Language Log

My rehab roomie has an unusual habit when speaking.  He randomly inserts the syllable "way" in his phrases (seldom finishes a complete sentence) and often repeats it multiple times.  Some examples: I way I way way My wife way My son way I want way way way to toilet way. Bed way Way way way […]

Following up on "Bro!", I've discovered a useful coinage from Canada: Matthew Urichuk and Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez, "Brocatives: Self-reported use of masculine nominal vocatives in Manitoba (Canada)." In It’s not all about you: New perspectives on address research,  2019: This study focuses on nominal vocatives that have been traditionally associated with male speakers and addressees (familiarizers […]

On walkways around Penn's campus, I'm hearing bro more and more often. Especially common, or at least especially striking, is a monosyllabic response meaning something like "You're kidding!" A: So then they [blah blah]… B: Bro!  …which I'm hearing as often among groups of female students as male students (though I admit that the added […]

From Barbara Phillips Long: In a cooking competition show that I was watching as an antidote to all the political news I read, the chefs were assigned canned ackee as an ingredient. I hadn't thought about ackee before; I mostly recognize the word from a song by Harry Belafonte that refers to ackee:   Down […]

Because there are so many excellent entries of interest to Language Log readers in various fields, I am including all of those in this extensive list; "Genetic History of Scythia." Andreeva, Tatiana V. et al. Science Advances 11, no. 30 (July 25, 2025): eads8179. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads8179. Updated 27 March 2026.   "Decoding Parrot Duets: Complex Communication […]

Or maybe "initialism lengths"? Wiktionary defines initialism as "a term formed from the initial letters of several words or parts of words, which is itself pronounced letter by letter"; while some (fussy) people argue that the term acronym should be reserved for words like laser (= "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation") or NATO […]

Sylvain Farrel is a student nurse from Indonesia.  He came to America four years ago and speaks perfect English.  I asked him how that is possible, how did he learn English so quickly? Sylvain said that he studied English during his elementary and middle school education.  His national language is Bahasa (Indonesia), i.e., Indonesian. By […]

Following up on "Meadow writing", I thought it might be interesting to look at LOTR-associated word frequencies, using the the "weighted log-odds-ratio, informative dirichlet prior" algorithm Monroe, Colaresi, and Quinn 2009, "Fightin' Words", as discussed in seven previous LLOG posts. In particular, I thought I'd compare The Fellowship of the Ring to 16 of Charles […]

At BMR, the first thing the doctors, nurses, and techs ask patients when they interview them is "Do you feel any pain?"  And they want you to quantify it on a scale of 1-3-5 / small-medium-big. What is pain?  Physical, mental? I tend to think of it rather as Sanskrit duḥkha (/ˈduːkə/ दुःख) than as […]

Following up on the DP's April Fools "AI-yatollah" article, an Ayatollah pun from Admiral James Stavridis, USN, Ret.: [image or embed] — Admiral James Stavridis, USN, Ret. (@admiralstav.bsky.social) April 8, 2026 at 7:57 PM Wikipedia explains the etymology of Ayatollah: The title is originally derived from the Arabic word Āyah post-modified with the word Allah, […]

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "I think I accidentally installed an Overton window in my bedroom. A few months ago, the sun wasn't in my face in the morning, but now it is." ICYMI: Wikipedia on "Overton Window". More comically interesting: the menu of "Mode" choices now routinely displayed below the cartoon: You should try them […]

From Mark Dow: The ACLU's national legal director is Cecillia Wang. She argued the birthright citizenship case, Trump v. Barbara, in front of the Supreme Court this month. This case heavily depends on the 1898 case Wong Kim Ark.  I asked Cecillia — a birthright citizen herself — whether the names Wang and Wong are […]

From "Everyday Politics in Russia", The Eurasian Knot 4/6/2026: The podcast starts with a message from listener Amanda, who has been reading all of Dostoevsky for a workshop in Russia. In addressing the podcast's host Sean Guillory, she says (starting at 4:21.5): Your browser does not support the audio element. I sympathize with you, Sean, […]

The battlelines are being drawn ever clearer.  On one side are those who believe that it's all right to use AI to help with the preparation of an (academic) article, essay, or paper.  On the other side are those who think that the utilization of AI is impermissible for such purposes.  As soon as they discern the […]

The most recent SMBC: The mouseover title: "We will have had peace immediately!" The AfterComic:

Today's xkcd: Mouseover title: "Communication is one of the most popular ways to transmit information, ahead of rivals such as" The explanation and discussion on explainxkcd.

Study of 1,700 languages reveals surprising hidden patternsLanguages may seem wildly different, but new research shows they follow surprisingly consistent—and deeply human—rules. Science News, Max Planck Society (4/5/26)   Summary A massive new analysis of over 1,700 languages shows that some long-debated “universal” grammar rules are actually real. By using cutting-edge evolutionary methods, researchers found […]

This post documents one small step in a larger plan for improved evaluation of prosody in reading. It compares word-level timing in a large number of recordings, from the Speech Accent Archive at GMU, of 3038 people reading the 69-word "Please call Stella" passage. 661 of these people are native speakers of English, with accents […]

"Why Modern Chinese is Just ‘English with Hanzi’,Hanzi Shells, English Souls: The Europeanization of the Chinese Language", by Jingyu, Old North Whale Review (2/09/26) Learning Chinese is widely sold as the ultimate linguistic challenge. Students are warned that they must rewire their cognitive faculties entirely to grasp an alien logic. But there is a reality […]

That's the name of a very fine health care facility nestled in the wooded hills of Philadelphia's northwestern suburbs — Malvern, Tradyffrin, Bryn Mawr ("large hill"), Bala Cynwyd (named for towns in Wales), Haverford, Narberth, Radnor, Berwyn, Merion, and Gwynedd. My inclination is to abbreviate the name somehow — BMRH, Bryn Mawr RH, etc. — […]

"'The purist jungle?'" (3/27/2026) featured Anne Abeillé's book "La Grammaire se Rebelle". As background, I should have cited "Le français va très bien, merci", Tract des linguistes 5/23/2023 (= "French is doing very well, thank you"). Note the greyed-out third E in ATTERRÉES on the tract's cover, representing a gender-neutral orthographic form for atterré(e)s = "appalled": The […]

Apparently our haplogroup (family of Joseph Charles Mair [Pfaffenhofen, Austria] and Esther Frieda Louise Boyce Mair [Zweismmen, Switzerland]) is U8a1a. As our ancestors ventured out of eastern Africa, they branched off in diverse groups that crossed and recrossed the globe over tens of thousands of years. Some of their migrations can be traced through haplogroups, families […]

A student who's been working on LLM-style AI transformations of symbolically-represented music recently tried mapping a (fragment of a piece) back and forth between two genres, e.g. baroque and pop. She found that after a couple of steps, the results reach a fixed point and don't change any more. This is different from what used […]

There are many other episodes, for example Episode 25, featuring the musical genre Ambient Hyper Pop Shark Core Acoustic New Metal among many others: For some (partial and antique) background on that one, see "Genres" (8/22/2014). And the latest (four days ago) episode has a focus on cultural attitudes and accents, though no musical references:

Following up on Tuesday's DP link, today we have Wyatt G. Croog, "Harvard Launches 'Strategic Authenticity Initiative' to Help Students Seems Normal", The Harvard Crimson 4/1/2026: In an effort to address growing concerns that its students are “deeply unsettling in conversation,” Harvard University announced Monday the launch of the Strategic Authenticity Initiative, a university-wide program […]

Penn's student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, traditionally publishes an April Fool's issue every year, generally a week or so before April 1. This year's version has not (so far) been put out as a paper version, or even in the standard online form, but only as a set of images. Echoing the title pun, this […]

This may sound hopelessly old-fashioned.  People were making the accusation more than half a century ago, but the same problems it points to persist even today. In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) is the concept that flawed, biased or poor quality ("garbage") information or input produces a result or output of similar ("garbage") […]

John Burn-Murdoch, "Social media is populist and polarising; AI may be the opposite", Financial Times 3/28/2026: Every media revolution has transformed who distributes information, what messages are distributed and what form they take. As such, some media are fundamentally democratising and polarising, widening the pool of publishers and views beyond a narrow elite and amplifying […]

Anne Abeillé's recently-published book "La Grammaire se Rebelle" describes linguistic prescriptivism as "la jungle puriste" / "the purist jungle". But wait, don't prescriptivists want to turn the linguistic wilderness into a well-tended formal garden? Maybe, but in fact prescriptive rules are often incoherent as well as contrary to elite as well as informal usage, as […]

…and other applications of non-linear dynamics. A press release from Northwestern University — "Bell-bottoms today, miniskirts tomorrow: Math reveals fashion's 20-year cycle": Fashion insiders and beauty magazines have long cited the "20-year-rule"—the idea that clothing trends often resurface every two decades. According to Northwestern University scientists, that observation isn't just anecdotal. It's a mathematical reality. […]