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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

I tried to do an image search in rural Cameroon and it resulted in a Mondrian painting

Meet Jenneke van der Wal (@jennekevanderwal.bsky.social). By investigating how speakers of different African languages structure information in their grammar, she unravels fundamental principles about how people articulate their thoughts. 👉 shorturl.at/BwEEj Ammodo Science Award Laureate 2025 🧪

Equipment delivered to the Atomb team! With thanks to FEL for funding the audio equipment and to ELF for a follow-up grant that enabled the purchase of a laptop for the language committee

Happy to have reached the career stage where retired autodidacts are sending me emails about their big ideas about historical linguistics / proto-World. Feels like a rite of passage

Why is it always "my collaborators don't speak English" and never "I don't speak isiZulu"? (from Corrigan et al. 2011, "Ethnobotanical plant uses in the KwaNibela Peninsula, St Lucia, South Africa", South African Journal of Botany 77: 346-359)

The ELSEA field school has started! The 12 participants and 5 lecturers have been received at Makerere University and we’re making friends with wonderful people from Uganda, Tanzania, Burundi, Netherlands, DRC, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, UK, Malawi!

Trying to relax after work by reading a 4-page short story by Ursula Le Guin someone sent me and Adobe Acrobat is prompting me to just read an AI summary instead 😒 She would be rolling in her grave...

Morning: drinking palm wine and eating bitter kola with the village chief Afternoon: checking noun class agreement paradigms, some evidence for vowel harmony from Obj to STAMP in STAMP-O-V constructions, and trying to distinguish coda [n] vs [ŋ] vs [ɲ]

9 years ago today I was conducting fieldwork with Ekegusii speakers in the south of Kisii county, Kenya, where I came across an unparalleled piece of home decoration

I have been working with agriculturalists in Cameroon since 2019, with a mix of ages, political opinions, educational background, etc., and I am yet to meet a climate change denier. Every year I hear things like "the rains are late", "the harvest isn't good". It's a real struggle to keep afloat.

Yesterday's recording of cacao farming in Nefanté village, central Cameroon

How do you continue after finishing a PhD? I’ve put together some lessons I learned on my ‘academic skills’ page: jennekevanderwal.com/tips-in-acad... What are your best post-PhD tips?

Literal fieldwork - filmed and helped with peanut harvesting in Ndikiniméki this morning with one of my neighbours

Confs: 57th Annual Conference on African Linguistics

Today in mic levels - I set the mic sensitivity setting with consultant 1 to comfortably avoid clipping, then for the same task with the same mic at the same levels consultant 2 was a bit louder, then consultant 3 was like consultant 2 at the beginning but got way louder (!) as the task continued

Jobs: Linguistic Theories, Morphology, Syntax: Research Position (Postdoc), Bielefeld University

The third edition of this syntax textbook was updated to include examples from a more diverse range of languages, with some of my PhD data on Tunen now used to illustrate mixed headedness (S-Aux-O-V word order, of a type different from Germanic). Cool to think of how many students will see it!

Three fully funded positions on multilingualism @usc.gal (ATRAE program), starting in 2026: • 2 PhDs (multilingualism in Galicia & Gibraltar) • 1 Postdoc (both regions) Research includes fieldwork, corpora, social network analysis & pupillometry. 📩 [email protected] Please share!

Nice end to a day of fieldwork - received this time capsule of letters my family wrote me for my birthday back in February, which arrived in Cameroon April/May/June

🔎 Et si une seule syllabe pouvait porter tout un sens? Le linguiste Lameen Souag (CNRS) décrypte dans cet article des langues comme le #Dinka, où intonation et ton font sens. Avec le projet Nilomorph, il explore ce que cela dit de l’origine du langage. À lire ici 👉 bit.ly/44OtpU7

WeTransfer just changed their TOS giving themselves permission to train AI on any content you transfer and produce derivative works based on content you transfer that they are allowed to monetize and you are not allowed payment for. Stop using WeTransfer.

In sunny news, praatpicture version 1.5.0 is now on CRAN 🌞🧨 and you can now finally overlay pitch and intensity on the waveform (thanks to @jannelorenzen.bsky.social for suggesting this)

Starting a thread of views from linguistics departments: #1 - Université Yaoundé I, Cameroon