Humans Who Read Grammars

World map from Glottolog, each language is one dot and coloured by language family (or other top-genetic unit). Language families are the main way we categorise and understand the language diversity of the world. A language family is a group of languages that have been analysed as having one ancestor,  one great-great-great-and-yet-greater-grand-mother language. Indo-European is a language family, with the sub-groups of Romance, Germanic, Slavic etc. Maps are great tools for visualising information,  we're pretty map-nerdy on this blog.   Robert Forkel, one of the editors of Glottolog, kindly shared an interactive map of the world with languages plotted out and coloured by language family with me. This map is interactive, rendered in a web browser with and html and json file. This map is not available on the Glottolog site, but will later be implemented in the command-line interface.  You can see language families on the website by either selecting a co...

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...

Lately I've been reading papers in diversity and evolutionary linguistics and some in biology. And I've also been creating mixtapes for friends. So, it occurred to me to make a mixtape of academic papers that go well together and that I think should be shared, and well.. here we are now. This is Hedvig's Evolutionary/Diversity Linguistics Mixtape Vol.1! It features s ome well-known classics, some perhaps lesser well-known ones. They're ordered al phabetically, but can be read ever which way. There's a link to a free PDF for almost all of the publications. The intention is not to create an exhaustive list of everything in evolutionary/diversity linguistics that is important (just like a mixtape of pop songs does not consist of all excellent pop songs), these publications have been especially selected for how they go together. They are also very suitable for new comers to these kinds of research questions, they're quite accessibly written and reada...

We've had a new submission for Goodies from Grammar Reading - a series of blog posts with interesting, fun or in other ways noteworthy utterances found while reading linguistic description ( blogger posts here , old posts on tumblr here ). This one was noted by Siva Kalyan during Don Daniels' talk at the annual meeting of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS 2015 in Western Sydney University). The example is taken from a collection of texts in Apalɨ by Martha Wade (Wade n.d.) and serves to illustrate the way this language encodes imperatives. The codes for this language are:  ena and  apal1256 . Original text : Vac-ɨna huji hisi sɨmɨl-ɨlɨŋ  u-avɨ-la-lɨ. Glossing : move.aside- 2sg.ds  underarm rotten smell- 1sg.imp  say- pl-hab-3 Translation: ‘ “Move aside and let me smell your underarm,” they say.’                  As utterances out of context goes, this...

I made some maps of language diversity, to add to Hedvig's long lists of existing info graphics here and here , using data from Glottolog.  I wanted to make a map showing the number of language families - 272 according to Glottolog, not counting sign languages, artificial languages, creoles, pidgins, and mixed languages.  Each curve shows the area in which languages in these families are found.  The colors were randomly selected in order to try making the curves distinct from each other, although in some areas these are difficult to make out, such as in southeast Asia.   Try spotting in particular Indo-European, Turkic, Afro-Asiatic, Na-Dene, Quechua and Niger-Congo. Austronesian is the red triangle in the right hand corner, although my curve-plotting algorithm makes it incorrectly cover Australia as well.   The maps are generated in R using the 'maps' package.  Here's a function 'drawcurve' in R for drawing curves of a particular colour around a se...