A fresh batch of linguistic items for your listening, viewing, and reading (lots of reading) pleasure. There are a few new language podcasts on the scene, but I’ll save those for a separate post.
On gibberish.
The etymology of Triscuit.
On capitalizing Black and White.
Free ebook: Making Sense of “Bad English”.
A brief history of strange English street names.
The social value of linguistic creativity in a pandemic.
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language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: accents, dialect, language, language change, language history, linguistics, links, words, writing | 
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Posted by Stan Carey
Language links ahoy. If you’re looking to pass an hour or a few with some linguistic reading and audiovisual material, see what takes your fancy from the selection below (there are lots more after the fold). A couple of them are even about you know what.
Forest dialect words.
Viral language and racism.
What counts as a slur, and why?
The Iron Curtain lives on as an isogloss.
Newly published: the Mother Jones style guide.
Science Diction: a new, bite-sized etymology podcast.
Irish English as the new EU working language [my annotations]
Emoji are to digital messages what gestures are to speech.
Solving the mystery of honeybee dance ‘dialects’.
When translation means editing the machines.
The newly launched Opie Archive.
12 Comments | language, linguistics, link love | Tagged: dialect, emoji, language, language podcasts, lexicography, linguistics, links, podcasts, translation | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
For your reading (and listening and viewing) pleasure, a selection of items on language and linguistics that caught my eye (and my ear) in recent weeks:
Endangered alphabets.
How children use emoji.
The rise of ‘accent softening’.
Settling a grammar dispute (or not).
Finding room for unnameable things.
En Clair: a podcast on forensic linguistics.
The z in Boyz n the Hood as a key cultural signifier.
Macmillan’s unique Thesaurus now has its own website.
How bite configuration changed human speech (Discussion).
A brief visual history of British and Irish languages.
Leave a Comment » | language, linguistics, link love | Tagged: dialect, dictionaries, language, language change, language history, linguistics, links, slang, translation, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
Happy new year to readers and visitors of Sentence first (which, I just noticed, turned ten last year). If you’re into language or linguistics, you should find a few things to interest you below. Don’t eat them all at once.
Why was writing invented?
Why do we call it a paperback?
Black English and who gets to use it.
The emotional portmanteau pentagram.
Morph: a blog about languages and how they change.
Tweetolectology: exploring language change via social media.
Using machines to understand ancient languages.
13 Comments | language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: grammar, language, language history, linguistics, links, slang, sociolinguistics, translation, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
It’s past time for a linkfest, so here’s a selection of items from the world of language and linguistics that caught my eye in recent months.
Normally I include some audio material, but I’ll save that for a post on podcasts in the hopefully-not-too-distant future. In the meantime, happy reading.
Word aversion.
White emoji, black skin.
Losing your native language.
Icelandic: a lively linguistic fossil.
The globe-trotting history of golazo.
Irish English for the non-Irish (PDF).
Saving Stephen Hawking’s synthetic voice.
How grammar superstitions can unravel good writing.
How the Brothers Grimm changed historical linguistics.
Something interesting is happening to exclamation marks!
6 Comments | language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: dialect, etymology, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, links, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
For your reading, listening, and viewing pleasure, here are some language-related links that have caught my eye in recent weeks, or rather months – it has been ages since I did a linkfest.
If you want a more regular supply, follow my Twitter account @StanCarey, where I often share these first.
Why writing matters.
EU English after Brexit.
Stealth marketing for editors.
The drit, or dirt, on metathesis.
Clotilde Olyff’s pebble alphabet.
Towards a new vocabulary of nature.
Emily Wilson’s radical Odyssey translation.
Editing can make all the difference to a book.
Why white people should never rap the n-word.
How Irish nature words connect us to history and place.
How the suffix -tron captured the spirit of a technological age.
What happens in the brain when an adult learns to read.
9 Comments | language, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: dictionaries, editing, language, language history, linguistics, links, research, science, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
As usual I’ve left it late to do a linkfest, so I have a bumper crop of 50 language links for you this month. There are more podcasts than usual, so you can spare your eyes and treat your ears between reads.
54 Irish curses.
Slang family trees.
The tragedy of Google Books.
Interactive speech synthesiser.
How etymology can help your spelling.
Podcasts about language and linguistics.
The thing is is that ‘is is’ is surprisingly common.
Free e-book (PDF): Applied Sociolinguistics (1984), ed. Peter Trudgill.
Language use and names in classical Rome (podcast).
‘Good grammar’ comes from privilege, not virtue.
Samtaims ai vonder if inglis spiiking piipöl…
Language and feral children (podcast).
5 Comments | grammar, language, language history, linguistics, link love, words | Tagged: books, etymology, grammar, language, language history, linguistics, links, words | Permalink
Posted by Stan Carey
 | Philip Cummings on Gently enchanted |
 | Stan Carey on Gently enchanted |
| Stan Carey on Gently enchanted |
| Philip Cummings on Gently enchanted |
