st Call for Papers for a new volume titled "Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching: The Case of the Nordics" (edited by Pia Sundqvist, Liss Kerstin Sylvén, and Hayo Reinders). We welcome submissions that present empirical data as well as papers targeting theoretical/conceptual perspectives or methodological issues that illuminate innovative learning and teaching practices. Please see the full CfP here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KAOqg1bP7oGga3pdA94WGfuDSS_4Dn41Yb1xyAA

Words reflecting anger and swearing are more common in people with personality dysfunction.

Trump's Wednesday evening speech got a lot of media coverage, as expected — but along with descriptions of (and responses to) the content, there were also many references to the tone, and specifically to the pace. Thus Cameron Andrews ("Doctor Sounds Alarm After Trump, 79, Gives ‘Manic’ Address", Daily Beast 12/18/2025) quote a series of […]