Actually, you’re being pedantic

Tweeting "happy Eid" and "there is no God but God" is apparently "undermining Islam" and deserves a five year prison sentence in Qatar, if you are a Baha'i. www.hrw.org/news/2025/08...

On the left is a rabbit. On the right is an elephant. But guess what: They’re the *same image*, rotated 90°! In @currentbiology.bsky.social, @chazfirestone.bsky.social & I show how these images—known as “visual anagrams”—can help solve a longstanding problem in cognitive science. bit.ly/45BVnCZ

Does anyone have a sense of the origins of the term "Standard Southern British English" (SSBE)? It seems to have developed as an alternative to "RP" but I'm not sure who popularised it (if anyone).

Keep your cats indoors and switch to Linux.

New paper out, just accepted to Interspeech! We find that acoustic measures of similarity between English and French only weakly correlate with human judgements. roryturnbull.github.io/papers/Turnb...

While English is undeniably vital for accessing opportunities & fostering community cohesion, it's essential to recognize the UK's rich linguistic tapestry. Languages like #Welsh, #Scots #Gaelic, & others are integral to our national identity & cultural heritage. 🔗 tinyurl.com/4mte5vae #langsky

Do caregivers exaggerate vowels when talking to infants? Prior findings are inconsistent () & the mechanisms unclear. We meta-analyzed 35 studies across 10 languages to disentangle systematic cross-linguistic and methodological variation. Paper: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵

Come to Glasgow on May 28 for Phon-UP 3 (Phonetics/Phonology Unconference on Pedagogy)! Attendance is free. Please repost for reach! blogs.ncl.ac.uk/phon-up/

This is a terrible misunderstanding. Your Pope-name is the last thing you ate IN LATIN, + the number of letters in your last name (in roman numerals of course) signed Pope Pirum XIII

can we get human rights for the humans first please?

A new CV section for UNINVITED talks. List of instances I’ve accidentally lectured in unwanted contexts

TODAY is the LAST day to submit an abstract to SLRF! If you research L2s in ANY capacity: submit a 250-word abstract and join us in Flagstaff, AZ, this September for an unparalleled experience discussing the latest work with leading researchers in the field. sites.google.com/nau.edu/slrf...

They're only formants if they come from the supralaryngeal region of the vocal tract. Otherwise they're just sparkling harmonics.

this was published yesterday

mathematicians are wizards

what's wrong babe? you've barely touched your rarohire rochi terochichimomo

Two Weeks In The Death Spiral Of Cardiff University, by an anonymous academic. This is truly shocking read. The Cardiff executive board should hang their heads in shame. voice.cymru/two-weeks-in...

Me, working on my little articles and book projects in February 2025:

I love having a wander around the shops on 13th February. So many anxious-looking men scurrying around. So many men rushing into Card Factory with a debit card and terror in their eyes. So many men trying, with an air of panic, to figure out what their partner actually likes. Just delightful.

Finally finished reading Douglas Stuart's (2020 Booker prize-winning) _Shuggie Bain_. It's been described as "Dickensian" - it's unashamed to show poverty and suffering but has a compassionate emotional core that differentiates it from "poverty porn" that typifies a lot of literature about Scotland.

These days if you say l*g*c*l p*s*t*v*st you'll be arrested and you'll be thrown in jail

in Prey the prey predate the predator, while in Predator, which predates Prey, the predator preys upon the prey.

Never ask a linguist "Is that a word?" because you will always get the same response, "IT IS NOW!" 😃 delivered with some variation of jazz hands like you just won a very low stakes game show and I'm so sorry it's just part of the training it's not something we can control.

News filtering through of yet another round of (300) redundancies at Newcastle University, and talk of an end to most research time that isn't externally funded. The jobs massacre just rolls on and on and on. Will get worse and worse at most universities.

That’s right.

Just got my hands on this wonderful book - looking forward to getting stuck in to it!

Great loss. I loved his campus trilogy, which I re-read last year. Compulsory reading, of course, for anyone working at a redbrick university. www.theguardian.com/books/2025/j...

SALT!

I emailed [email protected] directly to summarise my thoughts on the bullshit consultation with its bullshit proposal. tl;dr: Why is this consultation loaded towards "the law shouldn't apply to scammy tech bros"?

Okay, buckle up bsky, it's time for the Tale of the Bunny Paper. Here's the imported thread from twitter where the search all started: bsky.app/profile/bets... (1/n)

Languages do not just “decline” or die” naturally. Languages are endangered due to inequitable sociopolitical structures and deliberate processes of oppression, discrimination, and violence.

Actually, I haven't heard of elf on the shelf, and I don't care to, thank you

On the infinitude of language 🐦🐦 (h/t @rikker.bsky.social and @roryturnbull.bsky.social) Roses are red, Trump is a cretin...

Currently approaching day 7 of listening to the Wicked soundtrack on repeat

My colleague at @hhu.bsky.social and go-to-phonologist Christian Uffmann just released a special music video to introduce himself. He truly puts the fun back in phonology, the antics in semantics, and makes you scream for more more more morphology 🎶🎵 #linguistics www.instagram.com/reel/DDHUNSB...

Nahua views of excrement differed from ours, and this can be seen in how the word kwitla- 'shit' is used. kimokwitlawia "take care of someone" lit "provide someone with shit" nakaskwitlatl - "ear wax" lit "ear-shit" ixkwitlatl - "eye booger" lit "eye-shit" kwitlachiwia "accuse" lit "shit-enchant"

People enjoy the myth that the word avocado originally meant "testicle" in Nahuatl. Sadly it is a myth; it's simply that, as we call testicles nuts, Aztecs apparently called them avocados. What's more fun is the word for gold and silver: teocuitlatl, literally "god-excrement".

Interesting observation about the new Wicked movie: Cynthia Erivo (Elphaba) and Jonathan Bailey (Fiyero) are both English, but Cyntha performed with an American accent while Jonathan perfomed with an English one. I wonder how these artistic decisions were made?

Sapphire Worf hypothesis #linguistics #startrek

Ain't Right (2022)

Just got an email from the zombie journal soliciting my submissions so I thought I'd remind everyone that in 2015 the entire editorial board of "Lingua" resigned and created a new independent OA journal (Glossa). Don't submit to the new Lingua. slate.com/human-intere...

Sino-Tibetan historical linguistics remains one of the coolest things out there (and there are still big breakthroughs to be made!)

Here's the unlikely century-long story of how a non-gendered pronoun became gendered, and then got itself re-de-gendered. This one's got everything! Poetry! Grammar! Love songs! Queer communities! Unicode! and ... Y.R. Chao! What more could you want? #langsky 🀄️📚 1/

is this the most fun party fact of all time?

Nice illustration that the count-mass distinction is lexically specific and not determined solely by semantics.

Jonah Katz's CV pulling no punches here.

Wow, this is a cool pattern, and it goes up as far as I care to test it. 16+17+18+19+20 = 21+22+23+24 25+26+27+28+29+30 = 31+32+33+34+35 36+37+38+39+40+41+42 = 43+44+45+46+47+48 49+50+51+52+53+54+55+56 = 57+58+59+60+61+62+63 64+65+66+67+68+69+70+71+72 = 73+74+75+76+77+78+79+80