Neat article about a sign language that had been completely off the radar to the academic community until a chance question from one study participant during research on ISL (“do you want the sign I use with my friends, or the sign I use with my mother?”). A distinctive sign language arose in the Jewish quarter of the Algerian city of Ghardaia, and there’s still a community in Israel using it today! (And possibly also in France, although it’s not clear.) Cool stuff.

An article about Ajami, a writing system where West African languages like Wolof, Hausa and Fula have been written in the Arabic alphabet. What kind of boggles my mind is that the French clearly saw people using this script… and then just branded them “illiterate” anyway? How much contempt can you have. Ugh.

Interesting Twitter thread about the multitude of different writing systems used to write Hokkien! (Saved on archive.is, because I have very little faith in the longevity of Twitter links these days.) It’s difficult to write in Chinese characters, because about 15% of Hokkien words have no cognate in Mandarin, nor an ancestor in Old Chinese. There are a few different systems used to write those words (and sometimes for writing whole texts), including ones based on the Latin alphabet, bopomofo, and apparently a Hangeul-based/inspired script which was new to me. Cool stuff 🙂

An article talking about how accents have shifted over time (generally towards a “standard”, prestige accent) in the US, and how this can feel threatening to people because accents are so bound up in our sense of identity. The article makes a distinction between “dialect loss” (which it argues is bad, according to linguists) and “accent evolution” (which is neutral). I’m not sure how I feel about this, if only because I feel like both phenomena have much the same causes. But I do also feel like there’s value in having a “standard” language form which is readily comprehensible to all. Perhaps we need greater knowledge and acceptance of code-switching 🙂 Along with understanding that where people don’t use local dialects/accents it’s not because they’re inferior, but just because they’re less universally understood…

If you have an interest in different English accents, I found this a very interesting online book that actually goes into the different subdivisions of the lexical sets we all know and love, and how different accents pronounce them differently (e.g. the amount of variety in the BATH and CURE sets).

Great article. A Māori-run non-profit, Te Hiku Media, has collected hundreds of hours of audio recordings of Māori speakers speaking their language, which they want to create text-to-speech tools and the like… so of course, gigantic corporates have swooped in and tried to convince Te Hiku to surrender their data so they (the big profits) can sell access to the tools back to Māori people for $$$. Te Hiku steadfastly refused, and also sought to educate others as to why data sovereignty is so important.

Article talks about the word “Latinx”, a gender-neutral alternative to “Latino”/“Latina”, which has caught on largely among American academics and NGO types, but not among ordinary Spanish-speakers. The article instead points to the alternative “Latine”, and the use of -e in general as an alternative to gendered -o or -a, which is much more popular in the Spanish-speaking world and has the benefit of, y’know, actually being pronounceable.

Another article in the well-established “y’all is good, actually” genre. It makes the point that y’all is actually not first attested in the US, but in the UK – but then fails to go on to mention that its use still not restricted to the US, being characteristic of Indian-South African dialect as well, for example. When I visited Vivian’s family there, within a few weeks y’all had become part of my internal monologue, although I cut myself off and refrained from saying it aloud because I thought people would just find it funny coming from an Australian. (I mean, “ja” did come to form part of my active vocabulary for a while, and people thought that was funny enough, lol.)

Overall, though, I’m still a “you guys” person. I don’t see it as gendered; “guy” singular is gendered, but “guys” plural isn’t, sort of like Spanish vosotros (except even more so, because I would 100% address an all-female group as “you guys” and not find that weird. I mean what else am I going to say, “you girls”…?).