Engaging the public in humanities & social sciences feels more important than ever. So we are offering £8k grants for researchers to work with galleries, libraries, archives, museums or performing arts organisations to do this. Please help spread the word! www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

What’s the future of the humanities at a time of pressure in higher education and wider digital change? I’ll be on R4 at 4pm discussing this as part of their Rethink series. It was recorded several weeks ago so I now have no recollection of what I specifically said! www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m...

Fantastic lecture by Stephen May of @aucklanduni.bsky.social on multilingualism and language rights at @glasgow.ac.uk today. Included reference to desire of immigrants to take Maōri classes in context of increased political hostility to the language in New Zealand/Aotearoa.

How much are UK MPs earning from X? Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe has received more than £70k, including more than £10k in a single month Luke Charters has become the first Labour MP to register income from the platform (which he is donating to local causes)

Conference season is upon us and mercifully it is cooler in Dublin than London for GRAMS 2026 #linguistics- I’ll be talking about a new SSHRC funded project on subject clitics in #Francoprovençal w/ Luisa Seguin, Naomi Nagy and Maria Polinsky

A concerned reader replies @economist.com #linguistics #Gaelic #Scots :

I can think of no better act of resistance to #language oppression. Is it any wonder that speakers continue to see Creoles as ‘broken French, English etc’ when their very own elected representatives continue to describe it as such.

Today staff in the School of Creative Arts, including the Humanities department, were called to a redundancy consultation meeting. We were informed that 23 posts were to go by August this year, with further redundancies as the Humanities programmes are taught out over 2 years.

Stunned by the absence of debate among dialectologists around ‘smack barm’. You lot are letting the side down #linguistics #labour #makerfield

H4h, n00bs royalsocietypublishing.org/rsta/article... @elliot-murphy.bsky.social

Child language development expert here. No. The answer is absolutely not. So-called baby talk is culturally specific. Developing language is not. #linguistics

You couldn’t make it up

We are looking to fill an open-rank position in Sociolinguistics in Oxford, in conjunction with Worcester College. Come be a part of the exciting developments in language and linguistics in Oxford! www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/news/2026/05...

“We are concerned about the growing risk of geographic and subjectbased “cold-spots”, affecting areas and disciplines such as music and modern languages.” #Nottingham is a regional behemoth for the study of #languages - this is so stupid and short sighted publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5901/cm...

Today’s Education Select Committee report on higher education is the best report on HE to come from Govt/Parliament in ages. It takes a rounded view of the whole system, moving away from the more atomistic or narrow accounts we’ve seen 🧵 committees.parliament.uk/committee/20...

"The study of literature and language isn’t dying of declining interest or public insistence. It’s being quietly smothered by underfunding." (Chris Newfield, 2022) president.mla.hcommons.org/2022/08/10/t...

📣 CALL FOR INTERVIEWS! If you know a recently retired sociolinguist who had a major influence on the field, consider interviewing them and publishing the transcript with the Journal of Sociolinguistics! To propose an interview, just email the EICs with your idea - contact details below 👇

The report includes England, France, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. 'It identifies three shared challenges that universities in each country are facing: cost pressures, how to position themselves as international institutions and the evolution of research systems.' 2/2

No @economist.com - what’s an “awfy shame” - and worse - is the decades upon decades of oppression of Scottish Gaelic well into modern times that you yourselves allude to. It’s not about emphasising difference, it’s a project of language reclamation.

Things I liked in 2025: holding my second book! Nitti’s 1944 account of his escape from a train to Dachau is beautifully translated by Martin Sorrell and I wrote a (very) long introduction on Vichy France, Nitti, and the sensory history of deportation. www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Phantom-...

Proofs in on our @inmfl.bsky.social chapter for ‘Humanities Forward: Opportunity, Innovation, Policy in the 21st Century’. Society needs the Humanities. We make the case that #language teaching also needs #linguistics. www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.... @hetanshah.bsky.social

🔎The ELL programme at the University of Hertfordshire is under review. 🫂Linguistics plays a critical role across humanities and social sciences contributing to areas such as education, communication, social justice and interdisciplinary research. ✍️Sign the petition: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Was promoted to Reader today. Hopefully this means I'll have more time to read as I am struggling to keep up with all the amazing work out there. One manuscript bibliography seems to be growing by the day. #linguistics

Une excellente émission autour de la langue française, de la grammaire et du purisme, avec @anneabeille.bsky.social et Julie Neveux du Collectif des Linguistes atterrées @tract-linguistes.org en grande forme, ainsi que Jean Pruvost. www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/...

#Cornish segment on this evenings #BBCRadio4 PM programme. A testament to revitalisation efforts and the importance of not simply thinking about #language in terms of ‘usefulness’

On Friday afternoon before the Bank Holiday, colleagues in the Humanities department were called to a meeting on Tuesday. They were informed that the University Portfolio Review had decided that English Language, English Literature, Philosophy, History & Creative Writing UG degrees would close

Bit on #BBCRADIO4 this AM re: a new book ‘How to Kill a Language’. A good reminder (for there is tons of work on it), that a) language endangerment is nearly always driven by oppression/coercion; b) popular works prioritise biological analogies ‘death’, ‘killing’ etc no matter how much we shun them.

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International artists from Ireland and Brittany will perform at Tafwyl this year as part of a new initiative aimed at strengthening collaboration between minority language cultures across Europe

Our Book Symposium sees sociolinguists across the world engage in dialogue on 2 recent, innovative volumes in the field (Decolonizing Linguistics; and Inclusion in Linguistics), both edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz 📚 acharityhudley.bsky.social

Save English Language & Linguistics at University of Hertfordshire. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

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

Our own Prof Claire Nance of @lancslinguistics.bsky.social was on BBC Breakfast this morning talking about changes to local accents, including here in Lancaster 🗣️💬 Watch the segment now from 1hr 50m, or look out for her on BBC North West Tonight this evening!

Exit polls won't/can't be published until the last voter standing in each & every queue has voted. Yet regular polls can be published anytime & two big ones are expected at 7PM. They are expected to show extremely high turnout among young voters and a possible Tisza 2/3 majority

One week from today! We hope you’ll join us to learn about some amazing language revitalization work in Sierra Leone:

In your face, former Air Canada CEO

I am shocked to see this language from the NSF. “The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”

Great article—if you want to know why so many universities, even across oceans, are singing the same tune, look to the consultants selling them the same plans! I like this point that the same-ness distills down to the department and class level too. we all become fungible units.

Just out in #earlyview from Amanda Cole, this innovative paper draws on multiple investigation strands to offer methodological advancements in dialect identification tasks, highlighting the importance of social meaning in perceptual processes. Check it out below #openaccess !

One for the undergraduate #French #sociolinguistics courses…

This is all too real. These days, satire is just news but in teaser format.

Christmas Number 1, 2009, with good reason!

Here’s a bit of analysis from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com showing chatbots are less likely to serve up misinformation than social media. So if this is how people are going to start consuming information it may be a moderating force towards factualness. Who thought that LLMs might be a force for truth?!

Just published / newydd wedi'i gyhoeddi / díreach foilsithe: Report of Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities on medium and lower density areas for Welsh. www.gov.wales/commission-w...

We are fast moving from cold spots to blackout. This is not trivial and the impact in terms of access to languages education will be inter generational. How do you “level up” or promote “growth” without a multilingual workforce and the know-how to deploy? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

biggest solidarity to the Department ot Languages and Intercultural Studies (LINCS) at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh): heriotwatt.web.ucu.org.uk/2026/02/04/d... please sign their petition and send them any support they need, this is part of a UK-wide attack on languages education!

None of this is normal.

Warnings from experts, learned associations, the APPG etc continue to go unheard as universities walk blindly into a strategy blackhole for language capabilities that will have intergenerational impact. @hetanshah.bsky.social @ucflangs.bsky.social @darrenpaffey.bsky.social @drbeckymt.bsky.social

🚨Save Languages at the University of Essex 🚨 #langsky #linguistics UoE plans to cut German, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese + all evening classes and merge Language and Linguistics with a larger unit. Only 2 languages will remain next October. Please sign our letter: tinyurl.com/SaveLingLang...