What kind of language is Eridian, question? Here’s your guide to the linguistics of Project Hail Mary: Website: linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/projec... Substack: open.substack.com/pub/linguist... #ProjectHailMary #linguistics

The Indo-European Lexicon is a database of all the words and affixes of Proto-Indo-European, and all the descendants of those words in modern Indo-European languages. Check it out here! lrc.la.utexas.edu/lex

Linguistics explains why some names capture one’s ‘essence’ Sound symbolism is the idea that some sounds have intrinsic meaning: www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lang...

Happy Tolkien Reading Day! Today was the day the One Ring was destroyed, and fans commemorate the day by celebrating Tolkien's works. What's your favorite language from Lord of the Rings or the Tolkien legendarium? #TolkienReadingDay #Tolkien #LOTR

What are constructed languages? blog.rosettastone.com/constructed-...

Can you tell a person is lying just by how they’re speaking? www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lang...

How many words do we know?

Do people who speak different languages think differently? No. For centuries, linguists found that an intriguing, attractive idea but there is no clear evidence for it. mindmatters.ai/2024/01/do-p...

How new words enter our language—a linguist explains www.futurity.org/how-new-word...

How those incredible interpreters do it www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life...

🦣 Did Homo erectus have language? ✍🏼 Did writing just get pushed back tens of thousands of years? 😎 How slang works (Psychology Today interviews me) 🐴 We finally understand why horses whinny 🧠 Your native language shapes the way your brain is wired

WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME PROJECT HAIL MARY HAS LINGUISTICS IN IT

How dictionaries are made (and how they’re changing) @robwords.bsky.social has a fantastic interview with Merriam-Webster lexicographer Peter Sokolowski about how dictionaries work: www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p5o...

One animal that comes up repeatedly in any discussion of animal communication and intelligence is the dolphin. Talking to them might not be as far away as you think. www.cuteness.com/2042229/talk...

How the Chitimacha tribe of Louisiana heard their language spoken for the first time in 70 years, with @dannybate.bsky.social

A new language book for kids was published earlier this year! A beautifully illustrated overview of the history of languages around the world, filled with maps, sidebars, and unusual facts. Amazon: amzn.to/4a8D5Nw Bookshop: bookshop.org/a/110785/978...

I don’t talk about it much on here, but my full-time job is working with a Native American tribe in Louisiana called the Chitimacha to help them revitalize their language.

Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it. “LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language.” www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Like most media outlets reporting on this study, Popular Mechanics conflates writing (which represents language) with proto-writing (which only convey limited information)–and they miss the coolest part of the study besides!

In Nigeria, Wiki for Minorities is helping contributors use Wikipedia and its sister projects to document, bring awareness, and digitally preserve languages considered minor or small in terms of speaker populations, documentation, and institutional support.

Do all cultures use baby talk? Or is it just some weird thing white Americans do? Do some languages lack baby talk entirely? #parenting #linguistics #language #science

6,000-year-old Mesopotamian seals linked to the dawn of writing The cylinders worked like a cookie press and were part of an accounting system.

How accents change your perception of characters in Wuthering Heights www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/wuther...

Okay this book coming out looks perfect for linguistics nerds like me. Excited to check it out. One reviewer says, “Pitch-perfect science fiction about linguistics and consequences. This book destroyed me.”

People with personality disorders often use language differently from others, new research finds theconversation.com/people-with-...

A new study reveals that the human brain processes spoken language in a sequence that closely mirrors the layered architecture of advanced AI language models.

🐤 Baby chicks know their kiki from their bouba 🏛️ New Zealand coalition advances bill to make English an official language 🤖 Why human language isn’t like computer code 👥 Why English needs “y’all” 🅰️ Why do so many women’s names end in A? 🪦 Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die

A database of the Arapaho language is helping revive the language before its last speakers are gone theconversation.com/a-database-c...

🐤 Baby chicks know their kikis from the boubas! New research shows that newly-hatched chicks perform almost exactly the same as humans on the bouba-kiki test (It’s almost like if wugs took the bouba-kiki test 😀)

Did new research just push back the date of the earliest writing by tens of thousands of years? Nope. The findings are even cooler than that.

A recently-deciphered papyrus scroll reveals the location of Plato’s grave The scroll is one of thousands that had been scorched and buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius at Herculaneum that scholars have recently used AI to read for the first time. www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/p...

Your brain can crack a new language’s patterns in three days, but fluency takes 64 weeks, according to an experiment by the BBC. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

Why does English need “y’all”? @upworthy.com explains, featuring a video of mine on the topic: www.upworthy.com/a-linguist-f...

Did Homo erectus have language? A new review article says yes

First published in 1935 and regularly updated and republished in new editions ever since, “A history of the English language” has been the authoritative textbook on the history of English for nearly a century. And now the 7th edition has just been released!

Where does slang come from? How does it spread throughout society? And why do people use it? Psychology Today interviewed me, Adam Aleskic ( @etymologynerd.bsky.social), and Valerie Fridland about exactly these questions. Here’s what we had to say: www.psychologytoday.com/ca/articles/...

🧠 How your brain separates sounds into words 🧒🏼 How toddlers in Finland are saving an endangered Saami language 🗣️ Language learning can help lower your risk of dementia by 40% 💵 Is “costed” the past tense of “cost”? 📖 How printing presses ignited the first information revolution

Why the worst idea in linguistics won’t die: Why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong (mostly) open.substack.com/pub/colingor...

🐤 This is a wug. 🐤🐤 Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are two _____. a) /wʌɡ/ b) /wʌɡs/ c) /wʌɡz/ d) /wʌɡɪz/

The use of “cost” vs. “costed” as the past tense of “cost” over time in the Google Books corpus If this continues, eventually “cost” will become a regular past tense verb. Which do you say? - It cost $12. - It costed $12.

Since decoding the “waggle dance” in the 1940s, bees have been at the forefront of research into insect intellect 🐝🧠 A new study shows that bees can be trained to understand the dot-dash behavior of morse code when those short dots and long dashes are associated with sugary rewards.

Recent work at Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative, focused on studying communication in whales, dolphins, and porpoises) shows that sperm whale calls feature vowel-like sounds that resemble elements of human speech.

Some dogs can learn categories like human toddlers do

You’ll never guess what Saturday’s issue of the Linguistic Discovery newsletter is about

Despite the vast diversity of human languages, certain grammatical patterns appear again and again.

🧑🏼‍⚖️ Bilingualism affects your moral decision-making 🦍 Did Kanzi the bonobo have imagination? 🔤 Shavian: A better English alphabet? 🤙 The wild origin of the word “dude” 📰 Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics! ⬇️

The way we read in our first language influences how we read in other languages, according to a recent study

If people talked about English the way they talked about other languages

Cracking the code of Papua New Guinea’s undocumented languages Nicholas Evans has spent decades trying to decipher the undocumented tongues of Papua New Guinea and Australia. His work has redefined the way we think about human communication observer.co.uk/news/science...

Every single issue of Babel: The Language Magazine 🗣️ @babelzine.bsky.social I’ve got so much fun reading to nerd out on now! 🤓