The CfPs for LavLang32 at Edinburgh is now OPEN! A reminder of our stellar lineup: • Dr. Nikki Lane (Duke) • Dr. Kevin Guyan (UoE) • Prof. Erez Levon (Bern) • Dr. Stamatina Katsiveli (American College of Greece) • Dr. Eddie Ungless (UoE) Submit a paper here: lavlang32.ppls.ed.ac.uk?page_id=231

POSIWID: the purpose of a system is what it does. Intentions are irrelevant. At scale, AI creates dependence, intensifies surveillance, deskills workers and students, extracts value, and concentrates power. It consumes vast electricity and water. It exploits laborers in data processing. Net negative

Skilled workers may ride this wave. We can automate our boring tasks, build useful tools, maintain our position. But the primary effect of AI deployment is transferring wealth upward while presenting that transfer as inevitable progress. This is a bargain that will not create anything good for us.

Your typical Russian new year prep with the "Olivier" salad ingredients on the hob

L'empire des lumières / The dominion of light https://botfrens.com/collections/61/contents/3114591

Plan for today: • a long walk in the forest • vet • 1 or 2 peer reviews (depending on the overall vibe) • Jane Eyre

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

I distinctly remember the first time I saw this practice. It was Bella in Twilight talking to her mom on the phone. I remember thinking maybe she hurt her ear and I missed that bit because I wasn't watching the film very attentively, why else would she be holding her phone I such an odd way

We are looking for advanced PhD student interns! Spend 12 weeks scratching a research itch in our Cambridge Massachusetts lab. Closes January 17. apply.careers.microsoft.com/careers/job/...

Dog owner life: texting your friend to ask if she (and hers) already spotted new benches on a trail behind the house. A conversation about which bench was the scariest ensues. You both chuckle happily, look at your fur rugs and go to bed.

Save the date: Finnish Cognitive Linguistics Association FiCLA and Linguistic Association of Finland (SKY) organize a joint seminar on cognitive approaches to language learning 24th April 2026 in Helsinki. The language of the event is Finnish, although English may also be used if desired.

Happy solstice! I never paid much attention to the cycle of light and dark before I moved to Finland and began walking the dogs in the forest every morning - often before daybreak

There are always empty words about "human in the loop", that you should always check the work of an LLM. But the entire value of a summary is as a replacement for reading. Nobody uses an LLM to generate a "summary" *and* independently verifies.

I'd love to hear your book suggestions if this list brings anything to mind! #BookSky #ReadingList #ToRead

That seemed rather a given to me, but more and more I come to the realisation that many researchers have... hmm let's say different practices I am not talking about students here

Used an Amazon gift card to give myself half the Kindle wish list as a birthday present. It strongly tends towards gothic horror this time of the year

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Mr. Darcy is such a king of negging, I wonder that I never noticed before

Today is the final day to send us your abstracts! You have until midnight (UK time)! 😁 Here is the submission link: forms.cloud.microsoft/pages/respon...

A simulation tool (developed at Uni Lübeck) for estimating the costs of grant funding: osi-luebeck.shinyapps.io/GrantInq/

"These costs are incurred by scientists in writing proposals, by their peers in reviewing them and by the administrative systems that run the process. The question is, which costs more: the research being funded, or the application process itself?" #AcademicSky 🧪

For the first time in her life, Belya howled in unison with a passing ambulance and it was glorious

One of the things that I find infuriating about this article is that it makes clear that many researchers are clearly just citing papers that they have never read to support claims they are making. That’s not how this works. If you cite it, you need to have read it. Understood it. Agreed with it.

Oh my God just go read the papers, do the research, and learn the stuff you need to know. I realize the incentive structure in academia is bullshit, but have some integrity - and some interest in learning things and producing quality work!

The last online talk of our lecture series was a success! @ylvabiri.bsky.social @lulind.bsky.social Keep your eyes on the OSSO page for updates on season 2026: www.dariadayter.org/osso

The last talk of the 2025 OSSO / DDI collab! Come (on Zoom) and listen to @ylvabiri.bsky.social's lecture on finfluencers 17 December, 11-12 EET tinyurl.com/talkddi 🐦🐦

It’s a slow Sunday, so I thought I’d do a thread of my 2025 publications. Get in touch if you any a pdf! 🧵

Most of this morning's walk in the forest was before sunrise. Three dogs running around us in pitch dark; eyes like gold coins in the shadows. A good way to shake off grant blues 🐺🌲

Btw another classic on language and gender that i always cite to my students in Sociolinguistics class: Coates (1989) (just look at that fabulous book cover): all-female talk often features cooperative turn-taking 1/2

I worked at Penguin UK when her follow-up book was delivered, and it had to be gently explained that her title for a book about language at work, On the Job, was in the UK a slang term for sex. (She changed it.)

A very well researched topic in sociolinguistics. If anyone wants an accessible entry text, look no further than Tannen's 1990 "You just don't understand" A bit sad that the authors ignore four decades of research on language from linguistics, but guess we can treat this as a kind of triangulation

Exciting news! You can now view our plenary speakers' abstracts: wp.lancs.ac.uk/cad-2026/ple.... You have one week remaining to submit your abstracts!

Exhausted and burnt out editors of academic journals, unite

A colleague came up.with the idea of doing some kind of cross-journal black list of people who submitted papers with fake references, and hopefully adding a checker to the Editorial Manager

I'm of half a mind to start writing to the universities these people work at and reporting them, but then, they probably won't care and I will just spend more energy on it

Pragmatics & Society: we get at least one paper per week with made up references now. Checking them takes time. Not something I used to do as an editor before. Stupid people armed with AI make life so much harder for everyone

Digitale Soziolinguistik am Europäischen Zentrum für Sprachwissenschaften der @uniheidelberg.bsky.social und des @idsmannheim.bsky.social: Am kommenden Mittwoch ist @danielpfurtscheller.at zu Gast, im Januar spreche ich über joyful pronouning in digitalen Communities seit den frühen Neunzigern

A couple of years ago I thought about buying a daylight lamp for the Finnish kaamos. And then I saw how much they cost.

anything to get in the carpool lane

'Skull of St. Thomas Aquinas being transported to Fossanova Abbey.' Photograph by Daniel Ibanez

It's that time of year (grant rejection season in Finland 🎄🏗) when i reskeet Jan Blommaert's blogpost about what grant rejections are telling researchers

It's a no from kone again. But also, what does this say about the state of Finnish academia: "We received a record number of 7,642 applications in this year's funding call. The Kone Foundation Board of Trustees decided to award funding to 408 projects." Last year it was ~3000 applications

Light reading for absorbing Finnish culture

I wonder how Finnish postal service sees its role in life. My packages (and everyone else's in Hervanta, one of the biggest Tampere suburbs with a huge student population) get delivered to a pick up point 6 km away. Need I say more?

Come and join us in Valladolid in July for the CADAAD conference Deadline is Monday 15th Dec.

Swearing & Christmas, there's no better combo 🤬🙃 Join us for the last ISLE Online forum of the year with Kate Burridge, Kristy Beers Fägersten & Karyn Stapleton on Friday (Dec 12), 10am CET. Zoom link available here: www.isle-linguistics.org/activities/o... #ISLE #EnglishLinguistics #Linguistics

Next in the @uniofjyvaskyla.bsky.social 2025-26 English online seminar series, 12 Jan at 16:00 EET: 'Self-promotion, ideology and power in the social media posts of Nigerian Female Political Leaders' (Lily Chimuanya, Covenant University, Nigeria) Register/abstract👇👇 Go go! r.jyu.fi/engseminars2...

Next up: github.com/turkunlp and their web register research resources

at a DARIAH event where Steven Coats is presenting his and @danaroemling.bsky.social corpus CRIME: 133 mio words of courtroom proceedings, investigative interviews and true crime content. Very cool! Easily accessible corpus of spoken language for forensic linguists