HESA put the academic staff numbers in 23-24 in Essex at 1560, and given voluntary severence schemes it's likely to be lower now, so this is at least 2/3rds of all academic staff in Essex receiving risk of redundancy letters.

About a pair of trousers that came home from school all tangled after the Christmas show: I don't un-inside-out them because it would take too long #LinguistBabyPhotos (7ish)

This creater puts "reading levels" into perspective in a really helpful way, so sharing it here.

My dad abhors any negative comments about immigrants. Asked him recently why he’s so strong on it: ‘Because we’re always happy to take the rich and clever ones. Which means it’s not about disliking immigrants. It’s about disliking the poor and vulnerable. And that’s a bad human instinct.’

I'm not going to judge a book on its cover and blurbs, but I'm curious how grounded in sociolinguistic research this is given that it "Proposes a political agenda to resist the sticklerocracy and overthrow a world of word nerds" Anyone happen to know? www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/1...

And I did get to talk about the Rosetta Stone - yay!

Wish me luck as I try and explain Egyptian hieroglyphs in under five minutes for a kids science podcast. Am I hoping I get to talk about the Rosetta Stone too? Absolutely!

#OTD 98 years ago, William Labov (1927-2024) was born 🥳 He was a pioneering sociolinguist studying language variation, dialectology, but also AAVE. In 1966, Labov published his landmark study "The Social Stratification of English in New York City". #LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx

A little something I wrote for @theconversation.com about Wicked and prescriptivism theconversation.com/wicked-for-g...

Alt text available here bsky.app/profile/neil...

Happy World Linguistics Day from Cardiff, Wales!

It's also bleakly funny that even in 2022 I thought it was laying it on awful thick about tech bro douches, but if anything Norton's character is way too aware of other people as a concept and is at least attempting to fake an interesting inner life.

Got a mini-op-ed published in the campus newspaper today, in case you're wondering how I feel about generative AI. (With the compulsory shout-out to @emilymbender.bsky.social, of course) swarthmorephoenix.com/2025/11/20/o...

To everyone I follow who warns/complains/worries about genAI, thank you! You make me feel less alone each time I present an anti-AI view to mostly bemused colleagues. It's not just me who thinks it's a concern in many, many ways.

I came to this country as a child refugee. No English, no certainty, no idea what my life could become. Britain gave me refuge. Not on a timer, not with conditions attached, but with a chance to grow roots. A thread 🧵 1/8 www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Still a better acronym than what’s being suggested for our new super school 😬

MAJOR UPDATE: apnews.com/article/louv...

Modern Languages students at the University of Nottingham have started a petition to save languages degrees. Please sign and share www.change.org/p/stop-the-r...

Edinburgh University is closing the Institute for Academic Development. Download these student resources while you can. Making notes, reading strategies, time management, dissertations and so on. CC licenses. Pdf and text only versions. #HE 🗃️ institute-academic-development.ed.ac.uk/study-hub/le...

#linguistics of food

I'm not at #NWAV53 but the South Wales Speech project is. Check out our poster today and chat to Ianto (my co-author) about /t/ in Welsh English. We have glottals, we have taps, we have [ɹ], we have [h], we have zero (but not as t/d deletion) and more.

If you’re going to wake up stupidly early and scroll your timeline instead of going back to sleep, today’s not such a terrible day to do it #HopeScrolling #NYC

Glad to know it's not just me submitting last minute conference abstracts... between this morning and this evening over 40 abstracts have been submitted for ICLaVE13 (I submitted two)

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

On further reflection, handing operation of our Universities over to a professional administrative class with no personal investment in the educational mission of the university or the creation and maintenance of knowledge might have been somewhat in error.

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

It’s already nearly dark 😭 (currently 17.15)

What pieces of fiction help you make sense of genAI's place in the world? (or just make you worry about it)

Happy Friday to everyone but especially to Caerphilly.

Discovering that our uni online learning platform (Blackboard) uses Amazon Web Services this morning because I can't access half the things I need to teach shortly because AWS is down. Joy!

New scam post (reposted with ALT text)

Happening now: Here’s a view of the “No Kings” protest in Washington, DC

The outcome of organisational reviews captured:“Everything was over-organised and so failed to work properly. The new bureaucracy, which was supposed to impose order, was still enjoying itself writing memos and making out permits, and everything was delayed” (Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday)

The thing is, if you genuinely believed that preteen girls are old enough to be mothers while males in their thirties are too young to comprehend fascism, then you logically wouldn't trust men to be responsible for anything more consequential than a balloon animal, let alone a government

If you're a Labour, Green or Lib Dem voter in Caerffili it's morally incumbent on you to vote Plaid. That's the long and the short of it. We're out of excuses or arguments now, either we stand up to fascism or we give in.

Using ChatGPT

COT/CAUGHT merger problems... small person telling me about the soup they made at school. Me: did you put stock in it? SP: no, we just put leaves in Me: *confused until I remember that I pronounce stalk and stock the same way* #linguistics

This is my regular reminder to everyone that jstor is open to the general public now; a free account there will give you access to 100 papers a year.

Starting off the teaching year as we mean to go on? Fire alarm (test?) which evacuated the building at 9.30.

I'm still plotting how to get the mainly Valleys form 'bother with' in the sense of be friends with/hang out with into the dictionary. Next time? #WelshEnglish www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

dudes rock

Anyone shocked that Reform plan to deport immigrants with Indefinite Leave to Remain hasn’t been paying attention. Next it will be stripping citizenship from dual citizens, then deporting them. Who do you think Reform are? This. This is who they are.

@brymes.bsky.social are you still using your account? The post content seems to have changed a bit lately...

Currently listening to the rain pour down. I live in Wales, you say, what do I expect? The thing is I’m in Amsterdam 🤣

Student led General Competition for the Welsh Graduate School for the Social Sciences is open now. Have a look/register for webinar if you're interested in applying for a PhD (or MA + PhD) in sociolinguistics at Cardiff (other subfields, pathways & unis available too) wgsss.ac.uk/student-led-...

After 15 min talks with 5 min for questions at #UKLVC15 last week, next week I get 30 min with 15 min for questions at #LiCLA1 next week. *adds more cool left/right dislocation and fronting examples to slides* lime.meertens.knaw.nl/en/events/li...

German speaking friends, please help me out. How would you translate Marilyn Frye's "double bind" into German? I found "Doppelbindung", "Zwickmühle", but that both sounds profoundly wrong to me. Any ideas?