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allthingslinguistic · 3 years

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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.

Introduction

Morphology

Morphosyntax

Syntax

Semantics

Pragmatics

Sociolinguistics

Phonetics, Consonants

Phonetics, Vowels

Phonology

Psycholinguistics

Language acquisition

Historical linguistics and language change

Languages around the world

Computational linguistics

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:

Tracing languages back before recorded history

Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics

The happy fun big adjective episode

Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates

How translators approach a text

Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P

Small talk, big deal

Writing is a technology

Listen to the imperatives episode!

How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity

Not NOT a negation episode

And the twelve monthly bonus episodes:

Doing linguistics with kids

Tones, drums, and whistles - linguistics and music

LingComm on a budget (plus the Lingthusiasm origin story)

The quick brown pangram jumps over the lazy dog

The most esteemed honorifics episode

Crash Course Linguistics behind the scenes with Jessi Grieser

Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster

Deleted scenes - outtakes from Lingthusiasm interviews

100th episode Q&A about naming dogs, modifying English, linguistics research, and more

The episode-episode (reduplication)

Talking to babies and small children

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