All Things Linguistic - 2022 Highlights
2022 was a year of opening up again and laying foundations for future projects. I spent the final 3 months of it on an extended trip to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a delightful reason to have a delay in writing this year in review post.
Interesting new projects this year included my first piece in The Atlantic, why we have so much confusion on writing the short form of "usual" and 103 languages reading project: inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia.
Continuations of existing projects:
Return of LingComm Grants
A survey for those using Because Internet for teaching
10 year Blogiversary of All Things Linguistic: highlights from the past year and highlights from the past decade
6 years of Lingthusiasm
Conferences/Talks
LSA 2022 and judging Five Minute Linguist
I was on panels about swearing in SFF and the Steerswoman books at a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation
I was on panels at WorldCon (ChiCon 8) in Chicago: Ask A Scientist, That's Not How That Works!, and Using SFF for Science Communication
I was a contestant for the second time in Webster's War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.
I attended the Australian Linguistics Society annual meeting in Melbourne and the New Zealand Linguistics Society annual meeting in Dunedin, where I gave a talk co-authored with Lauren Gawne called Using lingcomm to design meaningful stories about linguistics
Lingthusiasm
In our sixth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did a redesign of how the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are layed out in a chart, in order to correspond more closely with the principle that the location of a symbol is a key to how it's articulated. This involved much digging into the history of IPA layouts and back-and-forths with our artist, Lucy Maddox, and we were very pleased to make our aesthetic IPA design available on a special one-time edition of lens cloths for patrons as well as our general range of posters, tote bags, notebooks, and other all-time merch.
We also did our first Lingthusiasm audience survey and Spotify for some reason gave us end-of-year stats only in French, which I guess is on brand, but we were pleased to see notebooks, and Lingthusiasm is one of Spotify's top 50 Science podcastsF/href.li/?https:/www.redbubble.com%2Fi%2Fmouse-pad%2FAesthetic-IPA-Chart-Square-by-Lingthusiasm%2F129215087.G1FH6&t=OTkxYjYxYjNmMzA1M2VhNGViOGIxZWIxOGI0NDRjYjE2YTIzYTE2NCw2YTgzNDQyZTM3MzY0YjRkNjc3NGJkNzhhYzJhMzk3ZjA2Y2NkYzIz&ts=1684794278">other all-time merch!
Main episodes from this year
Making speech visible with spectrograms
Knowledge is power, copulas are fun.
Word order, we love
What it means for a language to be official
Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
What we can, must, and should say about modals
Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko
Various vocal fold vibes
What If Linguistics
The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory
Who questions the questions?
Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions
Bonus Episodes
We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more
Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference
Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics
Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular
What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫&
There’s like, so much to like about “like”
Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda
Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science
Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart - Interview with Lucy Maddox
Linguistics and science communication - Interview with Liz McCullough
103 ways for kids to learn languages
Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?
Selected Tweets
Linguistics Fun
aunt and niece languages
Swedish chef captions
IPA wordle
wordle vs kiki
creative use of emoji and space
resume glottal stop
dialects in a trenchcoat
which of these starter Pokemon is bouba and which is kiki
(for no author would use, because of the known rendolence of onions, onions)
acoustic bike
An extremely charming study by Bill Labov featuring a rabbit named Vincent
Rabbit Meme
Cheering on linguistics effects (Stroup and Kiki/Bouba) in a vote on the cutest scientific effect name
Old English Hrickroll
The word you get assigned with your linguistics degree
Sanskrit two-dimensional alphabet
Cognate Objects
Linguist Meetup in Linguaglossa?
baɪ ði eɪdʒ ʌv θɚti
j- prefixing
"But clerk, I am Bill Labov" (pagliacci meme)
Usual winner
Because Internet Tumblr vernacular
Linguist "Human" Costume
Cursed kiki/bouba
dot ellipsis vs comma ellipsis
intersection of signed languages and synesthesia?
Antipodean linguistic milestone
Selected Blog Posts:
Linguistic Jobs
Online Linguistics Teacher
Impact Lead
Customer Success Manager
Hawaiian and Tahitian language Instructor, Translator & Radio Host
Language Engineer
Data Manager & Digital Archivist
Linguistics fun
xkcd: neoteny recapitulated phylogeny
Eeyore Linguistic Facts
Lingthusiasm HQ: Frown Thing!
xkcd is making a vowel hypertrapezoid
Title: Ships and Ice Picks: An Ethnographic Excavation of alt.goncharov
Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.
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All Things Linguistic - 2021 Highlights
2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)
I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.
Media and crossovers
How Linguistics Can Help You Learn a Language – I did a talk for Duolingo’s DuoCon
Why do adults…over 40….use ellipses…so much? Crossover with Tim Blais of Acapella Science
xkcd Tower of Babel
Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French (video with Tom Scott)
PUZZLE SPOILERS: A quote from Because Internet in the New York Times acrostic
Someone made a crossword puzzle of Because Internet!
Peeking face, palm up, and palm down – the emoji I proposed with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel are now officially in Unicode 14.0 and will be coming to your devices in the next few years
Media
BBC Word of Mouth – The Shipping Forecast
I’m cited in a Wikipedia article about boomerspeak
I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period.
Lauren Gawne and I did a Lingthusiasm crossover appearance on the NPR show Ask Me Another, featuring two fun quiz segments, one on accepted or rejected emoji and one on famous book titles
Crash Course Linguistics
The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.
What is linguistics?
What is a word? Morphology
Syntax 1: Morphosyntax
Syntax 2:
Semantics
Pragmatics
Sociolinguistics
Phonetics 1: Consonants
Phonetics 2: Vowels
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Language acquisition
Language change and historical linguistics
World Languages
Computational Linguistics
Writing Systems
Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!
Lingthusiasm
In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:
Where to get your English etymologies (transcript)
Cool things about scales and implicature (transcript)
Corpus linguistics and consent – Interview with Kat Gupta (transcript)
That’s the kind of episode it’s – Clitics (transcript)
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind (transcript)
A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip (transcript)
Making machines learn Fon and other African languages – Interview with Masakhane (transcript)
Not NOT a negation episode (transcript)
R and R-like sounds – Rhoticity (transcript)
How linguists figure out the grammar of a language (transcript)
Listen to the imperatives episode! (transcript)
Writing is a technology (transcript)
And here are this year’s bonus episodes:
Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory
Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️
Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia
Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word
Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication
Language under the influence
Gotta test ‘em all – The linguistics of Pokémon names
Lingthusiasm liveshow: The listener talks back (on backchannelling)
Talking to babies and small children
The episode-episode (reduplication)
Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)
Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language and Because Internet
Slate’s Future Tense about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel.
I moderated a panel for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on NLP Applications for Crisis Management and Emergency Situations.
Contestant on Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House, and also attended online conferences,
guest interview about internet language on That Word Chat (summarized in tweet form)
The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern
Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma
Sotheby’s Level Up in Los Angeles (physical)
Unicode Conference in the San Francisco Bay Area (physical), where I did a keynote called “Taking Playfulness Seriously – When character sets are used in unexpected ways” (slides here!).
The Unicode talk isn’t online but a few days later I did a talk on the same topic for Bay Area NLP, for which the video is here.
Virtual talk for some internal folks at YouTube
Rosemary Mosco Talks to Gretchen McCulloch about Pigeons, a book event at Argo Bookshop
Conferences/events attended:
Linguistic Society of America (LSA) – did a Wikipedia editathon
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Dictionary Society of North America conference
Annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association
WorldCon (physical)
LingComm and LingFest
In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.
LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events.
Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
Designing online conferences for building community
Scheduling online conferences for building community
Hosting online conferences for building community
Budgeting online conferences or events
Planning accessible online conferences
Selected tweets
Books and more
A Memory Called Empire and the latest Murderbot novella, Fugitive Telemetry
The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book
History of Swear Words on Netflix
Helpful threads
Analysis of camera angles on tiktok vs youtube (a thread with, unexpectedly, Hank Green)
Generational differences on email salutations, a topic of never-ending public fascination
Threads on conference “homework” and zoom fatigue
Modulo and other obscure English prepositions (a thread)
robot voice in tone languages (short thread)
given that we’ve been living with a giant panda for the past year
Conversation styles
teach students how to email you
Lack of diversity in childhood language acquisition studies
Why kids these days don’t understand file systems
buy your older coworkers a nice linguistics book
A thread about research debt
vocal fry is completely fine
A many-layers-of-screencapped-post citing Because Internet on youth socialization made the front page of Reddit, so I’ve added some further reading
Linguistics fun
Happy feast day of St Gottschalk, patron saint of “languages, linguists, lost vocations, princes, translators”
A thread of linguistics versions of the roses are red meme
Ellipses in vintage recipes
Not Haunted: new favourite example of implicature
Vaccinated every 8 seconds: new favourite example of quantifier scope ambiguity
A bagel with cream cheese: new favourite example of structural ambiguity
In appfreciation opf pfinally being pfurnished with the Pfizer vaccine I will be pfroducing all opf my voiceless bilabial stopfs and pfricatives as apffricates pfor the next pfortnight.
“you may injure…” new favourite example of deontic vs epistemic modality
garden path ads
Linguistics takes on the “for the better, right?” Padme/Anakin meme
lips are a social construct
linguists are really not kidding when they say that your command of language enables you to understand sentences never before said by the human species: bacteria/Michelangelo edition
bouba vs. kiki outfits
tell Duolingo to add IPA
On average linguistics familiarity
linguistic phenomenon reducing capitalization
Zipf’s Law
phonetic boundary ambiguity: chris pratt
linguistics takes on the “did it hurt?” meme
Enweirdening words through AI magic
#MetGala2021 as linguistics books
haunted trunk implicature
emoji reaction research idea
Mario epenthesis
Japan’s new prime minister, Britney Spears crash blossom
red flag on unicode support
linguistics Halloween candy
IPA card catalog
memes and emojis are folklore
Canadian English spellcheck
boō, bōare season
Zoom linguistics studies incoming
linguist puzzles
phonetic beatboxing
is this outfit bouba or kiki
warblish
the feminine urge to make your adjectives agree with your nouns
linguists on a bus
General fun
business larping
Wellerman but in emoji
they taste bland when I fall
A thread of emoji poems
multiocular sideeyes emoji
A thread of linguistics-y place names
French accents and icicles on tiktok
Suez meme: ordinary conversation topics vs noticing something about the language
Convaxulations
A double dactyl about the www
A nice festive machine translation fail
The “CDC says” meme takes on linguistic discrimination
A limerick about my podcast
Dendronization
landline emojis
writing gifs by hand on paper
Hangul children’s book
“left to our own devices”
multi-time-zone days of the week
plamps
srùbag
phonetify wrapped: most used phoneme and zipfy unwrapped
glottal on a bottle
xkcd on relevance implicature: debunking
the linguist urge
Finnish pronouns and sarcasm
teach a person how to look up the etymology of “fish” and they learn for a lifetime
the Double Empathy problem
conjugating Christmas
Christmas plural you form
Pinguinuca and Antipinguinuca
verbing tetris
Grice’s maxim of relevance in photo caption directionality: male bison edition
Selected blog posts
I celebrated my ninth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:
Linguistics jobs
metadata specialist and genealogist
legislative drafter
technical writer
CEO of a SaaS company
social media lead (for NASA)
senior analyst
academic linguist
Linguistics fun
Linguistics Games online
“Indeed, old man” in Middle Egyptian
Linguistics Halloween jokes
Beatboxing in IPA
The kiki to bouba pipeline
Dinosaur Comics on the “I dunno” hum
Scuba, an exotic English word meaning “to keep breathing even though the water rises all around you”
Self-referential words for places of articulation
Languages
It’s Complicated/Because Internet on why teens socialize online
The fight to save Hawaii sign language from extinction
The art and science of beatboxing
The linguistics of hyperlinks
Pitch, intonation, and the role of technology in language description
The origin of language and interspecies communication
A McGill student and professor realized they both speak Mi’kmaq; it changed everything
ancient translation to badger
Pronouncing words in English (by Chinese speakers)
An interactive visual database for American Sign Language
On standard dialects
Meta and advice posts
Superlinguo’s year in review (involving many joint projects with me and also finally getting tenure!)
I reposted a classic “how to twitter” (from a social perspective) post of mine from 2016, which people tell me they still refer to occasionally
How to get started in writing pop linguistics, both short form (media articles) and long form (books)
How we made a better podcast website for Lingthusiasm
Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.
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