Had a great time at the Queer Linguistics Workshop at the 49th Austrian Linguistics Conference @uniklagenfurt.bsky.social!
Huge thanks to organizers Oliver Bunk, Nicholas Catasso, J. Mx Gaul & @vzie.bsky.social for making it possible! (Photo from Martin Stegu's talk)
🤔
Bernie Sanders keeps saying the most wrong headed about AI and paling around with Geoffery Hinton. We write more about it here --
buttondown.com/maiht3k/arch...
Next week at @unibonn.bsky.social, I’ll be talking about how the battle over gender-just language in Germany is often less about grammar and more about feeling, and why it matters for language scholars engaging in these debates.
Details in the flyer and in the link in thread if you are nearby! ⬇️
The Linguistic Justice Foundation is looking for 60 people to make a $5 monthly donation to help support our work pursuing linguistic justice for everyone. Please donate if you can, shar eif you can't.
www.zeffy.com/en-US/donati...
Spotted at Ames No Kings 🫶
It’s on
In our nation’s capitol promoting gender ideology ✅
Anyone else in the US having serious delays receiving int’l mail? Several simple letters from Germany have taken 2+ months to arrive recently…other direction is fine, maybe even faster than usual 🤔
Antifa
I feel this needs to be said again but LLMs are not implementing usage-based theories of language unless one interprets the latter in the shallowest, devoid of their most interesting assumptions, way. “Usage” is not just frequency ffs.
here's Eric Trump saying "they" at least 10 times in under 30 seconds
Week 4 of American Kindergarten going just about as expected ✅ 🏈
Trans people are worth protecting. Not because we are amazing people (although we are) or because we offer a great deal to society (although we do) or because we are fine as hell (we are). We are worth protecting because we are HUMAN BEINGS, and it’s amazing how often that simple fact is forgotten.
If you're going to send me something written by an LLM then save us all time and resources and just send me your prompt instead. I'll value a text that says "Heartfelt condolence message with reference to a list of events" more, because this way I at least actually know what you were thinking
Just out: new article on gender-just language across 8 first-year German textbooks. I was (mostly) pleasantly surprised!
🙏 to editors Katherine Kerschen, Claire Scott, and @spracheistleben.bsky.social for this special issue on trans and non-binary identity! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
"It's unclear if this research matters because real users speak English and Chinese" has got to be up there for worst dismissive takes about how multilingual doesn't matter.
40% of Norway finalists, for example, were nixed by the state department for ideological reasons. www.insidehighered.com/news/global/...
Worth sharing again as Universities start to share congratulatory posts about Fulbright awardees…
FischerKing @FischerKing64 Subscribe English will be the common be the international language for the foreseeable future. It has almost no grammar that is really important. It's just a group words cobbled ogether from around the world. It's easy to learn. Iits only problem is that it's hard to spell because of Il the historical interludes. It has 26 letters that most people know anyway. Chinese or anything like it has no chance. No one wants to learn 3,000 characters or hieroglyphs to read a newspaper. The Chinese won't even want to learn tt long run. You could think of English as a proto-Al - a first step toward artificial intelligence that made us able to communicate seamlessly, while also making us all stupid. 4:45 PM. 22Jul 25 . 356K Views
Amazing things are happening on X: The Everything App
Very excited that the Special Issue of Die Unterrichtspraxis/Teaching German on trans and non-binary issues in the L2 German classroom is coming together! The full special issue will be released in the fall 25 issue but articles are coming out. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17561221...
#linguistics
mais loch ☠️
It’s a cow, you’re welcome
Well
BREAKING: Scientists are staging a “science fair” in the lobby of a Congressional building to tell elected officials about the critical knowledge the US will lose because their research grants have been canceled.
Entrance iwh with cringe poster
Second conference day about to begin, we are looking forward to talks by @larshinrichs.site, @heidevolkening.bsky.social, @ldpres.bsky.social, @theresaheyd.bsky.social, @ryfountain.bsky.social and Chloé Thomas.
Cringe in dialectological fieldwork, Bad Poetry, neopronoun affect, and more!
heute im Buchstabenmuseum ❤️🔥
conference poster with details, see https://uebercringe.de/tagung-ueber-cringe/
Next week: conference time! We look forward to an interdisciplinary exploration of ambivalent affects and everyday aesthetics:
July 7 to 9 at @uniheidelberg.bsky.social as well as online!
Keynote: Teresa Pratt (SFSU), Language and affect in interaction and performance
