In response to my rant yesterday, I was asked how we can make better parks and other public places for teenage girls? What do they want? I have answers to this, so now a positive 🧵. Starting in Sweden, where this was co-designed by teenage girls.

East Asian Studies is being gutted at Sheffield - all staff at risk with 8.6 FTE proposed to go (a third of us). Biggest cuts in Chinese and Japanese Studies. We’ll be taking a few days to process. Solidarity to Materials and Chemistry colleagues who are also dealing with similarly bad news.

This looks like a rich and informative set of studies in rhythm in speech!

Great to talk a bit about our Brevit project that combines phonetics and multimodal interactional linguistics in the ISCA newsletter.

"In our geopolitically volatile age, with global supply chains exposed and defence and diplomacy the watchwords of the day, language degree closures represent a loss of critical linguistic and cultural skills." Well said. Learning languages is a skill we need.

What a joy to see Bury Art Gallery’s exhibition on Victoria Wood, who died 10 years ago. You can really see the work she put into her scripts.

A new article I co-authored with Paul Drew has just been published in @rolsi-journal.bsky.social: "Addressee points in conflictual interactions: A reductionist analysis of action". Free-access link: www.tandfonline.com/eprint/IXCAG... More below.

If you’re interested in language, eating, how we express ourselves, or any combination of these things, Sally’s blog is a really great read!

Professor Jeff Robinson, Portland State University will be a Guest Tutor on our Introduction to Conversation Analysis and Health Care Encounters 2-day course, St. Anne's College, Oxford, 10-11 June 2026. Join us! 🤩 @iscaupdates.bsky.social @oxqual.bsky.social @oxprimarycare.bsky.social #EMCA

praatpicture has a couple new features in the newly released version 1.8.0! You can now embed audio with a moving cursor to your figures (thanks Marina Cantarutti, and thanks to @sorensorensen.bsky.social for donating his voice!) 1/3

Call me Cassandra, but if you make thousands of HEI staff either compulsorily or 'voluntarily' redundant and create conditions in which senior staff take early retirement in an attempt to save more junior colleagues' careers without significant new hiring, a critical loss is exactly what happens.

Flagging this up as a generous and excellent resource from @scoretta.bsky.social

Language shapes everything, from how we think to how we connect and innovate. Linguists are essential to understanding communication, and to creating ethical, responsible AI. We need more linguists. #TalkAboutSocialSciences #TalkAboutHumanities

I really enjoyed #BAAP2026, meeting colleagues old and new, and seeing the diversity and strength of phonetics (which is so often +something, like psychology, social issues, tech, language acquisition or in my case conversation analysis) in Britain.

I made a whole BBC TV series (2020) about the remarkable resilience of the people of Iran and their culture over centuries of threat and callous rule. You can watch it right here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

@marinanc.bsky.social doing us proud condensing a tightly written paper into 15 fun and informative minutes at the British Association of Academic Phoneticians in Warwick today.

Here comes the ☀️

The York English Language Toolkit returns on 10 July 2026. This free hybrid CPD workshop for A-level English Language teachers features talks from Prof Devyani Sharma, Prof Paul Kerswill, Prof Sam Hellmuth and Dr Kobin Kendrick. Save the date. englishlanguagetoolk...

Géraldine Enjelvin, Yumi Nixon and Ulrike Wray use traditional Japanese Kamishibai storytelling to teach languages. They are bringing interactive workshops to York schools and the York Festival of Ideas this June. Read more: www.york.ac.uk/langu...

The Department is hosting an African Linguistics Workshop featuring new research from staff and students. Special guest Prof Enoch Aboh (Uni of Amsterdam) joins the session following his Robert Le Page Lecture. 13 March at 09:30 in AEW/106. Read the programme: www.york.ac.uk/langu...

I go into the bread shop, and the woman after me says: have you got any [ˌsaɪəˈbatə]?

What can you do with a degree in Language and Linguistics? Join us to hear from alumni working in teaching, marketing, and the Civil Service. Discover how they used their degrees to shape their careers. 5 February 2026, 15:00–17:00, B/T/019 Register here: tiny.cc/LLSalumni

Are you a current MA/PhD student, or a recent PhD graduate? York's annual conference on Conversation Analysis is open for abstracts. Keynotes and workshops in CA skills by me and @ana-ostermann.bsky.social Ana Cristina Osterman.

Excellent overview of current theory, and hopefully interesting for colleagues in #CA. "it is not always clear how posited categories are realised in spontaneous speech... but existing studies suggest that caution is needed when we assert the generalizability of laboratory data."

It's a sign of the times that the Journal of the IPA will no longer be published in print. It's a sign of my age that I will miss receiving the yellow and black volumes and lining them up with the issues I've collected since 1998. Browsing electronically isn't the same pleasure.

What excellent news! No one's life was better for not being able to take part in this scheme.

We are excited to have Professor Richard Ogden (@richardogden.bsky.social) as an invited speaker at #YorCCA2026! His research combines phonetics and CA to explore how phonetic detail shapes social action. His work deepens understanding of turn-taking, stance, and non-lexical vocalisations in talk.

The first ever monolingual Irish dictionary has been launched www.rte.ie/news/ireland...

YorkCCA is York's annual CA conference organised by PhD researchers at the University of York and affiliated with the Centre for Advanced Studies in Language and Communication @uoycaslc.bsky.social. Next year's conference is 17-18 July. The other invited speaker is me!

We have a CA pathway in our MA Applied Linguistics at York. Includes dedicated modules on CA, multimodality, and institutional interaction (taught by Merran Toerien). Applications open for 26-27. Find out more www.york.ac.uk/study/postgr...

This year we launched an #EMCA study group in Peru 🇵🇪, mainly composed of undergraduate students, called Secuenciando. As the year comes to an end, Secuenciando has officially wrapped up its second season — this time focused on sequence organization! (1/3)

Delighted that our module The Language of Turn and Sequence was renamed The Language of Turn and Sequins by Zoom's captioning system.

I survived my first teaching term in Oxford! To celebrate, I've made some updates to the praatpicture library! 🥂

A couple of signs in Trondheim. Good to see the inclusion of Sámi, something that can’t be taken for granted.

Just one of many great sessions at Nordisco in Trondheim this week.

Words matter. Language matters. Languages matter. @spencerhazel.bsky.social on how universities cut their language degrees, AND stress the importance of language, AND use language poorly and offensively in communicating their decisions ("marketing-infused slop"). #AcademicSky #Universities

I love this YouTube channel. This episode combines home cooking from an old Canadian cookbook with the linguistic and cultural subtleties of writing a recipe in English and French. youtu.be/GYkxduAIhT8?...

What a joy this book is. I wish it had been available years ago when I was taking classes

Our paper @sarabogels.bsky.social covering our pre-registered multi-year research is now finally out in Cognition. We show that in conversations people reduce their multimodal signals non-linearly; the steeper this non-linear drop-off the more communicative success. www.wimpouw.com/files/Bogels...

Since January 2022, we (me, 93% Club & SS) have been working a project that tackles accent bias in Higher Education, focusing on the 'elite' institution where we're based. Today, we're launching the project website which brings together all our work: accentbias.ed.ac.uk

Michael Slavinsky is the founder of Languages For All, a charity which exists increase the number of modern language students at A-level and degree level from state schools. He will talk about how school collaborations! Free but booking required: leedscityoflanguages.leeds.ac.uk/events/webin...

This kind of precision timing is pragmatically strange. Not 5 to 2, not 2pm. Does arriving at 1359 count as late, and I will be denied boarding? This is exactly the sort of point Harvey Sacks made in his Lectures. People don't aimlessly use numbers like this in real life!

A postdoctoral researcher position (languages and conversation analysis) open in Oulu! #EMCA oulunyliopisto.varbi.com/en/what:job/...

In Aix en Provence today for the PhD exam of Kübra Bodur, whose PhD is all about phonetic reduction. Excellent work all round! Afterwards, there was a table of wonderful home-made Turkish food that she and her family had made.

How much precious academic and professional support time and energy goes into making applications, whose success rate is essentially that of a lottery -- not to mention evaluating them. It's hard to see how this is properly 'strategic' or beneficial.

Good thing then that this week's White Paper fails to recognise modern languages as a key skill for young people.

"Languages" appears twice. Here's one: "language students could have conversations with artificial intelligence, building confidence and breadth". Bit naive. Conversations about what? What did you think of the film? What's the best pastry you sell? Can you help me find a good place to eat nearby?

Congratulations to Katariina Harjunpää and Beatrice Szczepek Reed on this lovely collection of papers on interspecies interaction, for which Leelo Keevallik and I wrote a commentary. www.sciencedirect.com/special-issu...

🎉 - Pleased to announce a new journal 📔 - Registered Reports in Linguistics (RRLing) journals.ed.ac.uk/rrling/index The first linguistic journal dedicated to Registered Reports. We accept submissions from all areas in linguistics and language research.

I'm really pleased to be running a workshop on the phonetics of talk in interaction at ICCA in Edmonton next year.