Sociolinguo @sociolinguo - Tumblr Blog

aymmgreen

the audacity of a tiktok filter not accepting the correct pronunciation from a literal korean 😭😭

psychotic-gerard

x

kiragecko

[Image of text saying,

Some AAVE speakers pluralize 'child' as 'childrens'. People get racist about this ("It's already plural!"), but 'children' actually comes from Middle English speakers doing the same thing: slapping their plural marker on word already pluralized by an extinct plural marker.

To oversimplify: in Old English, 'childer' ('ċildra') was the plural of 'child' ('ċild'). Middle English developed an '-en' plural marker, which we see in 'oxen'. Instead of updating to 'childen', people slapped their preferred '-en' onto the end of 'childer' - so now we have 'child-er-en'. AAVE carries on this tradition with 'child-er-en-s'.

"Pure" language is just impurity obscured by the passage of time.

End ID.]

fansplaining

For fans in Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, “uncringing” non-English fanfiction is an endeavor in decolonialism.

Our latest piece is live! The brilliant Soila Kenya writes about the dominance of English in fandom and especially fanfiction spaces, and why for her and the fellow fans she interviewed from Kenya, Nigeria, and Burundi, this is partly about the global dominance of English-language pop culture, but especially about the legacies of colonialism:

The deep psychological imprints of this language disparity remain. And therefore, when I encountered fanfiction, it didn’t even occur to me that there were fanfics written in any language but English, let alone Swahili or any of the 42 indigenous languages in Kenya.

Click through to read the whole piece or listen to a full audio version! And if you enjoy it, please consider becoming a (free) member or especially a paying subscriber—we want to commission more pieces from Soila and other smart writers and we need your help to pay them!

(As a reminder, we have a discount rate for anyone who wants it, no questions asked—if you're a student, educator, un/underemployed, have a lower income, or literally any other reason, just email [email protected] and we're happy to provide!)

elizabethminkel

This piece is SO good—absolutely worth your time to read or listen (I always love hearing the writers read their work, but since the focus of this piece is language, it was especially great hearing Soila read it). If you enjoy it, please share widely: I know what Soila writes here will resonate with so many people across fandom.

bookshop

Just seconding the love for this piece! It really is SO tremendously worth your time.

Soila was one of my favorite WorldCon panelists last year and here she's written a really thoughtful but also extremely enjoyable treatise on what can sometimes be the "cringe" effect of reading—let alone writing!—fics in your native tongue.

I found this piece so engrossing, delightfully wry, provocative, and educational. It makes me so happy and proud to be a part of this era of Fansplaining.

Specific genomic regions that seem to play a role in human language development evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago, before humans an

"The researchers discovered that Neanderthals also had HAQERs, and that they may have been even more prominent than those found in humans today. This doesn’t necessarily mean Neanderthals had language, but it suggests they had the genetic mechanisms in place in order for it to develop.

However, some experts take a more skeptical view of the role HAQERs might have played in Neanderthals and early humans. Though today the genetic sequences appear to be associated with language ability, they may have initially developed for some other reason."

#language #linguistics #HAQERs

In a preregistered experiment involving 500 participants, individuals assigned to report symptoms to a chatbot produced significantly lower-

"Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are increasingly used for self-triage and medical advice seeking. Accurate AI performance, however, hinges on how users interact with such consumer-facing applications. While previous research has identified reservations regarding AI-generated medical advice, earlier stages of human–AI interaction, such as how symptoms are communicated, remain largely unexplored. In a preregistered between-subject experiment (n = 500), participants were randomly assigned to provide simulated symptom reports for common medical conditions to either an AI chatbot or a human physician. We evaluated the quality of the reports for an initial medical urgency assessment using physician-validated large language model-based suitability metrics. Participants who believed they were interacting with an AI tool (versus a physician) provided lower-quality symptom reports for medical triage. Our findings indicate a bias in how users communicate symptoms in digital settings. This outcome could compromise the performance of consumer-facing AI tools in real-world applications, regardless of the underlying model’s actual capacity."

#language #linguistics #human-AI interaction

Navajo Highways, a groundbreaking Navajo-language children’s series and original production from First Nations Experience, has received two

"Navajo Highways, a groundbreaking Navajo-language children’s series and original production from First Nations Experience, has received two Emmy Award nominations from the Pacific Southwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The series is nominated in the Informational/Instructional – Short Form or Long Form Content category and for Best Set Design, recognizing both its educational impact and production excellence.

Created by Pete Sands, Navajo Highways introduces young audiences to Navajo culture and language through storytelling, puppetry, and vibrant characters. The series follows Sadie, a young girl from an urban background, as she reconnects with her family and heritage in the fictional community of Mitten Creek. Along the way, Sadie learns traditional values, Diné Bizaad (Navajo language), and cultural teachings from her relatives and a host of Indigenous guest stars."

#Navajo #linguistics #language #Indigenous languages

The Arabic influence in Spain is big, but it's also important in Mexico, and not just because 8% of the Spanish language has Arabic origins.

"It is fascinating to find that the name of Mexico’s most beloved religious figure, La Virgen de Guadalupe, has neither a Spanish nor an Indigenous origin, but an Arabic one. The devotion to our Lady of Guadalupe was brought by Hernán Cortés himself. Although the Arab occupation of Spain had ended by the time he left for the Americas, it left deep remnants in his home region of Extremadura."

#language #linguistics #Spanish #Arabic

The discovery uncovers new insights into how English spread and evolved over time, the researchers say.

"To be clear, this is the third discovered copy of the poem Hymn by Caedmon the cowherd. The manuscript was included in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People by Bede, a northern English monk, and dates between the years 800 and 830. Although the two previously found copies are slightly older, these were mostly written in Latin with some Old English in the margins or at the end. By contrast, the newest discovery has the poem’s main body text in Old English, demonstrating a growing interest in the language at the time, according to a recent study on the findings, published in Early Medieval England and its Neighbours."

#language #linguistics #poetry

These data consist of newly OCRed and annotated narratives, both autobiographical texts written by, and interviews with, formerly enslaved p

"These data consist of newly OCRed and annotated narratives, both autobiographical texts written by, and interviews with, formerly enslaved persons of African descent in the United States of America and the Caribbean, including extensive time-related and geographical metadata. The texts authored by these individuals span from the years 1795 to approximately 1900, while the interviews were conducted in the 1930s. The former are written in standardised English from that time, whereas the latter often are written down in mediated, vernacular form, causing issues in lemmatisation and part-of-speech tagging. The aim is to create openly accessible corpora that can be utilised for the purpose of researching how these formerly enslaved persons described their own lives."

#language #linguistics #corpora

"There is a particular grief to being a bilingual writer, having access to words and worlds that cannot be easily shared," writes Juliet Fai

"Which brings me back to my mother’s tongue. I no longer see my mother’s invented word, “tengerous,” as a mistake. It is a creative solution, a neologism. Having more than one language in your head, on your lips and at your fingertips makes you flexible, sharpens your ear and lengthens your reach. Until one day, you may even touch your nose."

#language #linguistics

You’ve heard "12" used for cops…but why that number? Here’s the origin of the slang and why it stuck.

""12" isn’t the only slang term for police, but it is one of the more unusual ones, largely because of how unclear its backstory remains. Most other nicknames for officers can be loosely tied to cultural moments, changes in language, or specific historical contexts."

#language #linguistics #12 #slang

Writer, poet, and translator Laura Marcos outlines the Asturian-language literary scene and its social, cultural, and political context.

"Last year, writer Miguel Rodríguez Monteavaro brought contemporary Asturian writers to new readerships with his bilingual anthology Para alêm dos glaciares e do cemitério de sóis, presenting work by twenty-two Asturian poets translated into Portuguese by Jorge Melícias. And writers of every generation recently came together to found an Asturian chapter of PEN International, which we hope to see up and running in the near future."

#Asturian #language #linguistics #literature

The terminology of the US-Israel war on Iran is drawn from a range of linguistic origins.

"The terminology of the US-Israel war on Iran is drawn from a range of linguistic origins. From “Epic Fury” to “Kafir” and “Hormuz”, there are stories behind what these words mean and where they come from. Al Jazeera’s Alma Milisic and Basel Ghazoghli break down some of the terms."

#language #linguistics #Iran

My family moved eight times before I turned eleven. The biggest of those moves took place when I was three, when my parents moved us from Si

"The funny thing about all this talk of being Asian and therefore perceived as transparent, or being a translator and therefore required to be transparent, is that in Yau Ching’s words 愈坐愈透明, the words we chose for the title, for now I am sitting here growing transparent, it is the speaker of the poem who insists on her own transparency, a transparency that has not been imposed on her:

the world is big and for now I am

sitting here growing transparent

Whether applied to Asian Americans or to literary translators, transparency is framed as an inherent quality, an immutable aspect of a person’s identity—but in Yau Ching’s poem, transparency is a process, a way of being in the here and now over and against the vastness of the world. The poem from which these words are drawn is called “Spacetime” 時空, and one of its opening lines reads: “The English word longing has length in it.” Yau Ching puns on the long vowel in the Cantonese word 長, mirrored in my translation by the long vowel in the word “longing.” This is one of the poems that, to my mind, demonstrate the self-translating quality of Yau Ching’s work, its easy fluency with both of Hong Kong’s official languages."

#language #linguistics #translation #Cantonese #English #Mandarin

Long before modern debates, immigration was already transforming English into the distinctive way Americans speak today.

"Key Takeaways

The American accent emerged from early cultural mixing, especially in the more diverse and tolerant middle colonies of the Quakers.

German and Scots Irish immigrants left lasting marks on American pronunciation and dialects.

Despite historical fears dating back to the late 18th century, immigration has consistently strengthened and reshaped English in America."

#language #linguistics #English #accents #America #American English

"Iran is one of the most linguistically diverse countries in the Middle East. Researchers estimate that about 79 living languages exist in the country, including more than 65 Indigenous tongues.

Many of these languages belong to the Iranian language group related to Persian. Kurdish, spoken by millions of people in western Iran, is one of the largest minority languages."

#Iran #language #linguistics

We speak to Salvador Navarrete (AKA Sega Bodega) and Mayah Alkhateri about Palestinian poetry, the Backstreet Boys, and the songs that made

"Something strange happened while Salvador Navarrete (AKA Sega Bodega) and Mayah Alkhateri – partners both in life and in music – were making Kiss Facility’s debut album, Khazna. Galway-born Navarrete doesn’t speak a word of Arabic, but when he heard UAE-raised Alkhateri’s lyrics for dreamy techno cut “Kotshena”, he immediately began describing the exact image she was singing about. “It was honestly scary,” Alkhateri tells Dazed, laughing in disbelief. Navarrete, however, found a deeper meaning in the interaction: “Sometimes you don’t even need to be heard to be understood. That’s why music is so powerful. Once it’s done and you hand it over to people, they understand what you’re saying – even when they don’t know they understand.”"

#music #language #linguistics

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Sociolinguo