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SLA Blog

Official blog of the Society for Linguistic Anthropology

  1. Language Related TV Tropes

    In a followup to my post from last week about the language section in the Snopes database of online myths and hoaxes, I’d like to share this link to the language section of TVtropes.org. The TV Tropes website was featured on the NPR radio show, On the Media, which explained that the show, which “catalogs [...]

  2. Publisher Discounts on SLA Website

    Oxford and Elsevier offer discounts to SLA members.

  3. Celso Alvarez Caccamo on Catalan Language Policies

    Celso Alvarez Caccamo had such an interesting response to my first roundup that I have pasted it in full so anyone seeing the blog will see it. I was tempted to remove the Altalang.com link but will leave it (and its evidence of my utter lack of knowledge about Spanish dialects and Iberian penninsula languages) [...]

  4. Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #2: Our Man at the Times, Ben Zimmer

    A special edition of the Linguistic Anthropology Roundup to introduce, Ben Zimmer, a Chicago-trained linguistic anthropologist, linguist and lexicographer who was just appointed as the New York Times’s Sunday Magazine, “On Language” columnist.

  5. Language Myths in Your Inbox

    NPR has a nice profile of the couple which runs Snopes.com. Having long ago convinced most of my contacts to stop forwarding chain e-mails, I rarely check Snopes anymore, but inspired by the NPR story I went back and was pleased to see that they have an entire section devoted to language. This, in turn, [...]

  6. Linguistic Anthropology Roundup #1

    Welcome to the inaugural Society for Linguistic Anthropology Roundup Blogpost that will briefly summarize some of the current interesting linguistic anthropology related materials available on the web. Three of us, Alex Enkerli (SLA Web Guru), Chad Nilep (a regular blogger on this site), and myself (Leila Monaghan, SLA Digital Content Editor), will share the duties [...]

  7. Wyoming Language, Culture and History Conference

    We got so many interesting paper proposals that we have extended the conference for an extra half day so we could fit them all in. The Wyoming Language, Culture and History Conference now runs from Thursday, July to Saturday, July 3. See full blog post for the preliminary program

  8. Accent, Race, and Social Preferences

    A piece in Scientific American Mind called “Accents Trump Skin Color” reviews work by Katherine Kinzler and colleagues suggesting that, for young children, accent is as important as visual cues to race, gender, and age in selecting friends. The magazine article was interesting, and led me to look for the research paper it was based on.

  9. Basic Color Terms + Gender Stereotypes

    The perfect cartoon for teaching Deborah Cameron and Berlin and Kay

  10. Study the life and culture of the Highland Maya (Deadline: March 26, 2010)

    Ethnographic Field School in Highlan Guatemala 6 undergraduate credits in anthropology May 25–July 8, 2010 (two days on-campus, six weeks abroad) Maury Hutcheson, Ph.D. mhutcheson@vcu.edu Program cost: $2,380 (includes roundtrip airfare) plus applicable VCU tuition[1] Based in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, this six-week program will provide students with a comprehensive overview of Mayan indigenous life in Guatemala, [...]

  11. CFP Volunteer Session AAA 2010: “Circulate-able” Selves

    CFP Volunteer Session AAA 2010: How We Formulate “Circulate-able” Selves: Introductions as a Social and Political Discourse Genre. Send to Nathaniel Dumas by March 15th, 2010.

  12. Toyota and Japanese orthography

    A radio quiz program suggested that Toyota uses a character written with eight strokes, while Toyoda uses one with ten, and that eight is a more auspicious number. This is strange for at least two reasons.

    It turns out that BBC News contributor Kathryn Westcott published an article last week addressing the question, “Why is the car giant Toyota not Toyoda?” which does a pretty good job explaining the apparent inconsistency.