Almost everyone uses language, so inevitably almost everyone thinks they are an expert in it. I don’t consider myself an expert, though most of my work requires at least language competence and sometimes actual skill, but I do follow the blogs featured on this feeds page.
(If you are wondering where the translation-related feeds have all gone, I have put them on their own page.)
Most of the blogs represented here are in English, most of the time, but don’t be surprised to find other languages used. Go with the flow – I occasionally find myself pleasantly surprised at how much I can grasp in languages I have never seen before.
Language On the Net
Language Log » Delay no more
This is what happens when copy editors type what they're feeling and then forget to take it out again before it goes online: 
This is from the following article in Coconuts Hong Kong: "Delay what?! SCMP readers blast paper for headline innuendo" (1/12/16) As the article explains: As most Hongkongers know, "delay no more" is a homophone for "diu lei … [Link]
Language Log » Do not animals
Sign from National Taiwan University: 
qǐng wù fàngshēng 請勿放生 "Please do not release living [creatures into this pool]." Fàngshēng 放生 ("life release") refers to the freeing of captive animals. Adherents of Buddhism often do this in special pools or ponds designated for the purpose on the grounds of temples and monasteries. One can purchase captive fish, turtles, birds, and so … [Link]
Language Log » Both Chinese and Japanese; neither Japanese nor Chinese
An ad for a new product of a Hong Kong cake shop went viral for taking pseudo-Japanese to the extreme: 
It is my custom in Language Log posts always to provide Romanized transcriptions of writing in hanzi / kanji / hanja, but in this instance I will forgo the Romanizations for the simple fact that, in many instances in this … [Link]
languagehat.com » Manchu Hangs On.
Well, sort of. The Manchu language is essentially dead in its homeland, Manchuria, but the Xibe of Xinjiang speak a variant of it, as Andrew Jacobs explains in a surprisingly good NY Times story (thanks, Eric!): Two and a half centuries later, the roughly 30,000 people in this rural county who consider themselves Xibe have proved to be an ethnographic … [Link]
Omniglot blog » Flan cupboards
A Welsh plygain song I’ve been learning recently with some friends (Carol y Swper) features the word fflangell in the line “Ein Meichiau a’n Meddyg dan fflangell Iddweig”. We weren’t sure what it meant at first, and guessed that it was some kind of container for a flan or a flan cupboard. A fflan is a flan, and cell means … [Link]
Language Log » Style or artefact or both?
In "Correlated lexicometrical decay", I commented on some unexpectedly strong correlations over time of the ratios of word and phrase frequencies in the Google Books English 1gram dataset: I'm sure that these patterns mean something. But it seems a little weird that OF as a proportion of all prepositions should correlate r=0.953 with the proportion of instances of OF immediately … [Link]
Wordorigins.org » Tommy, Tommy Atkins
The great joy of running this website is that now and again you discover a term that simultaneously connects with great historical figures and events and reveals how language, the most human of inventions, works. The British slang term for a soldier, Tommy, is just such a word. It is short for Tommy Atkins, and the word’s history, both purported … [Link]
languagehat.com » Burgess on Ambiguity.
Stan Cary quotes Anthony Burgess on Joyce and dream-literature; all of it is worth reading, but I especially loved this paragraph: Our educational tradition, both in Britain and America, has conditioned us to look on words as mere counters which, given a particular context, mean one thing and one thing only. This tradition, needless to say, is geared to the … [Link]
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