Linkguistics!

Accents and Dialects:

Is there such a thing as a “gay accent?”  I wouldn’t even touch this question were there not a decent amount of scholarly research about it.  The notion of “talking gay,” after all, is a staple of homophobic parody.   So before going further, let me state that I believe gay men speak with as wide an array of voices as heterosexual men.  I don’t give credence to the idea of a universal “gay voice.”  Read more

Here’s another interesting perspective on GayDialect:

http://www.macleans.ca/society/of-lisps-and-linguistics-the-power-of-the-gay-voice/

More on accents and dialects:

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http://www.redding.com/news/wire-news/in-stanford-linguistics-study-the-accent-is-on-how-californians-speak_64552086

Abbrevs and Misplelings:

When two friends created the site I Can Has Cheezburger?, in 2007, to share cat photos with funny, misspelled captions, it was a way of cheering themselves up. They probably weren’t thinking about long-term sociolinguistic implications. But seven years later, the “cheezpeep” community is still active online, chattering away in lolspeak, its own distinctive variety of English.  Read more

Imitation Theory:

Check out this article on children recognizing the language of the country they were born (but not raised) in:

http://www.columbiachronicle.com/health_and_tech/article_1765d862-797f-11e4-968f-27ec0ff6f1cd.html

Creoles:

From our very own Professor Bigham on universal linguistics:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/09/08/one_planet_one_language_science_fiction_versus_earth_linguistic_diversity.html

The Fulani have not only lost many herds to rustlers, they may be losing their language as well. But the language is rising in Europe and the USA, where it is studied in a total of 14 universities.  Read more

Animals and Language:

Animals communicate with each other, and sometimes with us. But that’s where the similarity between animals and us ends, as Jason Goldman explains: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20121016-is-language-unique-to-humans

Con Slobodchikoff at Northern Arizona University has done some of the most amazing studies in animal communication and cognition. Using sonograms to analyze the distress calls of Gunnison’s prairie dog, one of five species of prairie dogs found in the U.S. and Mexico, he has found that prairie dog colonies have a communication system that includes nouns, verbs, and adjectives. They can tell one another what kind of predator is approaching — man, hawk, coyote, dog (noun) — and they can tell each other how fast it’s moving (verb). They can say whether a human is carrying a gun or not.  Read more