tough to overstate how quickly science funding in New Zealand has been blown to pieces - on Friday the NZ govt straight up disbanded the Marsden fund (our version of the NSF) it'll be replaced by a 'transition fund' with less money and zero information, as of yet, about what it will support #nzpol

My article on Bislama borrowings in Vatlongos speech is now published. Vatlongos speakers use a high rate of Bislama words in their Vatlongos speech compared to other studies of Vanuatu language communities, though the overall differences seem to arise from shared norms. doi.org/10.1163/1955...

This is online now! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

This game was made by a human (me!)

I’m a professional writer, and dyslexic. I had to have special classes all through school. I know it’s tempting to pick on peoples spelling, but two things: Shakespeare wrote all of his works before industrialized standard spelling was established. And it’s ableist, and quite likely classist to.

Last year I did a 20 min presentation about "How does media influence work?" as part of the Thinking Life series from Massey Uni's College of Humanities and Social Sciences. It's now available as a podcast here for anyone interested in whether the media brainwashes us, or how its influence works.

StatsNZ monthly selected prices came out on Friday BTW

A lot of how we talk about languages (and families and death and extinction) is rooted in underspecified metaphorical conceptualization blending source domains of sexual reproduction (where if the parent is gone, it’s dead) with mitosis (parent cells are essentially sublimated into offspring)

Love this for them #subnautica #videogames #gaming

📣 New open-access article in AJL New research on interpreter-mediated courtroom discourse in Australia shows how small speech-style features (like fillers and hedges) shape power, credibility, and fairness in virtual hearings. Read it here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... #AJL

How delightful: tvl.digling.org

I’ve seen reports by journalists, an AI venture capitalist and programmers saying they fed prompts to LLMs telling them NOT TO HALLUCINATE. Anyone who does this should lose all credibility regarding generative AI. They’re admitting they don’t know how it works.

Pit Park Working Bee. May 17, 2026, 10:30 AM – 12:00 PM (3rd Sunday of each month) Edwards Pit Park, Tweed Street, Roslyn, Palmerston North 4414 All Welcome - jobs can be found for all fitness levels. Stay for a cuppa afterwards.

nice piece on the Canvas ransomware hack (now paid off for an undisclosed sum by Instructure), its effects on new zealand higher ed, and why universities should skip enterprise businessware in favour of local expertise and open source (I'm not holding my breath) #nzpol

Waikato: please support uni students protesting the disestablishment of gender affirming healthcare at their Student Health they'll be doing a "die in" protest Thurs 14th May 2:30pm outside Student Health image: poster for event (basic info above, full info in replies) source: UniQ Waikato fb

1/ Important retraction news 👇📰 A recent article using “national IQ” data to claim that a country’s “national intelligence” causes economic growth has been retracted @rebeccasear.bsky.social was among those who raised concerns - a good example of the importance of responsibility in science 💪 🧪

Happy Lá Bealtaine - the swallows have arrived and summer's on the way 🔥 Prints: www.ciaraioch.com/artprints/p/...

I'm at the 'find your voice' stage of our project modules, and am doing the time-honoured task of getting infuriated by the wrong #linguistics on the advice that is on university web pages on this topic. Did you know, it's only 3rd person if it's existential?

Fascinating case where a regulatory body went after a Uni, after a ‘gender-critical feminist’* claimed she had been victimised. The ‘victim’ said she wasn’t allowed teach certain texts. The Uni pointed out that this was nonsense, especially as the texts were on the academic’s reading list!

Very cool NZSL resource! 🤙🏽 NZSL Quiz — Score: 3,900 ⚡ Blazing fast! ✅ 16 correct ❌ 2 wrong Mode: Level 1 – Beginners · Speed: Normal (×1) Can you sign faster? 👐🏽 nzslquiz.com

📊 Five #ggplot2 functions I wish I'd known about earlier 📊 I've written a short blog (with examples) of some of the lesser-known {ggplot2} functions and arguments that make it easier to create better charts! Link: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/five-gg... #RStats #DataViz

Faculty everywhere should be incredibly concerned that our employers will steal our teaching materials just as Arizona State has. Absolutely shameless.

i dunno, seems bad arxiv.org/pdf/2603.18161

Is the Middle English Medical Texts (MEMT) corpus available any other way than the 2005 CD-ROM?

The publication of this article has managed to get all the white men academics on X really really angry--even if they do not actually do qualitative research and are not qualified to comment. Once again, why are the AIbros so ANGRY when we refuse? journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

“The government is increasing the number of people allowed in under the Recognised Seasonal Employer Scheme, while reducing the minimum pay for some and allowing an increase in accommodation costs charged to the workers.” There is no may. Wages will drop. www.rnz.co.nz/news/nationa...

Diachronica gets a paper bump every (northern) summer, and we're seeing submissions pick up. This year, there are many more submissions with AI involvement (declared or undeclared). Here's a brief thread about why the vast majority of such #linguistics papers won't make it past my desk:

“officials raised their estimate of carbon emissions from AI by a factor of more than 100.” www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Still looking for folks who'd be interested testing out an eReader app

Discussions on Legacy Materials is here to teach our community to imagine a world where conferences are robustly chandelierer. Grab your befuddling archival language data and join us next April (in Passau!), everybody!

I’m in Paris at the third Discussions on Legacy Materials meeting the next few days, hosted by Aimée Lahaussois and her team from CNRS and Université Paris Cité. It’s a workshop/conference about using language data collected in the past by non-linguists to learn about language structure. #DiLegMa3

Smaointe Fánacha Aonghusa: Scríbhinní - Mícheál Breathnach aonghus.blogspot.com/2026/04/scri... Buíochas arís @naoisedolan.bsky.social as an deis seo rleabhair a fháil a chur faoi mo bhráid

what an introductory paragraph!!

‘It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this right-to-repair fight. While it has obvious implications for the ag industry, others like the automotive and even home appliance sectors are looking on.‘

“Feel free to adapt and reuse. No attribution needed (…) If you make an adaption that you also want to share, I’d love to know about it, too.” irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/04/08/r...

"Most of the homecomers demonstrated a deep rejection of the language(s) which they were forced to speak or to learn during migration... the rejection of French is far stronger among those returning from migration than among those living in Mali... [they] aspired to use a 'pure' Bambara."

new zealand's 47-page govt report on science, out today, uses the terms "basic science", "discovery science", and "fundamental science" zero times "curiosity-driven research" appears only in regard to cutting it a foolish report released on April Fool's Day www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/repor...

We will be organising the annual Corpus Linguistics Summer School from 6 to 9 July this year. The event will return in an entirely online format. Please see our website for details: www.birmingham.ac.uk/events/corpu... #ccrss26

Tākapu about to go ki wīwī ki wāwā #musicsky Givus a sub on the YT if like eh #PerspexWindowMusic #kikorangi

The University of Essex has proposed to discontinue most of their undergraduate language provisions as well as the Languages for All programme as part of large-scale restructuring. Sign their petition to urge the Executive Committee to reconsider the proposal: docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Patronage on Palmerston North’s fully electric bus network has grown 69.4% since it was launched. www.thepost.co.nz/nz-news/3609...

Hey, so, shitty news. I have just had my contract terminated because of lack of available work. This is super a bummer, as I cannot afford to, y'know, live now. Any leads on work-from-home transcription work much appreciated.

More on weaponizing of verbatim quoting. Here's my piece from the July/August 2000 Brill's Content (RIP), "Grammatically speaking." Dumb title, short piece, intensive reporting, needed more analysis, but the zeitgeist didn't yet consider linguistic style as a legit topic. 1/n

I’m hiring an 18-month postdoc to work on physics-informed machine learning for acoustic-articulatory speech inversion at @phoneticslab.bsky.social 🗓️ Deadline: Friday 10 April. 🔗 More info & applications: hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx... 📣 Please share with anyone who might be a good fit!

A relevant CBC article that came out today: '"You could say that the AI is inadvertently colonizing and hurting Indigenous language revitalization because [people] are taking information generated by an artificial intelligence and putting it out there for people to read," said Sherbert.'

EDs are busy - how much checking of is there going to be. No one wants their clinical notes hallucinated with false info. “The notes could be quite wordy, and did need to be "very carefully edited, and occasionally it hallucinates and puts in false information, but not too much", he said.” #nzpol

Can anyone recommend software that's better for giving notes in the margins of document files than Office? (This is a spectacularly low bar to clear, every version of Office makes that process and the comments themselves worse to deal with and read)

Ní inniu 👀