Humans Who Read Grammars

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, is looking for a director to head a new department there. They've done something novel, had an open call and an open workshop series with invited speakers related to this director search. Below is the list of invited speakers and talks they've given in the workshop series which has now come to an end. Looking at the invitees and talk titles is a nice way to see how the institute sees the future of the field of psychology of language. As this blog started at this institute, I figured I'd share this here in case it's interesting for people following this account. From MPI-Nijmegen website: __________________________ The Max Planck Society is about to start the process of finding a new director for a new department at the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. The directors of the institute have identified that the field of Psychology of Language remains a core area that distinctly and uniquely co...

Reading/listening suggestions for people doing language documentation and description and who are interested in perspectives from indigenous people:  "Something's gotta change" book by Lesley Woods (2023): https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/asia-pacific-linguistics/somethings-gotta-change   (Indigenous Australia generally) also Gaby, A., & Woods, L. (2020). Toward linguistic justice for Indigenous people: A response to Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz.  Language ,  96 (4), e268-e280  https://old.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/e05_96.4Gaby.pdf   also podcast Because Language episode 35 which features interview with Woods & Gaby https://becauselanguage.com/35-somethings-got-to-change/ "Decolonizing Methodologies" by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonizing_Methodologies (Māori, New Zealand) Zobule, A. G., & McDougall, D. Grammar as a bridge: Empowering Indigenous learners in a Solomo...

Google's linguistics research team have put together a great big table of speaker population size data and other information. There is population data for over 5,000 languages. It's free, it includes sources and you can get it here: https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp/tree/main/linguameta .  Proper citation is: @InProceedings{ritchie-etal-2024-linguameta-unified, author = {Ritchie, Sandy and van Esch, Daan and Okonkwo, Uche and Vashishth, Shikhar and Drummond, Emily}, title = {LinguaMeta: Unified metadata for thousands of languages}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation}, month = {May}, year = {2024}, address = {Torino, Italy}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association}, pages = {10530–-10538}, abstract = {We introduce LinguaMeta, a unified resource for language metadata for thousands of languages, includi...

  I wrote a little document called "CLDF for dummies" based on what I know about CLDF that I think may be helpful to other researchers in language and cultural diversity and evolution. I am NOT a CLDF-developer or editor, this is all from an end-user perspective. I'll keep a full and updated version here . Here is version 1.0: CLDF for dummies This document outlines some of the very basics of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF) for researchers who want to use the data sets for analysis, comparison or plotting. CLDF is a way of organizing language data, in particular data sets with many different languages in it. The basic organisation is a set of tables, usually in csv-sheets (languages.csv, forms.csv etc). These documents are linked to each other in a specific way which makes it possible to combine them into an interlinked database. The files are all governed by standards, there are sanity-checks to make sure all lines up right. Because they are often just plain csv...

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 ...