Ryan Fountain

special issue cover of Anglistik, dominantly colored in red, the picture shows a blackboard menu

Right in time for #FoodAndCommunication4: our special issue "Focus on Language and Food" is out now with Anglistik 🤩 9 papers (and an introduction) that will make your foodie/linguistics heart happy. All of it open access: angl.winter-verlag.de/issue/ANGL/2... #LanguageAndFood #CulinaryLinguistics 🍩

Entrance iwh with cringe poster

Second conference day about to begin, we are looking forward to talks by @larshinrichs.site, @heidevolkening.bsky.social, @ldpres.bsky.social, @theresaheyd.bsky.social, @ryfountain.bsky.social and Chloé Thomas.
Cringe in dialectological fieldwork, Bad Poetry, neopronoun affect, and more!

UEBER CRINGE: Ästhetik und diskursive Praxis der Schamlust 1751886000  days  hours  minutes  secondsuntilTagung 07. – 09. Juli *** English Version below *** WISSENSCHAFTLICHE LEITUNG: Theresa Heyd (Heidelberg), Heide Volkening (Gr…

The Ueber Cringe conference is nearly here! (July 7-9, Uni Heidelberg) I'll be giving a talk on "Uncouth Gurgitators"

More info here: uebercringe.de/tagung-ueber...

It's warm out there people. Try to stay cool 🙏

*Brits

To my American brain these for sure look like the things Brtits are calling biscuits or tea biscuits 🤷‍♂️

#LanguageAndFood #CulinaryLinguistics #DigitalPalates 🍽

Abstract accepted for "Ueber Cringe: Ambivalent Affects and Everyday Aesthetics"
(Heidelberg University, July 7-9, 2025) 😁

I'll be speaking about the ambivalent 'cringe' of competitive eating-as-entertainment 🌭 from a linguistics perspective 🗣

#Linguistics #Cringe #LanguageAndFood #PhD

R.I.P William Labov, an absolute G.O.A.T. He is one of the main reasons I became interested in linguistics and his work has had a huge influence on me and countless others.

#RIPBillLabov #g.o.a.t #sociolinguistics

One story about him that I loved was that he would deliberately not correct people on how to pronounce his surname, because he was interested in the variation

How many of is walk taller, unashamed of our vernaculars, directly or indirectly because of him?

*you're. don't come after me...

If you an Ausländer going through a visa process with your respective Ausländerbehörde in Germany, not all hope is lost. I received an email my Ausländbehörde (a famously inefficient one) - with an UPDATE. This is simply unheard of. Change is possible.

#PhD #Germany #Ausländer #stillhope

The grand season finale of the #OSSO (Online Selves-Self Online) digital talk series (org. with @coocho.bsky.social) is coming up on Dec 11: Don't miss Alex Georgakopoulou's talk on "Re-positioning Positioning Analysis for Stories and Identities Online"!
forms.office.com/e/LVmB9NYtPh
#linguistics

Finally finished writing my first abstract for a conference, my first book review has made it to the "in press" stage, and I'm making good progress on final transcriptions for my project. Really needed some tangible movement. #linguistics #phd #academiclife

Map of Britain titled "Who brings Christmas presents in different British regions?" A few names: Northern Scotland has "Nessie", southern Scotland has "Old Man Puddin'", the North East has "big Johny Winter", Cumbria has "Tabitha the Christmas Hedgehog", Yorkshire has "Odin", West Midlands has "Replacement Bus Service", Cambridgeshire has "Professor X-mas", Wales has "Cymrawd nadolig barfog", Kent and East Sussex have "amazon.co.uk" and the rest of southern England has "father Christmas"

Ryan Starkey makes wonderful, well-researched maps about dialects and accents in Great Britain.

But sometimes he gets silly.

I did NOT eat the whole pie.

Eating-pie-as-a-meal season is come. #holidayfood #teamdescriptivism #teamfun

From a Christmas market in Esslingen. They threw the whole English language on their sign. #linguisticlandscape #linguistics

Celebrated #Thanksgiving a wee later. Aside from swapping turkey for chicken, we had most of the classics.

I don't normally get hungry transcribing eating videos, but one got me today. There was a challenge with these mac and cheese tacos.

No turkey for Thanksgiving this year in Germany, but Franklin is doing his best impression. Detroit Lions on the TV. Mini lion here next to me. #Thanksgiving #cat

BaFoLa abstract flyer with a donut: German cuisine is famously meaty, but Germany is also the world’s largest market for meat replacement products. Fake meats like vegan sausage and schnitzel are enjoyed by omnivores as well as vegans and vegetarians, and the array of animal-free copycat products is dizzying. In Germany, meat replacement products are abundant, cheap, and often delicious, with restaurants and grocery stores (especially in cities) selling vegan versions of almost any product you can think of, from sushi to egg liqueur, from raw minced pork to shark’s fin soup, and multiple brands of vegan canned tuna. In this talk, I will examine how these veganized products are linguistically marked as vegan versions of meaty (and dairy) originals. Drawing on interviews with producers of vegan products and grocery store shelf analysis I conducted in Leipzig in July 2024, I will identify strategies producers use for navigating the legal landscape for product names, and how labels and advertising make their products legible as both distinctly vegan and aligned with the animal-product originals. To conclude, I invite discussion on the similarities between vegan product labeling strategies and Gendersprache, or means of speaking gender-neutrally in German. German traditionally requires indicating male or female gender for all kinds of person-related nouns, and queer and non-binary people in Germany are innovating to find a wide variety of ways to speak gender-neutrally. Especially given the social overlap between vegan-ness and queerness that I have observed in my fieldwork in Leipzig, with vegan food’s ubiquity in queer spaces, I’m interested in exploring together in our discussion the ways these gender-neutral noun forms echo fake meat product labeling.

Save the date: next #BaFoLa lecture coming up on November 29, 12:30-13:30 CET. Ariana Gunderson will present on "Veganizing Language: Strategies for Plant-based Legibility in Germany". Official invitation going out via the mailing list soon, let me know if you'd like to join! #Linguistics

Influencer Discourse: Navigating the Spectrum from Positive to Negative Impact

CfP: @coocho.bsky.social, @nounfraze.bsky.social, Dawn Archer & I are organizing a panel on "Influencer Discourse: Navigating the Spectrum from Positive to Negative Impact" at next year's ADDA conference (Tilburg, May 21-23)
More info on the panel @ www.diggitmagazine.com/adda-5-panels #linguistics

Do you study influencer discourse? Send your abstract to our ADDA panel! We’re interested in classic 🌹👓 influencers but also in the “dark side” of social media power-users
🐦🐦

Slip of the spell check rather?

It's good! Probably just a slip of the finger tho right?

This is hilarious 😂. I've come across most of these thru TikTok. As an approaching middle-aged American living in Germany, w/o TikTok I'd have other hope to keep up with any slang

Agreed. Reading this, I would probably still think that she's at least 90% dead ^^ Interesting to think about tho!

(Native speaker USA) A. I would think she's dead. To me, it depends greatly on whether this is a narrative. Less so but maybe: Jessie has lived most of her life away from Canada or doesn't affiliate herself with Canada for some reason.