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 » Illiterate phishers
I've recently noticed an uptick in spam with good graphical quality but terrible proofreading. A few random examples are below. The spammeisters at ResearchGate are acting like proud grade-school parents over my contributions to the field of Natural Glyage Processing: 
Some people who pretend to be from nightly.news.report or maybe from Home & Life Magazine want to tell me about … [Link]
Language Log » SOTU interpolations
In "Text-as-data journalism? Highlights from a decade of SOTU speech coverage" (Online Journalism Blog 2/5/2018), Barbara Maseda surveys some of the ways that "media has used text-as-data to cover State of the Union addresses over the last decade". When Erica Hendry asked me for thoughts about features of Donald Trump's style in last week's SOTU, the only contribution I could … [Link]
Omniglot blog » Beards and chins
One of the Romanian lessons I did today was about parts of the body. One word that came up was bărbie [bərˈbi.e], which I guessed meant beard, but actually means chin. I suppose beards usually grow on chins, so this isn’t too surprising. Bărbie comes from the Vulgar Latin *barbilia, from the Latin barba (beard; wool; down on a plant). … [Link]
Urban Word of the Day » uncanon
Another word for unbelievable. It’s so bad that it’s unbelievable, uncanon “I hate cheese so much that it’s uncanon”
[Link]
Language Log » Tones for real
For several years, John McWhorter has been studying Mandarin very seriously. He and I have, from time to time, corresponded about the best, most effective, most efficient way to do that. After years of assiduous learning, it seems that he has recently experienced a kind of satori about one of the most challenging aspects of acquiring fluency in spoken Mandarin: … [Link]
languagehat.com » Tangut.
Victor Mair recently had a Log post about a Tangut Workshop at Yale which is full of striking tidbits: The Tangut were a Tibeto-Burman-speaking people whose name first appears in the Old Turkic Orkhon inscriptions of 735. Sometime before the 10th century, the Tangut moved to Northwest China where they founded the Western Xia / Xixia or Tangut Empire (1038–1227). … [Link]
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