America is now the country where people who just quote Charlie Kirk face more consequences than pedophiles in the Epstein files.

The only thing Charlie Kirk had in common with Jesus is that Christians get mad when you quote him to them.

Academics: Please read and consider signing this open letter. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Needed now more than ever 💪

Excited to share this essay on racial violence, civic apology, and the elusive dream of racial reconciliation. www.newyorker.com/news/the-wee...

1. Cory Zukatis - found around 10:30am hanging in Vicksburg MS. He was homeless. 2. Trey Reed - found hanging around 7:05am at Delta State University. Black folks are calling it for what it is: a lynching. Because no Black man takes his own life by hanging himself from a tree. Rest in peace

NEW: The family of Delta State University student Trey Reed is calling for an independent autopsy after his body was found hanging in a tree on campus. U.S. House Rep. Bennie Thompson is calling for a federal investigation, citing "Mississippi’s painful history of lynching and racial violence."

UN Commission of Inquiry verifies the existence of birth PREVENTION in Gaza 👇 "Attacks on healthcare have affected 545,000 woman (…) Clinic was shelled in December 2023, reportedly destroying around 4,000 embryos" UN also reported Israel shot and exploded nitrogen tanks which can harm pregnancy

🚨BREAKING -- The UN Commission of Inquiry has concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Will the UK government continue to engage in genocide denial, @yvettecooper-mp.bsky.social?

Fear will try to convince us to isolate, to hoard resources, to avoid community, to build the least threatening campaigns making little impact. A grounded risk assessment will move us closer to each other, it’ll remind us of that we are millions, it’ll make our work more bold and more brave.

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

Did the right wing idiots who are screaming for us to mourn Charlie Kirk mourn her, her husband or even her dog? The hypocrisy is appalling. #USDemocracy

Cancel student evaluations now. www.psypost.org/students-rat...

It's fascinating how, because the left is coded as feminine, criticism is "scolding," while all the shaming and blaming on the right is masculine and therefore not "scolding."

What's alienated young men is information bubbles in which they convince each other that women are inferior beings and they should have total power.

Please consider donating to Clean Shelter www.cleanshelter.org, an organisation formed by two women, an Israeli and a Palestinian, that works to provide clean water and shelter. #Palestine #donate #support 🇵🇸

UC-Berkeley gives Trump administration 160 names “related” to anti-semitism, mostly for voicing support for Palestinians. Judith Butler is among them, she calls this “McCarthyism” UC Berkeley gives Trump administration 160 names in antisemitism probe www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/arti...

Don't forget raping girls is a violent act too. RELEASE THE TRUMPSTEIN FILES!

cf. also (not cited in that paper): Foulkes, P. & Vihman, M. (2015) First language acquisition and phonological change. In P. Honeybone & Salmons, J.C. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Historical Phonology. OUP, 289-312.

As I heard Joan Bybee say it most succinctly in a 2010 talk: “children have no clout!”

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.

NEW: Tonight, this is all that remains of Nepal's seat of government in Kathmandu. Singha Durbar was the largest palace in Asia; home to the Prime Minister & government offices. A 48-hour revolution, led by Gen Z protestors, has toppled the government & left large parts of the capital in flames.

Note to self: always write out a script for a conference talk ahead of time just in case I get a terrible head cold during the conference 🫠 #academia

Time for the universities to follow suit.

Scottish Parliament votes for immediate boycott of Israel www.thenational.scot/news/2543951...

Brendan Regan's #uklvc15 talk on Andalucía Spanish shows that listeners from outside Sevilla attribute Sevilla features (seseo & rotacismo) as indexing Sevilla, but listeners *from* Sevilla hear the same features as indexing rural spaces *outside* of Sevilla. Enregisterment is awesome.

The ways in which sign languages can be shaped by specific deaf schools is so interesting. Waddell & Lafferty's #uklvc15 poster documents the mixed signs of a Glaswegian school initially staffed by Irish nuns: things like BSL signs with ISL handshape. Now a generational marker; an endangered lect.

Thanks to Célia Richy for her #uklvc15 talk on Bourdeaux #French. Many different variables and a very careful statistical test of the hypothesis some call "coherence." Very convincing argument that bricolage offers a stronger account of the data. #variation #linguistics #sociolinguistics #LVC

Chiu et al. #uklvc15 show that UK evaluations of doctors' knowledge & helpfulness correlate with accent: SSBE & Indian always highest, Essex & Nigerian always lowest. Random fun finding: listeners from the Highland and Islands gave overall more positive ratings vs. all other regions of listeners! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

@sarah-kb.bsky.social great talk!!

At the end of my Q&A yesterday @scillym.bsky.social asked a Q that I think I got wrong. She sat down thinking she'd misunderstood something but I think I misunderstood her Q. Here's the relevant slide... Can you ask it again, Emma? Apologies!! #uklvc15

I'm really looking forward to Gabrielle Hodge's #uklvc15 plenary this morning. Gab is my colleague at @schoolofppls.bsky.social and has become a dear friend. She's also a badass linguist and activist. Check out her website and I'll see you there at 9am! www.gabriellehodge.com #linguistics

So cool that #uklvc15 had a session just on kids: Ryan et al. on Polish and Libyan teens in Glasgow, and two talks on the dreadfully understudied demographic of upper primary school: Jones et al. on Somali kids in East London and Stuart-Smith et al. on kids across central/southern Scotland. /1

I hadn't thought about the phonetics of sarcasm before seeing Karatepe's #uklvc15 poster yesterday. She looked at spontaneous speech in a Turkish comedy show and found a general correlation with high tonal contours, unless the speaker was trying to avoid offence, and then they used "murmur tone".

I'm so impressed at Palfreyman et al.'s #uklvc15 poster on grammaticalization in both Creoles and sign languages. We had a great discussion about phonetic/phonological reduction processes in sign. There can be reduction in both modes of articulation: manual and mouthings. So complex and interesting!

Staying with me after yesterday's #uklvc15 poster session is Schaeffler et al.'s point that Child-Directed Speech was different in soviet East Germany than in the West. Less influence on individualism influences CDS phonetic features! #acquisition #linguistics #sociolinguistics #contextmatters

Deep comparison of 4 girls from 4 different communities of practice by @scillym.bsky.social & Rob Podesva (from Bolton, UK). Affect is a defining characteristic of personhood only for some of the CofPs, so members are constrained in different ways in how they can index affect. #uklvc15

Three cheers to @lucy-jackson.bsky.social for showing how awesome the Scottish CAT vowel is 🥰🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 #uklvc15 Also the study of changes in social class and class indexicality over time! More of this please 🙏🏼 #sociolinguistics #variation #change #LVC #phonetics

On the stylisation and alignment of non-locals towards Roadman person; @christianilbury.bsky.social's #uklvc15 plenary hits home with me because my 13-year-old Edinburgh-raised daughter is going as a Roadman for Halloween this year! Social media and "linguistic concept collapse," indeed.

Random thought about how very ideological cardinal directions are, e.g., "East London" being where the London borough of Hackney is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_... (from @christianilbury.bsky.social's #uklvc15 plenary about the Roadman persona)

Ilbury & Walcott (under review) analyses how people contest the labels "Gen Z language" and "TikTok language" #uklvc15 P.S. Rianna Walcott is awesome: www.riannawalcott.com

The idea that billionaires are “job creators” is just billionaire propaganda. Workers create value. Communities create demand. Billionaires just hoard the profits and scare us with lies so we don’t tax them. #socialistsunday #marxistmonday

⚠️ Women in the UK don’t need to be told what danger looks like — we live it every day. ⛔ One woman is killed by a man every three days in this country (Femicide Census, 2023) ⛔ In 2023, 1.7 million women experienced domestic abuse (ONS, 2023). It is not trans people who perpetrate these crimes.

More than 50 ships are heading to Gaza to challenge Israel’s illegal blockade and deliver urgent humanitarian aid.

So, who else is going to #UKLVC15 this week?? 🥳 wp.lancs.ac.uk/uklvc15/ #linguistics #variation #languagechange #language #change #sociolinguistics #LVC #conference #academia #follow

This is just cruel. Google Scholar needs a button you can click that's like, hey, stop it, some people are still mourning this person's death. @developers.google.com

👏 STOP 👏 TREATING 👏 UNIVERSITIES 👏 AS 👏 A 👏 BUSINESS 👏 Provosts/chancelors/etc should be members of the academic community and paid as such. 👏 STOP 👏 PAYING 👏 HIGHER 👏 EDUCATION 👏 BUREAUCRATS 👏 LIKE 👏 THEY 👏 ARE 👏 CEOS 👏 #AcademicSky