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Sociolinguistic Persona Hacks: Ce n’est pas grave, mon cherri
“Hacking,” as a liberating activity (see previous post on Google Translate Hacks) coordinates well with “Citizen Sociolinguistics.” Both take the tools of a highly standardized and hierarchically...
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Talking Music and Singing Language: More is More
Jane Frazee (a renowned music educator who also is my stepmother) has spent most of her life teaching and writing about music and music teachers (see her latest here). She constantly thinks about...
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Retweet! and Other I-Agree Signals
“Retweet!” This week, listening in on a heated high school discussion, I heard someone shout out “Retweet” from across the room. I wasn’t sure what was going on. Was our conversation being tweeted...
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Acquisition versus Learning and Citizen Sociolinguistics
Did you LEARN how to speak English or ACQUIRE that ability? What about Spanish? Or Arabic? This is a distinction that many in the language teaching world like to think about. Some tend to think that...
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Nyle DiMarco: Citizen Sociolinguist of the Deaf Community—and Communication...
Let’s be honest: Most hearing people could not be bothered with sign language. As kids, we may have thought about how amazing it would be to know it: Maybe wehappened on the card with the alphabet and...
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Tone Deaf
Have you ever witnessed someone using language painfully out of tune with the present company? Examples I’ve encountered include A college student, charging meals and shopping sprees to their parents’...
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Elbow, Elbow Pit, or Cough Pocket?
The human elbow is getting a lot of attention these days, as we collectively fight the global spread of COVID-19. But what does that word “elbow” refer to? Am I the only one who has spent most of my...
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Five DIY Language Games for Online Learners of All Ages
Lately, the Internet has become an indispensable resource for teachers and professors as we surf through websites and social media looking for examples, links, lessons, or just something to break the...
View ArticleTalking about Language, Talking about L-O-V-E
The hip hop classic, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998), is now over 20 years old. The album was recorded before either of my children, now ages 13 and 21 were born. But, during quarantine, I’ve...
View ArticleCitizen Sociolinguistics and AI-Assisted Writing
This semester I have been receiving a lot of bizarrely polished essays from my students. They aren’t plagiarized or even straight-up usages of ChatGPT. I haven’t seen one grammatical mistake, not...
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