Flights for summer trip to Poland are booked, so time to start learning some Polish! Happy to take recs for helpful books, podcasts, & other media from those who've already been on this journey (Dziękuję!) 🇵🇱

ICE told nurses this Minneapolis man “purposefully ran headfirst into a brick wall.” What actually happened is that they pulled him from a car, beat him so viciously with a steel baton that he had 8 skull fractures, 5 life-threatening brain hemorrhages, and couldn’t remember he had a daughter.

My course syllabi now contain a link to this document, "why Professor Holliday Doesn't Use Generative AI". Feel free to share/repurpose or just check out the links for your own reference. It won't stop some of them, but I want students to know why. docs.google.com/document/d/1...

I just got done watching a truly horrible movie at Sundance ("The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist"). It was introduced by the Sundance programming rep as having "a strong sense of informational integrity", but it's hard to imagine a characterization more off the mark. A long thread 🧵>>

"There’s an extremely hurtful narrative going around that my product, a revolutionary new technology that exists to scam the elderly and make you distrust anything you see online, is harmful to society."

Hard copies of my new OUP book with @lhlew.bsky.social have arrived! Kaz gives it five stars for being smooth, shiny, easy-to-hide-behind, and delicious #linguistics

Available today on Google Books! "Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory" edited by me and @jennycz.bsky.social books.google.co.uk/books?id=T6m...

Glad to see the parents highlight something I felt was overlooked: Alex Pretti’s “interference” with border patrol agents was standing in the way while they were roughing up a woman.

Kare 11 local news just read, in full, this statement from Michael and Susan Pretti, the parents of Alex Pretti. "Please get the truth out about our son."

If they are doing this to white people in broad daylight imagine what they are doing to non-white people in detention facilities.

The newest video shows very clearly that they attacked him for coming to an aid of a woman that the agents pushed, and then executed him while he was immobilized. Everything the government has said, like with Good, has been a complete lie.

Tomorrow's front page of the Minnesota Star Tribune: Jan. 24, 2026

JBLAC @jblacjournal.bsky.social submissions are now open! If you submit in the next few months, your article will still appear among the first in JBLAC. We have an open office hour today from 2-3 pm PST. A link to the office hours is below! www.lsadc.org/ev_calendar_...

Our GURT program is live! See our exciting array of topics, sessions and presenters for the 2026 Georgetown University Round Table: Futuring linguistics: Content, curriculum & careers! Our live program schedule will reflect any changes up to the moment. Share among your networks!

This is a systematic effort to violate constitutional rights as policy while keeping it secret from the public, the courts, and Congress. Yet more evidence that "reform" is not an option. The bare minimum is to abolish ICE and permanently bar all employees from future federal employment.

The program for GURT 2026 ("Futuring Linguistics") is live! Gonna be a good one docs.google.com/document/d/1...

Most important practice for learning to write articles in my field? Reading lots of articles in my field! I guess other "tips" or shortcuts or explicit guidance can help but really, if you wanna be a good writer, you gotta be a good reader! (goes for non-academic writing too)

Whatever my uni declares, I am not going to engage with AI. I am not going to use AI or teach students to use it. I am going to continue to explain to students why it is harmful. Absolutely absurd to allow this anti-intellectual, environmentally devastating technology into the university at all.

No, these are very serious comments. ChatGPT has absolutely no goddamn place in graduate education. It steals from other authors, routinely gets major facts wrong, hallucinates sources, and generally makes the prose flat and boring as hell. And if you shill for it in my mentions, I'll block you.

The 6-month-old that DHS is tweeting about here lived in the neighborhood and the baby’s father was just trying to evacuate his family after federal agents had shot someone.

A new NYT video analysis by confirms that Renee Good's vehicle did not run over Jonathan Ross and did not strike him. It's possible that it brushed up against him, but that remains unclear. Ross should be under arrest. This is a gift link. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/15/v...

"Officers threw flash bangs and tear gas in my car. I got six kids in the car" "His wife, Destiny Jackson, told FOX 9 their 6-month-old infant stopped breathing and lost consciousness. She then performed CPR on her baby."

This dude is intense and correct

“AI” 👏🏽 DOESN’T 👏🏽 UNDERSTAND 👏🏽 LANGUAGE. This shit is getting people killed.

#linguistics #persona

The message from the White House this morning is that, once again, it falls on ordinary American citizens to remain calm and professional when dealing with the heavily armed agents of the government because they are very emotional and might fly off into a murderous rage at the slightest insult.

📚 Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory (co-edited by me and @lhlew.bsky.social) is now available online at Oxford Academic! (print copies coming end of January) academic.oup.com/book/61815

hmmm if anyone at York is working on a longitudinal dialect contact & place identity study at their uni (or might be interested in collaborating on one w/an international colleague) I'd like to talk 😁

In 2026 I want all of the decent people to remember one thing. You aren’t meant to be this disciplined, this self-sacrificing to survive. The environment is supposed to support good living. We can have that. You are not a failure. That is politics. That is all.

Same. When I'm checking BlueSky each day I'm usually too wiped to generate any fun lingx content myself, & instead mostly just wind up reposting critiques of AI, academia, & AI in academia 🫠 Not gonna call it a "resolution" but I *will* try to post more about linguistics here in 2026!

🥳

Worst of all, these big companies and the technofascists that run them tell young people they cannot exist, thrive or even function with this tech. And academics are buying and spreading the lie. No, our students don’t need LLMs to read, edit, write or think. And we shouldn’t encourage this.

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

I am not sorry. This is simply true. Academics should be able to write fluently and express themselves clearly and academics should do their own work. It’s literally our job. It’s what we trained until 22nd grade to do. This is a simple observation that should require no explanation or defense.

Do not cite an academic paper unless you’ve read it

I don't understand why people do this? you get a review request & either accept it cuz you wanna read the paper & think you can make time to read it & articulate some helpful thoughts, or you decline; there's no reason to fake a review (no $ or CV clout for completing it). What am I missing??

did you know: the American Dialect Society is the oldest "word of the year" event in the States, and the words are chosen by several hundred linguists who get raucous in a big meeting room in January. you can submit nominations for us to consider! great activity for classrooms!

There isn't a single problem "solved" by edtech that couldn't be fixed with smaller classes led by well-paid teachers given real academic freedom

second dialect acquisition in The Atlantic! I'm quoted in this piece (along w/@abbyjwalker.bsky.social & other linguists) #linguistics

this encapsulates the essential relationship between the people running universities, the people doing academic work in universities, and the people looking to smash and grab as much as possible from universities while we're on the way down

Does anyone know anything about Praat and accessibility? TTU is beginning to request accessibility documentation (i.e. VPAT) for all software in use. My impression is that Praat doesn't play well with screen-readers, and I haven't been able to find a VPAT. #praat #linguistics #accessibility #a11y

Do you know Zoom & other companies are encouraging discrimination against employees for things like "pausing too long" or not sounding sufficiently "charismatic"? Read all about our dystopian present in my new paper, out today in JASA! (Seriously, read it. It's important) doi.org/10.1121/10.0...

Excellent thread on how bots decontextualize information, and why that’s especially a problem for students. Being 90% right 90% of the time is a mess if you can’t ever trace the 10%.

Congratulations to our sociolinguistics PhD students, Abby Killam and Michael Guarino, whose research was featured in the Top Papers panel of the Language and Social Interaction division at this year’s National Communication Association convention in Denver, CO!

hey #linguistics peeps! have you ever taken (or taught) a syntax class? we want to hear your opinions (good or bad) about it! We're doing focus group interviews (on zoom, or in person at select conferences) - if you're at all interested, you can fill out our interest form: forms.gle/nhBtz78hQXNA...

It’s here! The 2026 LSA Annual Meeting Program is live! Huge thanks to everyone who submitted abstracts, the 200+ reviewers, and the 2026 Program Committee for making this possible! Start planning your New Orleans experience! We can’t wait to see you there! #LSA2026 web.cvent.com/event/d45318...

The abstract deadline for GURT has been extended a week - submit your abstract by 11/24!

Virtual information session for Georgetown’s 2-year Master’s in Computational Linguistics! Learn about our courses in NLP, psycholinguistics, low-resource languages, digital humanities, and LLMs, plus phonology, syntax, & semantics. DM for registration link. Friday Nov. 21 | 10–11 AM #linguistics