Online resources on linguistic typology and beyond

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 phonological typology, 'typology of force' (imperatives and interrogatives), and subordinate clauses, can also be found on youtube. Tom Scott has made some fun relevant videos, including on morphological typology and on some very useful grammar features that English lacks, see all of them here. Lastly, here is a short intro to linguistic typology made by yours truly, because none of the above really covered what I wanted to convey. 

Five years ago, Hedvig wrote a post about two excellent educational videos about language history/evolution, one on Peter Whiteley and Ward Wheeler's project to map the evolution of Uto-Aztecan languages and one on How languages evolve by Alex Gendler. Here is another lecture on that topic by Michael Corballis. 

Another cool video deals with Berlin and Kay's (1969) implicational hierarchy of basic color terms. The famous TEDx talk by Lera Boroditsky on linguistic relativism is here. As well as another TEDx talk on the same topic by Petrina Nomiko. There are a lot of other TEDx talks on linguistics, on a variety of topics, including on language endangerment and the importance of linguistic diversity. 

Hedvig also posted earlier about the lecture sets from the Centre of Excellence for Language Dynamics (CoEDL) that can be found on iTunes Uni, among which is a set of lectures called 'Language shape' that deal with multilinguality, diversity, language documentation and description and a lecture series on Language evolution. Her original post describes how non-iTunes Uni-users can get access to them. 

Another series of lectures can be found on this channel (mostly in Russian). A tonne of lectures on typological topics can be found on the Vidya-mitra channel, in a variety of languages, but I haven't really figured out how these are structured yet. Here is a playlist of lectures on various typological topics, but I don't think it is set up as an online course. 

Here are some documentaries on language revitalisation:
Voices on the Rise: Indigenous Language Revitalization in Alberta:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dtEujiPUE0 (Voices on the Rise, episode 1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0UH1IhBnNk (Voices on the Rise, episode 2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZgJ8TZ0Zs0 (Voices on the Rise, episode 3)
Karihwanoron: Precious Things (with Kanien'kéha/Mohawk subtitles)
Rising Voices / Hótȟaŋiŋpi - Revitalizing the Lakota Language see also the official website. 
And there is a lot more to be found on youtube, also older stuff, like 'Why save a language' by Sally Thompson (2006).

This is some of the stuff that I will be assigning to my students - hit me with your best videos, podcasts, and other online resources below!