2022 was a year of opening up again and laying foundations for future projects. I spent the final 3 months of it on an extended trip to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a delightful reason to have a delay in writing this year in review post.
Interesting new projects this year included my first piece in The Atlantic, why we have so much confusion on writing the short form of "usual" and 103 languages reading project: inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia.
Continuations of existing projects:
Return of LingComm Grants
A survey for those using Because Internet for teaching
10 year Blogiversary of All Things Linguistic: highlights from the past year and highlights from the past decade
6 years of Lingthusiasm
Conferences/Talks
LSA 2022 and judging Five Minute Linguist
I was on panels about swearing in SFF and the Steerswoman books at a local literary speculative fiction con, Scintillation
I was on panels at WorldCon (ChiCon 8) in Chicago: Ask A Scientist, That's Not How That Works!, and Using SFF for Science Communication
I was a contestant for the second time in Webster's War of the Words, a virtual game show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House.
I attended the Australian Linguistics Society annual meeting in Melbourne and the New Zealand Linguistics Society annual meeting in Dunedin, where I gave a talk co-authored with Lauren Gawne called Using lingcomm to design meaningful stories about linguistics
Lingthusiasm
In our sixth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did a redesign of how the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are layed out in a chart, in order to correspond more closely with the principle that the location of a symbol is a key to how it's articulated. This involved much digging into the history of IPA layouts and back-and-forths with our artist, Lucy Maddox, and we were very pleased to make our aesthetic IPA design available on a special one-time edition of lens cloths for patrons as well as our general range of posters, tote bags, notebooks, and other all-time merch.
We also did our first Lingthusiasm audience survey and Spotify for some reason gave us end-of-year stats only in French, which I guess is on brand, but we were pleased to see notebooks, and Lingthusiasm is one of Spotify's top 50 Science podcastsF/href.li/?https:/www.redbubble.com%2Fi%2Fmouse-pad%2FAesthetic-IPA-Chart-Square-by-Lingthusiasm%2F129215087.G1FH6&t=OTkxYjYxYjNmMzA1M2VhNGViOGIxZWIxOGI0NDRjYjE2YTIzYTE2NCw2YTgzNDQyZTM3MzY0YjRkNjc3NGJkNzhhYzJhMzk3ZjA2Y2NkYzIz&ts=1684794278">other all-time merch!
Main episodes from this year
Making speech visible with spectrograms
Knowledge is power, copulas are fun.
Word order, we love
What it means for a language to be official
Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
What we can, must, and should say about modals
Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko
Various vocal fold vibes
What If Linguistics
The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory
Who questions the questions?
Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions
Bonus Episodes
We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more
Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ - Dispatches from the Unicode Conference
Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics
Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular
What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫&
There’s like, so much to like about “like”
Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda
Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science
Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart - Interview with Lucy Maddox
Linguistics and science communication - Interview with Liz McCullough
103 ways for kids to learn languages
Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?
Selected Tweets
Linguistics Fun
aunt and niece languages
Swedish chef captions
IPA wordle
wordle vs kiki
creative use of emoji and space
resume glottal stop
dialects in a trenchcoat
which of these starter Pokemon is bouba and which is kiki
(for no author would use, because of the known rendolence of onions, onions)
acoustic bike
An extremely charming study by Bill Labov featuring a rabbit named Vincent
Rabbit Meme
Cheering on linguistics effects (Stroup and Kiki/Bouba) in a vote on the cutest scientific effect name
Old English Hrickroll
The word you get assigned with your linguistics degree
Sanskrit two-dimensional alphabet
Cognate Objects
Linguist Meetup in Linguaglossa?
baɪ ði eɪdʒ ʌv θɚti
j- prefixing
"But clerk, I am Bill Labov" (pagliacci meme)
Usual winner
Because Internet Tumblr vernacular
Linguist "Human" Costume
Cursed kiki/bouba
dot ellipsis vs comma ellipsis
intersection of signed languages and synesthesia?
Antipodean linguistic milestone
Selected Blog Posts:
Linguistic Jobs
Online Linguistics Teacher
Impact Lead
Customer Success Manager
Hawaiian and Tahitian language Instructor, Translator & Radio Host
Language Engineer
Data Manager & Digital Archivist
Linguistics fun
xkcd: neoteny recapitulated phylogeny
Eeyore Linguistic Facts
Lingthusiasm HQ: Frown Thing!
xkcd is making a vowel hypertrapezoid
Title: Ships and Ice Picks: An Ethnographic Excavation of alt.goncharov
Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.
2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)
I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.
Media and crossovers
How Linguistics Can Help You Learn a Language – I did a talk for Duolingo’s DuoCon
Why do adults…over 40….use ellipses…so much? Crossover with Tim Blais of Acapella Science
xkcd Tower of Babel
Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French (video with Tom Scott)
PUZZLE SPOILERS: A quote from Because Internet in the New York Times acrostic
Someone made a crossword puzzle of Because Internet!
Peeking face, palm up, and palm down – the emoji I proposed with Lauren Gawne and Jennifer Daniel are now officially in Unicode 14.0 and will be coming to your devices in the next few years
Media
BBC Word of Mouth – The Shipping Forecast
I’m cited in a Wikipedia article about boomerspeak
I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period.
Lauren Gawne and I did a Lingthusiasm crossover appearance on the NPR show Ask Me Another, featuring two fun quiz segments, one on accepted or rejected emoji and one on famous book titles
Crash Course Linguistics
The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.
What is linguistics?
What is a word? Morphology
Syntax 1: Morphosyntax
Syntax 2:
Semantics
Pragmatics
Sociolinguistics
Phonetics 1: Consonants
Phonetics 2: Vowels
Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Language acquisition
Language change and historical linguistics
World Languages
Computational Linguistics
Writing Systems
Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!
Lingthusiasm
In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:
Where to get your English etymologies (transcript)
Cool things about scales and implicature (transcript)
Corpus linguistics and consent – Interview with Kat Gupta (transcript)
That’s the kind of episode it’s – Clitics (transcript)
Are you thinking what I’m thinking? Theory of Mind (transcript)
A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip (transcript)
Making machines learn Fon and other African languages – Interview with Masakhane (transcript)
Not NOT a negation episode (transcript)
R and R-like sounds – Rhoticity (transcript)
How linguists figure out the grammar of a language (transcript)
Listen to the imperatives episode! (transcript)
Writing is a technology (transcript)
And here are this year’s bonus episodes:
Linguistics puzzles for fun and olympiad glory
Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️
Lingwiki and linguistics on Wikipedia
Q&A with Emily Gref from language museum Planet Word
Sentient plants, proto-internet, and more lingfic about quirky communication
Language under the influence
Gotta test ‘em all – The linguistics of Pokémon names
Lingthusiasm liveshow: The listener talks back (on backchannelling)
Talking to babies and small children
The episode-episode (reduplication)
Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)
Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language and Because Internet
Slate’s Future Tense about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel.
I moderated a panel for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on NLP Applications for Crisis Management and Emergency Situations.
Contestant on Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House, and also attended online conferences,
guest interview about internet language on That Word Chat (summarized in tweet form)
The Internet is Making English Better at Yale with Claire Bowern
Internet Linguistics and Memes as Internet Folklore with a student at the University of Oklahoma
Sotheby’s Level Up in Los Angeles (physical)
Unicode Conference in the San Francisco Bay Area (physical), where I did a keynote called “Taking Playfulness Seriously – When character sets are used in unexpected ways” (slides here!).
The Unicode talk isn’t online but a few days later I did a talk on the same topic for Bay Area NLP, for which the video is here.
Virtual talk for some internal folks at YouTube
Rosemary Mosco Talks to Gretchen McCulloch about Pigeons, a book event at Argo Bookshop
Conferences/events attended:
Linguistic Society of America (LSA) – did a Wikipedia editathon
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Dictionary Society of North America conference
Annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association
WorldCon (physical)
LingComm and LingFest
In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.
LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events.
Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
Designing online conferences for building community
Scheduling online conferences for building community
Hosting online conferences for building community
Budgeting online conferences or events
Planning accessible online conferences
Selected tweets
Books and more
A Memory Called Empire and the latest Murderbot novella, Fugitive Telemetry
The Language Lover’s Puzzle Book
History of Swear Words on Netflix
Helpful threads
Analysis of camera angles on tiktok vs youtube (a thread with, unexpectedly, Hank Green)
Generational differences on email salutations, a topic of never-ending public fascination
Threads on conference “homework” and zoom fatigue
Modulo and other obscure English prepositions (a thread)
robot voice in tone languages (short thread)
given that we’ve been living with a giant panda for the past year
Conversation styles
teach students how to email you
Lack of diversity in childhood language acquisition studies
Why kids these days don’t understand file systems
buy your older coworkers a nice linguistics book
A thread about research debt
vocal fry is completely fine
A many-layers-of-screencapped-post citing Because Internet on youth socialization made the front page of Reddit, so I’ve added some further reading
Linguistics fun
Happy feast day of St Gottschalk, patron saint of “languages, linguists, lost vocations, princes, translators”
A thread of linguistics versions of the roses are red meme
Ellipses in vintage recipes
Not Haunted: new favourite example of implicature
Vaccinated every 8 seconds: new favourite example of quantifier scope ambiguity
A bagel with cream cheese: new favourite example of structural ambiguity
In appfreciation opf pfinally being pfurnished with the Pfizer vaccine I will be pfroducing all opf my voiceless bilabial stopfs and pfricatives as apffricates pfor the next pfortnight.
“you may injure…” new favourite example of deontic vs epistemic modality
garden path ads
Linguistics takes on the “for the better, right?” Padme/Anakin meme
lips are a social construct
linguists are really not kidding when they say that your command of language enables you to understand sentences never before said by the human species: bacteria/Michelangelo edition
bouba vs. kiki outfits
tell Duolingo to add IPA
On average linguistics familiarity
linguistic phenomenon reducing capitalization
Zipf’s Law
phonetic boundary ambiguity: chris pratt
linguistics takes on the “did it hurt?” meme
Enweirdening words through AI magic
#MetGala2021 as linguistics books
haunted trunk implicature
emoji reaction research idea
Mario epenthesis
Japan’s new prime minister, Britney Spears crash blossom
red flag on unicode support
linguistics Halloween candy
IPA card catalog
memes and emojis are folklore
Canadian English spellcheck
boō, bōare season
Zoom linguistics studies incoming
linguist puzzles
phonetic beatboxing
is this outfit bouba or kiki
warblish
the feminine urge to make your adjectives agree with your nouns
linguists on a bus
General fun
business larping
Wellerman but in emoji
they taste bland when I fall
A thread of emoji poems
multiocular sideeyes emoji
A thread of linguistics-y place names
French accents and icicles on tiktok
Suez meme: ordinary conversation topics vs noticing something about the language
Convaxulations
A double dactyl about the www
A nice festive machine translation fail
The “CDC says” meme takes on linguistic discrimination
A limerick about my podcast
Dendronization
landline emojis
writing gifs by hand on paper
Hangul children’s book
“left to our own devices”
multi-time-zone days of the week
plamps
srùbag
phonetify wrapped: most used phoneme and zipfy unwrapped
glottal on a bottle
xkcd on relevance implicature: debunking
the linguist urge
Finnish pronouns and sarcasm
teach a person how to look up the etymology of “fish” and they learn for a lifetime
the Double Empathy problem
conjugating Christmas
Christmas plural you form
Pinguinuca and Antipinguinuca
verbing tetris
Grice’s maxim of relevance in photo caption directionality: male bison edition
Selected blog posts
I celebrated my ninth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:
Linguistics jobs
metadata specialist and genealogist
legislative drafter
technical writer
CEO of a SaaS company
social media lead (for NASA)
senior analyst
academic linguist
Linguistics fun
Linguistics Games online
“Indeed, old man” in Middle Egyptian
Linguistics Halloween jokes
Beatboxing in IPA
The kiki to bouba pipeline
Dinosaur Comics on the “I dunno” hum
Scuba, an exotic English word meaning “to keep breathing even though the water rises all around you”
Self-referential words for places of articulation
Languages
It’s Complicated/Because Internet on why teens socialize online
The fight to save Hawaii sign language from extinction
The art and science of beatboxing
The linguistics of hyperlinks
Pitch, intonation, and the role of technology in language description
The origin of language and interspecies communication
A McGill student and professor realized they both speak Mi’kmaq; it changed everything
ancient translation to badger
Pronouncing words in English (by Chinese speakers)
An interactive visual database for American Sign Language
On standard dialects
Meta and advice posts
Superlinguo’s year in review (involving many joint projects with me and also finally getting tenure!)
I reposted a classic “how to twitter” (from a social perspective) post of mine from 2016, which people tell me they still refer to occasionally
How to get started in writing pop linguistics, both short form (media articles) and long form (books)
How we made a better podcast website for Lingthusiasm
Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.
A Teach Yourself Linguistics Linkfest from Mutual Intelligibility
Looking to teach yourself linguistics? Mutual Intelligibility was a year-long project to help curate free linguistics resources online for people who are trying to teach or learn linguistics, and now all of its posts are collected here for you.
Crash Course Linguistics
A structured introduction to linguistics. Each post contains a 10-12 minute video from Crash Course Linguistics, plus supporting resources on the same topic including exercises with answer keys.
Week 0 - Preview
Week 1 - Introduction
Week 2 - Morphology
Week 3 - Morphosyntax
Week 4 - Syntax
Week 5 - Semantics
Week 6 - Pragmatics
Week 7 - Sociolinguistics
Week 8 - Phonetics, Consonants
Week 9 - Phonetics, Vowels
Week 10 - Phonology
Week 11 - Psycholinguistics
Week 12 - Language acquisition
Week 13 - Historical linguistics and language change
Week 14 - Languages around the world
Week 15 - Computational linguistics
Week 16 - Writing systems
Resource Guides
Longer, more comprehensive guides to a few common intro linguistics topics.
Introduction to IPA Consonants - Resource Guide 1
Introduction to IPA Vowels - Resource Guide 2
Introduction to Morphology - Resource Guide 3
Introduction to Constituency - Resource Guide 4
Introduction to World Englishes - Resource Guide 5
Introduction to Languages around the World - Resource Guide 6
3 Links Posts
Quick highlights of three relevant links about a specific topic, with a short description for each.
2020 wasn't the year anyone was expecting, and I did much less travel than in previous years. But, while I was social distancing at home like everyone else, I did at least keep doing enjoyable linguistics things: Crash Course Linguistics videos went from early planning stages to nearly complete, Because Internet came out in paperback, and my podcast Lingthusiasm launched two other projects to contribute to the pop linguistics ecosystem: LingComm Grants and Mutual Intelligibility.
Because Internet
Because Internet, my book about internet language which hit the NYT bestseller list last year, came out in paperback this year! Links to get it in all of the formats, including how to get signed copies.
Here are some photos of the new paperback edition, same bright yellow cover, now with 10x more nice quotes from people. I also wrote an old-school reflexive blog post about what it's like to hit the final milestone in a book journey that began in 2014.
Crash Course Linguistics
I worked on these 16 fun intro linguistics videos, 10-12 minutes long each, along with a large team, including linguists Lauren Gawne and Jessi Grieser, host Taylor Behnke, the animation team at Thought Cafe, and of course the production team at Crash Course itself. Writing the scripts ended up being our first lockdown project in the spring, and then reviewing the filmed and animated episodes for accuracy a second lockdown project in the fall. The final few videos will be appearing in early 2021 -- you can watch them all at this playlist.
Preview trailer for Crash Course Linguistics
What is linguistics? Crash Course Linguistics #1
What is a word? Morphology, Crash Course Linguistics #2
Language acquisition - Crash Course Linguistics #12
Language change and historical linguistics - Crash Course Linguistics #13
Other Writing
Wired Resident Linguist column:
Covid-19 Is History’s Biggest Translation Challenge
A Mission to Make Virtual Parties Actually Fun
Language Files videos, with Tom Scott and Molly Ruhl:
The sentences humans can understand but computers can't
Abso-b████y-lutely - Expletive Infixation
the Hidden Rules of Conversation (about Grice's Maxims)
schwa
the Bouba/Kiki experiment
the corpus statistics behind the pronunciation of "gif"
the complicated question of how many languages there are
Lingthusiasm
My fourth year of producing a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics with Lauren Gawne! Regular episodes:
Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane
This time it gets tense - the grammar of time
What makes a language easy? It's a hard question
The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
Schwa, the most versatile English vowel
Tracing languages back before recorded history
Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics
The happy fun big adjective episode
Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates
How translators approach a text
Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P
Small talk, big deal
And 12 bonus episodes, with thanks to our patrons for keeping the show sustainable:
What might English be like in a couple hundred years?
Generating a Lingthusiasm episode using a neural net
Teaching linguistics to yourself and other people
When letters have colours and time is a braid - The linguistics of synesthesia
A myriad of numbers - Counting systems across languages
Doing linguistics with kids
Tones, drums, and whistles - linguistics and music
LingComm on a budget (plus the Lingthusiasm origin story)
The quick brown pangram jumps over the lazy dog
The most esteemed honorifics episode
Crash Course Linguistics behind the scenes with Jessi Grieser
Q&A with lexicographer Emily Brewster of Merriam-Webster
We started a Lingthusiasm Discord server, a place for people who are enthusiastic about linguistics to find each other and talk! And we released new schwa-themed merch with the (admittedly aspirational these days) slogan Never Stressed.
Lingthusiasm also sponsored two other projects this year: LingComm Grants and Mutual Intelligibility.
LingComm Grants - We gave out four $500 grants to up-and-coming linguistics communications projects. Thank you again to everyone who applied, and do check out the projects of the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants.
Mutual Intelligibility - A newsletter to connect linguistics instructors with existing linguistics resources suitable for teaching online in a bite-sized, easy-to-digest fashion, with considerable help from the editing and organizational skills of Liz McCullough.
Conferences
I did do a tiny bit of travel this year, my usual January trip to the Linguistics Society of America annual meeting (this year in New Orleans) and February trips to Comma Con (I gave a keynote about the future of language online), Social Science FooCamp, PanLex at Long Now, the Internet Archive offices (all San Fransisco Bay Area) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) annual meeting (Seattle).
Virtual conferences and talks:
An impromptu panel about linguistics in science fiction/fantasy at the online version of WisCon (#WisConline) with a fun group of linguists
A talk with Lauren Gawne about emoji as gesture for Abralin ao Vivo (the Brazilian Linguistics Association's online lecture series)
A panel about linguistics podcasting for Linguistics in the Pub,
A panel about translation and the juxtaposition of historical texts with modern language styles with Maria Dahvana Headley (translator of the new "bro" Beowulf edition) and Alena Smith (creator of the show Dickinson) for Slate's Future Tense.
A keynote at the Australian Educational Podcasting Conference: From mythbusting to metaphors - Learning from cross-disciplinary research to communicate complex topics better
A virtual "night owls at the hotel bar" meetup at the National Association of Science Writers conference
Media and internet crossovers
xkcd: hovertext on ok vs okay, cameo pursued by a bear, (possibly a subtweet?)
The latest set of draft emoji from Unicode include three emoji that I co-wrote the proposals for
Because Internet cameos on the official tumblr, Steak Umm, and QI twitter accounts
I late-night-wrote a parody version of "Jolene" but about vaccines ("Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaccine, Vaciiiiine / I'm begging you please go in my arm") which someone made an excellent video recording of and then it got picked up by quite a lot of media outlets
Selected media
New York Times about retronyms and the vocabulary of covid times
Wall Street Journal about how covid is changing the language of emails
The Cheese Plate Is A Technology - Interview with the Smart Bitches, Trashy Books podcast
Words of 2020! (and Metaphors, and Interfaces of the Year) on the a16z podcast
Spanish-language interview about Because Internet in Archiletras
kottke.org on Weird Internet Careers
Selected twitter threads
Books I enjoyed:
The Language Lover's Puzzle Book
A Memory Called Empire
Murderbot novel
The Tale of Genji
Romeo and/or Juliet (choose-your-own R&J)
The Victorian Internet
Love's Labours Lost
brb translating "hwaet" as "bro"
Grammar West to East
Helpful threads:
An advice thread on effective recs - how to get other people into something you love
Tips for communicating remotely during a stressful time: be gentle with yourself and each other
A thread about how our communication habits are changing
A thread about why waving is such a clever solution for bridging the awkwardness at the end of a video call
Why you don't need to do an unpaid internship (and especially you do not need to become my intern) in order to get started in lingcomm (and what you should do instead)
General fun:
A thread about why many European languages have a verb "to hamster" but English instead has "to squirrel"
Recipe of Theseus
Quarantimes days: robot vacuum cleaner, learning old english
kids setting timers and doing pretend video calls
Over-the-top adjective names for birds: the birding/linguistics crossover I've been waiting for
Long Hundred: a cursèd and entirely real Wikipedia article (thread about numbers)
it has come to my attention that the Chinese translation of Häagen-Dazs ALSO has a spurious umlaut on it
the months of the year (metric system) (an ever-increasingly bizarre thread)
How recycled woodcuts resemble modern memes
How it started / How it's going (Because Internet edition)
Welsh takes on LL Bean
things that feel bouba but are actually kiki
a cursed wordgame and the results
Selected blog posts
I celebrated my eighth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:
Linguistics jobs and other advice:
community radio outreach coordinator
wug farmer (parody)
Grad school advice post: do I need to have done a linguistics major to apply for linguistics grad school?
exhibition content manager at Planet Word
transcriptionist
dance instructor and stay-at-home mom
freelance writer (and creator of Dinosaur Comics)
speech pathologist
Practical advice for if you want to start a podcast - An advice post on Superlinguo which I co-sign (unsurprisingly, as we have a podcast together)
law student
at the American Anthropological Association
ESL teacher
developer advocate
Languages:
These students speak perfect Spanglish -- and now they're learning to own it
Comparative evolution of Cuneiform, Egyptian, and Chinese characters
Grammatical gender in Greek and Latin is more complex than most people think
Indigenous languages of Taiwan are regaining prominence
Indigenous activists are reimagining language preservation under quarantine
New kanji for social distancing
"Language features are not neutral in the way that the calculator feature is neutral."
Pompeiian graffiti
A video singing the names of the Indigenous languages of Australia
The poetic process powering real-time language translation in Namibia
The Scots Wikipedia saga
How do you sign "Black Lives Matter" in ASL?
How to tell apart various languages that use the Arabic script
A linguistic perspective: The harmful effects of responding 'All lives matter' to 'Black lives matter'
68:Hazard:Cold, a short story by Janelle Shane which does interesting things with language
Gestural theories about the origin of language
Cuneiform and not quite having enough space at the end of a line
Towards a new language of the global language crisis
Linguist fun:
Cookies decorated with IPA symbols
académie française: you can't just make up new words willy-nilly like that!!! linguists: haha language machine go brrrr
This is not a joke: a baby was named Diot Coke in 1379
Which Indo-European Subfamily are you? (Buzzfeed quiz)
the best animal species name, featuring very small frogs
Neolatinist TikTok
xkcd does dialect quizzes (a parody)
Ancient Sumerian meme dogs
A neural net writes variations on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
The language after "Modern" English: English_final_FINAL?
English's avoidance register in front of certain animals: W-A-L-K
Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.
My book about internet language, which I'd been working on since 2014, finally came out into the world! Because Internet hit the New York Times bestseller list and was one of TIME's 100 books of 2019, plus tons of other media.
I wrote two op-eds for the New York Times and continued writing my Resident Linguist column at Wired, and we made two special video episodes of my podcast, Lingthusiasm.
Book: Because Internet
There were around 200 media hits for Because Internet (I'm sure I'm missing a few). Here are a few highlights:
Two (!!) reviews in the New York Times, by Jennifer Szalai (NYT Daily) and Clay Shirky (NYT Book Review)
Two reviews in the New Yorker, by Katy Waldman and Mary Norris
Reviews in: The Economist, Time Magazine, Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Science Magazine, The Times (of London), the Observer/Guardian, BBC Science Focus.
NPR: All Things Considered and Science Friday
BBC World News
Trade reviews: Kirkus, Publisher’s Weekly (starred), Booklist, and Library Journal
Podcasts: The Cracked Podcast, The Allusionist, Grammar Girl, Slate’s “Lexicon Valley”, New York Times Book Review podcast, The Ezra Klein Show
Lists: TIME’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2019, Goodreads Choice Award Semifinalist, an Amazon Best Nonfiction Book of 2019
My publisher made me a special leather-bound version of Because Internet in celebration of it becoming a New York Times bestseller. It's beautiful.
I have a Wikipedia page now and someone dressed up as my book for Halloween!
Short-form Writing
We Learned to Write the Way We Talk (New York Times Op Ed)
How Can You Appreciate 23rd-Century English? Look Back 200 Years (New York Times Op-Eds From the Future)
We Will Have Meme Folklorists (New York Magazine)
How to use irony on the internet (Wall Street Journal)
The Big Idea: Writing towards the future (John Scalzi’s Whatever)
Wired Resident Linguist column:
Children are using emoji for digital-age language learning
Predictive text presents the best version of you
Coding is for everyone — as long as you speak English
Fans are better than tech at organizing information online (about the Archive of Our Own)
The meaning of all caps — in texting and in life (excerpt from Because Internet)
New emoji are so boring — but they don’t have to be
Boomerspeak is now available for your parodying pleasure
I also co-wrote an academic article with Lauren Gawne, Emoji as Digital Gestures in the journal Language@Internet [Open Access].
Events, Talks, and Videos
In January, I did a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon and judged the 5 Minute Linguist competition, both at the LSA annual meeting.
In March, I gave a comic talk at the festival of Bad Ad-hoc Hypotheses (BAHfest) about why we should make English spelling more weird and confusing, which you can watch online. Recommended if you like Unicode jokes.
In May, I recorded the Because Internet audiobook! Here's a thread with my linguistic thoughts about the process and an audio sample of me reading the audiobook.
In July, I went to the LSA Summer Institute in UC Davis, to do a lingwiki Wikipedia editathon focussing on articles about underrepresented languages, a talk about effective communication of linguistics to a general audience, and MC'd the 3 Minute Thesis event. Plus, I had book launch party in Montreal with Argo Bookshop!
In September, I did a book event in Toronto in conversation with Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics fame), featuring a packed house with many old friends at The Ossington with Flying Booksn. I also went to XOXO fest in Portland, and did two talks about the book in Seattle, with Textio and the Seattle Review of Books and Elliott Bay Books.
In October, I was on a panel about busting language myths through podcasting at Sound Education in Boston. I was also on panels about Using Language for Worldbuilding (moderator) and “What did we say before we said Cool?” at Scintillation, a small speculative fiction convention in Montreal.
I now have a speaking reel! So if you've ever wondered what it's like when I'm giving a talk about internet linguistics, you can now watch a five minute highlights video here!
I collaborated on several Language Files videos with youtuber Tom Scott:
why typing like this is sometimes okay.
Why “No Problem” can seem rude: Phatic expressions
The language sounds that could exist, but don't
Can the words you read change your behaviour?
Why do we move our hands when we talk?
Lingthusiasm Podcast
We celebrated our third year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne. New this year were two video episodes, about gesture and signed languages, so that you can actually see them!
Here are all 24 episodes from 2019, 12 main episodes and 12 bonus episodes:
How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages
The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on
Why do we gesture when we talk? (also a video episode!)
Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas
You heard about it but I was there - Evidentials
Why spelling is hard - but also hard to change
Emoji are Gesture Because Internet
Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger
Villages, gifs, and children - Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts (also a video episode!)
Smell words, both real and invented
Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals, and more
How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
Bonus episodes on Patreon:
Naming people (and especially babies)
How the internet is making English better (liveshow from Melbourne)
Adapting your language to other people
How do radio announcers know how to pronounce all the names? With guest Tiger Webb
Talking with dogs, horses, ravens, dolphins, bees, and other animals
North, left, or towards the sea? With guest Alice Gaby
Words from your family - Familects!
Welcome aboard the metaphor train!
Behind the scenes on Because Internet (Q&A)
Jobs, locations, family, and invention - Surnames
Reading fiction like a linguist
The sounds of sheep, earthquakes, and ice cream - Onomatopoeia
We also made new Lingthusiasm merch, including items with the best esoteric Unicode symbols on them, adding socks, mugs, and notebooks in all our prints (IPA, tree diagrams, and esoteric symbols), onesies saying Little Longitudinal Language Acquisition Project. greeting cards that say “thanks” or “congrats” on them in IPA; the pun-tastic “glottal bottle” and liquids for your liquids bottle/mug; and shirts/mugs/bags that say Linguistic “Correctness” is just a lie from Big Grammar to Sell More Grammars. (See photos of all the Lingthusiasm merch here.)
Selected twitter threads
Book-writing meta threads
Expanding the linguistics bookshelf
How you can order a book you’re excited about from your local library
What I’ve learned about autographs and signing pens
How to preorder a book from your local indie bookstore
A very meta thread on how to promote your book on social media without being annoying
Leaving online book reviews, why they’re important and how to do them
What blogging taught me about research and writing
Was not expecting how many people would tell me that my book made them cry
Adding linguistics programming to not-explicitly-linguistic conferences
Because Internet as other objects that are also yellow and light blue: a thread
What happens when “machine learning” looks at your book with a yellow and black cover and decides what other products are relevant
Other threads
On being a walking dictionary: a very on-brand story
Symbols of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) as brands of IPA (India Pale Ale)
A relationship between faceblindness and letter recognition ability
I managed to find a linguistic angle to a major Canadian sporting event
Direction words in various languages
The best phone keyboard autocorrect error story I have encountered
Poll/replies threads on “and” versus “&” and about your early internet usernames and why (especially how you chose the numbers)
The most frequent words make up the majority of ANY English corpus (a thread that led into the Inverse Upgoer Five Challenge)
"linguists are not kidding when they say that language enables you to understand sentences that have never been said before in the entirety of human history"
The genre of photo captions using directional parentheses to create humourous implicatures
The raised initial c in Mc surnames
Some books I enjoyed!
Raven Tower by Ann Leckie
Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells
This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
How To by Randall Munroe
Language Unlimited by David Adger
You Look Like A Thing And I Love You by Janelle Shane
Tensorate series by JY Yang
Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers
Selected blog posts
I celebrated my seventh year blogging at All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:
A series on Weird Internet Careers
Part I – What is a Weird Internet Career?
Part II – How I Built a Weird Internet Career as an Internet Linguist
Part III – How to start a Weird Internet Career
Part IV – How to make money doing a Weird Internet Career
Part V - What can a Weird Internet Career look like?
Part VI - Is it too late for me to start my Weird Internet Career?
Part VII - How to level up your Weird Internet Career
Memes and linguist humour
Linguistics takes on the Roses are red meme
WUG is for the way you look at me
Are your teens secretly texting about languages using ISO-639-3 codes?
A very linguistic wedding cake
“linguist with questions” as the goose in Untitled Goose Game
Falkland Islands – new favourite example of pronunciation ambiguity from TikTok
Linguistics Halloween photos
Last Christmas / I gave you a chart
Other Linguistics
Guide to making alveolar trills (as in Spanish “rr”)
Babies sometimes think that “you” means “me”
All words are made up words
Verbing is a feature, not a bug
How people with synesthesia map colours onto vowels
An animation of what it’s like to have dyslexia
Heaven’s Vault, a videogame about decoding an ancient language
Affixes, explained by koalas
A base-27 counting system on the human body
Internet linguistics reading list from Maria Heath
An analysis of the meaning behind different kinds of screenshots
Bohemian Rhapsody but linguistics
Why parrots can talk like humans
Because Internet featured on the official tumblr books blog
a classic tumblr post in Because Internet
Wikipedia is helping keep Welsh alive online
How Twitter is helping the Scots language thrive in the 21st century
Voicemail and voice chat
How grammatical systems cause machine translation mismatches
The problems with how grammar is taught in grade school (comic)
A linguist on what Baby Yoda's first words might be
No, that dog on instagram can't really talk
Watching a "language" develop when kids can't speak to each other
Things about languages
Using machine learning to decipher ancient Sumerian cuneiform
Why hearing people should not make up a new sign
The World’s Writing Systems website (which has posters!)
Beowulf and discourse markers
Court stenographers often misunderstand African American English
The importance of mother-tongue education
On studying emerging sign languages
Mayan languages like K’iche’ and Mam in the US immigration court system
Word length in Greenlandic
Ænglisc Ἐτυμολογικal Speling Réforme
Things that should happen in a sci fi story with a universal translator
Lox: the English word that hasn’t changed in sound or meaning in 8000 years
The chicken/poultry cow/beef animal/food loanword phenomenon also exists in isiXhosa
The complicated decisions that come with digitizing indigenous languages
The Bender Rule: why it matters to name the language(s) we study, even when it’s English
Duolingo and smaller languages: useful, but also complicated
Smartphone keyboard support for under-represented languages
Language family maps around the world
Linguistics jobs interviews
data scientist
PR consultant
journalist
school linguist
lexicographer
internet linguist (me!)
marketing content specialist
software engineer
communications specialist
product manager
learning scientist at Duolingo
Lists and how to
How to type the International Phonetic Alphabet on your phone (iOS or Android), newly updated
How to teach yourself linguistics online for free, revised and updated
I updated my long list of recommended pop linguistics books and lingfic
Linguistics Merch Gift Guide, 2019
How to explain linguistics to your friends and family this holiday season, revised and updated
Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.
If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.
In 2018, I finished writing my book about internet language, which now has an official title (BECAUSE INTERNET) and publication date (July 23, 2019). You can preorder it here now and it will arrive as a delightful present from yourself halfway through the year!
I also started writing a column for Wired about internet language and went to Australia to do two Lingthusiasm liveshows.
Writing
My book about internet language officially has a title and publication date! Look for BECAUSE INTERNET: UNDERSTANDING THE NEW RULES OF LANGUAGE in July 2019, and you can also put your email address here to make sure you don’t miss when it’s out on social media.
I also began a column about internet language for Wired. My first two articles:
Voldemorting, birdsite, The Cheeto, and other ways of hiding words in plain sight online.
Why do some mid-sized languages, like Swedish, have extensive internet resources, while others with the same or larger speaker populations do not?
Lingthusiasm Podcast
For Lingthusiasm, my podcast with Lauren Gawne, we did our long-anticipated liveshows in Sydney and Melbourne! We also released new Lingthusiasm merch, including tree diagram scarves, rainbow IPA scarves, Space Baby art, and IPA ties.
We released 12 main episodes and 12 bonus episodes:
16. Learning parts of words - Morphemes and the wug test
17. Vowel Gymnastics
18. Translating the untranslatable
19. Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions
20. Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binary
21. What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles
22. This, that and the other thing - determiners
23. When Nothing Means Something
24. Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz
25. Every word is a real word
26. Why C and G come in hard and soft versions, and more about palatal sounds
27. Words for family relationships: kinship terms
Bonus episodes:
11. We are all linguistic geniuses - Interview with Daniel Midgley
12. Creating languages for fun and learning
13. The grammar of swearing
14. The poetry of memes
15. Linguistics grad school advice
16. Forensic Linguistics
17. Homophones, homonyms, and homographs
18. Emoji, Gesture and The International Congress of Linguists
19. Hyperforeignisms
20. Bringing up bilingual babies
21. What’s it really like at academic conferences?
22. Q&A (with bonus video!) about the shape of your ears, very old words, and more
Media
A few select media articles:
Multiple exclamation marks in internet speak!!! (Atlantic)
Video on NBC about teen slang (NBC)
Dictionary.com’s decision to add entries for emoji (TIME)
Emoji in the courtroom (CBC The Current)
On the origins of “doggo” (Wired)
An interview about Lingthusiasm with Lauren Gawne (Babel Magazine Meet the Professionals series)
Lingthusiasm was featured on Dictionary.com’s list of best podcasts about language.
I also started a personal/professional instagram account, and started updating the accounts for All Things Linguistic and Lingthusiasm more frequently: go check those out if your instagram feed needs more linguistics in it.
You can also follow All Things Linguistic on Mastodon for a daily linguistics post there.
Talks and conferences
I gave a talk about emoji as gesture at EmojiCon in Brooklyn and about emoji sequences as beat gestures at Emoji2018 at Stanford.
I went to a broad range of interesting conferences this year: XOXO, PatreCon, LangFest, Scintillation, Automatic Speech Recognition for Endangered Languages (ASREL retreat), McGill Symposium on Indigenous Languages, and the annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR).
While in Australia, I gave workshops on LingComm at the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society and at the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language summer school, in addition to a sold-out public lecture on internet linguistics at the summer school. I also gave talks about emoji as gesture at four universities: Sydney, Melbourne, Monash, and La Trobe.
At the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, I organized a panel called Language in the Public Ear: Linguistics Outreach via Podcasts and Radio, for which my cohost Lauren Gawne represented Lingthusiasm. I also organized the linguistics Wikipedia editathon with Lauren Collister, and stepped in at the last minute to co-host the Five Minute Linguist competition with Lane Greene of the Economist, in addition to our previously scheduled judging, due to weather issues.
Selected blog posts
I hit my 6-year blogiversary! Here are a few of my favourite posts from 2018:
Roundup posts
A very long list of linguistics YouTube channels and other free online videos about linguistics
How to explain linguistics to your friends and family this holiday season (updated)
Linguistics Gift Guide 2018
So, your linguistics department has a recruitment challenge
Linguistic approaches to language learning (updated)
How to teach yourself linguistics online for free (updated)
28 tips for doing better in your intro linguistics course (updated)
Long list of pop linguistics books and lingfic (updated)
Language and Linguistics podcasts (updated)
An extensive playlist of songs about linguistics
Linguistics jobs interviews
Linguistics + X career advice post (updated)
Freelance editor and writer
Webinar on working in tech
Webinar on how to get into linguistics grad school
Language creator
Standards engineer
Translator
Working in tech
Conductor
Accent coach
Communications professionals
Museum curator
Think tank researcher
Data science skills
University course coordinator
Memes and other linguist humour
Punctuation takes on the distracted boyfriend meme
lana del rey, translated
grendel grendel / yes mama
Linguistics Sign Bunny
Look, Simba. Everything the light touches on that chart is pronounceable.
Linguistics takes on the “Is this a pigeon?” meme
May the 4th Be With You: Syntax Wars
Is your child texting about linguistics?
Linguistics takes on the “Hallelujah” meme
This is the best meme poem and I will brook no arguments
Half of the students transcribed ‘marriage’ with a final [tʃ]; so I guess it’s true that 50% of marriages end in devoice
why would you do this / it just seems right?
Wallet but pronounced like ballet, laughter but pronounced like daughter, and more
A Maximal Onset Principle joke
The English “th” sound takes on the Distracted Boyfriend meme
Things about languages
Pro-Tactile American Sign Language
Folks, there’s nothing left from the linguistics division. (On the Brazil National Museum fire)
New Zealand government pushes for Maori in all primary schools by 2025
Indigenous sign languages
“I’ve never met anyone who regretted being bilingual”
Generation poems for names in Korean and Chinese
Indigenous languages spoken by people at the U.S.-Mexico border
Plains Sign Language
Learning Javanese is like learning 3 languages
“We see value in speaking two languages, but we don’t see value in speaking two dialects. Maybe it’s time we did.
”This Egyptian bird has declared himself “your evil son”
Proto-Algonquian Dictionary now online
A free online course about the linguistics of signed languages
Latin roots in English words that ultimately go back to the same Proto-Indo-European roots as native Germanic English words
Using punctuation marks to help learn tones
The injustice of the baby sign trend
On learning Aboriginal languages as a non-Aboriginal person
You’re never too old to become fluent in a foreign language
Why Hanukah/Chanukkah/etc is spelled so many different ways
Example sentences
Pragmatic ambiguity: have you seen my cat?
Retronym: call-phone
Reduplication: moonmoon
Semantic ambiguity: let this be the hour that we draw swords together
Cheeseburger stabbing ambiguity
Structural ambiguity: “Fake degree claims dog prominent Spanish politicians.” and “Nicole, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” (diagrammed)
Linguistics handmade things
A christmasyntax tree
Schwa cookies
Wug cookies and a 3D-printed wug cookie cutter
Colourful IPA cookies
How to crochet your own wug
Internet linguistics
A study of tagging on tumblr
A thread on meme semiotics
A masters thesis about tumblr orthography
A paper about tagging practices on tumblr
Icelandic language battles threat of “digital extinction”
Robot mind meld, a word net game
Keysmashing “wrong”
Are emoji sequences as informative as text?
“Utterly linguisted”
Other linguistics
A mollusc that matches the tree diagram scarves
What dogs understand when we speak to them
Star Trek takes on the Gavagai problem
The impact of climate change on language loss
Why teaching phonics is an important part of learning to read
Singular ‘They’ is 700 Years Old
Crows with a human accent
Debunking the idea that apes might have learned a sign language
Repairing the World: a sci fi short story featuring linguists
IPA Twister
What’s something that seems obvious within your profession, but the general public seems to misunderstand?
Yesterday’s syntax is tomorrow’s morphology
Repetition can make sounds into music
This young girl uses “los,” “las” and the gender-neutral “les” — watch her explain why.
Communicating colours using black and white (a language evolution game)
Yanny or Laurel (two threads, origins)
A colour-coded diagram of the English IPA with the part of the mouth you use to make each sound
The logic behind childhood spelling “errors”
A lexicographer’s guide to real words
Heaven’s Vault: a videogame that’s “like Guitar Hero for linguistics”
IPA chart Battleship
xkcd and the linguist meteorologist
Why drawings aren’t universal communication
Deflecting “how are you” and “how many languages do you know” with Gricean Maxims
An anti-linguistic discrimination limerick for Grammar Day
Linguistic accommodation
Babies notice the difference between signed languages and gestures
Pointing with the index finger isn’t as universal as you might think
How to visualize consonants by painting charcoal on various parts of your mouth
The story of “sic”
When most people tell you they think words are so fascinating, they have in mind items like “canoodle” and “serendipity.” When linguists say it, they have in mind, like, “the.”
Why do cartoon villains speak in foreign accents?
Ursula K LeGuin on singular “they”
The 300-year history of using “literally” figuratively
Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, you can sign up for that on my website.
Links that may or may not be related to gardens, food, travel, nature, or heterotopias and liminal spaces but probably are. Sources in parentheses.
long article: GHOSTS ON THE GLACIER (John Branch and Emily Rhyne/NYT gifted link). Janet Johnson and John Cooper became part of the folklore of South America’s Aconcagua mountain when they died there, and now, almost 50 years later, an old camera…
