This helped to explain a phenomenon I’ve noticed, where some words (like fault, false, alter, because – although that last one isn’t really explained by this link) are pronounced with the “lot” vowel by most people, but with the “thought” vowel by a minority (I want to say mainly by old people), in Australian English. I wondered if it was a lot-cloth split thing (and it probably is in the case of because), but where the vowel precedes [l] it didn’t seem to be that, so I had to keep looking. Finally I found that this phenomenon occurs in RP too, and this blog post describes the class of words affected as “words like salt”. At last, some confirmation that what I’ve noticed is a well-known “thing”!

Is there a city version of the Irish language? And if there is, how different is it from Gaeltacht Irish? A conversation I recently had with a speaker from Limerick, who is raising her daughter in Irish, revealed a fascinating fact. She never listened to Raidió na Gaeltachta. Was it that it was a Gaeltacht station and irrelevant to her, I asked? Only partly, she admitted. It was actually because she found the presenters very difficult to understand.

Yet this woman spoke fluent Irish. How could a fluent speaker of Irish have such difficulty with the national Irish-language radio station?

This article’s from 2010, but I found it really interesting nonetheless. The Irish language has been gaining popularity in Ireland’s cities, but speakers of this urban variant often struggle to understand speakers from the Gaeltacht, while Gaeltacht speakers often find the urbanites' speech weird and unpleasant to hear – to the point that members of the two groups often prefer to speak English with each other.

This article talks about the linguistic differences between Gaeltacht Irish (varieties passed on continuously from one generation to the next) and urban Irish (the result of language revival efforts, like Irish-medium schools). I appreciate that the author doesn’t just dismiss the latter as “bad Irish” or put down its speakers; he’s actually very positive about that community, even though he’s quite frank about the “simplified” nature of their Irish.

Thought this was an interesting Reddit thread on the things Spanish-speaking kids say when they’re learning how to talk 🙂 Unsurprisingly, many of them are the same classes of mistake that English-speaking kids make, like misconjugating irregular verbs as if they were regular, or mispronouncing certain phonemes to make them easier to say.

Interesting interview about regional variation in African-American speech.

The main thing I took away from this piece is that Victoria makes some of the most thorough recommendations for how much language-learning schoolkids should get, but in my experience no primary school student gets anywhere near 150 minutes of foreign language instruction per week. Try one-third of that at best. And kids end up not learning much except rote-memorised lists of numbers, days of the week, members of the family, etc. and basic pleasantries like “Hello, my name is…” and “How are you? I’m fine thanks.” The whole system needs a big overhaul.