Posts

A racist map of the world's languages

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Detail of world map of languages and races from 1924. The legend outlines language groups of the "yellow race". In order to move forward towards racial and social justice as a discipline we must become familiar with our history and the ways in which racist, colonialist, sexist and classist ideas are still present in our academic spaces. I would like to present to you a concrete piece of evidence of our racist past in particular - a world-map where languages are grouped into three races: white, yellow and black.  I started writing this blog post several years ago, but ended up not posting it because I felt there was so much to say and I wasn't sure I was the right person to say it, nor able to cover all related content in a fair and accessible manner. With the recent publication of the article Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession by Charity Hudley, Mallinson & Bucholtz

Online resources on linguistic typology and beyond

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Many Humans Who Read Grammars are also teachers of some kind, myself included. With the world-wide outbreak of COVID-19, most of this teaching is forced to be no longer in a classroom setting, but rather in a remote fashion. This comes with one benefit: if someone can tell it better than you, and a video of it happens to be on youtube, get your students to watch that lecture! So, please find some resources on linguistic typology & co below. First up is a short list of youtube videos on linguistic typology and some related topics. There is an entire MA course called 'Language Typology' from the Virtual Linguistic Campus (Uni Marburg). Here is a link  to the  Virtual Linguistic Campus , featuring many more lecture series on topics in linguistics. The same for this course here , a full course from the NPTEL-NOC IITM channel that contains a lot of courses, also on linguistics. A  set of mini-lessons in linguistic typology by  Isabel Cooke McKay , including topics such as p

A decade of state-of-the-art quantitative methods in linguistic typology

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Some turning points in linguistic typology are easily recognised, such as the ground-breaking work by Joseph Greenberg on implicational universals entitled "Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements" (Greenberg 1963). Other turning points are less well-defined, less commonly associated with a single paper, or a specific typologist, team, or place. But there was definitely something in the water during, let's say, a period  centred  around 2010  –  a change that we could call the quantitative turn in linguistic typology.  Linguistic typologists have long recognised that the languages of the world are related in various ways, most importantly, in nested arrays of hierarchical descent (genealogy) as well as in so-called Sprachbunds or linguistic areas (geography). For a long time, i.e. work reaching from Bell (1978) all the way to Bakker (2010), these interdependencies have been viewed as something of a nuisance, something to

Ethnologue changes access, again! Clarifying points

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News in brief. Ethnologue, as of October 26, have changed their access conditions on the site. Instead of getting 3 free page views per month, users can now see all pages on the website but not all information on them. To the right  are examples of what the views look like for Country and Language pages. This has sparked negative emotions. They are also pushing more for their guide pages, which old users may notice is very similar to the "Statistics" pages of older editions but with less information. These guide pages seem directed more at educators than academics. Just like with the previous access restrictions, these are not levied against users in certain countries with low mean incomes.  They have also launched a contributor program , which will enable people who contribute to access Ethnologue freely. SIL International is the publisher of Ethnologue, they are a "faith-based" organisation and while they claim to not be missionary, they work cl