“Quantitative evidence of complex metrical prosody in Chugach Alutiiq” by McKinley Alden and Anja Arnhold (Feb. ’26) doi.org/10.1016/j.wo...

New info on the cool tonogenesis that’s underway among young Seoulites: “The effect of contrast-specific minimal pair competitor in hyperarticulation of VOT and F0 phonetic cues in Korean initial stops in tonogenetic sound change” by Cheonkam Jeong and Andrew Wedel (Feb. ’26) doi.org/10.1016/j.wo...

“Crossing the boundaries: perception of voice onset time in word-initial stops by multilingual learners” by Zuzanna Cal (Feb. ’26) journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

“Palatalization is a lexically triggered phonological process operating at multiple levels” by Anna Poĺomská (Jan. ’26) www.researchgate.net/publication/...

“Shared and language-specific phonological processing in the human temporal lobe” by Ilina Bhaya-Grossman, Matthew K. Leonard, Yizhen Zhang, Laura Gwilliams, Keith Johnson, Junfeng Lu and Edward F. Chang (Jan. ’26) www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I'm from the US midwest, with some southern traits; for me, these are syllabic L: [pʰɫ̩z], [pʰɫ̩s] [ʃɫ̩ts], [ʃɫ̩z] [ˈbɫ̩zˌwɫ̩], [ˈbɫ̩bɫ̩] [pʰɫ̩pɪʔ], [pʰɫ̩pɪŋ] [ˈbɫ̩ˌhɛɾ], [ˈbɫ̩ˌkɛɾ] [ˈbɫ̩jɪ̈n], [ˈbɫ̩d͡ʒɪŋ] [ˈbɫ̩mɪ̈n], [ˈbɫ̩bɪ̈s]

“Gesture and information structure: a case study on gestural topic markers in southern Italo-Romance” by Valentina Colasanti and Chiara Marchetiello (Feb. ’26) www.italian-journal-linguistics.com/app/uploads/...

Verb ellipsis klaxon: [characters discuss marriage] 'Ever been?' 'Married? No.' #linguistics

“Grosso modo” map of the hypothesized distribution of language families and isolates in Mesoamerica during the Classic period (c. ad 1–550) from “The linguistic panorama of the epiclassic: placing Nahuan among the languages of western Mesoamerica” by @magnuspharao.bsky.social Hansen (Feb. ’26)

‘yarmulke’ is /ˈjɑ(ɹ)mʊlkə/ or /ˈjɑ(ɹ)məlkə/ in several dictionaries, but the initial stress here is quite ungrammatical in English phonology unless the /l/ is dropped. English could potentially manage a pseudocompound like /ˈjɑɹˌmʊlkə/ or /ˈjɑɹˌmʌlkə/, but no dictionary reports such pronunciations

Another quandary? The antecedent lies outside the clause with the reflexive, so non-reflexive ‘him’ might be better, unless ‘looking’ is weirdly high-adjoined, but the man joined his own search party, so he’s semantically tauto-clausal with ‘himself,’ but ‘search party’ would weirdly favour ‘itself’

Does you variety have the BULL–HULL merger? If so, please humour me and try these near-minimal pairs: pulls vs. pulse Schul(t)z vs. Shull’s (US physicist) bullswool vs. bulbal pulpit vs. pulping bullhead vs. bulkhead bullion vs. bulging Bul(l)man vs. bulbous

Second-greatest repeat Columbo villain Patrick McGoohan’s sublime rendering here is second only to pronouncing the game as 麻雀兒 /mo²² t͡ɕiã⁵³/ = “sparrow” + nasalized erhua diminutive in the 上海吳语 Shanghainese Wu of the Yangtze Delta where the game originated.

the hengma phoneme is real

“A morpho-phonological study of plant names in Akan (Twi)” by Job Anane (Feb. ’26) memorial.scholaris.ca/server/api/c...

“Pathways to nasalization of the glottal approximant /h/ in Extremaduran Spanish: an aerodynamic exploration” by Ander Beristain (Feb. ’26) www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

Eating this would be time-consuming youtu.be/LRqgA3IIbMM?...

#OTD 174 years ago, Georg Wenker (1852–1911) was born 🎉 He was a pioneering dialectologist, an expert in linguistic geography and the founder of the German Language Atlas. He distributed tens of thousands of questionnaires to map the many dialects spoken across Germany. #LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx

40,000-year-old proto-writing in Germany www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

“A course in first language acquisition” by Jeffrey Lidz and Tyler Knowlton (Feb. ’26) academic.oup.com/book/62352

“Phonetic characterization of stop manner contrasts in four Australian languages” by Mitch Browne, Michael Proctor, Mark Harvey, Jane Simpson, Robert Mailhammer, Harriet Carpenter and Naijing Liu (Feb. ’26) osf.io/download/dk6...

This reminded me of one of my favourite Canadian skits of all time: www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwW4...

Jonathan Eig /aɪɡ/, the author of this piece, is the only instance of this rhyme that I know of, aside from Tadgh which is obviously Irish www.thefp.com/p/i-didnt-as...

Re-upping my Barnum-level entry to the circus of phonological curiosities in English

The Weak Vowel Merger (Wells 1982: 167–8; Flemming & Johnson 2007: 95; Lindsey 2019: 39) is rather advanced in North American varieties, but many speakers retain a contrast between /ə/ and /ɪ/ in some unstressed syllables, esp. before /v/ (a random context, if ever there was one!) and before velars

zhuzh /ʒʊʒ/ www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/z... in the wild

In the second episode of our podcast, we touch upon the work of Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm as we explore the emergence of comparative-historical grammar. 🎙️ hiphilangsci.net/2020/01/31/p... #Histlx

Sands 2020

English speakers are surprisingly comfortable with Slavic clusters ending in -sk, e.g. /tsk/ in Yakutsk, Donets’k; /nsk/ in Minsk, Smolensk, Murmansk, Rybinsk, Lugansk, Severodvinsk; /lsk/ in Komsomolsk; /ɹsk/ in Kursk, Krasnoyarsk; /fsk/: Izhevsk, Khabarovsk; /msk/ in Omsk

/ʌ/ is just a stressed schwa IMO but if you think /ʌ/ and /ə/ are separate phonemes in your variety of English, you may enjoy this near-minimal pair: ‘handcuff’ /ˈhæŋkʌf ~ ˈhæn(d)kʌf/ ‘dandruff’ /ˈdændɹəf ~ ˈdænʤɹəf/

She drags out the consonant at the beginning of ‘dragging’ which helpfully shows that it’s /ʤ/

Open access book: “Word-prosodic systems of Japonic languages” ed. by Yosuke Igarashi, Kenan Celik, Tatsuya Hirako and Aoi Hayato (Feb. ’26) brill.com/display/titl...

#OTD 215 years ago, Ferdinand Nesselmann (1811–1881) was born 🎉 He was an orientalist and also an expert on the history of mathematics. Later in his career, he studied Old Prussian, Latvian, and Lithuanian, and in 1845, he coined the term “Baltic languages” for them. #LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx

Very happy to see @vtolkacheva.bsky.social's paper on the role of premotor cortex in perception and misperception of speech now open access in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience: direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

Coronal consonants freely occur after /aʊ/ (mouth, mouthed, out, loud, mouse, rouse, Roush, couch, gouge, down, owl, hour) but non-coronal consonants must be separated by a syllable boundary, e.g. linguist Liz Cowper /ˈkaʊ.pəɹ/ (cf. */kaʊp/), Hawaiian pudding haupia /haʊˈpiː.ə/ (cf. */haʊp/), [1/3]

#OTD 171 years ago, Maurice Bloomfield (1855–1928) was born 🎉 He was a comparative linguist and a student of comparative mythology. As a specialist in Sanskrit, he translated Vedic texts into English. His nephew, Leonard, was also a linguist. #LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx

CorpusPhon2 will take place on Monday 29/6/26 in Montréal, Québec, right after LabPhon20. Submissions are due on 3/13/26 and our website has been updated to reflect this. Please consider submitting to our workshop! sites.google.com/view/corpusp...

pre-l wisecrack

Long vowels and diphthongs are not permitted before a sequence of coronal consonant + non-coronal consonant in a single morpheme, so if the /l/ isn’t vocalized this word suggests that the NURSE vowel is not always long in British English, or else that truncations are exempt from regular phonotactics

A lovely appreciation of John Haiman by Stephanie Farmer www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

CoLang 2026 is headed to Reno! June 22–July 10, 2026 This summer, CoLang 2026 brings together scholars, community language activists, & language workers from around the world for an immersive institute focused on language documentation, revitalization, and reclamation. www.unr.edu/colang?mc_ci...

relatable

1940 Irish language scif-fi book Manannán by Máiréad Ní Ghráda It is the first Mecha Robot outside of Japan and mention of a Gravity assist in fiction. It was never republished or translated.

More hyperforeignism

Valuable L1 study: “Acquiring relational verb inflection in Northern East Cree: frequency, complexity, and overgeneralizations” by Ryan E. Henke (Feb. ’26) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

“The Vastness of Language Variation Across the Globe” organized by Lenore Grenoble and Jeff Good today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Phoenix, AZ aaas.confex.com/aaas/2026/me...

“The Phonological Mapping Negativity (PMN) is not phonology-specific: Sensitivity to speaker voice mismatch” by Jen Lewendon and Stephen Politzer-Ahles (Feb. ’26) www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

“Una revisión del Pure_ToBI a partir de enunciados aseverativos” by Uriel Montellano Moreno (Feb. ’26) revistes.ub.edu/index.php/ex...

Geoff Lindsey’s videos are priceless