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?

Le regard de notre caricaturiste Chloé sur l'actualité du 8 septembre 2025 👉http://bit.ly/47taykH

If there were ever a time for white Americans to learn a language besides English and speak it loudly in public, it's now.

www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour... is now out, @betsysneller.bsky.social 's beautiful tribute to Bill Labov

First plenaryof #UKLVC15 definitely needs a post @christianilbury.bsky.social on social media and sociolinguistic change

My cat decided his favourite snuggle spot was my carry on suitcase when we got back from holiday in early August so we’ve left it out for him. Suspect he’s not going to be impressed when I reclaim it to go to #UKLVC15 tomorrow 🤣

I can

Cardiff buddies, Green Squirrel are calling on steeper parking charges for super-sized vehicles. You can read more and sign the petition here www.petitions.cleancitiescampaign.org/cardiff/?fbc...

"I became a hater by doing precisely those things AI cannot do: reading and understanding human language; thinking and reasoning about ideas; considering the meaning of my words and their context; loving people, making art, living in my body with its flaws and feelings and life."

Today in AI Is Not A Good Source For Learning About The World's Most Misunderstood Body Part, meet this ChatGPT gem. Funnily enough, we're actually going to talk about how most of this is kinda sorta right (for small values of right), as a cautionary tale about generative AI.

Can anyone help my friend Stephanie? She's always been really active on fb and runs pages there to help diabetic cats, but suddenly her account was suspended.

The (baked potato) sights of Chepstow.

Yay, I finally submitted a review that was a week late! Now onto the many other things that are a bit less late or are due soon...

To my 10th grade English teacher, who said, “Make the conclusion count.”

Experimental philosophy

Someone please find a way to do something linguistic with this #linguistics (requires knowledge of current US events and of sandwiches)

One author looked up the Welsh for "Big Bad" for his Red Riding Hood retelling. And just assumed it used English word order, having the character say "Drwg Mawr. I was named Drwg because I am so large, and Mawr is my title, the Evil One."

I don't understand why people are making fun of the PhD-like thinking of ChatGPT. It's only been around a few days and already it has discovered letters in the word 'blueberry' that professional linguists never found.