I heard someone (Finnish-speaking, struggling somewhat with academic English) call it "degenerate AI" today, and... well, they weren't all that wrong

Ted Chiang: "The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write [...]. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning."

New Word of Mouth podcast with @michaelrosenyes.bsky.social and @jessaiston.bsky.social on language and the ‘manosphere’ www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/... #linguistics

A reminder that Frazer's talk starts in half an hour! Here is the Zoom link: tinyurl.com/talkddi (please use a recognisable username) @ylvabiri.bsky.social @lulind.bsky.social #DDIAFinLa #OSSO 🐦🐦🐦

I’m quite proud of myself actually for arranging this little Labovian installation at the welcome event for first semester English students

Join us for the new season of online talks, this year co-organised by OSSO and the Digital Discourse & Interaction research network @lulind.bsky.social The first talk is already tomorrow! @nounfraze.bsky.social

Somehow when I watched (and loved) X files as a teenager, it completely passed me by what a QAnon show it was. Absolute bonkers government slash science conspiracy in every episode. Very annoying now 😁

if you’re an isolated, angsty, strange young man, please know that you can become a Kierkegaard scholar instead of joining fringe online communities

Some crazy news from the Finnish legal system, where the hacker Kivimäki, who famously obtained records and notes from many thousands of patients of a psychotherapy clinics chain - and released the records he felt would do the most damage in order to blackmail the organisation - is to be released

getting my morning dose of finnish by communicating with an electrician who came to exchange my - attention - poistoilmapuhallin 🤖

can confirm, i have heard about this on 3 separate occasions and have considered spending a week to come up with an abstract that somehow links my entirely unrelated work to my deep love for trains

Johnny is single-handedly accomplishing the PR stunt of the century for Tampere University & English section with his railway conference on a train 😁🚉

With students heading back to the classroom, a group of cognitive scientists and AI researchers has published one of the most forceful and evidence-backed calls yet to reject the "uncritical adoption of AI" in academia:

🚨 Call for Papers! 🚨 we are excited to launch the Call for Papers for the Corpora and Discourse International Conference 2026. Deadline 16 November 2025. Submit your abstracts here: wp.lancs.ac.uk/cad-2026/cal.... Please share widely! #CADS2026

Right in time for #FoodAndCommunication4: our special issue "Focus on Language and Food" is out now with Anglistik 🤩 9 papers (and an introduction) that will make your foodie/linguistics heart happy. All of it open access: angl.winter-verlag.de/issue/ANGL/2... #LanguageAndFood #CulinaryLinguistics 🍩

Constantly hearing how our students need to be experts in “gen AI” to compete on the job market, meanwhile the end goal of every executive is to hire absolutely no one, to pay absolutely no one else’s salary, just to let the little machine make something that they can still sell a subscription for

Well, turns out you can do both: the kitchen is clean, and the presentation is finished! I had the pleasure of talking about a collaborative project on Lenin's register mixing at the #UCCTS2025 today (sadly, online, and in Hildesheim only in spirit) 🧵

are you as annoyed by this Beta Research Assistant as I am? Keep you half-baked misleading insights to yourself, please, AI, and save me time to having to fact-check them

Have you seen the slit in his visor? It’s a miracle he found any flag in his closet.

Lest we baguette.

Whispers *that's the French flag mate*

Many thanks to our @pluraltampere.bsky.social social media queen Olga Andreevskikh for publishing the many conference reports from this summer. Among them, my trip to Tilburg for #ADDA5: blogs.tuni.fi/plural/tutki...

The deadline for a conference presentation is very near, and I’ve never had such a clean kitchen

Mit dem 01.09. ist der „Dick-Pic-Paragraf“ in Österreich in Kraft getreten, der das ungefragte Zusenden von Bildern mit Geschlechtsorganen unter Strafe stellt. Bis zu 6 Monaten Gefängnis sind möglich. 📵📵📵 Es gibt zu viele negative News, deswegen poste ich jeden Tag eine #guteNewsdesTages.

The Nordic Speech Research Forum, co-organised by Plural’s Elina Vasu, is inviting you to attend their autumn webinars. The webinar is open to everyone and can be accessed through the group’s website www.jyu.fi/nsrf

In other news, September is kicking off with a flurry of activity. The first class, the first fifteen important meetings, the first Pluminar scheduled, the first visit to a wine bar with a lovely new colleague @berlingual.bsky.social 🙃 Next week: an online conference & a PhD thesis to read

The Plural board is looking for two new members! Both the permanent staff of the Languages Unit and the postdocs are warmly invited to apply. Send a short motivation letter to the current director of Plural Daria Dayter by September 30 to indicate your interest! 📄

The wit a random passer-by possesses is usually inversely proportional to his desire to share it. Hello, the 100500th person in my life who felt compelled to say “are you walking him or he walking you hohoho”

Workday mornings (not always, but some monster day require prep)

Balancing teaching, research and service commitments while doing my best to dip into the grants pool

This looks pretty typical of 2024-2025, yes

That feeling when you tick off the item in your Reminders that’s been hanging there since October last year and, frankly, you’d thought is never going to happen (yes I was very late submitting an article. It wasn’t due in October, but still it’s been a few months)

Books: World Englishes in the 21st Century: Rüdiger, Neumaier, Leuckert and Buschfeld (eds.) (2025)

Not a lot of people know that although my current field of interest is language proficiecy, semantic knowledge and speech comprehension, I have also publihsed research on comparative typology of Finnish and Lithuanian, more precicely, about similarities and differencies in object case alternation. 👇

Yesterday I talked to two colleagues who both, independently of each other, said they’re going analogue with their classes, supporting my earlier idea for the same (which in my mind called “acoustic” 😁). One is already printing a reader for this term! Isn’t it interesting how things come full circle

So I am back to work and slowly getting ready to properly process my ERC rejection reviews. Everyone tells me I should take them on board to improve the project, since they are useful and come from experts. Unfortunately, already the very first review thinks my field shouldn't exist:

The key term is “deskill” (bcmerchant.bsky.social ‘s summary in the next post). For some incomprehensible reason, so many executives are suddenly totally ok with ‘good enough’ (not!) output. The sort of thing I see on uni and gov services websites now wouldve got me fired as a freelance translator

Me yesterday: I am a strong, independent woman. I will wheel my bike home and fix this chainsuck with my own wits and YouTube Me today: ok ok I have to ride the tram to the bike shop where a 12yo mechanic will solve the issue in 47 seconds with a screwdriver and an ounce of disdain

Oh dear god. On a related note, I wonder if the STEM departments being so onboard with LLM use in all domains of university life think that we (humanities) are gatekeeping languag-y skills for fear of being made irrelevant when we object

Hey everybody! @drjuliawester.bsky.social and I have a new paper! We surveyed over 800 scientists, science communicators, and science educators who use social media. Conclusion: Scientists no longer find Twitter useful or pleasant, and many have switched to Bluesky! 🧪🌎🦑 doi.org/10.1093/icb/...

#Linguistics 2 new additions in my #corpus toolbox, geared towards the study of the meta-discourse of press coverage: the Guardian and Figaro Comments Corpus Builders can be used to collect corpora of article comments from those two online newspapers. 1/3

Five days left to apply! TT or full professorship in English linguistics here in Tampere, Finland #AcademicJobs

You *think* the output is what you asked for, but it's made so many sloppy mistakes along the way. For example, I simulated the morality and inheritance dynamics of a 40 person shared property to optimize our tax burden over the next century.

Not only did this MOOC (well, its much earlier iteration) teach me A LOT about corpus linguistics, it also influenced how I think corpus linguistics should be taught. I highly recommend joining!

I need a palate cleanser for my last proper week of holidays: not Goffman, not literary fiction, something lighthearted. Any recommendations? Not totally trashy genre fiction works (or even totally trashy if it has linguists in it, hello Girl In Ice) #BookRecommendations

Just a reminder this list is drawn from a piece written by four researchers for MICROSOFT (data scientists, CS people, economists) who have never stepped foot in an archive/never taken an oral history/studied material culture, by their CVs. Unlike them, I do my research, and don't talk out my ass.

Justin’s list of jobs with highest AI applicability: 1. Listicle Creator 2. Corporate Think Piece Writer 3. Entrepreneur LinkedIn Post Writer 5. AI Conference Presentation Slide Creator 6. AI Conference Panelist 7. Life Coach® 8. Fad Diet Generator 9. CNN Staff Pundit 10. Rage Bait Content Creator

This! @sofiaruediger.bsky.social and I have been talking since, let me see, 2019 about how pick-up artists’ persuasion is actually aimed at other pick-up artists and doesn’t in fact pursue their ostensive goal of seduction

Diaries at the ready... the next Corpora & Discourse International Conference will take place from 23-25 June 2026, at Lancaster University. We are also very excited to launch our website, with plenary speaker info, key dates, and much more besides: wp.lancs.ac.uk/cad-2026/. Please share widely!