44.93/50! I always guess too light 🎨

The mantra that AI is "just maths" not only ignores the materiality (humans have to mine rare earth minerals) but also the political & human harms like fascism and indentured labour. The idea that AI is detached ideas — and not stolen data & labour that runs on colonial lines — is harmful itself.

hey guys why does my brain work best if I get semi-dressed up, buy a coffee, invariably choose a wobbly table, and get periodically distracted by small babies, doggies, and random people?

For what it's worth, I won't even use it for research. Seeing shit with my own human eyes and understanding how it fits together is the only thing I'm good at??

Giorgia Zorzi and I got some funding from our institution (HVL, Bergen) to study constituent order in Norwegian Sign Language. We are hypeee 👯🎉

Does anyone have any impressions about how common it is for academic journals to publish articles that sort of examine the field itself? I don’t mean reviews here. #linguistics #AcademicSky

Is there a name for when a method that was originally linked to natural phenomenon takes on a life of its own in the history of disciplines? Specifically that the motivation for using is that it's been used elsewhere? #linguistics #AcademicSky #PhilosophySky

Workshop on genetics, eugenics and scientific racism next week! #Philsci #Philosophy #Ethics #HPS #Sociology #AcademicSky We will be conducting hybrid sessions, you can find the zoom link at www.imseam.uni-heidelberg.de/en/heinzelma...

I do enjoy making a lil presentation. Also I absolutely need to use a graphical drag-and-drop type program bcs thinking through the presentation has to be visual for me

love spending my chosen writing day NOT writing 😭

✅️ 🐋 have vowels ✅️ 🐣 have bouba/Kiki prefs ❓️ 🫎 pass Wug test ❓️ 🦙 do center embedding ❓️ 🐌 experience garden paths #linguistics

Sheep to people ratio in Aotearoa/NZ for #TidyTuesday 🐑:👤 🇳🇿🌿 #R4DS #DataViz #ggplot2 Code: github.com/borstell/tid...

naming a folder "linguistics" on my laptop is so uninformative -- like, it's all #linguistics

current mood: depressed about annotation

inconsistent file naming will be the death of me

1/ ProPublica collected handwritten letters in mid-January from children held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the same facility where 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was taken. Hundreds of kids are still detained. We’ll let the children’s words speak for themselves. 🧵

using LLMs to write texts is so unfathomable to me bcs writing is sooo incredibly personal for me

one journal seems to only accept papers within an extremely narrow domain and its zombie alternate seems to accept everything

calling L1 speakers of British English, please help out my student Emilia on her dissertation study! 🐦🐦 it's a short (<20 min) and fun one on voice recognition, please share! lancasteruni.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...

the list of things I will apparently find time to apply to grows ever longer 😭

Dr. Adrien Dadone (Leiden U) will present on relative clauses in French Sign Language and French on Mon 2nd Feb at 2:30PM Norway time. Find the abstract and how to get the link to the presentation here: www.hvl.no/en/research/... Languages: Norwegian SL, International Sign, English #linguistics

✨that very special post-interview feeling of inadequacy✨

After more than ten years of preparation, our Manual of French-based Creoles is finally available for download. What better place to announce this publication than during a visit to Martinique? 🦎🌴 Fok zot kouri gadé-y !

In our recent manuscript, we invite cognitive scientists to be critical of the labels they choose to describe language users. We argued that the term native speaker is problematic as it distorts scholarly inquiry and introduces bias. Cognition link: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

🇩🇲 Would you like a thread on the multiple layers of multilingualism in Dominica? Of course you do. Starting with the linguistic memory of the indigenous Kalinago, still present in many toponyms and other names. The spelling varies widely but the meaning is often quite well documented or remembered.

Years ago, 957 people from Twitter contributed to my research on 'because X' and I promised I'd share the results with them. I can't, because twitter, but please share it with people here anyway: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi... Non-paywalled pre-print: kar.kent.ac.uk/105654/ #linguistics

Chicken on pizza should be illegal

About 6 months ago, I got so tired of getting mostly AI(-adjacent) papers in my Google Scholar Alerts for "sign language", so I added a new filter excluding a few keywords to get more relevant #linguistics papers. Now I checked the difference between the two alerts, and there's an obvious pattern.

all my chickens have come home to roost (I have to fill in all the places that say "CITE" in a draft)

my schedule right now is something like pet white kitty, pet black kitty, eat curry probably, pet black and white doggies, pet black kitty, pet white kitty, repeat

This year on Bluesky I wrote 118 posts and apparently I love saying "linguistics" and 😬! www.madebyolof.com/bluesky-wrap...

so.. who's going to Evolang next year? #linguistics

Two scholarships are available to Palestinian applicants looking to start a postgraduate Masters degree in Sep 2026, including our Masters in Comparative Literature & Masters in Global Languages, Literatures, and & Cultures: www.st-andrews.ac.uk/modern-langu...

Please consider submitting your manuscript to our special issue in Scientific Reports (deadline March 5th, 2026) www.nature.com/collections/...

"The question of what makes writing "human" has become dangerously narrow... If humanity is now defined by the presence of casual errors, American-centric colloquialisms, and a certain informal, conversational rhythm, then where does that leave the rest of us?"

finally made it home after more than a year of being away

New paper on lexical variation in Swedish Sign Language with Swedish colleagues. Using a combo of elicitation (in-person), survey (online) & corpus data, we look at some changes in lexical choices over time & discuss methods for measuring variation of variation #linguistics doi.org/10.16995/glo...

Highly recommended for all mentors and advisers who work with deaf students in graduate programs: academic.oup.com/jdsde/advanc...

Yesterday I got to give a guest lecture in Dr. Hannah Lutzenberger's methods class at the Humboldt University of Berlin. It was great and I finally got to make use of this little figure from the methods chapter in my dissertation! I forgot I like explaining things #linguistics

SynTeach is going to #LSA2026! We're doing focus groups while we're there so if you're interested, fill in the form and tick the LSA box. We're looking for teachers and students, people who loved syntax and people who hated it... anyone with syntax Thoughts! #linguistics forms.gle/PiBYpVPr1yg2...

This might be for an extremely limited target group, but if you ever need to visualize landmarks/keypoints of Mediapipe or OpenFace computer vision models, I've created simple coordinate data files for plotting in a Github repo: github.com/borstell/com...

Linguistic Typology Vol. 29 features a debate on the critical need for rigorous replication and robust methods in language typology, with a thought-provoking target article and commentaries discussing empirical scientific methods (degruyterbrill.com/journal/key/lity/29/3/html). #OpenAccess

I was very displeased to learn today that fungal infections like athlete’s foot are called something like the equivalent of mushrooms in English in Swedish and Norwegian 🤢 #linguistics

We are pleased to announce the third Reframing Our Language Experience (ROLE) Symposium 🥳 This year, the conference will take place over two days, with an in-person workshop (UNAM) on 9 April and an online conference on 10 April. Call for proposals: www.rolecollective.org/events/3rd-r...

more than a year post PhD and it definitely is a lot easier to just write -- the world being in perfect equilibrium is no longer mandatory

everything I write that has to do with numbers I'm like, PLEASE UNDERSTAND THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OBJECTIVITY

once again looking forward to "vacation", the time I can read all the academic papers I don't have time to do while working #AcademicSky

Aurélia Nanna Gassa Gonga will present at the Silc Seminars next week, Thursday Dec 11th, at 14:30 Norway time on her PhD research - "International Sign Interpreting: New Evidence for a Language-Like System" Find more information here: www.hvl.no/en/research/... #linguistics

somehow this Trinidadian, who should have a "sing song" accent in English, produces probably very flat Norwegian (a language that stereotypically has rising intonation over sentences) 🙃

I’m truing to make Norwegian prepositions make sense even though I know better