AI sign language projects are definitely unintentional language planning projects.

I guess ADHD means completely forgetting that you got invited to teach on a summer school in 2026 and then getting a delightful surprise when you get an email reminding you of it. 😂

This 👇🏻 sometimes I talk to PhDs whose whole project needed as much data processing as I did for just one subsection

PhD students - please don't compare yourselves to other PhD students. Some topics really are more challenging than others! If, for example, you're working on an under-described and under-documented language, never compare your work with people working on English. It's almost not the same discipline!

Let's talk about why "just spell it how it sounds" is actually not straightforward, especially for a large language like English. The big questions are: "How it sounds" when spoken*by whom*? And who gets to choose? #linguistics

Pleased to announce that I passed my PhD viva today!

early career scholar and their first publication

At this year's @lingcomm.bsky.social conference, we learned that the UK has been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th, and everyone immediately went, hey, can't we make that World Linguistics Day? Well, now it's only 20 days away, so time to get your celebration plans in order!

Abstracts with colleagues submitted for Evolang and ICLaVE 2026 conferences. Looking forward to both (haven't been to an ICLaVE for years!)

Ten more days to check out The Barbican's Voiced: The Festival for #EndangeredLanguages 🗣💬 #langsky www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/202...

Congratulations to my @unibirmingham.bsky.social colleague @heidiproctor.bsky.social who passed her PhD viva at @dcal-ucl.bsky.social and is now Dr Heidi Proctor! Heidi's PhD is on noun phrases in British Sign Language.

France’s Sorbonne University about to leave Times Higher Education (THE) Rankings: "These rankings are...black boxes that operate in a closed system” sciencebusiness.net/news/univers...

New paper with @ryanlepic.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1515/ling.... Our previous research showed that ✨️inherently plural meanings✨️ favor two-handed signs across sign languages, now we see that hearing non-signers also produce more two-handed forms when asked to gesture plural meanings! 👐🏼 #linguistics

Should #LingComm accounts with lots of followers on social media be called 'lingfluencers'? 😂

Congratulations Nick Evans: the first Australian linguist to get this award, I believe. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/prizes-medal...

wow.

Any reason to not think that L2M2 bimodal bilinguals also benefit to some extent?

Why is 'meh' not a word?

🐦🐦 lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk

So lucky that I just noticed a typo in my feedback while grading a student's master dissertation on Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in Chinese learners of English. I was about to compliment them on identifying '...an important gap in the WTF literature'. 😂

It should not have to be said, but actually thanks @johnbasil.bsky.social for including signed languages in this article!

On a happier note, new paper alert! Recently revised a piece with collaborators @chirila.bsky.social, Sunny Ananthanarayan, and Sophie Pierson on the digital infrastructure for language documentation. Accepted pending revisions at Language. MS: blogs.ed.ac.uk/amaliaskilto...

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...

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.