Syllables – A Myth of Universality in Linguistics

by
Neurodiversity Crowd 2

Stripped to its very basics, rules of English phonetics can seem pretty universal among speakers. We can all distinguish between consonants like b and m, we can all hear the difference between a whisper and a shout, and we can all divide speech into syllables, even if it might require clapping our hands a bit.

Except that last part might not be as universal as you might think.

I was 8 years old when we were taught syllables in school. While all the other kids would clap along and split words like pea/nut and foot/ball, I wouldn’t. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I couldn’t hear what they heard. I couldn’t hear syllables. At age 27, I … ↪

LingoSlam is coming back!

by
Lingoblog forsider 2

And in honor of that, it is time for a recap of last year’s event and participants.

Let us set the scene

It’s the second of May of 2025, a Friday evening, where summer is lurking just around the corner. The room is filled with eager linguists, hands filled with cake and coffee, waiting for the festivities to begin. Sebastian Hauptmann is our host in fabulous attire, as always, and as he stands up to present this year’s LingoSlammers, the chit-chat turns to occasional murmuring. The game is on. The first participant is Andreas Østergaard. He presents “The Language of Magic: The Gathering” with an overview of what can get lost in translation in the search for puns and intertextuality, … ↪

From Kortrijk to the Caribbean: the significance of a final -t

by
carriols2

Some linguistic features are striking and unmistakable. Others are so subtle that outsiders barely notice them – while insiders hear them instantly. A t-sound at the end of a word can be one of those features. It may seem insignificant, yet it can signal where you are from, where you belong, even who you are.

In Dutch, final –t is a fragile consonant. In everyday speech, it is often dropped altogether: Dutch speakers say nie instead of niet ‘not’, wa instead of wat ‘what’, and da instead of dat ‘that’. No speaker deletes every final –t, but no one keeps them all either.

This type of deletion is often associated with informality in Standard Dutch. But it … ↪

“Eat salad and die!” – An interesting and inspiring tale about linguistic fieldwork

by
Linguist on the loose scaled

As a person with around a million different allergies and an aspiration to do linguistic fieldwork one day, I got extremely excited when I read the quoted passage from the title of this review: “Eat salad and die!”. For an experienced field linguist this might be obvious (what do I know?), but I have often wondered whether the number of food allergies I have would stand in the way between me and my possible future prospects of doing fieldwork one day. Luckily Lyle Campbell was able to prove me wrong and restore my hopes in his book “Linguist on the Loose – Adventures and misadventures in fieldwork”.

In his book, Campbell describes most aspects of linguistic fieldwork through … ↪

Book review: Before the Linguistics Wars, was there peace? An edition of the correspondence between Hugo Schuchardt (linguist) and Gaston Paris (philologist)

by
Maanen i min kuffert

Perhaps, dear reader, you are at a linguistics department, while your friend – studying very similar courses at a different university – is in a philology department. Some departments used to call themselves one way but later renamed themselves, such as Harvard’s Department of Linguistics, originally Comparative Philology. What differences are there and why does the name seem to matter? A highly readable and enjoyable article containing both qualitative and quantitative data tackled this issue over three decades ago – Margaret Winters & Geoffrey Nathan’s 1992 “First he called her a philologist and then she insulted him” (a worthwhile longer account can be found in Momma 2012).

And a likewise highly readable and enjoyable book has existed since … ↪

Book review: When language grows larger than reality

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Lingoblog forsider 1

Review of Mikkel Toxvig. 2025. Magt og overmod – Om sprogets storhedsvanvid i ledelse og arbejdsliv [Power and Hubris – On the Megalomania of Language in Leadership and Working Life.] Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.

The inflation in grocery prices in 2025 has probably caused more than a few of us to place the minced beef back in the freezer section. Perhaps sometimes with the thought lingering in the back of our minds: whether the growing gap between those who have more than enough and those who don’t have much at all might sow the seeds of aggression; whether we are growing too far apart. Inflation – and the consequences of inflation – is also the subject of Mikkel Toxvig’s book Magt og … ↪

If I was a language dictator …

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COLOURBOX47811268 1 scaled

We are all prisoners of our mother tongue, in a way. Often we like to believe that our way of speaking is natural and healthy, while other languages ​​are exotic and indulge in nonsense that no Christian person can understand. At the same time, we probably realize deep down that speakers of these languages ​​could see us the same way.

In my more megalomaniacal moments, I have sometimes pondered what features I would incorporate into the Swedish language, if I was an almighty dictator. Now let’s remember that linguists are not supposed to have opinions about “good” and “bad” languages, but sometimes it is hard not to be struck by a feeling of: “Why don’t we have this extremely practical … ↪