About

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This blog is written by a bunch of young linguists who are interested in language diversity, disparity, change and evolution. For more on the authors, please go here. This blog was started by Suzanne and Hedvig while they were working at MPI Nijmegen on a grammatical survey of African languages, in 2014. It was originally a space to vent about what it's like to read lots of grammars, but now it's expanded into more topics.

 We write about things that concern linguistic diversity, change and description. We also cover evolutionary/historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, variation etc. Our focus is not basic introduction to linguistics for the public, but news and information that matters to linguistics, in particular junior researchers and research students. The tone of this blog is sometimes quite informal, we do enjoy our gifs and memes. Don't let that fool you though, we also write serious posts about current research.

 In the menu to the left, you can see tags that we have used. 

 Common tags

Static pages
Besides blog posts, we also maintain a few static pages with information. They are:

Follow us elsewhereYou can also find us on
Posts made on this blog get automatically posted to these other outlets. If there's any change in the post, the most updated version is found here on Blogspot.
This blog used to be only on tumblr, but it was later moved to Blogspot/Blogger. There's lots of old posts on Tumblr, why not go to tumblr and read everything we did before we moved to blogger? In particular, check out the tags Free Online Linguistic Databases and Goodie From Grammar Reading. The tag for everything before blogger is "humanswhoreadgrammarsbeforeblogger".
Why “Humans”?
The blog is called Humans Who Read Grammars because a few of the authors have a boss who likes to contrast them to (and perhaps also would like to replace them with…) Computers Who Read Grammars. Thus, we are the Humans Who Read Grammars.

 Disclaimer
This blog is not an official blog for any of the academic institutions that the authors are part of. Opinions and ideas expressed here are of the authors only, they do not necessarily represent the universities, centres or research projects of the authors.


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A Global Tree of Languages

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I was a reviewer for the Evolution of Language (Evolang) conference for the first time this year, a tedious-sounding task that turned out to be hilarious.  The conference attracts some bizarre manuscripts on the origins of language, one particularly imaginative one I wanted to devote a blogpost to, but regretfully cannot because of reviewer confidentiality. Also in my inbox to review was the most exciting paper about language that I’d ever seen.  I recommended acceptance obviously, even though it was only tangentially related to the theme of the conference, and it was accepted as a poster and published in the conference proceedings (available here ).  The paper was by Gerhard Jäger and Søren Wichmann, about constructing a world family tree of languages using a database of basic vocabulary, the ASJP database .  Claims about how language families may be related are nothing new but are normally statistically uninformed (such as work by Merritt Ruhlen and Joseph Gr...
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Language family maps

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Last week, I assigned Bernhard Comrie's (2017) chapter 'The Languages of the World' (from The Handbook of Linguistics, 2017) to a class. It's a basic overview of the world's language families, which is what I wanted them to read, but for one thing: there are no maps in it. I overcompensated in class by presenting a 30-item list of maps, because some things are just so much easier to understand using visual representations. I decided to post some of the best ones I could find here, for future reference and in order to invite you to post better ones in the comments. This blog has featured posts on maps before, by  Hedvig on how to best represent linguistic diversity on maps and by  Matt on new approaches to ethnographies-linguistic maps . It's clear that the kind of maps that are typically used to depict the spatial distribution of languages of a single language family are fraught with difficulties. Typically they deal with multilingualism very poorly, the data...
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My ELAN workflow for segmenting and transcription

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Hello everyone, Hedvig here. I'm currently writing up my PhD thesis, hence the lack of writing here. Hopefully I'll be able to pick it up after submission, there's a lot of drafts lying on blogger waiting for completion. If you really, really miss me in particular, you could listen to my ramble at Talk the Talk - a weekly show about linguistics. Now that the shameless plug and excuses are done with, let's get down and talk about: THE TRANSCRIPTION CHALLENGE! In this blog post, I will focus on a part of this challenge¹ - the workflow for segmenting and transcribing  audio material. This is a rough guide, if it turns out people appreciate something like this I'll re-write it more thoroughly. This is a bit sloppily written in places, but trust me - if I do this "properly" right now I will lose days of work time that I should be spending on my thesis... so, I'll only do it if people really want it - and I might wait a while until I do. Sor...
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