Why, in the year of our Paul Passy 2026, are there still people who've put in hundreds of coding hours and still manage to believe there's a single IPA representation for any given orthographic text?

I know they just WANT there to be a one-to-one mapping, but wishing it don't make it so.

I'm pretty sure someone's come up with a corrolary of the #BenderRule for accents!

https://github.com/open-dict-data/ipa-dict/

#linguistics #sociolinguistics #phonetics #IPA

Nach längerer Pause melde ich mich zurück — mit einem Thema, das mich schon länger beschäftigt: **Sociolinguistic Indexicality im Japanischen**. Wenn Sprache nicht nur Bedeutung transportiert, sondern soziale Strukturen aktiv reproduziert — sichtbar im *Keigo*-System, wo ein einziges Verb die soziale Beziehung markiert. Wie wandelt sich das bei jüngeren Generationen?

#Linguistik #Japanisch #Soziolinguistik #Sprachwissenschaft #Linguistics #Japanese #Sociolinguistics #LanguageAndSociety

Job opening for an Associate Professor or Professor in Sociolinguistics, at Oxford. "This is an open-rank post that is open to candidates at all career stages, ranging from those who have just completed a doctorate to senior scholars who have already attained the highest international standing." This is a very good opportunity for someone! Details at

https://www.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/news/2026/05/14/we-are-hiring-sociolinguist

Closing date for applications: Jun 12th

Please re-post this or circulate it via any route you like, so we can spread the word as widely as possible.

#linguistics #sociolinguistics

Men use “vocal fry“ more than women, counter to stereotype

Study suggests

Archive: ia: https://s.faithcollapsing.com/51afu

#acoustics #gender-bias #linguistics #science #sociolinguistics #sociology #vocal-fry #vocalizations
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/men-use-vocal-fry-more-than-women-counter-to-stereotype/

The Trouble with Harry’s grammar

Alfred Hitchcock’s comedy-thriller The Trouble with Harry (1955), amidst all its talk of murder and romance, has a fun little exchange of sociolinguistic interest between John Forsythe (‘Sam Marlowe’) and Edmund Gwenn (‘Capt. Albert Wiles’):

Marlowe’s correction is notable for being relatively polite. Those who correct others’ speech uninvited often do so in a rude and judgemental way. Marlowe corrects Wiles gently and off-handedly, as though automatically correcting a child. Indeed, Wiles doesn’t even notice and reacts as if Marlowe had merely echoed him. For good measure he adds another nonstandard usage: past tense say for said.

That Miles doesn’t pick up on the prescriptive nudge also chimes with what happens when children have their speech corrected – they tend to repeat what they said rather than immediately adopt the ‘proper’ form. Abby Kaplan, in her excellent book about language myths, Women Talk More than Men, reviews the research and concludes:

Some parents tend to repeat or expand on their children’s utterances, but it is unclear whether children actually use this kind of feedback to correct their own speech. Since there are societies in which this kind of interaction is rare, it is unlikely that repetitions and expansions are absolutely necessary for language acquisition.

Of course, Captain Wiles has already fully acquired his language: it’s just that the variety or dialect he uses differs in some respects from standardized English, prompting Marlowe’s useless intervention.

The script for The Trouble with Harry was written by John Michael Hayes. I don’t know if the same exchange appears in the source novel by Jack Trevor Story, but Hitchcock obviously liked it. He featured another linguistic allusion, to Alfred Korzybski and his General Semantics, in The Birds:

Hitchcock’s interest in usage also manifests in a letter he wrote to Ernest Lehman, writer of North by Northwest, in which he wondered, in a parenthetical aside, if his use of while should be whilst. I covered the whilst, amongst, amidst issue in a previous post.

To what extent is this a solution to the attacks on #science in the #US, particularly when it comes to #socialscience?

#NSF #NEH #research #openscience #sociology #anthropology #sociolinguistics #USpol

https://diversedaily.com/analyzing-patreon-science-creators-supporting-and-learning-from-independent-researchers/

V. A. Young (2009) argued against #codeswitching for non-White #US #students (i.e., learning #academic #language and using that in #school rather than their home variety) and for "code meshing" (i.e., blending both varieties in formal contexts), but his own article contained nothing that I would consider non-standard for academic writing other than contractions (e.g., "don't") that are perfectly typical even in the Associated Press.

#sociolinguistics #race #education #English

Hi Mastodon,

Here is a bit about me if you want to follow:

I am a student of linguistics at #Bogazici University. I am interested in topics related to #linguistics #sociology, #sociolinguistics, & #discourse.

Feagin's (1986) work comes with the title Competing Norms in the #White #Speech of #Anniston, #Alabama, but when she described her #participants, she never mentioned that they were White. This is a good example of how a dominant #race is treated as invisible.

In contrast, a study like Edwards' (1992) on the speech of #Blacks in #Detroit does include some discussion of participants' race.

#linguistics #sociolinguistics #sociology #anthopology