New favourite example of structural ambiguity

Haven't seen any linguistics research on character limits, but perhaps someone who follows me might know of some!

One of these shapes is called boo-ba and one is kiki. Which is which?

Happy Halloween from Count Noun! 🧛

The winner of the 2025 Linguapax Award has been announced, and it's an amazing group in Colombia doing important work on language maintenance and revitalization under very difficult circumstance. Read more below www.linguapax.org/en/hilo-de-j...

When people learn with ChatGPT instead of following their own searches, they end up knowing less, caring less, and producing worse advice, even when the facts are the same. Friction is an essential ingredient for learning! Convenience makes us shallow. academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

sweater weather + the start of our unit on speech acoustics in my undergrad phonetics = time to bust out the speech waveform sweater

Train reading: Margalit Fox's Talking Hands, which I bought like a decade ago and never actually got around to cracking open till now, but it's neat!

This is one of my favourite Lingthusiasm episode genres: Find one topic that lets us traipse through a whole heap of different subfields of linguistics. The nose takes us through etymology, phonetics, sign phonology, idioms and gesture. It's a very fun episode.

I'm not quite sure how it happened but this is possibly our funniest episode yet (our producer left us a note like MAKE SURE YOU TELL THE PEOPLE THIS EPISODE IS REALLY FUNNY) There's just something about noses, I guess?

Hellspark reminded me of @sueburke.bsky.social's Semiosis and @lateonsetgirl.bsky.social's upcoming What We Are Seeking The "order of nerds" element also reminded me of @rosemarykirstein.bsky.social's Steerswoman books If you liked any of these, strong rec for the others!

Having now read Hellspark I can confirm that it's exactly the sort of anthropological sci fi with plenty of language contact elements that I very much enjoy!

“Well-meaning” people are using machine translation to write Wikipedia articles in languages that they don’t speak themselves, accelerating the degeneration in quality of the web corpus for several languages with relatively few native speakers. www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/25/1...

Having now read Hellspark I can confirm that it's exactly the sort of anthropological sci fi with plenty of language contact elements that I very much enjoy!

I'm not quite sure how it happened but this is possibly our funniest episode yet (our producer left us a note like MAKE SURE YOU TELL THE PEOPLE THIS EPISODE IS REALLY FUNNY) There's just something about noses, I guess?

wikipedia's data shows that AI is siphoning traffic away from the site, which is a danger to its sustainability. ironically Wikipedia is more important than ever to users who want reliable information instead of slop, and to AI companies that need it for training data www.404media.co/wikipedia-sa...

Don't forget @tyanna.bsky.social's linguistic anthropology starter pack! bsky.app/starter-pack...

monstre bouba

if this is a Monstre Kiki, what would a Monstre Bouba look like

I also have a linguistics starter pack here, including many people who've themselves made starter packs of various areas of #linguistics! Feel free to leave more linguistics-y starter packs in the replies! go.bsky.app/UUM7Gcx

me 20 years ago: dangit people keep misspelling my name, if only there was some sort of handy reference item that I could convince people to place in easy view, for example on a shelf on their desk

brb changing my birthday to November 26, aka world linguistics day

In honour of spooky month, share a 4 word horror story that only someone in your profession would understand. "I'm correcting your grammar"

Honestly not sure how I'm going to stand it til 2026 when I get to talk with the rest of you about @korystamper.bsky.social's new book, it's KILLING ME OVER HERE

Higgledy piggledy Timothée Chalamet Has a name meriting Endless design Much like his forerunner Benedict Cumberbatch: Hexasyllabically, Easy to rhyme

Today I learned that the French equivalent of German’s eierlegende Wollmilchsau (lit. egg-laying wool-milk-sow,” your special unicorn all-in-one solution) is the mouton à cinq pattes (the 5-legged sheep). I love languages.

okay weird flex but I swear this is the second time someone on here has written me a double dactyl and now I cannot for the life of me FIND the first one, so I'm retweeting this with much better keywords so I have a hope of finding it again

Higgledy piggledy Timothée Chalamet Has a name meriting Endless design Much like his forerunner Benedict Cumberbatch: Hexasyllabically, Easy to rhyme

brb asking my publisher for an edition of Because Internet that makes the dialup screech as you open it, like a novelty birthday card, and gradually heats up the longer you read it

yo Scansion Bluesky, we got another one

This brilliant new book is all about the linguistic history of each letter of the alphabet, and I’ve hugely enjoyed reading it — I highly recommend you all get a copy! 👇👌

Post #3 in the LingComm IRL series is about how doctoral candidate Lee Murray got asked by a friend to do some talks for a skeptics conference in Australia and they ended up directly changing people's minds on prescriptivism! lingcomm.org/2025/09/30/l...

well, MY study of what percentage of human adults love ambiguity more than most people is based on an entirely unbiased sample of people at the linguistics conference, no problems there

well, MY study of what percentage of human adults love ambiguity more than most people is based on an entirely unbiased sample of people at the linguistics conference, no problems there

Missed our previous bonus episode? Get access to this bonus where we get enthusiastic about translating internet slang with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, linguist and translator of Because Internet into Spanish and over 100 previous bonus episodes by becoming a patron:

It's a very silly new Lingthusiasm bonus episode!

Wow, the latest edition of @superlinguo.bsky.social's Linguistics and Language Podcast list has over 100 different shows! I've been watching this list grow since it was just a dozen or so podcasts, so great to see! www.superlinguo.com/post/1584480...

@riverheadbooks.bsky.social, we can do this, right?

this book is quite deservedly a bestseller. if you spend a bunch of time online (this is literally all of you, dont lie) you owe it to yourself to read about how the internet has affected our language.

okay well TECHNICALLY also there's this very special edition of Because Internet as a Halloween costume, please enjoy

to be clear, the dialup screech does not stop, it plays on loop for the entire time you have the book open also it's sponsored by AOL ;)

even better! your phone doesn't have connectivity at all while the book is open! wait, fuck, everyone is going to buy this now

you literally had me making the dialup screech at my phone right now

(btw I did make the keysmash sound out loud for the Because Internet audiobook, looks like the preview of that part imported okay so you can hear that here if you want) bsky.app/profile/gret...

the headers on every page feature blinky text and "under construction" gifs

not gonna lie, we DO make @lingthusiasm.bsky.social tshirts that say "linguistic 'correctness' is just a lie from Big Grammar to sell more grammars" maybe there can be some sort of package deal

a version of Because Internet that's entirely in binary on punchcards and you have to assemble it yourself

i suppose i ought to add that if you want to obtain a tragically unscented, un-dialup-screechy edition of Because Internet you can do that here gretchenmcculloch.com/book

currently the only novelty edition of Because Internet that exists is the leather-bound special copy that my publisher made me as a treat, actually let's rescue that thread from the old site because it still gives me chills just thinking about it

An edition of Fahrenheit 451 that catches on fire when you open it.