Happy New Year, 2019!

Happy New Year, y'all! First of all, obligatory plug for the latest Dialect Dissection - this time on Lady Gaga!

I was looking at everything that's happened in 2018 and I'm truly, honestly floored at the response Ace Linguist has gotten. When I started the whole Dialect Dissection thing, I had no idea if anyone outside of a handful of linguists would be interested in long articles about phonetics in music. I was scared of pigeonholing myself and that it was too narrow a topic for anyone to be into it. I am so happy that you all proved me wrong.

Although I've mostly written about dialectology, phonology, and phonetics, I would like to expand to other fields of linguistics. The idea behind Ace Linguist was originally to just write about any topic that you could apply linguistics to, which is a nice enough idea but (a) has already been done by many other blogs and (b) I did not have the energy to follow. I briefly tried a "clickbait" approach to my titles, too. Hot takes aren't really my strength. Narrowing it to "dialectology applied to musicians with light media criticism" has helped me focus, but I'm hoping to expand the idea. The Founding Fathers article was a first step towards that, dipping into historical linguistics and tackling syntax and lexicology in addition to phonology. It also was not about a pop musician - win-win!

Figuring out the best way to run this site has been a true trial by fire, as anyone who looks at old blog updates will see ("updates two times a week!" "updates weekly!" "updates monthly!"), and 2018 being a transition year in my personal life hasn't really helped (hello, summer). It's definitely easy for me to get carried away with things I can imagine doing and then promise to do them "soon" on the site. One thing I am proud of is that I did post every month, even if it was just a blog update. Having learned my lesson about promising things, I am not going to commit to some strict schedule and instead I am going to say that I'm constantly working on new stuff for the site, even if it doesn't always follow the most convenient schedule.

With all that being said, once again, a big thank you to all the readers of Ace Linguist out there. I appreciate that you used a little bit of your time to read about linguistics, and honored that this site was a part of it. Here's to a great 2019!

- Karen

Update - December 7, 2018

17008 words for NaNoWriMo! And that's not even counting the entire article I apparently lost! Bring on the confetti!

Retrospective

I wrote about Cardi B disliking her New York accent. Also, in response to some questions about why almost all the examples on my Indie Girl Voice articles were women, I wrote an Addendum on the Methodology to explain why that happened.

This week in tweets - fashion people destroy bound morphemes:

Linguists: "Pant-" is an example of a bound morpheme in English! You can say "pant leg", "pants", and "pair of pants," but you can't say "*a pant"! #linguistics

Fashion people: pic.twitter.com/ZJ21nGhKHJ

— Ace Linguist (@acelinguist) December 5, 2018

"aiaλu" is not actually "aialu" but "aiyau."

A neat case of sensational spelling - using the Greek lambda (λ) as an upside-down Y. A little disappointed this brand isn't called 'aialu'! Apparently 'aiayu' means 'soul' in Aymara, and they source textiles from Bolivia, so it's still linguistically interesting. #linguistics pic.twitter.com/fXdSGBNbk6

— Ace Linguist (@acelinguist) December 5, 2018

@anoniscoding created a programming language in Yoruba called Yorlang! Here's why that matters:

Programming languages written in a non-English language are a great way to teach the fundamentals of programming to non-English speakers (especially young ppl!). Once you learn the concepts, it's easy to move to different languages. Excellent work! #linguistics #compsci https://t.co/z0bG8UdMZT

— Ace Linguist (@acelinguist) December 5, 2018

Finally, some fun with the pin-pen merger. Do "Nguyen" and "win" sound similar to you?

The pin-pen merger at work! #linguistics pic.twitter.com/4eRcs7VU5W

— Ace Linguist (@acelinguist) December 7, 2018

What's Cooking?

Getting permissions from Facebook to get my social media presence ~on fleek~ has proven to be an enormous drag. My next Dialect Dissection is also taking longer than I expected. I don't want to make more statements saying "expect this by this date!" because I inevitably end up not doing that, but my personal goal is to have the final Dialect Dissection of the year released this month. I'll be taking a short break from Dialect Dissections after that to start finding new examples to write about. There's going to be all sorts of content coming your way, from the micro-sized Tweets to more casual think pieces to the fully researched long reads.

10-1 Blog Update

Hello all! I hope you enjoyed my big post Dialect Dissection: Founding Fathers. It took nearly 2 years of work and a lot of books purchased on my end, so I was a bit nervous about releasing it into the world. I'm happy that the response has been positive and there has been a lot of interest in the topic!

Remember when, at the beginning of the year, I said it would be a good idea to post more often with smaller content? I ended up revising that in April where it became once a week. And after a few months of updating once a month, I had to admit that I was not feeling the once a week schedule. The idea was that more content was more desirable, but the statistics tell me, rather frankly, very few people are reading the short articles I write. Although I like some of them, they did end up being more rushed. I could not put as much polish into them as I would have liked. I also felt forced to come up with topics for the sake of writing about them. I enjoy working on a big post more than churning out middling linguistic content. However, I don't want to be beholden to a "one big post once a month" thing. Sometimes I want to make small observations without needing to source every single assertion. I've decided to create the casual tag for small articles that are observations as opposed to attempting to be seriously educational. Casual articles will invite more discussion as well. I will also post mini-articles occasionally - sometimes you just don't need a big ol' article to explain something. I will not make any promise more than that I will continue to update this website and will give you a post or failing that, a status update at least once a month.

If you want news or linguistic thoughts, you can find me on Twitter. Facebook will give you just the news if you prefer that as well.

I'm Back!

It's been a while, but I'm back! And officially able to dedicate more time to Ace Linguist. One thing I've been thinking about is maybe adding more opinion posts. Most of my posts are basically educational and attempting to be informative, but it may be interesting to talk about things that aren't entirely decided yet, or that are just kind of interesting. I enjoy making informative posts, but it's a constraining format at times.

- Karen

6-11 recap

The month of June has not been kind to this blog. As you can imagine, being in a full-time program trying to execute a career change takes up quite a bit of time! However, I'm not going to ignore this blog. That's why I'm uploading a short little article on Wednesday. I won't be able to update weekly for the time being, but I do want to remind my audience that I'm here and that this site is still active and being worked on.

On some non-blog news, I've recently gotten into podcasts as a result of a long commute. If you're interested in a linguistics podcast, I recommend checking out Lingthusiasm. It's fun and accessible to anyone. The episode I checked out was about the concept of "untranslatable words," which is an interesting one. If you're stuck in traffic, try it out! I'm also going to read the second book in Ada Palmer's Terra Nova series soon, "The Seven Surrenders." The first one talked a lot about language in society, so I'm expecting the second one to develop that further.

Thank you all for sticking with the blog. The regular schedule will return before long!

- Karen

Blog Update

I have some exciting personal news - I am now a full-time student studying programming! I'm very excited to be on this career path, not least because I've spent years messing around with HTML and CSS and being interested in programming but convinced that it was "too late" for me to start. (Note: it is not too late to learn programming; you don't have to be a 12-year-old genius to learn new things.) Part of the course involves HTML and CSS and I am already planning on using that to spruce up the site.

Now the flipside to this new knowledge is that the update schedule is going to be affected. Normally I posted Wednesdays, but recently I've been having some problems being able to post exactly on Wednesdays. Since my schedule is pretty intense now, I will have to be more flexible with the schedule. This means that I might post on Thursdays or Fridays instead of Wednesdays, or may end up taking more than a week to post and end up posting on Monday instead. If it's been too long, I will post an update to let you know that yes, this blog is alive and kicking.

I look forward to continuing with you all into this second half of the year and further developing this blog into a space for linguistics enthusiasts online.

- Karen

January 12 - Sick Day

Hey! You may have noticed there was no post today. That's because I contracted a cold over the weekend that left me feeling pretty bad. Unfortunately I was not able to write up a post in time for today. I'm quite sorry about that, and I'm looking into options to have back-ups in case I am unable to post on time.

If you'd like a heads-up on what I'm working on, I found an interesting lead for a future article. If you'll remember the article on happy-laxing ("happih") vs happy-breaking ("happay") I did ("Oh Babih Babay"), my conclusion on where happy-breaking came from in music was that Max Martin basically started it. I admit I wasn't fully satisfied with this explanation, because it left the question of where Max Martin got it from in the first place. Sure, he could have made it up entirely, but that's not quite satisfactory. There has to be something else to it. I found out an interesting tidbit that he sings all his demos himself and then asks artists to sing them just as he sings them. If that's the case, then it explains why songs linked to him have that feature - he himself is doing it, not just asking artists to do it. But where he got it from is the real question, since this feature is very rare before the 90s. There's further research to be done on this, but I think we're getting closer to definitively finding out where happy-breaking comes from in pop music.

Progress has stalled a little on the Dialect Dissection, mostly with regards to getting all the audio clips. The writing is mostly in place. If you want further hints on who this dialect dissection is about, let me tell you that this singer has been in the news recently, but not for the most positive things.

I hope you all have a great day, and make sure to protect yourself from sickness! If you're in a place that offers a flu vaccine, get a flu vaccine! Stay at home if you're sick so you don't spread it to others! Your health is important! I'll be back next time.

- Karen

Jan-29 Review

Man, how about those Grammys, huh? No? Okay, let's move on to the topic of the blog. Much to my disappointment, I could not end up finishing the next Dialect Dissection article in time for you all this week. You can definitely look forward to it next month. In reality, it's probably unrealistic to expect anything less than a month in-between Dialect Dissections. Luckily this one was already half completed and is on its way to being finished. A lot of progress has also been made on the other long-form article (still a surprise).

Firstly, a continued thanks to everyone that's reading! I'd like to extend a special thank you to Neal Whitman of Literal Minded for retweeting my Taylor Swift article! Literal Minded is one of the best examples of a linguistics blog that still reaches out to laymen out there. I highly recommend checking it out; his post on "a-yo" is a lot of fun and uses plenty of music examples.

This week saw my continued fascination with how song titles have changed nowadays. Of particular interest to me is the process for picking song titles that appears to have little rhyme or reason to me. What's the deal? Is this some streaming-influenced development? We also talked about another song title, Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You." This song title is pretty interesting to me as someone interested in English dialects. It's one of the more personalized aspects of the song.

Some important news: the Tumblr is now live! The Tumblr will focus on finding funny or interesting linguistics-related material and providing commentary. If you want to keep up with new articles from this blog, I will also post updates on the Tumblr to let you know when new posts come around. Follow to make sure you never miss a post! ;) The Facebook is still a work in progress. That one will be updated a little less frequently than the Tumblr, but if you prefer Facebook as your news feed, I'll still have you covered.

I've also decided on Monday and Wednesday as definite update days, with Friday as the recap day and Tuesday and Thursday as optional update days for if I just have too much time-sensitive stuff to post in a week. If you've been holding off on subscribing because you're tired of the emotional strain of following blogs that never update on a schedule, you can trust me not to let you down. ;)

Personal news: I saw Lana Del Rey in concert and let me tell you, she's just the sweetest. It was a trip hearing her say words like "Floridian" and "Miami" and "daddy" live. I probably won't do General Admission next time, though, because I am utterly exhausted in a way I did not know it was possible to be from a concert. I also think I overheard some pop music fans because who else would say "she invented sitting" and "queen of swings" (actual quotations)?

I'm looking forward to seeing you all next week. Have a lovely weekend!

- Karen

Jan-22 Review

In the interest of keeping to my New Year's Resolution and updating this blog more frequently, I've decided to start doing a 'week in review' sort of post to summarize developments this past week, preview things to come, and comment on things that happened during the week.

I'm going to cheat a little and look beyond this week by promoting my article "Dialect Dissection: Taylor Swift & Genre Hopping." If you have not read it yet, check it out - it's the start of a series where I look at how major musicians use language and dialect in their music. Here we take a look at how Taylor Swift changes her accent throughout her career. It's got sound samples and IPA previews (done by yours truly), so get your headphones and hurry on over!

This week I tried my hand at publishing more than once per week... previously I had been lucky to publish once per month. I found an Accent Challenge on Twitter with some interesting word choice and delved a little into the history of accent challenges and why they pick the words they do. I also asked the question of why some pop singers in the 70s sounded like they were saying 'WUH-man' instead of 'woman.' As always, comments are welcome: have you participated in an accent challenge? Heard instances of someone saying 'WUH-man'? You don't need an account to comment, so don't let that stop you!

Next week is going to be a tough one. I'm probably about halfway through making the next Dialect Dissection. My goal is to publish it for the beginning of February, but I've got a pretty full schedule next week that may challenge that (Lana Del Rey concert in there, by the way!). There's another article I've been working on since December of 2016 (yes, that long!) that I was hoping to get published mid-December, but I wanted to see if I could get some experts to chime in on the subject matter before haphazardly posting. The next next Dialect Dissection is still a mystery - I can go with the one that's almost entirely written, but where I don't know the musician's backstory and non-studio material well, or I can take a risk and start a new one where I am much more familiar with the singer's oeuvre, but I'd need to start over the work of collecting examples. Either way, there's plenty more Dialect Dissection coming up.

In more personal news:

• I've been re-reading Ada Palmer's "Too Like the Lightning," which is a science-fiction novel that, among many other things, explores how language affects society. I first heard of it because Gretchen McCullough - who runs the wonderful All Things Linguistic blog - read through part of it and tweeted down her reactions. When I saw Language Log had written about it to, I felt there must be something to this book to be written about on two linguistics blogs. It's a good read, but it requires a lot of worldbuilding before you can understand the plot, so don't rush through it. If you're interested in novels that deal with language, this is a pretty good bet.
• If you haven't noticed, I have linked my Twitter and Instagram in the upper right corner! They do not show up yet in mobile view; I'll have to work on that. I post about linguistics and music, as personal posts. If there's any demand for social media that's dedicated solely to the blog, I can do that so you only get the updates. Facebook and a Tumblr page dedicated to the blog will be coming soon.
• I challenged myself to listen to as many newly released and unheard albums that I could in 2017. I ended up listening to something like 80 albums. I don't think I'll be listening to every release of 2018 because that was a tiring project. If you have any recommendations for newly released albums throughout 2018, send them my way.

It's very exciting to be taking these steps towards making this blog a real thing. I don't want to make commitments that I can't keep, but I know that I want to post at least once a week, not including weekly recaps. Once again, thank you to everyone that's read an article and been kind enough to leave a comment or point out a typo. Your thoughts and help are invaluable. Let's see what's in store for next week!

- Karen

Wow!

Yesterday I shared my Dialect Dissection article on Taylor Swift on some platforms, and wow! I was utterly blown away by the response. I'd been thinking that long-form articles with this level of multimedia wouldn't be attractive, that the subject was too niche. Instead I've received tons of wonderful comments, encouragement, and suggestions. I've had some thought-provoking conversations with some of you on how to improve this. Firstly, thank you all so much for taking time out of your day to read my article. I appreciate it immensely. If this is your first time here (and it probably is), I recommend checking out my other long-form articles on why pop singers say babih or babay and the history behind 'daddy' as a slang term.

Secondly, the Dropbox links are down. I had no idea I would have that many people listening to a page! I will be looking into options with more bandwidth immediately. I've been told the IPA audio samples don't work in Safari, so I will also be troubleshooting that for my Apple-using friends. If you encounter any other technical errors, please let me know.

Thirdly, I've begun work on the second Dialect Dissection article! I've already received a lot of suggestions for future articles. Some are ones that I've already got on the list, others are new. Due to the sheer immensity of the Dialect Dissection project, which requires listening to an artist's entire discography, researching their career, selecting the best samples, etc. I cannot get to every suggestion given to me. I will do my best to give every artist a serious look, though, and consider their appropriateness for the project.

If this is your first time here, I hope you'll keep coming back. You can get updates via RSS feed, but I'll be expanding to other social media networks in the future. If you read me New Year's post, you'll see I'm still working out a release schedule for articles. My current goal is to post once a month and move more frequently from there. If you're not in the mood for long-form all the time, don't worry - I post small articles in between long-form articles as a palate cleanser.

Once again, thank you all so much for checking out this passion project of mine. I hope you'll stick around, because there's more where that came from. See you soon!

- Karen

Happy New Year, 2018

Happy new year, friends! Insert obligatory statement about how time passes really quickly. I swear it was just 2016 and I was swearing to write one article per month for this blog. Looking at the archive, I see I posted six articles in four non-contiguous months. Much better than 2016, where I wrote one article and made one (bad) video. What lies ahead for 2018?

Well, I started this blog in my last year of college because I was worried nobody would hire me upon graduation and I needed a portfolio. I wrote ten articles and ideas for articles and published one of them. My notion for the blog was very vague - I was going to write about linguistics... in "real life." Gretchen McCullough of All Things Linguistic (great person, wonderful blog, please check it out) had cornered the market on "fun linguistics for linguists," but I thought linguistics could be made understandable for the layman while still being enjoyable for the expert. I also wanted each one of my articles to be long and in-depth, like "Oh Babih, Babay" and "The Deal with Daddy." This clashed with the notion that I could put out an article every month, because it took me several months to do all the research for that article, condense it into a readable length, and select relevant multimedia clips. If I could have done both those things - make a broad, pop linguistics blog with relatively frequent long-form articles, I would have created my dream blog.

Unfortunately this is not a very realistic goal. The practical realization of my resolution was "do a lot of research on these topics every month and tweak the article." I have forty-something drafts right now and am sitting on another long-form article that I'm putting bells and whistles on. You can't get an audience without consistent content production, and my goals were directly counterproductive to that. Realistic concession number one - do shorter articles (like whomst and Amewican Teen). Realistic concession number two - limit my scope. The linguistics of everyday life requires knowledge in many subfields of linguistics and I am not equally versed in all of them. It also requires knowledge about, well, everyday life, which is so broad a topic as to be meaningless. The actual result was "blog about whatever curio crosses your mind." I've decided to narrow the focus significantly for now onto a field I'm pretty confident in - music and linguistics. As this blog finds its identity, the focus will undoubtedly shift. I think this is a good place for now.

I've been creating content online for thirteen years, but I've never been able to get a following. Part of this is that I would erase all my old material and old identities due to them being old shame, which prevented the few people who liked each thing from following me. Another is that I didn't interact with other creators for various silly reasons. Did you know that good content will not automatically attract consumers? Tell that to teenage me, who wrote pages upon pages of material on some pseudonymous blog and was frustrated people did not magically show up. My goal, then, is to interact with other creators and learn about the community (yes, there is a lingblogging community!), and to promote my work and be proud of it even if it's not absolutely positively perfect.

Finally, writing a bunch and talking to people does not mean a lot if what I'm saying isn't useful or correct. To this end, I also want to improve my knowledge and skills. That means reading more in-depth material on linguistics and music. That means a lot of practice and re-writing to make well-written articles. That means learning skills to analyze more interesting data or present it in a more readable way. I'm already well on my way with this in that I have a ton of books on articles I want to write ;) but I also have to read them and then write write write about them.

2017 had a lot of behind the scenes work on this blog. I hope 2018 can be the year that work becomes visible and public. I'd get more specific (after all, specific goals are better than nebulous ones), but I'd prefer to keep that a secret for now. Just keep in mind that this blog will get busier this coming year. I'm serving long-form multimedia articles. I'm serving short observations. I'm serving social media. I hope you'll join me on this journey and learn some cool linguistics stuff in the meanwhile.

- Karen