Martin Haspelmath

ORiGiNS OF LANGUAGe What enables human language? A biocultural framework Inbal Arnon1*, Liran Carmel2, Nicolas Claidière3,4,5, W. Tecumseh Fitch6, Susan Goldin-Meadow7, Simon Kirby8, Kazuo Okanoya9, Limor Raviv10,11, Lucie Wolters12, Simon E. Fisher13,14* Explaining the origins of language is a key challenge in understanding ourselves as a species. We present an empirical framework that draws on synergies across fields to facilitate robust studies of language evolution. The approach is multifaceted, seeing language emergence as dependent on the convergence of multiple capacities, each with their own evolutionary trajectories. It is explicitly biocultural, recognizing and incorporating the importance of both biological preparedness and cultural transmission as well as interactions between them. We demonstrate this approach through three case studies that examine the evolution of different facets involved in human language (vocal production learning, linguistic structure, and social underpinnings).

Review on language evolution just published - haven't read properly yet but from a quick skim looks important!
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

It's so amazing to me that "A Grammar of Mandan" already has almost 900 downloads after being put online less than a year ago! It's amazing to see how Open Access publishing really boosts visibility, so I'm pleased to see more publishers go that direction.

dlc.hypotheses.org/on-numerativ...

Coming soon - Turner & Hoffmann on Creative Construction Grammar. In this, we argue that the domain-general process of Conceptual Blending is the cognitive operation that combines constructions. BTW this will be published open access!

www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Mum people, Papua New Guinea, playing traditional game of spinning tops

Our Anthropological Linguistics group at Uni Zurich has a webpage now:
www.isle.uzh.ch/en/AnthroL.h...

#CfP alert! 🚨 The call for papers and theme sessions for the next International Conference of the German Cognitive Linguistics Conference (Bielefeld, 31.08.-02.09.2026) is finally out 🎉 www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/...

Mother tongue policy: Nigeria adopt English language for teaching in schools - BBC News Pidgin Di former policy bin provide say make di language instruction from early childcare education to primary six, be di mother tongue or di language of di immediate community.

This is very sad

www.bbc.com/pidgin/artic...

Denkt dran: Morgen ist die Deadline für die 23. Sprachwissenschaftliche Tagung für Promotionsstudierende in Osnabrück! Noch nichts eingereicht? Hier geht's zum CfP: staps.stuts.eu/call-for-pap...

#OTD 223 years ago, August Friedrich Pott (1802-1887) was born 🥳 He started working as a schoolmaster in Celle, but would later become one of the pioneers of (historical comparative) linguistics as well as the leading scholar of Romani in the 19th century.

#LinguisticBirthdays #Histlx

New paper on back-formation and "forward-formation": If one takes the right view of the inventorium (or "extended lexicon"), there is no distinction between "potential words" and "existing words", and the problems with "back-formation" disappear. www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/...

The Romance Inter-Views no. 4 on theory and experimental evidence is online on #Isogloss!
Six linguists talk about the integration of experimental and theoretical linguistics, when experiments challenged theory and when they confirmed it, and share ideas for new research directions in Romance ling!

hit-ašknz-u!

It's striking how good AI assistants are at reading linguistics texts. I couldn't have explained the neologism "synexpression" better. In fact, saying that synexpression is about bundling, while coexpression is about sharing is perhaps better than anything I have said. (ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007...)

Podcast episode 51: Martin Haspelmath In this interview, Martin Haspelmath talks about how he got started in linguistics, the rise of large-scale areal typology in the 1990s, language description vs language comparison, and the current…

Episode no. 51 is out 🤩

Martin Haspelmath (@haspelmath.bsky.social) talks about how he got started in linguistics, the rise of large-scale areal typology in the 1990s, language description vs language comparison, and the current state of the field.

🎙️ hiphilangsci.net/2025/11/01/p...

#Histlx

Yuen-Ren Chao was a phenomenal linguist. I recently discussed the enduring relevance of his key 1934 article here: dlc.hypotheses.org/3381

📅 The deadline to submit abstracts has been entended to November 23rd!
📅 La date limite de soumission des résumés est prolongée jusqu'au 23 novembre !

book cover

We accepted "I always migrated by reindeer: Lamunkhin and Bystraja Even narratives about their traditional way of life" by Brigitte Pakendorf langsci-press.org/catalog/book...

Wollen wir wirklich, dass Wissenschaft „populär“ wird? Vielleicht kann Wissenschaft mit ihrer skeptischen Haltung gegenüber allem Vorwissen nur als Eliteprojekt funktionieren…

In Großbritannien gibt es die Tradition der Festschriften bis heute kaum – dagegen sind sie in den USA verbreitet, auch durch den Einfluss des deutschen akademischen Systems ab Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts. Das Wort nahmen die Auswanderer über den Atlantik mit.

What is a “copula”, and what is “predicative inflection”? This new blogpost continues the comparison between the comparative concepts of Creissels et al. (2026) (in Bertinetto et al. 2026) and those of Haspelmath (2025): dlc.hypotheses.org/3865

Many thanks to Lilián Guerrero for inviting me to give lectures at UNAM in Mexico City! (The lecture materials are here: zenodo.org/records/1743...)

book cover

Just published "Notes on the grammar of Andakí" by Jelien Moens and Matthias Pache #openaccess #ela langsci-press.org/catalog/book...

Yes!

Bertinetto, Ciucci and Creissels just published a fantastic new cross-linguistic handbook. But I have some critical comments on their introductory chapter. It turns out that it's not so easy to say what exactly is "nonverbal predication". dlc.hypotheses.org/3832

Guests at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology symposium on "What Makes Us Human?"

Me with Nobel Prize laureate Svante Pääbo

Me with legendary cognitive scientist Mike Tomasello

Me with my good buddy, legendary composer J. S. Bach

Good to be back home after a week-long trip to Germany for a symposium at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology on "What Makes Us Human?" (www.eva.mpg.de/events/2025-...).

I spent about the same amount of time traveling as I did at the symposium, but it was worth it.

A bit of linguistic cartography to brighten your day. This map shows how the words for camel 🐫 spread across the Old World.

Graphic distribution of languages represented as dots in a two-dimensional space. X: AES (endangerment level, ranging from "extinct" to "not endangered" Y: MED (documentation level, ranging from "wordlist or less" to "long grammar"

Because I think better in pictures, here is a visualisation of languages according to documentation and endangerment status (I'm calling it glottocloud).

glottolog.org/langdoc/status

Thrilled to announce the publication of my paper "A Modern Synthesis: The Fillmorean Construction and its Hidden Lineage" in Constructions! The article digs into the prehistory of #ConstructionGrammar and is based on the first chapter of my upcoming book
constructions.journals.hhu.de/article/view...

Confs: 4th International Conference "Prominence in Language" Prominence relations establish a ranking between linguistic units, such as prosodic units, arguments of a verb, and discourse referents. Prominence is one of the key notions in language and communication: it accounts, for instance, for prosodic highlighting and for the building of linguistic structure and discourse representations. The CRC 1252 Prominence in Language (University of Cologne) investigates the role of prominence from an interdisciplinary linguistic perspective, involving phonology

Confs: 4th International Conference "Prominence in Language"

Advanced Tongue Route, obviously #IPA #Linguistics