If you haven’t encountered Pink Trombone before, you won’t be disappointed. It’s a saggital section (vertical cross-section) of the vocal tract that you can manipulate to create different sounds! dood.al/pinktrombone/

Kanzi is a bonobo who learned to communicate using symbols! In this video, Ryan Rhodes @langofmind.bsky.social breaks down exactly what Kanzi’s linguistic abilities were, and what this tells us about the human language faculty: www.youtube.com/watch?v=blzq...

Many of the most common words in the English language are really quite weird when you start digging into their origins.

This linguist has invented over 20 languages “Creating conlangs was something Ransdell-Green started doing just for herself. But now, it’s her job. Ransdell-Green uses her expertise in the science of language to create all sorts of conlangs for authors, comic book creators and other artists. [...]

Do all languages have slang? The secret life of slang—why it exists, where it comes from, and why it matters blog.duolingo.com/slang-all-la...

If you’re looking for a handy reference on the world’s major languages, this is the authoritative source. Now in its third edition, I reference this book whenever I need a basic overview of one of the large languages of the world.

Google’s Ngram Viewer is an awesome tool that lets you see the frequency of words over time in the Google Books Corpus

If there is extraterrestrial life, how would we communicate with it? This book looks at the history, future, and linguistic science of extraterrestrial communication!

“Kingdom of characters” follows the history of Chinese language and writing reform, and argues that language was one of the major hurdles to China’s modernization.

Racing against time—the challenge of preserving languages before they vanish In this interview, linguist Natsuko Nakagawa discusses her work with the minority and endangered languages of Japan, including the Tohoku dialects in the north and the Ryukyuan languages in the southwest.

Q&A: Racing against time—the challenge of preserving languages before they vanish

As local languages continue to disappear, Associate Professor Natsuko Nakagawa from the Faculty of Humanities is dedicated to documenting and preserving them while uncovering the linguistic…

phys.org

Speech recognition models typically require mountains of data, but technological advances have allowed scholars working with endangered languages of the Pacific to create automatic speech recognition using just 38 hours of transcribed audio. www.paradisec.org.au/blog/2025/10...

Teen talk and linguistic evolution: How and why language evolves www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lang...

The surprisingly complex history of a lost letter of the English alphabet, yogh (Ȝ ȝ) open.substack.com/pub/colingor...

Here’s a fantastic illustration of Grimm’s Law at work from @starkeycomics.bsky.social

It never fails to amaze me how much we intuitively know about how our own native languages work, without realizing we know it.

Are you taking a linguistics class this year? If so, what classes are you taking? Are you taking your first linguistics class, or taking more? Are you declaring a major? Finishing your degree? What are you most excited about!?

The ancient—and mysterious—history of ‘abracadabra’ The earliest mention of ‘abracadabra’ comes from a text in the second century A.D., which used the term as a treatment for fevers. www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/arti...

How many possible words of English are there? indepthnh.org/2025/10/14/s...

Speaking of Words: How Many Words Could English Have?

If you count chemical names such as dimethylformamide and monothioglycerol, or medicines such as rivaroxaban and zanubrutinib, you would think the number of possible English words is effectively…

indepthnh.org

How rhyme works (and why): A lesson in the anatomy of the syllable @ColinGorrie.bsky.social walks you step by step through the data to figure out how rhyming works—and it’s more complex than you’d expect! open.substack.com/pub/colingor...

Dogs name toys while elephants name each other. Animal language is more complex than we imagine

Music training seems to boost reading skills in young children by enhancing their ability to recognize and manipulate the sounds that make up words.

Folk etymology is the process by which the form of an unfamiliar or foreign word is adapted to a more familiar form through popular usage. It also accounts for the unsubstantiated theories about those word and phrase origin.

“It’s not unusual, when talking to guys, that when they hear what I do, they want to lecture me about it.” Deborah Tannen, author of “You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation” and several other great books, talks about how her love for language began in this interview:

Author Deborah Tannen on How Her Love for Language Began

“It’s not unusual, when talking to guys, that when they hear what I do, they want to lecture me about it.”

washingtonian.com

#phonetics

Did you know that the alphabet actually started as an *abjad*, a writing system which doesn’t write vowels? Ths sn’t tht hrd t rd, s t? Learn more about the history of the alphabet in this issue of the Dead Language Society newsletter:

How the alphabet began

And some Dead Language Society lore

deadlanguagesociety.com

“Whether reading a book or listening to a recording, the goal is the same: understanding. But these activities aren’t exactly alike. Each supports comprehension in different ways. Listening doesn’t provide all the benefits of reading, and reading doesn’t offer everything listening does. [...]

Why do some completely unrelated languages seem similar? Distant cousins? Borrowed words? Your brain playing tricks? Yup, all of that. blog.duolingo.com/why-unrelate...

To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness aeon.co/essays/is-it...

“Hindi is nobody’s mother tongue. We gave up our own languages to create a national language.” ~ Sadanand Shahi “Once the British linked Hindi with employment, people surrendered their languages.” ~ Apoorvanand Jha

How Hindi emerged as the lingua franca of the ‘Hindi Heartland’ at the cost of other languages

An excerpt from ‘The Hindi Heartland: A Study’, by Ghazala Wahab.

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