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February 28, 2020

Site Recommendations

I'm always surprised to find out how many people are running linguistics blogs, and how knowledge of these blogs is predicated on either being in a particular space (e.g. Tumblr), a "friend of a friend runs a blog on X" type deal, or just pure chance (googling Praat scripts and happening upon some interesting stuff).

I wish there could be a more connected "lingosphere" as it were. It used to feel like there were few people blogging about linguistics. I've come to realize that there are many, but not a lot of awareness! Likely because these are all passion projects made with the goal of sharing knowledge (much like yours truly :) ).

To that end, I'd like to promote some interesting blogs/sites I've had the pleasure of coming across recently.

Joey Stanley is a PhD candidate in linguistics who writes about phonetics, phonology, and Praat (a software for analyzing sounds). His writing is clear and concise and a joy to read. I enjoy his discussions on Wells' lexical sets and their limitations.

Humans Who Read Grammars is a blog about linguistic typology run by multiple young linguists. The topics are diverse, but if you're interested in the colorful spectrum of language diversity, you're sure to find something there. As an example, a fun discussion on r-metathesis in Germanic languages.

Possessive Suffix, or Ja me räjäytämme sinun possessiivisuffiksisi, is a Tumblr run by a historical linguist specializing in historical linguistics regarding Finno-Ugric. Because it is on Tumblr, it is less article-centric and more based on shorter posts and responding to other linguists. You may enjoy this thread on the difficulty of establishing orthographies for the same language family!

Most of the blogs I mention have an RSS feed, if you would like to keep up with them that way (Joey Stanley's blog unfortunately doesn't). Yes, Tumblr blogs have an RSS feed (though I don't know if there's a way to filter by tag)!

If you have other linguistics blogs that you read, or if you run one yourself, please feel free to post in the comments! You'll notice that I have a definite bias in what sort of blogs I'm interested in - phonology and phonetics, historical linguistics, and some typology. If your recommendation is outside of these fields, no worries. Bring on the syntax and psycholinguistics and pragmatics! We're not picky.

1 comment:

  1. You may enjoy this thread on the difficulty of establishing orthographies for the same language family!

    Like that Radio Yerevan joke, it's not about difficulty, but inconsistency between different linguists; not about orthographies, but about phonetic & phonological transcription – namely the loose cluster of traditions called "Americanist phonetic notation" and similar names; and not about any single language family, but all native languages of North America and sometimes elsewhere. :-)

    Don't overlook the author's blog on his own research, currently called Freelance reconstruction.

    Jabal al-Lughat is not only an interesting blog on its own, but has a long blogroll in its sidebar. In fact, that's how I discovered you.

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