I spent the International Day of Sign Languages using Auslan (the majority sign language of Australia) at the inaugural Auslan Teachers Conference in Melbourne, Australia.

Happy #EuropeanDayOfLanguages: I have English as my L1, and I also sign British Sign Language, speak conversational French, and wish to learn more Maltese (my father's first language).

Very excited to announce that yesterday I submitted my PhD thesis: The Linguistic Life of the Kufr Qassem Deaf Community: Language Emergence, Variation, Change, and Persistence. I dedicate this thesis to my people: the resilient Palestinian people

🚨 Open PhD position in sign language #linguistics 🚨 The focus should be on the structure of signed languages, or connect to other research profiles at the department (e.g. computational linguistics, acquisition, typology, multilingualism) su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Deadline: 15 October 2025

Was fun working on this paper on negation in BSL led by Gab Hodge and w/ Kearsy Cormier and @adamcschembri.bsky.social! Paper is open access and available here: doi.org/10.1515/opli...

September issue of @jslx.bsky.social is out with some very touching contributions @lhlew.bsky.social @betsysneller.bsky.social #linguistics

Want to know more about the Family ASL project? Check out our new paper “Language and Cognitive Development in Bimodal Bilingual Deaf Children in Hearing Families: Three Case Studies.” It’s part of a special issue on Lang & Cog Dev in Deaf Children www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/15...

UPDATE: Abstract deadline: Nov 1, 25! Invited speakers: Corrine Occhino, Dagmar Divjak, Idan Blank, Randy Allen Harris, Gary Lupyan, Laura Michaelis, Kanishka Misra ! @dagmardivjak.bsky.social @randyallenharris.bsky.social @congramqueen.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social @kanishka.bsky.social

Our paper is finally out online! Find it here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #linguistics

A preprint version of our paper "Deconstructing notions of morphological ‘complexity’: Lessons from creoles and sign languages" is here: it's soon to appear in print in the Journal of Linguistics. drive.google.com/file/d/1BEfZ...

I find it endlessly frustrating that one of the biggest empirical findings from sociolinguistics is consistently ignored. Change doesn't come from children making mistakes. Change comes from adolescents incrementing existing probabilistic patterns. I haven't read this paper but hopefully it's good.

I love this idea: Phrase-Lemma as a construct-for-building-words just like morphèmes-combination Video: Linguists just made a breakthrough in defining a 'word. ' No, really www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfnA... Paper: www.lsadc.org/Files/Langua... #linguistics

Can't wait!

British Academy looking at the emergence of 'cold spots' where you can't study #arts, #humanities or social science subjects close to home. Call for an urgent review of HE funding and monitoring of at risk subjects. --- Hetan Shah www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/news/univers...

Sometimes it depresses me how little impact decades of the study of sociolinguistic variation and change has had on other areas of the language sciences (I get the same feeling about gesture studies), but I didn't even realise that this idea was prevalent in some areas of my own field!

Come be my colleague! 🐦🐦

New paper with Gab Hodge, Bodo Winter, and Kearsy Cormier on negation in British Sign Language in England: we find the most common strategy is a manual negator, headshake, and mouthing an English negator, with relatively few clauses only marked by headshake 1/2 www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

"Are asylum seekers the biggest political issue in Britain?" Asks radio 4. "We interview man who is determined to make it the biggest issue in Britain. And make it a headline every morning until it definitely is"

If you'd like to attend the Sign Language Contact Variation and Change conference on Thursday 21 and Friday 22 August (this week!) make sure you have registered here! The Zoom link (including interpretation into English) will be sent to those who have registered. sites.google.com/view/slcvc-w...

It's a real honour to be an invited presenter: I'm so looking forward to this conference! www.melbournepolytechnic.edu.au/about-us/new...

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

📌 👉 The 14th International Construction Grammar conference will be held at Princeton, June 4-7, 2026 Usage-based analyses and Empirical methods Stay tuned for updates!

now OA!

I am one of the 14 authors who chose to leave the Polari Prize, and I find myself frustrated and saddened at the way this entire story has been represented. 1/

It seems a "science news site" has taken and translated quotations from an interview I did with a proper science journalist, giving that journalist and Scientific American no credit. Credits only their 'editorial staff' Feels icky. So here's the original. www.scientificamerican.com/article/ling...

I loved it. I think the School of English Drama and Creative Studies (of which my dept Linguistics and Communication is a part) at @unibirmingham.bsky.social regrets not recruiting Paris Lees. We probably need some reputational damage control after this fact was made central to the story line! 😂

The core role of the university in society is the generational transmission of knowledge and rare skills. This has been already long forgotten by administrators who have prioritised rebranding universities as publicly-funded job-training centres in recent decades.

Paper in @pnas.org shows 'industrial scale' academic fraud: Fake papers are not rare & are generally not detected (only ~25% get retracted). Facilitated by 'brokers' - "22 editors accept articles that were retracted significantly more frequently than one would expect by chance".

All linguistic prescriptivism is bad except the banning words that bug me, specifically

Me: linguistic prescriptivism is bad Also me: why do some psycholinguists call data collection ‘testing’? It drives me nuts! 😂

Reminds me very much of the Ladefoged/Dorian debate in Language in the 1990s. It's uncomfortable for academics I think to openly discuss what the authors call "The foreign-financed project [as] a framework" in CBR work, but it clearly matters in agreeing mutual goals #linguistics #langsky

Super proud of my first Cambridge Elements, joint work with my long-term collaborator Francesca Strik-Lievers: "Linguistic Synesthesia: A Meta-Analysis" www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/linguistic-synesthesia/C6B019926C53001D1D698CB0C46F80C6/ Quick summary of the take home message in thread ⬇️

Very thoughtful, well-informed and clearly motivated stance

This is what happens if you don’t recognise (reverse) right dislocations 🤣 #linguistics

Coming to CogSci 2025 - where do we look when watching sign language? Deaf signers look at the face (tho novice hearer-speakers look at the hands), showing how the language faculty adapts to different modalities. Led by @jennisander.bsky.social & Patrick Trettenbrein escholarship.org/uc/item/0183...

New position statement dropped by our department gallaudet.edu/linguistics/... Basically, as y'all know, people and language use are diverse. Respect that. Trying to standardize any of that backfires and is actually racist, classist and ableist

📢 We’re pleased to announce IcoLL2026: Joint conference of IcoSem and ILL (21–23 Feb., Nagoya U., Japan). The conference will feature invited talks by Dr. Mutsumi Imai, Dr. Noburo Saji, Dr. Pamela Perniss, and Dr. Neil Cohn. We look forward to welcoming you to Nagoya! 🌐 ianjoo.github.io/icosem/4

👇🏻In academia this is very common. People feel flattered or obliged when they are asked to be part of a project, give a talk, write a chapter ... What is often not part of the thought process is their own wellbeing. Why do so many academics ignore that they are the most important person for themself?

Great to see my colleague Bodo's class on iconicity in language - how I would love to be there!

I welcome the UK Government’s commitment to recognise the State of Palestine, but it shouldn’t be subject to conditions. It must be unequivocal, irreversible and backed by sanctions on Israel. Israel must agree to a ceasefire now and allow more aid into Gaza to stop starvation.

I spent last week in Berlin at the Summer School in Sign Language Studies organised by Humboldt University and Tallinn University -- it was such a great experience! #linguistics

Great that sign languages get mentioned here: youtu.be/F4kXiGT6lPU?... Less great that some work I did over 20 years ago is cited without sufficient explanation (and also when I no longer use the terminology being joked about 😂)

Auslan (the majority sign language of Australia's deaf community) has some interesting intensification phenomena - including the grammaticalisation of a sign originally meaning 'bad luck/unfortunate' as an intensifier used with both positive and negative adjectives.

hello world. new paper out!

Artificial language learning experiments often explain typology by showing that more common patterns are easier to learn. But this isn’t always the case. In work I recently presented at SCiL, I present a possible explanation for one such mismatch between the lab and typology. 🐦🐦 #linguistics 1/6

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My book has a cover and the final copyedited pages are submitted… my graphic novel "Speaking in Pictures: A Vision of Language” about language, cognition, and graphic communication will be out in February 2026! www.visuallanguagelab.com/sip

Nick Enfield, author of 'What Is Truth For?', is speaking at #HowTheLightGetsIn this September. Find Nick's book: buff.ly/znpugeD Find out more about the event: buff.ly/QO8oDjm

Officially endorsed by me on behalf of #linguistics Only missing tip in @hormiga.bsky.social 's post: Please, never write in your review "This paper should be edited by a native English speaker." You mean, "This paper needs edits for [grammar/style/voice/insert specific problem here]."