At last! Open Access version of the book on MIT's site. One for the syntax nerds. I argue we need to replace Merge, that there are no Phases, and that we need to rethink the basic theoretical typology of Islands. Feel free to download with abandon! 🐦🐦 #syntax direct.mit.edu/books/oa-mon...

First time in my life I see this way of writing lowercase <i> - these are the words "ikniun" and "oil"

Yesterday was the end of the marking period for the UK Linguistics Olympiad - keeping up the annual tradition of marking it (after quickly giving it a go myself). You can find a trove of past years' puzzles here: www.uklo.org/past-exam-pa...

Low bar for authorship these days

Today in linguistic example sentences 🍅 (Source: Gueche Fotso's 2024 illustration of resumptive pronouns for left-dislocated topics in Nda'Nda')

sigh

Moved to Paris for a 4-month research stay at the CNRS research unit Languages and cultures of Africa (LLACAN) 🇫🇷

Calls: 11th International Conference on Bantu Languages

The cfp for the 11th International Conference on Bantu languages (#Bantu11) cfp is out! Deadline 1st Dec for submissions to the general session or to one of the 11 workshops, conf. in Ghent/online, 18th-21st August 2026 www.bantugent.ugent.be/bantu11/ #Bantu #linguistics

Just logged onto #LinkedIn for the first time in 1.5 years in order to opt out of their new policy to use profiles/messages to train generative AI, due to come into effect 3rd Nov. It takes a few clicks and you can do the same here: www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-pr...

Cameroonian election results out www.bbc.com/news/live/cx...

My review of Bloom Ström et al. (eds.) (2024) 'Morphosyntactic Variation in Bantu' has just been published in the Journal of Historical Syntax: historicalsyntax.org/hs/index.php...

It's nice to be back in Germany. This beer is pleasantly called BAYREUTHER HELL

The brand new African Studies research centre building at @unibayreuth.bsky.social looks very good in autumnal colours

On the way from Gent to Bayreuth to speak at a workshop on Tunen language and indigenous law. May the Deutsche Bahn gods smile upon me 🙏 Step 1: Gent - Brussels Midi

UGent's copy of the Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages has finally arrived in the library - absolute unit of a book!

Look it’s published! 😍 Thank you to the three editors and my co-authors, and now it’s there for all of you (and your students) to read up about comparative syntax 🤓 📖

Today, Belgian university employees are called upon to protest against the Arizona government. Nothing against the US state - apparently named because the five component parties of the Belgian Federal government's colours match the (oh-so-well-known) Arizonan flag

Calls: Innaugural Workshop of the Young Africanists' Research Network

We aren't quite on the summer roadshow yet, but you will find us next at Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) conference with @mishee54.bsky.social representing #edusky #langsky #linguistics

It is that time of year again for linguistics students to start thinking of graduate school applications. In order to help them out, I wrote the following blog post. It is by far the most popular blog post I ever wrote. ordinaryworkinggrammarian.blogspot.com/2019/12/writ...

Confs: Language Documentation & Archiving 2026

CALL FOR COLLABORATORS The MapLE project is looking for 5 collaborators working on African languages, to collect and analyse data on the speaker’s and addressee’s knowledge in grammar. Will you join our project? See the website for details: epistemicity.net/call-collabo...

Great news! JSTOR now have a free account with an Independent Researcher category. You can access 100 documents per month www.jstor.org/action/showL...

Confs: 11th International Conference on Bantu Languages

this really works!

Come join us in Ghent next year for #Bantu11! The first cfp is out, with workshop proposals due October 15th (the next deadline will be December 1st for abstract submissions, which can be to a workshop or the general session) www.bantugent.ugent.be/bantu11/

Today in linguistic example sentences: m̀m'ǎ:bǎ:kɔ̌bá gwa:kɛ́ ḿbǐ:bé bɔkala "Mum hit me because I stole a doughnut" (Gunu (Bantu A62, Cameroon); Rekanga 1989:41)

Academia dot edu licensing agreement says it can use your likeness and voice and publications in any manner they want, world wide.

Home home for a couple of days

Our faculty is holding an online Graduate Open Day via Teams on 25th September, 1-2pm (British Summer Time); an opportunity to ask questions about the Linguistics graduate courses on offer at Oxford and the admissions process. www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/news/2025/07...

Wow. The number of Marie-Curie postdoc fellowship applications rose from 10,360 last year to 17,058 this year (with only enough in the pot to fund 9.7% of projects). 47.8% of applicants are based in the US. Good luck to anyone in the lottery 🥲 marie-sklodowska-curie-actions.ec.europa.eu/node/1463

POV: you go to the library looking for 2 books

Calls: 57th Annual Conference on African Linguistics

Come join us in Buffalo in 2026! Co-located with ACAL, to take place just before it.

In Paris with an Anatolianist, who points out that the pose in this YSL perfume advert for MYSLF is the same as the Hieroglyphic Luwian logogram EGO 'I, me', attested in inscriptions from the Hittite empire c3200 years ago onward. Plus ça change!

Roundtable discussion at #SLE2025 "How to do #linguistics with #AI, How to do #AI with #linguistics" with @emilymbender.bsky.social , Claire Larsonneur, Benoît Le Blanc & Christian Ludwig

And now in Bordeaux for #SLE58. 15 (!) parallel sessions during the day, and evening reception at the Bordeaux Hôtel de Ville

In Leiden for day 1 of the annual African linguistics colloquium #CALL54

Back from fieldwork

Come be my colleague! UC Berkeley Linguistics has a tenure-track position in language revitalization. aprecruit.berkeley.edu/JPF05022

Confs: Innaugural Workshop of the Young Africanists' Research Network

STAR's first issue is out! (STAR is an open-access journal publishing syntactic research from the same editorial team that brought us Syntax) #Linguistics star-linguistics.org

Next LAEA conference will take place in Kigali! See you there in 2027!

Today we concluded the first orthography development workshop on Atɔmb [ttf] (Bantu A461), with 9 community members hosted at the Laboratoire de Ressources Orales of the Centre International de Recherche et de Documentation sur les Traditions et les Langues Africaines (CERDOTOLA), Yaoundé

⚠️ Seminar announcement: in semester 2 of the new academic year (Feb-May 2026), I will be teaching a 𝐒𝐞𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐫 𝐨𝐧 𝐀𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐂𝐞𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐋𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬 (SG648) in the Dept. of Early Irish (@ceilteachomn.bsky.social) at Maynooth University. Guests from outside are very welcome. More info ⬇️

Mini-break in West Cameroon

Wta? Mind you I got an AI summary that insisted people who had been awarded PhDs were more likely to get Alzheimer’s. Perplexed, I looked up the original. It defined PHD as primary headache disorder. The AI took the statistically more likely abbreviation and came up with its idiotic response. Sigh!

More reasons to transcribe tone in Nomaandé: asama əyipólótoto = a red flower asámá əyipólótoto = a red testicle

Internships: Applied Linguistics, Language Documentation: Language Revitalization Fellowship Opportunity, 7000 Languages, remote