April 2022: #103papers, Lingthusiasm liveshow, and LingComm Grantees

Hello!

This month, I started a new reading project! It's inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia that came out last year, and which surveys the languages represented by all of the papers published in the four main child language acquistion research journals. Kidd & Garcia find that these journals contain papers about 103 languages; while this number is small compared to the total number of languages in the world (over 7000) and even the number of languages typically found in other cross-linguistic studies (the language maps at WALS often report data from 400-1200 languages), it does make for a relatively manageable reading list.

So that's what I'm doing: reading one paper per language from this list, and posting a screenshot of the abstract and a my own tweet-length summary in this thread on twitter. At the rate of one paper per day, not quite every day, it'll probably take me about four months. I've been missing going to conferences and finding out what people are working on in an informal fashion, which is different from diving in the literature to try and find out something specific for a lingcomm project, so this is an attempt to "refill the well" a bit.

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

Ever since the Kidd&Garcia paper came out surveying which languages are represented in major child language journals, I've been thinking "huh, 103 languages...this sounds like a #100papers project" So! Here's an ongoing thread reading one paper per language. I call it #103papers

Gretchen McCulloch @GretchenAMcC

"There is at least one article published in child language journals on a total of 103 languages. Thus, assuming that there are 7,000 natural languages, the four major child language journals have published articles on around 1.47% of them." https://t.co/p1NX7GPT3G

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was What it means for a language to be official. The bonus episode was Bonus 62: Approaching word games like a linguist - Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular. We did a Lingthusiasm liveshow online via the Lingthusiasm Patron Discord! It was great to see everyone (about a hundred people!) in the chat in real time, as well as everyone who messaged us questions and sweary anecdotes beforehand.

We also announced the winners of the LingComm Grants, giving out a total of 5 Project Grants (including the Kirby Conrod Project Grant for projects related to gender and lingcomm) and 12 Startup Grants. You can see the full list of grantees here, and stay tuned for more about their exciting

We also announced the winners of the LingComm Grants, giving out a total of 5 Project Grants (including the Kirby Conrod Project Grant for projects related to gender and lingcomm) and 12 Startup Grants. You can see the full list of grantees here, and stay tuned for more about their exciting linguistics communication projects as they get to work on them in the coming months.

Selected tweets:

• acoustic bike

• An extremely charming study by Bill Labov featuring a rabbit named Vincent

• Rabbit Meme

• Cheering on linguistics effects (Stroup and Kiki/Bouba) in a vote on the cutest scientific effect name

• Old English Hrickroll

• Noun & Name

• Prohibited childhood words

• The word you get assigned with your linguistics degree

• Zoom waving, the sequel

• Maltese Language Rabbit Hole

Selected blog posts:

• Eeyore Linguistic Facts

• Experts in a Sci-Fi Fantasy Setting

• Stomach is the truest Sundial

This month's image is from a short trip to Boston this month, featuring Because Internet hanging out the media section of Porter Square Books.

Thanks for coming along,

Gretchen