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 » Venn diagram with first grade spelling
Drawn by a seven year old in Los Angeles: 
It boggles the mind to think that a seven year old first grader could conceptualize the relationship between her teacher and herself in this sophisticated, abstract way. I don't recall having been introduced to Venn diagrams until high school or perhaps even college. Equally striking to me is the resourcefulness of … [Link]
Language Log » Topic comment
Yesterday, Buzzfeed published an article titled "This Woman Ate A Pork Bun In A Typhoon And Now Everyone Loves Her" (9/28/16). It featured this drawing: 
The drawing is based on a photograph that appeared in a Wall Street Journal article on Typhoon Megi slamming into Taiwan the previous day. I won't get into the psychology of the lady clinging to … [Link]
Language Log » Konglish, ch. 2
A little over a year ago, we had our first look at "Konglish", Korean-style English. If it was thriving then, it seems to be positively luxuriant now: "The Beauty and Perils of Konglish, the Korean-English Hybrid" (Margaret Rhodes, WIRED, 9/29/16) This article describes a zine by Ran Park called "Lost in Konglish", which presents "the macaronic form of English sweeping … [Link]
Language Log » The possessive Jesus of composition
Let me explain, very informally, what a predictive text imitator is. It is a computer program that takes as input a passage of training text and produces as output a new text that is composed quasi-randomly except that it matches the training text with regard to the frequencies of word or character sequences up to some fixed finite length k. … [Link]
Language Log » Talk amongst yourselves
Please, talk to each other. It's important to linguists that there should be plenty of chat. We need language live, on the hoof. Millions of spoken word tokens everywhere, so that we can (for example) compare Donald Trump's amazingly high proportion of first-person singular pronouns to the average for non-narcissists like typical Language Log readers. 
However, beware of engaging in … [Link]
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