Humans Who Read Grammars

Lots of languages in the world will fall out of use within the next decades and  century. There are between 6 - 9,000 languages in the world, and the language reference catalogue Glottolog (v5.3) estimates that over 4,000 languages are in a threatened or worse status*.   There are many reasons why this is a bad situation. One aspect that is often  mentioned is that when languages disappear , we lose an important facet of what it means to be human. All languages are different from each other, they represent different records of our history and capacity . When one falls out of use, especially when there is no documentation  of it, we as humankind loose information about what we are capable of, what it means to be human - how far we can reach, what unites us and what varies. This was for example argued very well by Dr Levinson in a talk I had the pleasure of attending in Berlin last week (poster ⇨)   It also forms part of the discussion between Cooperrider and Dr B...

Tiago Tresoldi , quantitative historical linguist extraordinaire, has created a fun -le game (e.g. wordle, worldle  and flaggle ). In Glottle , you try to get the target language and along the way you get clues from its position in a language family tree and its geographical position. You can read more about how to play on the website. Below is an example of a few guesses on the medium level:

If you work in language description and you want people to know about your work, a great way to increase visibility is to make a contribution to Glottolog.org. That's the first place many people go to to check out what's been done on a particular language. Glottolog catalogues language description, but it's not exhaustive. Glottolog aims to minimally include the most extensive description per language (i.e. for example a full grammar if available). If your work is currently not indexed in Glottolog, it is probably not an intentional oversight - the reference just hasn't reached the editing team yet. You can change that!  https://glottolog.org/meta/contact You can also contribute to Glottolog if you don't work in language description, if you just noticed some missing references that sure is welcome too. In the background, all references in Glottolog are formatted in bibTeX style. This is a popular format for reference mangement, besides being a part of the TeX-univer...

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, is looking for a director to head a new department there. They've done something novel, had an open call and an open workshop series with invited speakers related to this director search. Below is the list of invited speakers and talks they've given in the workshop series which has now come to an end. Looking at the invitees and talk titles is a nice way to see how the institute sees the future of the field of psychology of language. As this blog started at this institute, I figured I'd share this here in case it's interesting for people following this account. From MPI-Nijmegen website: __________________________ The Max Planck Society is about to start the process of finding a new director for a new department at the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. The directors of the institute have identified that the field of Psychology of Language remains a core area that distinctly and uniquely co...

Reading/listening suggestions for people doing language documentation and description and who are interested in perspectives from indigenous people:  Lesley Woods (Ngiyampaa Wangaaypuwan woman from Australia) Book: "Something's gotta change" book by Lesley Woods (2023): https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/series/asia-pacific-linguistics/somethings-gotta-change   (Indigenous Australia generally) Paper: Gaby, A., & Woods, L. (2020). Toward linguistic justice for Indigenous people: A response to Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz.  Language ,  96 (4), e268-e280  https://old.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/e05_96.4Gaby.pdf   Podcast Because Language episode 35 which features interview with Woods & Gaby https://becauselanguage.com/35-somethings-got-to-change/ Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Māori woman from Aotearoa New Zealand) Book: "Decolonizing Methodologies" by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonizing_Method...

Google's linguistics research team have put together a great big table of speaker population size data and other information. There is population data for over 5,000 languages. It's free, it includes sources and you can get it here: https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp/tree/main/linguameta .  Proper citation is: @InProceedings{ritchie-etal-2024-linguameta-unified, author = {Ritchie, Sandy and van Esch, Daan and Okonkwo, Uche and Vashishth, Shikhar and Drummond, Emily}, title = {LinguaMeta: Unified metadata for thousands of languages}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation}, month = {May}, year = {2024}, address = {Torino, Italy}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association}, pages = {10530–-10538}, abstract = {We introduce LinguaMeta, a unified resource for language metadata for thousands of languages, includi...

  I wrote a little document called "CLDF for dummies" based on what I know about CLDF that I think may be helpful to other researchers in language and cultural diversity and evolution. I am NOT a CLDF-developer or editor, this is all from an end-user perspective. I'll keep a full and updated version here . Here is version 1.0: CLDF for dummies This document outlines some of the very basics of the Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF) for researchers who want to use the data sets for analysis, comparison or plotting. CLDF is a way of organizing language data, in particular data sets with many different languages in it. The basic organisation is a set of tables, usually in csv-sheets (languages.csv, forms.csv etc). These documents are linked to each other in a specific way which makes it possible to combine them into an interlinked database. The files are all governed by standards, there are sanity-checks to make sure all lines up right. Because they are often just plain csv...