2026 LingComm Grants â Small Grants for Communicating Linguistics to Wider Audiences
We want to see more linguistics in the world!Â
The 2026 LingComm Grants are $300 (USD) to support linguistics communication projects that bring pop linguistics to broader audiences in new and engaging ways. The grants also include a mentoring meeting with Gretchen McCulloch, Lauren Gawne, and/or an experienced lingcommer who we have personally selected to be relevant to your project to ask your lingcomm process questions, and promotion of your project to our lingthusiastic audience.Â
We have six $300 LingComm Grants on any topic related to linguistics and an additional $300 Kirby Conrod and Friends LGBTQ+ LingComm Grant.
The initial grants are funded by Lingthusiasm, thanks to the kind support of our patrons, and judged by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. You can help fund the grants and other LingComm projects here. Additional grants in 2026 were funded thanks to Daniel Currie Hall, Sarah Kelen, Lukas Graf, Rob Monarch and other anonymous donors.
Please apply and/or share with any up and coming lingcommers you know!
For more information, and to apply, visit the Grants page of the LingComm website.
To stay in the loop on LingComm, we have a LingComm Google Groups mailing list.
Bonus 97: Rock, paper, scissors, Gesture book, and a secret project - Survey results and general updates
In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about two sets of updates!
First, results from the 2024 listener survey. We learned which one of us you think is more kiki and more bouba, an utterly nonsensical question that you nonetheless had 80/20 agreement on! We also learned about heart gestures and variants on rock, paper, scissors (or paper, scissors, rock) in many different languages.
Plus, we used results from all three years of listener surveys to create a massive blog post of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics, if you're looking for more linguistics options!
Second, our years in review and some upcoming things:
Lauren has finally finished writing her academic book about gesture and you can get Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press later this month (that's late March 2025 for people reading from the future). If academic books aren't quite your jam (extremely reasonably), stay tuned for the fun highlights version on an upcoming Lingthusiasm episode!
Gretchen had a big trip in Europe last year including the launch of the Spanish edition of Because Internet, started learning American Sign Language (ASL), and has also been working a lot on a mysterious secret project which can't be announced in public yet (ooooooh~~). It's thanks to the support of patrons that we can do projects like this before they're bringing in revenue on their own so stay tuned for further announcements once we're allowed to talk about it :)
Together, we also co-authored two academic articles in 2024 about the meta aspects of doing linguistics communication with broader audiences (an important part of convincing Lauren's job that it's worth her spending time still making the podcast). They're called: 'Towards a theory of linguistic curiosity: applying linguistic frameworks to lingcomm and scicomm' Â and 'Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics'Â (with a big team from Crash Course Linguistics).
Listen to this episode about our 2024 survey results and general updates, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
A vision for the field - How to frame a plenary talk
This is a post about how I think about plenary/keynote talks at conferences, brought to you by a friend asking for ideas on their plenary, expanded on as a thread on Bluesky (yeah I guess we're on Bluesky now), and repeated here for archival purposes because I think it might be useful for others!
First, a definition of terms: I'm using plenary to mean a big talk that's not cross-scheduled against anything else at a conference, thus implicitly aimed at all attendees at the conference. I think a keynote is basically the same but academic conferences tend to call it a plenary, at least in linguistics. I'm framing it around linguistics for the sake of having a few concrete examples and because that's what I work in, but people have already been telling me that they think it applies to other fields as well.
The thing I always hope for from a plenary is a vision for the field.
This is your chance to get people excited about work in a particular direction or that addresses a particular type of question!
The impact that a plenary can have is to fire people up:
inspire people to work or collaborate on that area
encourage people to pay attention to work in that area or be able to tell people about work in that area
give people who are already working on an area renewed energy on why it's important
The plenaries I've really liked are generally framed around "why". Why do this work? Why have I spent decades of my life on this?
Which leads into more detailed findings about a few specific things, to get people up to speed if they're unfamiliar or contextualize work into a bigger picture for people who are relatively familiar.
And then back out to why and hopes for future directions.
I say that a plenary is about an area or topic rather than a subfield because highlighting an approach or methodology or value system or something is also a great way of doing a plenary (and a whole subfield is possibly too broad anyway). Some examples:
Why is it important to look at this particular language, variety, or family?
Why is it interesting to do research at the intersection of these two areas, how can they cross-pollinate each other?
Why approach language using (a particular approach) as baseline?
This "why" structure of a plenary often fits nicely with a bit of personal reflection on how you got interested in the topic in the first place and how you situate yourself in the history of the field, especially as plenaries are often given by people relatively senior to a field who were there for (and indeed created) some of the history that more junior people might not know about.
However, this is not to be confused with a common historicizing template for plenaries that ALMOST works: "this is what I've done". Better to fit that retrospective into "this is why I've done it and what I hope other people can do as a result". You've been doing this for decades, surely there was a reason why! (If you've forgotten what this is because you've been too close to the nitty-gritty details for too long, sometimes asking a few friends or colleagues can help.)
People also have challenges with figuring out what level a plenary should be pitched at:
How much background information should the speaker assume the audience has, when they can vary from students to senior professors?
In my opinion, the level of assumed background knowledge of a plenary talk at a general linguistics conference should be pitched around first year grad student, for two reasons:
There are students in the audience!
Profs who don't specialize in the topic probably last touched it in grad school (which might have been 30 years ago)
You can scale this level of assumed background knowledge up or down depending on how niche the conference is. For example, a plenary at a phonetics conference can assume more specific phonetics knowledge, and at a general scicomm conference, it needs to assume much less shared background knowledge (people probably know about academic journals and statistical significance but not concepts specific to a field).
But in any case, it is a great idea to include a slide or two getting everyone on the same page about what some key concepts are. Even if you think half the room knows it already, people don't mind seeing familiar info as much as you think they do (in fact, if they're super experienced then they probably also have to explain it to unfamiliar people sometimes, so it's helpful for their own explanations to see a nice summary definition!)
In my opinion, the ideal state to leave an audience member in after a plenary address is somewhere on the spectrum of "now I'm all fired up to keep doing this work" to "I never thought about doing work in this area before but now I sorta want to do so?"
Summary: A plenary is a chance to think about the unifying threads animating why you've been doing what you do and where you hope it leads. In other words, what's the positive subtweet that you wish you could give the field? Sometimes people grumble to a few friends "I wish people would care about x". Well, here's a chance to reframe that into: "here's what it could look like when we care about x".
Also, Amy Plackowski added a helpful comment on bluesky that if there is a theme of the conference then the plenary should connect in some way! (I'd say it's useful to make this connection explicit at the beginning and end of the talk.)
My illustration, (recently titled "GaaḾ (Raven)") which was commissioned by the @endangeredlanguagesproject based on the theme of language revitalization will be on display at the International Conference on Linguistics Communication 2023, starting tomorrow. The event is held on @gather_town, a very cool digital space that gives total video game vibes and you can interact with me, view the artwork, and/or read about it. I'll be popping in and out over the course of the multi-day event.
Iâve read âShady Characters. The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marksâ by Keith Houston
This book was published in 2014. It cronicles the histories of several punctuation marks and other typographical characters of English. There are chapters on the pilcrow Âś, the interrobang â˝, the octothorpe #, the ampersand &, the @ symbol, the asterisk * and dagger â , the hyphen -, the dash â, the manicule â, quotation marks ââ and typographic depictions of irony.
In many of the chapters you can read about the origins of additional typographic marks. So if youâre wondering (like I did) why Houston wouldnât want to tell me about the comma, donât worry. Itâs in there. I especially enjoyed learning about the origins of the @ symbol and its associations with trading. I was not the biggest fan of the chapter on irony, especially irony on the *~internet~*, but oh well.
I found the book educational and entertaining. You learn a lot about stuff that is not technically typographical. But that is to be expected, since Houston wants to accurately set the scene for the contexts in which every mark was created and how it has developed ever since.
There are just the right amount of graphics in the book to depict certain marks in old manuscripts or variations of marks such as the ampersand.
I was especially fond of the colour work: While the whole text is (expectedly) set in a black font, all the âspecialâ typographical marks (not stops or commas, though) are set in red:
[Depicted above is a photo of part of a book page. All the typographical marks such as asterisks, daggers etc. appear in red when they are part of the main text.]
The book ends with a small annotated further reading section and a vast notes section full of further further readings.
I recommend âShady Charactersâ to all typography nerds and fans of historical graphematics and punctuation. From reading this, you will learn when to use which dash (what the heck, english?), a lot about the people working at the library of Alexandria and the consequences of limited space on typewriters.
I did some livetweeting while reading here (in German), if youâre interested in such things.
