"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 👀

"The abandoned native speakers of the Gaeltacht have not found reliable strategic allies among the [second-language educated] elites." www.irishtimes.com/opinion/2026...

Reading a historical autobiography. Around the turn of the 20th century, when the author was 8 or 9, she was sent to stay with a friend whose mother was away for the weekend to help cook meals for the friend's father and clean the house. Look what feminism took from us! 💀

Currrently reading "Where learning paths meet..." in my decades long search for the actual mechanisms behind child language acquisition. Surprisingly elusive in our literature, which has (almost certainly) spent too much time focussing on what is/isn't innate. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

"AI" is not a stochastic parrot.🦜 I wrote this piece a couple weeks ago, but it was hard for me to finish up given AI's role in society and war over the past few weeks. I should share it at some point though. Not perfect, but here it is. medium.com/@margarmitch...

'Teaching-only staff at Sheffield Hallam University are set to be moved into a subsidiary firm, leaving research intensive scholars the only academics still being employed directly by the institution.' Utterly inequitable & betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the teaching/research nexus. 1/3

3. BECAUSE INTERNET (Gretchen McCulloch). really enjoyed this, read it cover to cover. very fun, sparks of recognition, nostalgia, whoas, and lols.

I finally lost my shit about so-called AIs, LLMs, enshittification & everything fucking evil that @officialgrammarly.bsky.social is doing. I'm fucking furious, and not just about what 1 company has done. An open letter to Grammarly & the rest of the LLM hype machine www.moryan.com/an-open-lett...

Really proud of this work with Dr Jennifer Smith (Ngāti Whātua, Ngāpuhi) and our amazing UC Master of Audiology students. You can now screen your hearing in te reo Māori and New Zealand English at nzhst.canterbury.ac.nz

Great opportunity for Samuel Beckett scholars to work on the Beckett archive at Reading samuelbeckettsociety.org/2026/03/10/c...

This is Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. Best estimates suggest it was created some time between 1380 BC and 550 BC, making it by far Britain's oldest white horse figure. It's inspired 16 'copies' across the country - is there a white horse near you?

Here’s a full draft of the upcoming second edition of my “Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction”: socviz.co

Let me start a belated thread of Aotearoa New Zealand silvan birds. To lead things off, a New Zealand Bellbird photographed on Kapiti Island.

Eleven days on the Northwest circuit, on Rakiura, and what do I have to show for it? Here comes my best attempt at a trip report, tips, tricks, and confessions included… #NWC2026 First tip: the water taxi to Freshwater Landing is ALWAYS a good time; you have plenty of walking to do, don’t waste it

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair?” Aussiemandias

cot-caught-court on a British high street ;-) #linguistics

I would like to propose a syntax puzzles registry, for those nagging data sets we don't have analyses for, and others can claim them. Adorable syntax puzzle, free to a good home style of thing.

THIS!!! This is why I talk about “car drivers” and not just “cars” when it comes to collisions.

The registration for the Leiden Summer School in Languages and Linguistics 2026 is now open! Interested in classes in Anatolian, Indo-European, Semitic, Sino-Tibetan, etc., etc.? Join us in Leiden from 6-17 July! Program, fees, and application form: www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/education...

Le fascisme ne mérite que notre intolérance.

Palmerston Nort Repair Cafe Feb 28, 2026, 9:00 AM – 11:30 AM Palmerston North Repair Café takes place at Palmerston North Community Leisure Centre, 569 Ferguson Street. with the support of Environment Network Manawatū, PNCC, MENZSHED, SuperGrans and other community organisations.

my two favorite language family distributions

Written English has barely changed in 300 years. If you can read Harry Potter, you can read Robinson Crusoe (1719).

A lesson about networks that I’m kind of proud of: at the beginning of the year, I gave my 200 students a dumb survey: fav books, foods, etc. I told them they could use pseudonyms and that I’d share their responses with the class. We’ve been using that data in various ways: to make points about +

the new paper on bouba/kiki in chicks is utterly compelling canonical, elegant method from comparative cogsci & its partner in developmental science, ultra-simple design, ultra-clear effects, no need for fancy analyses, machine learning, or AI it appeared in an appropriately badass venue (Science)

Interleaving is when you combine or mix together multiple tasks or learning objectives into one session— like reading two chapters of one book, then two chapters of a second book, then returning to the first book. Participants were able to better retain new words and manage interference. #LangSky

I really enjoyed this interview with Mihingarangi Forbes. In 20 minutes we managed to touch on numerous issues relating to how AI is changing society, issues I've been grappling daily in conversations with colleagues here in New Zealand.

Great pair of talks from @carlbergstrom.com at Auckland Uni today - more grist for the upcoming conversations with students about their engagement with learning, their learning/life contexts, and the place (or not) of LLMs in that. And the ongoing existential gaaah of being an academic in the now.

In writing my grammar chapter where I discuss Triqui emphatic morphology, I originally wanted to distinguish between two main uses: (a) disjoint reference / new topics and (b) the discursive equivalent of a pointing gesture. Emphatic pronouns are used in both contexts. 1/n #linguistics

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: the weaponizing of normal speech disfluency is normal practice in political journalism

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

Luxon himself handed me the Prime Minister's science prize last year. Let me say this in plain English: he's an idiot for running a govt who budgeted more for AI than for the Marsden fund. any journo reading this can quote me on it #nzpol

A book I wished I had found in the first month of my PhD and not in the last: Toulmin (2009), From linguistic to sociolinguistic reconstruction Chap 3 is a superb discussion of reconstruction and subgrouping in dialect continua (aka everywhere) 1/3 openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/items/c30644...

🗣️ La collection #Pangloss offre, en libre accès, des documents linguistiques sonores, avec une spécialité de langues rares ou peu étudiées. 🎙️Explications avec Alexis Michaud, directeur de recherche CNRS au LACITO, qui assure la gestion de la collection Pangloss ⤵️ www.radiofrance.fr/francecultur...

It seems @oxfordunipress.bsky.social no longer cares about bibliographic metadata. The way they do their handbooks these days is they rob all individual chapters of bibliographies, meaning cites go undetected and the crossref metadata for chapters is the biggest mess possible 1/n

Hawaiian Language Schools Grow As DOE Shrinks. There’s One Big Problem The state doesn’t have enough teachers to keep up with demand for schools taught in Hawaiian. Upcoming retirements are expected to add to the challenge.

I don't mean to seem alarmed, but it appears Google's book search function is, just...gone. In a sane country it would be a huge deal, front page news, that a privately owned utility that millions researches, from journalists to scholars, rely on every day to advance knowledge can just disappear.

"Caouissin ... would like to think the language will follow a similar path to Welsh, which has enjoyed a revival over the past half-century and is spoken by 538,000 people" People keep getting this wrong about Welsh! There has not been a "revival". Let me explain. 1/