The world could be such a nice place if we allowed it. It's all so goddamn unnecessary. There's no need for any of it. It's so beautiful here. It should be so cool to be alive

Callers to Washington state hotline press 2 for Spanish and get accented AI English instead Callers to Washington state’s driver’s license agency who select automated service in Spanish are instead hearing an AI voice speaking English with a strong Spanish accent.

Callers to Washington state’s driver’s license agency who select automated service in Spanish are instead hearing an AI voice speaking English with a strong Spanish accent.

Everyone appreciates the effort to speak in another language. I discovered this as a white parent coordinator in an 80% Asian NYC school. Got big smiles when I introduced myself in Mandarin to our Dual Language families. It shows you care enough for them to feel welcomed n comfortable.

Learning a second language can be hard. Signing up for Pre-K and 3-K is easy.

Go to myschools.nyc to apply today. Deadline is tomorrow at midnight!

fucking genocidal

People who believe this are basically aliens to me. You cannot divorce reasoning from humanity, even when it’s weakly simulated in a chatbot. If you can’t compare two different texts, you should not be a scholar. If you have no personal approach to your work, then you shouldn’t take credit for it.

whoever made up the word “blizzard” was fucking ON IT

A detailed chart of the Cherokee Syllabary including the consonants and vowels.

On this day in 1928, the first edition of the Cherokee Phoenix is printed.

anticolonialhistory.com/event/358/

maybe @soclinganth.bsky.social knows. or some of their ppl

here at langywangy we think of standardization in terms of "imposition of uniformity" which doesn't necessarily come from the state. like we think of james milroy 2001, or michael silverstein 1998(?) "monoglot standard"

slavic language scholars seem to be using it 20+ years ago but for them, language standardization is clearly a question of state supported institutional shit, so "destandardization" can include regional *standards*

what's up with "destandardization" is this being theorized with a coherent definition or um... is it vibes?

oh so very much this

Rev. Jesse Jackson's "I *am* somebody..." remains one of the all-time great pieces of 20th century rhetoric / agitprop

And he could deliver it at a Black separatist meeting, the Democratic National Convention, or on god-blessed Sesame Street (see below 🥹)

RIP to the Voice of the Voiceless

I don’t know how to express how extremely gross it was to see the machine make my friend speak English against his will using his own voice.

Discovered today that Instagram had turned on (without my opt-in) automatic AUDIO translation of any reel that shows up in my feed not in English USING AI TO MIMIC THE SPEAKER’S VOICE and WOW it was creepy and upsetting.

You can turn it off in “Language & Translations” in Settings. 🙅🏻‍♀️

In some cases, the modern English form is unfortunately equal to what the umlaut plural should have been (wook : week), or the noun only exists derived from the verb (groot : greet : greeting).

“Our library sends out an annual book wook groot, but it used to send monthly beek week greet.”

what if it's not an ontogenetic transition, but a new arc of teeth that emerges along the inner circumference of adult teeth?

your speech would sound soooooo different. and the CHEWING power!

seeing no disagreements, we're going to claim total victory on this

multilingualism is NOT getting more complex. 'superdiversity' is a fake idea. shit has always been extremely complex and diverse

Come on Dunkin’ Donuts, you can make hearts, how hard would it have been to make groundhog-shaped donuts?

The English language is in crisis, most people who claim they can speak it don't even know what "filipendulous" or "jentacular" mean.

This language is dying.

the informal second person plural in english is now "chat"

Can word processors render boustrophedon?

We have this really strong belief in Anglophone culture that language is for communicating information and it often makes us rather clueless about the ways that language is used for rituals or feelings that aren't information-oriented. Small talk is a ritual of vibe coordination. This is useful!

the thing about not shaming and being patient is that in a human interaction, those are cues

they tell you somebody is paying attention to you, really listening, trying to understand with an open mind what you're experiencing.

those things are good because they are *indicators* of a good thing

‘A quiet, creeping Russification’: the displacement of indigenous languages across Russia According to the 2020 census, almost all national languages lost speakers despite the demographic growth of the corresponding ethnic groups.

oc-media.org/a-quiet-cree...

here at langywangy we like to focus on language stuff but you can't do language when you are dead in a concentration camp

PANGRAM (full use of alphabet): playing jazz vibe chords quickly excites my wife

“Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow” is OVER

Fucked up philosophy of language views:

- names are like nouns but they don't take articles, so they're mass nouns.

'John' refers to Johnny stuff