Hi everyone.

I’ve been watching the news with horror but also hope for the last few weeks, like probably everyone else on the internet. The stories of people coming together to protect their communities hearten, when the horrors persist. As you all probably know, I frequently attend 4th St Fantasy, which is held in St. Paul, so I have a lot of friends and acquaintances in the Twin Cities, and I’ve been thinking about all of you a lot.

It feels weird to write a newsletter under these circumstances, but maybe someone needs a break from doomscrolling. (We all do. Close Bluesky and do something else.)

Popular linguistics

I thought it would be nice to share some of the YouTube channels, podcasts, websites, and books that I find enjoyable or interesting. I don’t actually engage with all that much linguistics content on the internet, which is mostly a capitalism problem (gotta pay the bills), not an indictment of the quality of linguistics creators out there.

Electronic

If you want an intro to linguistics in a book, rather than a podcast or YouTube, Essentials of Linguistics is free.

One of my favorites is Jackson Crawford, who’s about 2 degrees separated from me. (My MA advisor was at UW Madison with him when they did their PhD work, and he also got his MA from U of Georgia.) He’s got a PhD in Scandinavian Studies/historical linguistics (or something like that) and usually makes videos about Old Norse. He’s been making videos about Greenland for the last few weeks. You might know him from the Tattúínárdǿla saga, aka “the one where they rewrote Star Wars but it’s a saga.” (And the colleague he mentioned, Ben Frey, was at North Carolina when I was there. Germanic linguistics is a very small world.)

I enjoy his Cowboy Hávamál, which was inspired by his grandfather. He has some videos with Simon Roper (on whom more in a minute) where they do comparative linguistics of Old Norse and Old English, like this one where Jackson speaks a dialect of Old Norse, and Simon one of Old English. And, because a lot of Germanic linguists are also Tolkien fans, he’s doing LOTR. He also talked with my professor at UGA who taught me Old Saxon about my favorite old continental German text, the Heliand.

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Simon Roper is a linguist of Old English whose credentials I know less about, because I mainly encounter him in other people’s videos or when YT puts them in my feed. He seems to focus on historical phonetics and phonology, and he’s recently been recording monologues in a single dialect from pre-writing (reconstructed) to modern. Which is pretty cool! I watched this one the other day. I could start picking out words in the Old English section (my pronunciation was always bad), then more in the Middle English. With subtitles, it was much easier.

Language Log is the first linguistics blog I started following, back when everybody had a blog. It’s a group effort, and you periodically get to read about old professors encountering some new youth thing (that isn’t really new anymore) and analyzing it. The comments section is actually not usually full of trolls.

One of the most popular linguistics podcasts is Lingthusiasm, hosted by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. They’ve covered a whole lot of topics in the few years they’ve been making the show. They’ve got a broad focus and discuss a wide range of general topics, but also more specialized ones. I am not a podcast listener, but I would be remiss to leave them out.

Digital humanities

There is a wealth of reference material out there online now, which is amazing, because you used to have to have access to a physical library with a physical copy of, say, Bosworth-Toller’s Anglo-Saxon dictionary. There are digitized historical texts like the Gothic Bible (Project Wulfila) and a whole lot of digital text corpora. I have a whole bunch bookmarked in my “thesis resources” folder, which are mostly in or about German.

I know saying there’s a lot of reference material online and only giving a couple examples is unsatisfying, because how do you know what references you’re interested in if you don’t know they exist, but I don’t know where to start looking for, for example, any African or Polynesian languages. So start on Wikipedia, which has a lot of good linguistics pages, and go through their references and see what turns up online.

If you’re interested in finding out what features are present or absent in different languages, WALS is really cool. It’s not very beginner friendly, though.

Print

I could be cheeky and say to go check the bibliography of my book, which is where I’m grabbing these, to save me the effort, but I won’t.

Because Internet by Gretchen McCulloch is about 10 years old now, but it’s still relevant, and you can take the lessons about the differences between Old Internet people and New Internet people and extend them to the iPad generation. It’s an accessible read about how language is changing on the internet.

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In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent is a delightful look into the history of conlangs and the author’s forays into Esperanto and Klingon. Okrent has written other books, but I haven’t read them.

Peter Trudgill has two books that I enjoyed reading. He’s written a lot of things in his long career, but these are from more popular publishers. Bookshop only has the print editions of these, but I know ebooks exist. Millennia of Language Change is more on the academic side, but I thought it was really cool. The Long Journey of English was much less academic, and I really enjoyed it.

I have Cultish by Amanda Montell in my to-read stack, and Wordslut is in my wishlist. I’ve got Anatoly Liberman’s Word Origins in my wishlist, and his style isn’t dry, from what everyone says. (I tried to find his etymology of “hot dog” talk, but I did not succeed.) You can read some of his musings on etymology at the Oxford University Press blog, which appears to have no new posts since summer.

What are your faves?

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Until next time!