“The role of prosody in expressing subjective and objective causality in English” by Na Hu, Aoju Chen, Hugo Quené and Ted J. M. Sanders (Nov. ’25) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

A paper title that I’m low-key proud of is “Radical allomorphy in Southwestern Turkish dialects” (with Eyüp Bacanlı) bpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/sites.udel.e...

“When syntax and semantics of compounds matter to voicing alternations: an experimental investigation of effects of grammatical relation on rendaku” by Michiko Fukasawa (Oct. ’25) www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...

To -er is human ‎ “I have my thankers to back”

Safe-ty or safe-ness? ¿Por qué no los dos? ‎ Btw, morpheme-final /i/ behaves interestingly with Class-II suffixes. Halle and Mohanan (1985) claimed that some Americans show [i] in ‘safetiness’ but [ij] in ‘safety net’ (Dialect B), whereas others show ‘safet[ɪ]ness’ vs. ‘safet[i] net’ (Dialect C).

Just encountered a new (to me) #eggcorn: "all do respect"

“Plastic Mandarin tones: regional identity in prosody” by Chenzi Xu (Oct. ’25) doi.org/10.1515/phon...

“Umlaut and allomorphy as diagnostics in the analysis of suspended affixation: Experimental evidence from acceptability judgments” by Stefanie Müller (Oct. ’25) nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:b...

“Glottal allophony in a spontaneous Triqui corpus” by Kayla Shames and Christian DiCanio (Oct. ’25) www.researchgate.net/profile/C-T-...

The phoneme and/or distinctive features make it hard to separate phonology from semantics. “Phonology is thus a semantically conditioned science.” –Stephen Ullmann (1959: 32)

Intro-Ling exercise: Discuss <e> in “Mercedes-Benz Ocean Drive — a pretty new genre”

Reminder: please join us tomorrow (Friday) for the first talk of the 2025-2026 University of Calgary Linguistics Speaker Series: “What is that thing? Distributional Bootstrapping of Determiner Semantics” by University of Toronto Professor Ana T. Pérez-Leroux

Last Spring, in a stochastic processes class, I made a simple Markov chain out of this and gave it as a test problem to my class. (Without the cute hypercube, and a little bit simplified.) ’Twas fun and they liked it.

I present, the lenition hypercube

Cool, there’s a conference on calligraphy in Calgary this week: calligraphyconferences.com Fun fact: ‘Calligraphy’ is an anagram for ‘graphically’ and ‘Calgary Phil’ @calgaryphil.bsky.social

Profile of Nick Evans, who just won the British Academy's Neil and Saras Smith medal for lifetime achievement in linguistics @theobserveruk.bsky.social @britishacademy.bsky.social observer.co.uk/news/science...

“Vowel (dis)harmony and consonantal influence in Turkish: revisiting I-spreading” by Göktuğ Börtlü and Semra Baturay Meral (Sep. ’25) www.researchgate.net/profile/Goek... (Abstract from the 22nd International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, İzmir, Turkey, Sep. 4–6, 2025)

Cool: ‘meetings’ /miːtɪŋz/ → [miːtɪnz] (“g-dropping”; rare in nouns like this!) → [miːʔɪnz] (“t-dropping” before [ɪn], not just syllabic [n̩]; increasingly common!)

“A grammar of Kangri” by Anil Swadeshi (Oct. ’25) lincom-shop.eu/epages/57709...

Some of our amazing profs and students talking to potential students and their families about our programs at today’s Open House, which an estimated 11,000 will attend!

Wow, the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni drama is *still* a hot topic? I’m not surprised that commentators lexically select ‘livelihood’. I had predicted early on that the rather obscure adverb ‘blithely’ would also be lexically selected in this drama’s proceedings (see post below)

This 2019 post has some nice, clear samples of Shanghainese: www.theworldofchinese.com/2019/09/fang...

Another excerpt from my book, Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language published by @mitpress.bsky.social This post is on the ancient sensorimotor origins of language production networks. www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wire...

“Phonological variation and gender performance: a sociolinguistic study of the “nü guoyin” phenomenon in Beijing youth speech” by Qi’ao Yang and Zhizhong Tian (Oct. ’25) simonowenpub.com/index.php/SO...

The arbitrariness of the sign, sure, but I like how "crispy" sounds crispy, "crunchy" sounds crunchy, "mushy" sounds mushy, and "sloppy" sounds sloppy

“Learning accurate onset clusters: perception lags behind production” by Claire Moore-Cantwell, Anne-Michelle Tessier and Ashley Farris-Trimble (Oct. ’25) journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Quite a bit on phonology :)

We are about a month away from the publication release date for my @mitpress.bsky.social book, Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language. Here's a chapter-by-chapter preview. drive.google.com/file/d/18mc5...

New Geoff Lindsey video: “S Sh sounds in Spanish and English!” youtu.be/9nI7AuPmwlA

A nice array of newspaper mastheads in blackletter type (Simon Garfield, "Just My Type")

“What makes a consonant a geminate?” by Lia Saki Bučar Shigemori and Felicitas Kleber (Oct. ’25) opendata.uni-halle.de/bitstream/19... (big file; whole Proceedings)

The Canadian Language Museum reopens this Thursday at York University’s Glendon Hall languagemuseum.ca

The Louvre is /luːv/ in English, similar to Canadian French. I wonder if anyone ever says /lʊɹv/ or /lɔɹv/ à la Brett Favre

Confs: 13th International Conference on Nordic and General Linguistics

Threw together a minimal site for these animations jofrhwld.github.io/vocal_tract_...

#OTD 193 years ago, Gustav Langenscheidt (1832–1895) was born 🎉 A language teacher, publisher, and founder of a publishing group. Together with Charles Toussaint, he developed an innovative method for self-learning languages. A bridge in Berlin is named in his honour. #LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx

UGent's copy of the Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages has finally arrived in the library - absolute unit of a book!

“Second Language Acquisition of Regionally Indexed Phonological Variation: The Case of the Castilian Spanish /θ/” by Stacey Hanson (Oct. ’25) www.proquest.com/docview/3258...

Congratulations Nick Evans: the first Australian linguist to get this award, I believe. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/prizes-medal...

“The effects of contextual tonal variation on Cantonese tone merging” by Xinran Ren and Peggy Mok (Oct. ’25) www.journal-labphon.org/article/id/1...

“The 23rd International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL–23), which will take place at the University of Milan from 15 to 18 June 2026” slin.unimi.it/icehl-23/

“The Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice is pleased to announce the fourth meeting of the Conference on the Endangered Languages of East Asia (CELEA) ... “On(c)e and (for) all” on 5th-8th May 2026” www.unive.it/web/en/16556...

“Investigating potential MERGED and DISTINCT speakers in an ongoing merger — Evidence from production and perception” by Maria Evjen, Timo B. Roettger and Sverre Stausland (Oct. ’25) www.journal-labphon.org/article/id/1...

“Melodies are not a useful mnemonic cue for immediate word recall regardless of familiarity” by Isabella L. Ramirez and Laura M. Getz (Oct. ’25) journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

“Book of Abstracts: 58th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, 3–5 September 2025, Department of Linguistics, University of Bern, Switzerland” www.isw.unibe.ch/unibe/portal...

Three phonology articles in the latest issue of Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area www.benjamins.com/catalog/ltba...

Thou shalt not merge vowels before r

“The 11th iteration of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (TU+) will be hosted by MIT Linguistics. The workshop will be held at MIT, Cambridge, MA, on April 11-12, 2026 in-person. The abstract submissions are now open.” turkicworkshop.github.io/tu11/

“Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages 16 (FASAL 16) will be hosted by the Linguistics Program at the University of South Carolina ... in person on April 10-11, 2026 ... and a fully online component on April 18, 2026” sites.google.com/view/fasal16...

“The loud silence of echo” by Maria Esipova at NELS 56, New York University, Oct. 17–19, 2025 bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/wp.nyu.edu/d...