The @cla-acl.bsky.social has issued a press release "calling on the Government of Québec to reconsider its decree banning forms of gender-inclusive writing, specifically the inclusive pronoun 'iel', the word 'toustes' and the interpoint." cla-acl.ca/pdfs/Ecritur...

¡We should Adopt Language Practices as we see Fit!

What if we didn’t and content in African languages remained useful and written by humans?

this guy using the word "Mono" like it's a slur????

Instant messaging was better when no one had a smart phone. Conversations had well defined beginnings and endings because people were either online or not.

@djinnandtonic.bsky.social sticker spotted on H Street in Washington, D.C.

btw this scene from The Frisco Kid with the German speaking Amish with black clothes, big hats and beards mistaking a Yiddish speaking Jew with black clothes, big hat and beard for an Amish and vice versa never stops being hilarious (even if they dropped the ball by using standard German)

What if we did WAY more translation? Way way way more. Between and among every combination of language systems!

This kills the Clippy. ... Should be obvious. Lots of people saying otherwise, and for each one, I shudder to imagine them interacting with, like, a child or an animal. "Unbend" like, my intestines or my brain folds, yuck I don't think so

what if we analyzed (linguistic or other) misgendering misgendering not as an error, not as a misidentification or reflection of a different understanding of reality, but rather as a speech act intended to discipline, enforce, and re-inscribe gender onto a referent

People say Boston is a white city because they don’t know Boston is a city in a majority minority metro where the Taiwanese American mayor succeeds in part because she campaigns in Haitian Kreyòl

I hate it when people misuse the word “decimate” and one tenth of me will die on this hill

I have been slightly AWOL on here, but I am popping in to share a new article that I wrote which has just been published in the Journal of Linguistic Anthroplogy (open access!). It is about Star Trek, the Universal Translator, and utopias. anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

"but we can't support trans rights, it's unpopular!" just a reminder that US approval for marriage between black and white people at the start of the civil rights movement was 4%, reaching a whopping 20% by the end of the movement it's 95% now you don't wait for popularity for a rights movement

i love this little genderfluid pig in stardew valley who uses he/she pronouns

we see lots of horrible antisocial & inhumane action. but, even the nastiest ppl kinda already know how to stop doing that. we all have a little friendly bug in us and everybody is an expert at cooperation already :) because that is the only way that communication can ever work :)

Hoping to do a talk about langywangy at this book fair ~~~ in Pittsburgh, Oct 24-26. Submissions are open until this coming Monday

Austrians will complain "foreigners don't learn German" but by this they never mean the white Brits, Americans etc who have lived here for 10+ years and can barely order a beer but they definitely do mean Turks, Bosnians etc who actually do speak German, just with an accent and grammatical errors

Every time someone says this, we add another language to the signs.

Reminder to the reading public: if you report a book to Kindle for "typos" Amazon may yank it off publication completely and demand the author fixes the "typos". Even if the typos are vernacular English and YOU are the idiot who didn't check a big enough dictionary.

It's called Amtrak because you am on trak

The more you study history, the more you realize: 1. Stuff seen as ancient and intrinsic is at most two generations old 2. It was deliberately constructed 3. The people who constructed it were quite open about doing so

every “ancient tradition” was invented between 1848-1870 and every “modern perversion” is so ancient as to predate writing

lol wow

Truckers ticketed for 'lack of English proficiency'. But who decides whether a trucker can “read and speak English sufficiently to converse with the general public"? The Sikh Coalition is right to fear that "roadside English tests [...] profile drivers based on their accent or appearance"

I would like to know how much truckers are being ticketed for and why perceivably lacking a specific level of English proficiency is a ticketable offense and what is even meant by "ticket" here (do you get points on your license for not Englishing hard enough) and who is actually enforcing this and

Heads up Bluesky disabled the "require alt text before posting" setting again. You'll need to go into the accessibility settings to turn it back on

Using the wrong pronouns when referring to someone, but not in a misgendering way but a grammatical way "Oh yeah, her is doing pretty well"

My favorite part is when the BBC opens by referring to an "Irish language band" before IMMEDIATELY anglicizing Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh's surname. Bit on the nose there England! Did y'all forget to take that "oppress Irish into extinction and anglicize everyone's name" part out of the style manual, or?

Watching old episodes of Inside the Actor's Studio and feeling a little more disappointed with some of the questions than I expected to be, but for both better & worse, they very much fit the era of late 90s/early 00s. But credit where credit is due: Tommy Lee Jones, I did not recognize your game.

"Speak English," he said, racistly.

again, not the main point but Welsh has equal status in Wales

in Scotland, Gaelic is established to have the same status as English, which is technically "no status at all"

hey does anyone know a good article or explainer about gender / transition *in Norwegian* that I could send to my mom?

Completed CASCA panel on "fun shit in linguistic anthropology" - papers on Star Trek (by me), D&D and performativity, Nigerian hip-hop puns and proverb play, and social media presentations of Quebec French. Probably the most fun I've had in actually doing academic work, but also smart.

My apparently unpopular opinion is that when we focus on the supposed grammar mistakes of those we disagree with we reinforce longstanding prescriptivist ideologies that are most heavily used to police poor people of color. It may seem cute but is actually oppressive. apple.news/A6sySH6IGTYe...

I don't know who needs to hear this, but the Yiddish word for the pope is DER POYPS (דער פּױפּס) unless it is a lady pope in which case it is DI POYPSKE (די פּױפּסקע)

star wars may contain a lot of garbage, in there, but there's some incredible language things happening. people like chewbacca and greedo and R2-D2 just... talk the way they talk, and other people just deal with it. brilliant. inspiring ✨🌈✨

Hey if you or your language and #linguistics students are looking for some end-of-term de-stressing, I put a couple more pages from my coloring book project up here: tinyurl.com/coloring-gre...

This is nonsense

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but LLMs do NOT learn language like infants do.

Fun fact about sound languages: their relationships don’t actually parallel normal sign languages! It’s well known that ASL’s closest relative is LSF, but did you know that the closest variant of the American sound language is the British one?

In this video, Ashani Coviello tells us: "I was taught that to speak improperly meant that I was deficient in some way, and that not just my words, but my mind was inadequate, my voice would be ineffective."

happy birthday (it’s always someone’s birthday, somewhere)

what songs do we know with lyrics in many languages? it's very langywangy to sing a song in many languages at the same time (overlapping, with friends)

Call for papers! I'm putting together an edited collection with @hedahlbergdodd.bsky.social on "Monstrous Language": studies of the language of monsters, "others", and the in/unhuman. Please share with any interested scholars! Abstracts are due end of May, with the goal of a complete draft in Dec.

Linguistics grant cancelled for mentioning grammatical gender: "The sole mention of gender in the grant’s description is in reference to the fact that the Hebrew language (like many) assigns gender to nouns."

the denser the accent the better