Intergalactic linguistics: The extraterrestrial language of Angine the Poitrine deciphered

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Unknown 27 1

             By Retep Rakbek, Berte Pakker, Pratek Beek and Peter Bakker

The folk/rock/metal/electronic music band Angine de Poitrine is taking the world by storm. The two-person band is known for the music that is not from planet Earth, and apparently microtonal, according to musicologists. The first landing took place in the small town in Saguenay, Québec, a city of about 150,000 inhabitants. Their concerts tend to be sold out quickly. Their exoplanetary language has not been studied by linguists yet. This is the first analysis.

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Language data

The musicians, despite their 333 year presence on our planet, have not yet learned to speak Earthian, but they understand enough French and English so as to give an occasional interview in which … ↪

Making fun of the English language

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Lingoblog forsider 3

Girls and boys in airports, they may get bored. It could be you. What do you do? You find a bookstore. There you find a book that looks interesting, and you buy it, and you will start reading it – if you can find a place to sit. The book is non-fiction, and of course it is about language.

This happened to someone I know (I, on the other hand, take the train whenever I can), and she bought the book for me, not for herself as she works in the hard sciences, and I found it under the Christmas tree. Thank you.

The book is called The Language-Lover’s Lexipedia and has the subtitle an A-Z of linguistic curiosities. … ↪

The social life of Turkish keysmash

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Eks. paa enkeltside

With thanks to my students in Class 201, Academic Year 2025–2026, for always teaching me, making me laugh, and reminding me that language is alive in the smallest details.

A student once sent a message in our class WhatsApp group that looked like a keyboard accident: “JSJHGHGHGJBJBJBJBSBSB.” When I asked whether something was wrong, she laughed and said, “Teacher, it just means I’m laughing. A lot.” That moment raised a question worth taking seriously: what if this digital chaos is not chaos at all? Turkish Gen Z keysmash, I have come to think, is a small sociolinguistic system with its own grammar of closeness.

As an English instructor in Istanbul, I spend a lot of time observing how students move … ↪

A linguist takes on the AI hype and dehumanization

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Banevogteren 1
Emily M. Bender is one of the most prominent critical voices against the uncritical adoption of “AI”-branded language technology. What makes her voice particularly insightful is her domain expertise as a computational linguist and her technical understanding of how languages models work — and how significantly they differ from the way that humans acquire and process language.
This week, Professor Bender is visiting Aarhus University and will give a talk titled “Resisting Dehumanization in the Age of ‘AI’, the View from the Humanities”. Her argument is that the production and promotion of so-called “AI” technology involves dehumanization on many fronts: The computational metaphor valorizes one kind of cognitive activity as “intelligence”, devaluing many other aspects of human experience, while also
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The 10-year anniversary of LingoSlam

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Lingoblog forsider 2

This year’s LingoSlam was certainly a special event filled with laughter, thought-provoking facts about language, and yummy cake. The 10-year anniversary was celebrated by having one participant from each semester, so all semesters were represented in the competition.

If you were not there with your own set of eyes to experience this awe-inspiring event – fear not!

Here is a recap of the legendary LingoSlam of 2026

The event took place on the 17th of April at 14:15. After students, professors, and other language-lovers had gathered around and gotten a cup of coffee and a slice of cake it was finally time for the first participant to enter the stage: Jeanne from 10th semester (4th semester of the Master’s … ↪

Syllables – A Myth of Universality in Linguistics

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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!

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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, … ↪