The oldest runestone yet found was discovered in Norway in 2023. Known as the Svingerud Runestone, it dates to sometime between 0–250 CE, potentially making it the earliest instance of writing in Scandanavia.

Does the language you speak affect how you see the world? This idea is called the *linguistic relativity hypothesis* or *Sapir-Whorf hypothesis*, and the @Lingthusiasm.bsky.social podcast put out a great episode treating this topic back in March.

Invented languages and the science of mind: Linguists use constructed languages to explore how children perceive language www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lang...

@laurainparis.bsky.social I really enjoyed your article about ancient plagues in New Scientist this week! Fascinating! www.newscientist.com/article/2500...

Check out this recent book that uses the study of online cat discourse to teach sociolinguistics! What a cool way to introduce people to the field of sociolinguistics. You might be surprised at just how much we can learn about language from cat memes.

‘Rizz’ vs. ‘skibidi’: Why some slang words stick around and others fade away What gives some slang staying power? Linguistic experts weigh in on Gen Z and Gen Alpha slang words. www.fastcompany.com/91142295/riz...

Need a new podcast to listen to? Here’s a list of over 60 linguistics podcasts: linguisticdiscovery.com/podcasts #podcasts #linguistics #language

How is soufflé linked to flatulence? Ask the linguist, not the doctor. A recent book exploring the origins of common food terms—from bialy to lima bean to bibimbap—is a fascinating history of how we eat and cook.

You are not a parrot. And a chatbot is not a human. And linguist @EmilyMBender.bsky.social is very worried what will happen when we forget this. nymag.com/intelligence...

We’re finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum’s lost library A whole library’s worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Nearly 2000 years later, we can at last read these lost treasures.

How AI and Wikipedia have sent vulnerable languages into a doom spiral Machine translators have made it easier than ever to create error-plagued Wikipedia articles in obscure languages. What happens when AI models get trained on junk pages?

For my conlangers, a new guide to constructing languages was just released. What’s interesting about this book is that it’s designed specifically for use as a class, and not just for the purpose of introducing linguistics, but as a course focused on conlanging in its own right. amzn.to/4qrt8Rm

Premature babies who heard recordings of their mothers reading to them had more mature white matter in a key language area of the brain, a Stanford Medicine-led study found. med.stanford.edu/news/all-new...

Birds worldwide use the same sound to warn of threats—and offer insight into the evolution of language More than 20 species make a nearly identical noise to warn nearby birds of brood parasites, a behavior that bridges the “sharp division between animal communication systems and human language”

What came before English? @ColinGorrie.bsky.social of the Dead Language Society newsletter interviews @LauraInParis.bsky.social, author of the new book “Proto: How one ancient language went global” about the original language from which English descends: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/what-came-...

Scientists have long and studiously avoided claiming that other animals have language. Now, using the power of AI, they are on the verge of deciphering one. Which species will be first?

Too many em dashes? Weird words like ‘delves’? Spotting text written by ChatGPT is still more art than science. 🧵

Researchers have found that elephants are capable of using their trunks to make a range of gestures that express their intentions and wants.

New York is the most linguistically diverse city on the planet. Can it stay that way?

China aims to bolster controversial claim to Pacific languages with a new museum:

The linguistic science behind viral social media slang Linguist Adam Aleksic (@EtymologyNerd.bsky.social) explains how viral slang and algorithm-driven speech aren’t destroying language––they’re accelerating its natural evolution.

Over 90% of the words in the works of Caesar and Cicero have English derivatives 😲

Congratulations to @JessZafarris.bsky.social and @RobWords.bsky.social of the Words Unravelled podcast for reaching 100,000 YouTube subscribers! 🎉

I → myself you → yourself he → himself she → herself they → themselves y'all → ???

From the creator of the bestselling game League of the Lexicon @LeagueOfTheLexicon.bsky.social comes a new book for language enthusiasts: “The language-lover’s lexipedia: An A–Z of linguistic curiosities”:

WHAT DO YOU MEAN “HAMSTER” DOESN’T HAVE A “P” IN IT

Wherever human populations mix, their languages blend as well. A new study shows that the genetic mixing of populations in contact is reflected by their linguistic mixing—borrowed vocabulary and grammatical structures.

At some point in the evolution of human language, our species transitioned from instinctual vocalizations to ones that had to be learned and passed down through culture rather than genetics. 🧵

The Māori language, recently saved from obsolescence, faces fresh threats. The latest issue of Babel: The Language Magazine looks at this renaissance at risk. Get your own subscription to Babel: The Language Magazine here: babelzine.co.uk

A word which baffled the producers of the latest series of Race Across the World is among 10 Welsh words to be added to the Oxford English Dictionary in its latest update. www.bbc.com/news/article...

Cuneiform was first used to write the Sumerian language, but eventually the Akkadian Empire displaced the Sumerians. The Akkadians then adopted Sumerian cuneiform.

Linguists have long speculated that language may have originated in gesture, as a type of early sign language, before shifting to a spoken medium. Using experimental evidence, a 2022 paper suggests that the meanings of gestures are sufficiently universal to have provided a basis for early language.

🇨🇳🏝️ China lays claim to Austronesian languages 🎤 The Linguistics of a Showgirl: How Taylor Swift’s accent has changed 🐬 We will soon be able to talk with other species—but which will be first?

I am woefully addicted to @linguisticdiscovery.com's Substack. In it, Dr. Danny Hieber curates a wonderful and wonderfully sourced collection of linguistic news—and this week, he's also included an excerpt from my book! Check it out and sub: linguisticdiscovery.substack.com/p/useless-et...

The Linguistics of a Showgirl: Linguists show how Taylor Swift’s accent has changed over the course of her career.

What do the words “shrapnel”, “guy”, “pants”, and “sideburns” all have in common? They’re all eponyms!—words derived from proper names. (Often “eponym” is used to refer to the source name instead though.)

Antarctic leopard seal ‘songs’ are surprisingly similar to nursery rhymes theconversation.com/antarctic-le...

The Tsimane language only has basic color terms for blackish, whitish, and reddish. However, Spanish-Tsimane bilinguals are starting to rework the Tsimane color system. www.scientificamerican.com/article/bili... @elisecutts.bsky.social

Before cuneiform became a fully-developed writing system, it was primarily a system of tallying different types of goods. Early cuneiform texts are all numerical tablets containing calculations and tallies of objects. 🧵

Studying linguistics is kind of like reading a car manual: it’ll teach you everything about how the car works, but when you’re done reading it you still won’t know how to drive.

Merriam-Webster just added 5,000 words to their collegiate dictionary, including “petrichor,” “teraflop,” “dumbphone” and “ghost kitchen.”

The most frequent words in English, according to the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA).

🧬 Could Neanderthals handle language variation? 🦍 Primatologist Jane Goodall dies at 91 🔤 Merriam-Webster adds 5,000 words to the dictionary 📜 A new book on the history of the alphabet

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal) Both blind and sighted people who speak the same language use similar gestures to represent events.

The frequency of each consonant sound in Old English versus Modern English words. Old English had 3 consonants that Modern English doesn’t: /ç, ɣ, x/ (although /ç/ was probably just an allophone)

Every human child has to go through a long process of learning their language(s) from their caretakers. But what if you didn’t have to? What if you inherited your language fully from your parents, and never had to learn it?

National Linguistics Day in the UK is coming up on November 26th! If you’d like to participate in promoting linguistics, you can learn more here: www.linguisticshq.co.uk/national-lin...

Where did we get the letters of the alphabet from? And why does English use them so strangely? Here’s an excerpt from the new book, “Why Q needs U: A history of our letters and how we use them”, which takes you on a linguistic odyssey through the history of the alphabet:

One of the major reasons why most Native American languages are endangered in the U.S. and Canada today is because of the Indian residential school system.

Birdsong obeys Zipf’s Law of Abbreviation, which states that the more frequently a word is used, the shorter that word tends to be. New research shows that the most frequent chirps and tweets tend to be shorter, while infrequently-used ones tend to be longer. www.iflscience.com/all-human-la...