@adamcschembri.bsky.social
https://sites.google.com/view/adamcschembri/home Australian professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham, UK Hearing person interested in sign languages & signing communities 🏳️🌈🇦🇺🇲🇹🇪🇺
Tweet from Alexander Clark: I was explaining at dinner that linguists disagree radically about almost everything and one person said so what do they actually agree about? Just that languages exist? And I was like: well you might want to sit down for this
26.02.2026 18:07 — 👍 14 🔁 2 💬 2 📌 0It is interesting how everywhere in the south of England apart from London hardly registers on this map. But then basically nowhere in the Midlands does.
26.02.2026 18:01 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
❓What can a social-justice oriented, pluriversal sociolinguistics look like? @yecidortega.bsky.social reflects on this question in his review essay of 3 brilliant new books on critical sociolinguistics, language & social justice. Early view version here! 👇
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Bauer, A. & Gipper, S. & Herrmann, T.-A. & Hosemann, J.. 2026. Rethinking linguistic feedback: A modality-agnostic and holistic approach to multimodal addressee signals in spoken and signed dyadic interaction. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 11(1), 1–50.
DOI: doi.org/10.16995/glo...
Bots have made their way to Prolific experiments. Our lab has stopped online testing of adults entirely now for this reason - we want to know if what we study is real. Probably data collected 2-3 years ago are ok, but moving forward we just can't know. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
19.02.2026 15:14 — 👍 170 🔁 97 💬 6 📌 11
In the British English Dialect Research Bibliography, the study of Birmingham English is noticeably under-represented compared to London, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and other major cities. montgomerycm.shinyapps.io/Articles/
26.02.2026 08:45 — 👍 9 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Sociolinguists - who has written about possible relationships between the time depth of a spoken language variety and the amount of regional sociophonetic variation? British Englishes show a great deal of regional accent variation whereas Australian Englishes have relatively little.
11.02.2026 08:44 — 👍 7 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
book cover vol III
book cover vol II
book cover vol I
Just published "Negation in the worlds languages" (3 vols) edited by Matti Miestamo & Ljuba Veselinova with Héloïse Calame. #rcg #openaccess langsci-press.org/catalog/book...
23.01.2026 07:24 — 👍 26 🔁 12 💬 1 📌 3Almost as good as my rule of thumb: has anyone you know ever written anything in it you want to cite? If not, then it’s not the Journal for you.
03.02.2026 22:49 — 👍 11 🔁 5 💬 1 📌 1
calling L1 speakers of British English, please help out my student Emilia on her dissertation study! 🐦🐦
it's a short (<20 min) and fun one on voice recognition, please share! lancasteruni.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
Our paper (w/ @bodowinter.bsky.social and @mperlman.bsky.social) is finally out, officially 🥳. In it, we set ourselves the lofty goal of defining iconicity, focusing on its subjectivity, context-dependence, and gradability. Let us know if you agree with our definition? 🤔
doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...
Screenshot of a chapter by Carl Börstell called "Iconic plurality across modalities"
Four years(!) after the chapter was originally written, the official publication is now live (pre-print has been out for some time though):
doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...
How can plurality be expressed with iconic forms across different modalities of human languaging?
#linguistics
'I have more impact outside of university'
Google Translate appears to do a reasonable job translating this article from Dutch into English, so, if you don't read Dutch, you can still check out this interview with my friend and former academic Onno:
www.nemokennislink.nl/publicaties/...
IGALA list: Deborah Cameron, one of the greatest feminist linguists ever, has passed away. Everybody interested in the relationship of #language and #gender, please go and read her witty and myth-busting blog: https://
debuk.wordpress.com/ .
#linguistics #GenderLinguistics
Day 1 of #BooksAreMyJam!
Blueberry Maple jam, with Linguaphile: A life of language love by Julie Sedivy.
A classic Canadian flavour duo + this book about @juliesedivy.bsky.social's relationship with language through her childhood in Montreal, later research as a linguist, and more
This is awesome! I have been curating a list of #linguistics journals, with information on their publishing model (and also on whether they admit submissions created by LaTeX, a high-quality, professional Open Source way to produce scientific documents).
uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/s/BvRY0u3rDY...
In the past decade or two, predatory publishers have built a parallel universe of publication opportunities preying on the least privileged & most vulnerable of our colleagues
I got my hands on what passes for peer review at one such journal
ideophone.org/on-plagiaris...
Yes: interesting question. I’d love to see a study into how much this varies in LSF.
In our BSL Corpus data, we see 2 and 1 handed variants of signs 6-10, but there is very much a change from 2 to 1 handed variants in progress. I think this change is much more advanced in Auslan.
Are you on LinkedIn? Would love to share this infographic there.
14.01.2026 09:39 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0
I appreciate that some of
you are outraged about the White House absurdity of keeping ASL interpreters out of press briefings — but please don’t call us “hearing-impaired.” It’s a slur. Nothing wrong with using “deaf.” Saves you extra space too.
In their article "Signs of Deaf Ni-Vanuatu", Jacqueline Iseli and Rachel McKee describe the sociolinguistic context of deaf people in Vanuatu who have limited opportunities to socialise together, and document signs used by 19 deaf adults across the country nzlingsoc.org/journal_arti...
11.12.2025 03:40 — 👍 3 🔁 4 💬 1 📌 0I've very much noticed this too so it's great to have some data-based infographics to back this up!
13.01.2026 17:34 — 👍 12 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0
First paper of 2026 with Rhys Sandow, @jwgrieve.bsky.social, and Rose Stamp!
www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
The University of Birmingham is hiring through its 125th Anniversary Fellowships and Chairs scheme!
www.birmingham.ac.uk/jobs/125th-a...
The Linguistic Justice Foundation is looking for 60 people to make a $5 monthly donation to help support our work pursuing linguistic justice for everyone. Please donate if you can, shar eif you can't.
www.zeffy.com/en-US/donati...
Happy to share the first version of my textbook "Quantitative Data Analysis for Linguists in R".
stefanocoretta.github.io/qdal/
Comments and suggestions welcome! (on the GitHub repo: github.com/stefanocoret...)
The textbook takes you from 0 to basic stat modelling with Bayesian regression.
There are possibly 8000 language varieties used around the world today, many of them with communities of speakers and signers that number less than 10,000.
Even if only a handful of people in those communities want to keep their languages alive, I’m happy to promote their right to do so.
You're not interested in Cornish nor BSL. Your children aren't interested in Cornish either. Yet we are having got several posts about exactly how much you're not interested in any of this discussion about minority languages.
28.11.2025 15:35 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0That's quite a non-sequitur. Nobody here said anything about forcing anyone to do anything.
28.11.2025 15:01 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0Most people are not gay, but we have same sex marriage. What's your point? Minorities should have no rights?
28.11.2025 13:54 — 👍 3 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0