Humans Who Read Grammars

Happy news, it is possible to access lectures from the Centre of Excellence for Language Dynamics (CoEDL) on any podcasting app! Now you can also look this smart while listening to lectures about linguistic diversity on your normal podcast app! For more on the map of linguistic diversity in the bubble, go here . The centre has long had lectures up at iTunes U , but it wasn't until now that I figured out how to get them out of the apple-bubble and into podcasting apps for android etc (i.e the RSS URL)*. I tried it out yesterday, I ended up listened to Russell Gray's talk on grand challenges of linguistics while grocery shopping at Aldi - a throughly pleasant experience that I wish you all! (I'm a podcast freak, every alone moment spent not working is spent listening to podcasts.) The centre has several different programmes and projects, and the lectures are organised into different "courses" or "podcasts" accordingly. Below, I've included ...

In a language serving a complex (i.e., real) community,  it is absence of structured heterogeneity that would be dysfunctional Uriel Weinreich wrote this in the much influential paper " Empirical foundations for a theory of language change" from 1968, and it is as true today as it was then. The paper was written by him, William Labov and Marvin Herzog. It was published and finalised after Weinreich's death, he died in 1967 at the age of 40. In the last weeks of his life, he devoted his time to discussing and writing this very paper. In the preface of the paper, his two co-authors write about him and the work behind this paper, and how honoured they are to have written this with him. They write that by section 2.4, the personal editing of the paper by Uriel Weinreich ends. While the finalisation of the paper was their work and the arguments represent their joint discussions, they underline that the conception and much of the writing was his. The paper is well-c...

Hiya readers,  This is a post more about public outreach by scientists and journalism than linguistic diversity or description; please bear with me. _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ TL;DR: Journalists are producing more and more composite stories where infographics and fact sheets are being used as separate entities. The interest for the infographic of the world's languages that I made a post about is an example of this. The public's awareness of the world is being shaped more by media outlets and journalists and less by published academic papers, education and/or encyclopaedias. Many of these stories and facts require more context and background to make sense. There is a higher demand than before on consumers of information evaluating and judging the information.  Researchers are also becoming more interested in publicly accessible visualisations of their work. Journalists and researchers are very sim...

Have you seen this infographic ( click here for original post and larger size )? It's been floating around various linguistics blogs, been shared of 32 thousands times on the book of faces and been reblogged and retweeted in many other places.  I bet you found a flaw in it! Did you read the fine print and look up the sources (it's mostly from just this page )? No? It's ok. Allow me to give some explanation and context, as a diversity linguists working with public outreach - I'd like to take this chance to explain some things about data on languages of the world. © 2015 Alberto Lucas López, South China Morning Post  Publishers Ltd The international edition of the newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP)  published this infographic of languages of the world  on the 27th of May and later updated it. SCMP is an English language newspaper based in Hong Kong. They have a great internet presence and have made several neat infographics  on other topics....