Listened to an auto-voice read a NYTimes article to me (thanks to my workplace for the free Times subscription!, major perk!). "Minneapolis-St. Paul" was read as "Minneapolis Street. Paul."

It used to be called juvenile diabetes, which was confusing because adults can get type 1, and because kids can get type 2. It was renamed to avoid this confusion.

Sometimes people even falsely assume that T1s were “born with it” because they expand on the confusing word “genetic.” I wasn’t born with it! I got it at age 25

The only really unfortunate thing about the movie is it might lead her to falsely believe that scientists and astronauts are all white dudes 😭 we talked about that a bit afterward

We didn’t exactly plan to let her watch this. We were watching it (with our infant son) while she was hanging out with grandma in the next room, but she wandered in a few times and seemed interested. It’s a really good movie and the plot is pretty easy for a kid to follow, in broad strokes

Let our 2.5-year-old watch her first movie - Apollo 13! She only saw 15 minutes of it because she was also playing, but she definitely understood the plot (after we explained it to her) - “that little girl” (a minor character to whom she relates) “is sad because her daddy’s spaceship is broken.”

Sounds like very interesting saga. I hope you consider using ASR (Marcus Ma’s Bed Word!) plus post correction for the transcription!

I keep thinking about how the “big beautiful bill” violates the general rule (Scontras et al!) that more subjective adjectives typically appear further away from the noun that they modify. Normally it would be “beautiful big bill”

I’m in a Facebook group about type 1 diabetes and someone has lamented that it’s a real shame that “AI” has not found a cure for it yet and I am just wondering what they think AI is 🤔

Thanks to my undergrad research team, the reviewers/editor for feedback, & above all to our speakers for sharing their language, stories, and time with us. /end, thx for reading!

TL;DR: Asian Americans are leading the (pan-regional, pan-ethnic) Low-Back Merger Shift in Georgia. Perhaps this accent is rising across regions and ethnicities precisely because it is not strongly linked to any specific region/ethnicity & thus connotes cosmopolitanism. 6/

These speakers project elite education & cosmopolitanism, while associating regionally-specific accents with lower education & ethnic insularity. Here's my favorite quote, from "Charles." 5/

More broadly, I argue that speakers' metalinguistic commentary sheds light on the social meanings that may be driving the rise of the Low-Back Merger Shift across regions & ethnicities (displacing regionally/racially-specific White ethnolects like the Southern & the Northern Cities Vowel Shifts). 4/

These results are consistent with other descriptions of the speech of Asian Americans. One new finding here is that these results extend to South Asian Americans as well as East Asian Americans. 3/

Social Meanings of the Low-Back-Merger Shift among Young Asian Americans in Georgia This article analyzes the vowel systems of 56 Asian American college students in Atlanta, Georgia, with reference to 26 Black and 125 White peers. With the greatest overlap between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ and the...

In a study of 56 Asian American young adults (compared to White & Black peers), Asian Americans are at the forefront of the Low-Back Merger Shift, with the lowest/backest TRAP vowel & the greatest LOT/THOUGHT overlap (but a backer GOAT & a lower/backer pre-nasal HAND vowel than White peers). 2/

happy to share a new paper drawing on the work of my undergrad research team (Language & Identity in the New South)! "Social Meanings of the Low-Back-Merger Shift among Young Asian Americans in Georgia", *American Speech*. 1/

it is a textbook. it's supposed to welcome computer-confident folks to appreciate the richness of language data while also empowering humanities-confident folks to learn more computational tools!

How to Examine Your Marriage and Your Life Podcast Episode · Honestly with Bari Weiss · 05/27/2025 · 1h 10m

Podcast episode is here podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/h...

One for @dailynous.com: Agnes Callard on Bari Weiss’s podcast discussing her philosophy of her complicated personal life. I took Agnes’s class in 2011

Adorable language progress from my 2-year-old.

On her baby brother’s hiccups: “He’s hicking up.” (She parsed “hiccup” as a particle verb like “pick up”!)

Seeing me and Dad folding laundry: “I want to play laundry with you” (as if we play with it like she plays with toys)

great resource! For a gentle intro to some ideas from NLP (which I think linguists benefit from knowing about!), my coauthored Language and Computers book is also open access! langsci-press.org/catalog/book...

Other stuff provided by hosts: trash bags, Keurig pods. Other stuff provided by guests: mini dumbbells, sunscreen (both of which we use in our house daily).

We are staying in an AirBnB this summer in California while renting out own Atlanta house on AirBnB. It’s interesting what stuff is considered essential to be provided by the hosts (dish soap, hair dryer which I never use) and what stuff guests are supposed to get themselves (toothpaste).

Congratulations!!

Greetings from my first day on BlueSky (2025), which reminds me of my first day on Facebook (2005), when I thought that Facebook would be a fleeting trend like MySpace and Xanga (and now maybe also X/Twitter). How wrong I was, & how interesting that different platforms have such different lifespans.