Humans Who Read Grammars

Hello readers of Humans Who Read Grammars, As well as writing on this blog, I also work with the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL*). The IOL is a contest for students of secondary school from all over the world where they get to compete in solving linguistic puzzles. Normally in order to explain what the contest is all about I send people to the page with old problem sets,  but there's a hip IOL-meme page that's produced some very apt memes that may do a better job at explaining the contest to linguists. I'll paste them in below. ( Remember how we started as a meme-based blog for typologists? ) I recently made a post on our blog over there about the dominance of European countries in the contest and language diversity . For that post, I derived a little data visualisation of speaker populations per language (based on the 19th edition of Ethnologue) with infogram . I thought y'all might like it as well, so I'm sharing it here too. By the way, if you...

I’m excited to give a guest blog post here at humans who read grammars on new methods in language geography.  I’m a geographer by trade, and I am currently a PhD student at the University of Maryland.  I also work for an environmental nonprofit - Conservation International - doing data science on agriculture and environmental change in East Africa.  Before ending up where I am now, I lived for some time in West Africa and the Philippines.  During my time in both of those linguistically-rich areas, I became quite interested in language geographies and linguistics more generally.  Spurned on by curiosity and my disappointment in available resources, I’ve done some side projects mapping languages and language groups, which I’ll talk about here. Problems with Current Language Maps A map of tonal languages from WALS.  Fascinating at a global scale, but unsatisfying if you zoom in to smaller regions. One major issue with most modern maps of languages is...

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...

People love languages; there are many game shows on TV which are language-based.  Most language quiz shows test contestants on their knowledge of the broadcasting language itself. For instance, English-language channels testing contestants on their knowledge of the English language and English literature: Wheel of Fortune ; e.g. CBS News Have you seen quiz shows on TV where they quiz contestants on languages other than the broadcasting language (or some major international language)? Wouldn't it be cool if there are quiz shows on TV where they test contestants on languages that are rarely or never broadcasted?  Here I will talk about the "dialect quiz shows" in China, which I think can be emulated in many other parts of the world. These shows are entertaining for the general audience (if done right), and can help raise the interest in regional languages. (In this blogpost, there are many pics/gifs of people struggling and failing. They are not suggesting that...