Our Book Symposium sees sociolinguists across the world engage in dialogue on 2 recent, innovative volumes in the field (Decolonizing Linguistics; and Inclusion in Linguistics), both edited by Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz 📚
acharityhudley.bsky.social
Language shapes everything, from how we think to how we connect and innovate.
Linguists are essential to understanding communication, and to creating ethical, responsible AI. We need more linguists.
#TalkAboutSocialSciences #TalkAboutHumanities
Yea increasingly it’s a case of good luck if you don’t work on English. Market forces narrow the scholarly scope.
Our own Prof Claire Nance of @lancslinguistics.bsky.social was on BBC Breakfast this morning talking about changes to local accents, including here in Lancaster 🗣️💬
Watch the segment now from 1hr 50m, or look out for her on BBC North West Tonight this evening!
Exit polls won't/can't be published until the last voter standing in each & every queue has voted. Yet regular polls can be published anytime & two big ones are expected at 7PM. They are expected to show extremely high turnout among young voters and a possible Tisza 2/3 majority
One week from today! We hope you’ll join us to learn about some amazing language revitalization work in Sierra Leone:
In your face, former Air Canada CEO
I am shocked to see this language from the NSF.
“The U.S. National Science Foundation's Fiscal Year 2027 Budget Request reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment while eliminating woke and weaponized grant programs that previously funded radical DEI projects.”
Great article—if you want to know why so many universities, even across oceans, are singing the same tune, look to the consultants selling them the same plans! I like this point that the same-ness distills down to the department and class level too. we all become fungible units.
Just out in #earlyview from Amanda Cole, this innovative paper draws on multiple investigation strands to offer methodological advancements in dialect identification tasks, highlighting the importance of social meaning in perceptual processes. Check it out below #openaccess !
One for the undergraduate #French #sociolinguistics courses…
A cartoon showing soldiers sitting in a transport plane with jump door open. One soldier asks "Where are we heading, sarge?". The soldier next to him answers "Not sure. But @DonnieJunior just made a $150M Polymarket bet on Kharg Island beachfront futures. By Wintersart (substack.com@wintersart).
This is all too real. These days, satire is just news but in teaser format.
Christmas Number 1, 2009, with good reason!
Unfounded claims abound on social media but are rejected by Al chatbots % of social media posters, general population and Al chatbot responses that support each statement • Strong agree Agree Neutral / no response J Disagree Strong disagree "Vaccines may be a cause of autism" Social media General population Al chatbots "Much of our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places" Social media General population Al chatbots "The Covid pandemic was part of a global effort to force everyone to be vaccinated" Social media General population Al chatbots "The number of people reported as dying from Covid was deliberately exaggerated by the authorities" Social media General population Al chatbots Source: FT analysis of the Co-operative Election Study. For social media, data reflects the views of people who post political content. Each of the most widely-used Al chatbots was asked each question 100 times with a range of user personas FT graphic: John Burn-Murdoch / @jburnmurdoch
Here’s a bit of analysis from @jburnmurdoch.ft.com showing chatbots are less likely to serve up misinformation than social media. So if this is how people are going to start consuming information it may be a moderating force towards factualness. Who thought that LLMs might be a force for truth?!
Just published / newydd wedi'i gyhoeddi / díreach foilsithe:
Report of Commission for Welsh-speaking Communities on medium and lower density areas for Welsh.
www.gov.wales/commission-w...
We are fast moving from cold spots to blackout. This is not trivial and the impact in terms of access to languages education will be inter generational. How do you “level up” or promote “growth” without a multilingual workforce and the know-how to deploy? www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
biggest solidarity to the Department ot Languages and Intercultural Studies (LINCS) at Heriot-Watt University (Edinburgh): heriotwatt.web.ucu.org.uk/2026/02/04/d...
please sign their petition and send them any support they need, this is part of a UK-wide attack on languages education!
None of this is normal.
Warnings from experts, learned associations, the APPG etc continue to go unheard as universities walk blindly into a strategy blackhole for language capabilities that will have intergenerational impact. @hetanshah.bsky.social @ucflangs.bsky.social @darrenpaffey.bsky.social @drbeckymt.bsky.social
🚨Save Languages at the University of Essex 🚨 #langsky #linguistics
UoE plans to cut German, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese + all evening classes and merge Language and Linguistics with a larger unit. Only 2 languages will remain next October. Please sign our letter:
tinyurl.com/SaveLingLang...
Today, we're shining a spotlight on Language & Linguistics - one of the founding departments of the University of Essex, and a very strong department on the national scale, and - as part of a cynical and short-sighted cost-cutting exercise - a department slated for 50% cuts by VC Frances Bowen.
👀 2 documentaires en partie sur les accents et sur Marseille cette semaine :
▪️ Lundi 9 à 23h20, "Avé l'accent", documentaire diffusé sur Paris-Première (en partie sur la discrimination à l'accent)
▪️ Mercredi 11 à 17h20, "Invitation au voyage" sur Arte : "Le marseillais, c'est aussi une langue"
L’anglonormativité est en excellente santé
(Ou: comment dire je me fous pas mal de vous sans dire je me fous pas mal de vous)
A new series of Stori'r Iaith, the S4C programme that explores the history of the Welsh language, starts today. Ep 1 was filmed at Jesus and features several of Oxford's Celtic scholars. Watch the programme live at 9PM or on catch-up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0n1q6c0 Subtitles available.
The Journal of Sociolinguistics Editorial Board were saddened to learn of Deborah Cameron's passing earlier this year. We are grateful to Don Kulick for writing this obituary - a moving account of Debbie's brilliance, and a friendship that spanned decades:
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
New on APLV: Đinhet al., Registers in the Bahnar dialects in Vietnam: A sociophonetic study. benjamins.com/catalog/aplv...
#Reform throwing a wobbly this AM about #Green election literature printed in a multilingual format (“in #Urdu”). I can’t see the problem with widening democratic participation and this makes perfect sense. #Reform monolingual candidate clearly didn’t represent the constituency. #GortonandDenton
when i keep saying that language technologies enable the expansion of surveillance and monitoring that simply would not have been feasible previously making shitty jobs even shittier — this is what i mean
🥳 The latest issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics is here! February's issue contains a brilliant and wide-ranging set of orginial research in Sociolinguistics, including the indexicality of 'bad' schools in Chicago, variable ING in Australian indigenous boarding schools... (1/3)
