Darin Flynn

Cracking the code of Papua New Guinea’s undocumented lang... Nicholas Evans has spent decades trying to decipher the undocumented tongues of Papua New Guinea and Australia. His work has redefined the way we think a...

Profile of Nick Evans, who just won the British Academy's Neil and Saras Smith medal for lifetime achievement in linguistics
@theobserveruk.bsky.social @britishacademy.bsky.social

observer.co.uk/news/science...

“Vowel (dis)harmony and consonantal influence in Turkish: revisiting I-spreading” by Göktuğ Börtlü and Semra Baturay Meral (Sep. ’25) www.researchgate.net/profile/Goek... (Abstract from the 22nd International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, İzmir, Turkey, Sep. 4–6, 2025)

YouTube video by Dr Geoff Lindsey An American T-dropping conspiracy?!

cf. “An American t-dropping conspiracy” by Geoff Lindsey www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_0V...

Improbable but fun old-school SPE-style Duke-of-York analysis:

‘meetings’
/mɪjtɪŋz/
↓
[mɪjtɪnz] (“g-dropping” and place-assimilation to /z/)
↓
[mɪjtn̩z] (schwi syncope)
↓
[mɪjʔn̩z] (regular t-debuccalization before syllabic n)
↓
[mɪjʔɪnz] (schwi epenthesis)

Cool: ‘meetings’ /miːtɪŋz/ → [miːtɪnz] (“g-dropping”; rare in nouns like this!) → [miːʔɪnz] (“t-dropping” before [ɪn], not just syllabic [n̩]; increasingly common!)

Good name for a linguist

“A grammar of Kangri” by Anil Swadeshi (Oct. ’25) lincom-shop.eu/epages/57709...

Just after 9am; big crowds already!

Some of our amazing profs and students talking to potential students and their families about our programs at today’s Open House, which an estimated 11,000 will attend!

Wow, the Blake Lively–Justin Baldoni drama is *still* a hot topic? I’m not surprised that commentators lexically select ‘livelihood’. I had predicted early on that the rather obscure adverb ‘blithely’ would also be lexically selected in this drama’s proceedings (see post below)

Fangyan Friday #10: Sing-song Shanghaiese Learn the melodious and hybrid dialect of China's most cosmopolitan city

This 2019 post has some nice, clear samples of Shanghainese: www.theworldofchinese.com/2019/09/fang...

The Hidden Orchestra: How Ancient Systems Underlie Speech Your brain transforms thoughts into speech using an ancient blueprint: the sensorimotor control system. New research reveals how evolution repurposed movement control for language.

Another excerpt from my book, Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language published by @mitpress.bsky.social
This post is on the ancient sensorimotor origins of language production networks.

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wire...

“Phonological variation and gender performance: a sociolinguistic study of the “nü guoyin” phenomenon in Beijing youth speech” by Qi’ao Yang and Zhizhong Tian (Oct. ’25) simonowenpub.com/index.php/SO...

The arbitrariness of the sign, sure, but I like how "crispy" sounds crispy, "crunchy" sounds crunchy, "mushy" sounds mushy, and "sloppy" sounds sloppy

“Learning accurate onset clusters: perception lags behind production” by Claire Moore-Cantwell, Anne-Michelle Tessier and Ashley Farris-Trimble (Oct. ’25) journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

Quite a bit on phonology :)

We are about a month away from the publication release date for my @mitpress.bsky.social book, Wired for Words: The Neural Architecture of Language. Here's a chapter-by-chapter preview.

drive.google.com/file/d/18mc5...

You’ll enjoy this one @brettc.bsky.social

YouTube video by Dr Geoff Lindsey S Sh sounds in Spanish and English!

New Geoff Lindsey video: “S Sh sounds in Spanish and English!” youtu.be/9nI7AuPmwlA

Image from "Just My Type" showing five newspaper mastheads, all in blackletter typeface: The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Irish Examiner, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Daily Telegraph. A caption in smaller text reads: "Blackletter news from around the world".

A nice array of newspaper mastheads in blackletter type (Simon Garfield, "Just My Type")

“What makes a consonant a geminate?” by Lia Saki Bučar Shigemori and Felicitas Kleber (Oct. ’25) opendata.uni-halle.de/bitstream/19... (big file; whole Proceedings)

cf. bsky.app/profile/litt...

The Canadian Language Museum reopens this Thursday at York University’s Glendon Hall languagemuseum.ca

The Louvre is /luːv/ in English, similar to Canadian French. I wonder if anyone ever says /lʊɹv/ or /lɔɹv/ à la Brett Favre

Confs: 13th International Conference on Nordic and General Linguistics

Threw together a minimal site for these animations jofrhwld.github.io/vocal_tract_...

#OTD 193 years ago, Gustav Langenscheidt (1832–1895) was born 🎉 A language teacher, publisher, and founder of a publishing group. Together with Charles Toussaint, he developed an innovative method for self-learning languages. A bridge in Berlin is named in his honour.

#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx

Holding large, 1200-page book

UGent's copy of the Oxford Guide to the Bantu Languages has finally arrived in the library - absolute unit of a book!