Something I’ve been planning to post occasionally are interviews with career linguists and related language folk – especially those working outside of academia. Yes, they (we) exist! Until recently these were rare birds, but lately the numbers are growing. I credit several factors: the growth of the discipline generally; the growth of technology industries trying…
It seems that the world’s largest manufacturer of construction equipment, Caterpillar Inc., is in serious need of a basic semantics lesson. I came across this article a couple days ago: “Santa Cruz coffee shop with ‘cat’ in its name hit with cease and desist from Caterpillar Inc.” Beyond the ridiculousness of a giant corporation going…
This last post on accents and dialects summarizes an editorial by linguist, academic, and popular writer John McWhorter. McWhorter’s linguistics research focuses on sociohistorical language change and creoles, but he has published multiple articles and books about race relations as well. Here, he tackles a combination of those subjects with Black English (taking a particular…
In this second of three posts on accents and dialects, I summarize a relatively short article about the universality of accents. Article: “Everyone Has an Accent” (The New York Times) Contrary to popular belief, it’s not actually possible to speak a language without an accent. What’s more, our approval of certain accents and scorn of…
What’s the difference between an accent, a dialect, and a language? These concepts are prone to a multitude of misconceptions, often with adverse consequences for millions of people whose speech doesn’t fall within the realm of what’s considered “standard” for their particular region. In this series of posts, I summarize three articles about accents and…
Think of a situation in which you might try to lip read. Would it be chatting with friends in a noisy bar? Or watching a muted TV? Maybe you were born (or became) deaf. In all of these scenarios, the channel for auditory input is severely obstructed or entirely absent. But what if I told…
Digital voice agents like Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant are all the rage these days. But when we talk to our smart devices, are they actually “understanding” our speech in the same way that another human understands it? Take the command, “Find flights from Chicago to New York on February 21.” We can easily comprehend…
Happy Halloween! In tribute to the holiday (my favorite), here’s a smidge of spooky linguistics. Ever play that game where you repeat some word so many times it starts to lose its meaning? That’s actually a thing, called semantic satiation. Semantic satiation is a psychological phenomenon where a person temporarily loses the meaning of the…
You’re probably familiar with the old adage “the only thing that’s constant is change.” Still, so many people tend to think about language as a relatively fixed affair. I’ve said it before (and will inevitably say it again): all living languages change all the time, and at all levels – phonological (sounds!), morphological (word-bits!), lexical…
I could spill a lot of ink (well, use a lot of pixels) writing about endangered languages, and the reasons why language revitalization, or at least preservation, is crucial. But I’ll spare you today, dear readers. I will say in summary that linguistic diversity is both culturally/anthropologically important, and significant to the study of human…
