We’re delighted to tell you that this year we’ll be hosting an unprecedented nine summer interns due to additional funding from the National Science Foundation.  Our first intern joined us on Monday, and the 2012 internship cohort will continue arriving until June; stay tuned for an upcoming post introducing this year’s LINGUIST interns!

What have past LINGUIST List interns said about their experiences?  Here’s a sampler:

“I really like the people here. We’re all interesting, smart people and we genuinely like to be here together. Also, we get to work on great projects.” -Danielle St. Jean, 2009 summer intern and subsequent LINGUIST editor

“The intern program at LINGUIST allows you to explore and develop your interests, and find ones you never knew you had.” -Danniella Hornby, 2010 summer intern and current LL Publications Editor

“I greatly valued the camaraderie between workers in the office and having the chance to bounce ideas off of each other in each of the projects. I also enjoyed the problem solving aspect of my work, specifically the foresight and creativity necessary to digitize complex maps.” -Christine Evans, 2011 summer intern and current Fulbright scholar

If you missed your chance to intern this summer, never fear: you’ll get a chance next year. The call for 2013 interns will go out this fall; see the 2012 call for interns here.

The LINGUIST List Amazon store has made its debut!  Users can browse linguistics books by category, as well as essential electronics like audio recorders and hard drives.  Best of all, every purchase you make through the LINGUIST List Amazon store contributes a small donation to LINGUIST, at no additional cost to you!

Update: We now have stores for several countries; save money on shipping by shopping the store closest to you!

USA: http://astore.amazon.com/linguistlist-20
Canada: http://astore.amazon.ca/linguistlistc-20
Germany: http://astore.amazon.de/linguistlistd-21
France: http://astore.amazon.fr/linguistlistf-21
United Kingdom: http://astore.amazon.co.uk/linguistlist-21

We do not yet have stores in Japan, China, Italy or Spain, simply because we
have not yet received permission to open a store in these countries. But
we will certainly add them when the opportunity arises.

Happy shopping, and thank you for supporting LINGUIST List!

Friday, 4/13, 11 am – 1 pm: The LL-MAP Scholar’s Workbench Workshop will introduce attendees to using the LL-MAP interface and Scholar’s Workbench tool, including tutorials on how to map your own data.  The workshop is open to the public, and will be held at Eastern Michigan University’s Halle Library, room 111.  If you’d like to attend, please register here:

http://llmap.org/llmap-flyer

Friday, 4/13, 1:30 pm: ILIT faculty affiliate Dr. Maƚgosia Ćavar will be presenting a talk at LINGUIST List entitled On the influence of L1 on L2 perception: The case of tenseness contrast in American vowels.  This will also be open to anyone– if you’re in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, you’re invited to attend!  For those unfortunate readers who can’t make it to Michigan, we’ll be recording Dr. Ćavar’s talk and making it available online.

We hope to see you on Friday!

With the help of the LINGUIST List Advisors, who in the eleventh hour ponied up the remaining funds, we made our goal!  We can all breathe easy, knowing that we have the ability to continue our operations for another year, and that we can continue funding the graduate students who run LINGUIST List (they’re surprisingly resistant to being chained to their desks as free labor).

We’d like to give special thanks to the following folks:

Sociolinguists everywhere, winners of the Battle of the Fields!

It was neck-and-neck for a while, with Syntax in the lead for weeks, but Sociolinguistics rallied at the last minute and pulled ahead for a final tally of $9296!  Bravo, sociolinguists!

Graduate Tournament winners:

The University of Washington, whose 50 donors* contributed an astonishing $4205, is the winners of the First Annual Golden Pig Award.  Well done, Huskies!

The University of South Carolina, recipients of the School Spirit Award with an amazing 34 donors!  Way to go, Gamecocks!

And all hail the top donors in each region:

North-West University (Africa)

University of Toronto (Americas outside US)

Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (Asia)

University of Cambridge (Europe)

Bar-Ilan University (Middle East)

University of Melbourne (Pacific)

*We wanted to spread the glory around a little bit, and to recognize USC’s fighting spirit, so we’ll be awarding them the School Spirit trophy with a nod to Washington.

Our limerick contributors!

Special congratulations to Brenda Boerger, Ultimate LINGUIST Limerick Champion– check out her winning entry!  Thanks to all of our ingenious subscribers who sent in limericks.  You can view all of their poetic masterworks over in the Limerick Museum!

And most of all we thank all of our donors, everywhere.

Thanks for making this the best Fund Drive ever.  We hope you had fun (we sure did), and that you know how much we appreciate your support.

https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

The LINGUIST List has provided me with experience and skills and
allowed me to work alongside the most motivated and hardworking
students I could imagine. But most significantly, it has opened my
eyes to the importance – and necessity – of free and accessible
resources.

I missed my opportunity to write to you during the 2010 Fund Drive -
if I had, I would have said that I hoped you would consider supporting
a fantastic organization, because working on grant projects and
editing Ask-a-Linguist questions had already opened my eyes to what a
valuable resource the LINGUIST List is. Last year, I wrote to you as a
bright new graduate student and a new editor of Journal Calls, and
hoped that you would feel my excitement at having returned to
LINGUIST. This year, as the Publications Manager at LINGUIST, I write
to you in the hopes that you will appreciate what a valuable training
ground LINGUIST is and how dedicated we are to what we do.

I know that when my time at LINGUIST and at EMU comes to a close,
there will be new interns and new graduate assistants who are eager to
step up and continue the work that we all do and love at LINGUIST
List. By donating to the fund drive, you can help ensure that, each
year, students will continue to have this opportunity.

https://linguistlist.org/donation/donate/donate1.cfm

Sincerely,
Danniella Hornby
Publications Manager

I find biographies of people, and especially of linguists, a fascinating subject, and I think it’s a wonderful idea to ask linguists how they got into the field. But my own story does not really contain any surprising elements, at least at the beginning: I got fascinated by languages early on, beginning with a Spanish course on the West German radio (“Vamos a España,” a very easy course in 20 lessons of 15 minutes each, geared to tourists) that I listened to when I was 14 years old…

Does Dr. Haspelmath’s story contain surprising elements after the beginning?  You bet!  Read on at the Hall of Heroes…

LL-MAP (Language and Location: A Map Accessibility Project, llmap.org) is a database of maps with geospatially-referenced information about existing languages.  LL-MAP also includes a user-friendly online interface which organizes linguistic, geographic and social sciences information into customizable map layers.  Scholars and students can use the newly-updated database interface to query and compare language maps, draw new hypotheses about language, layer different maps together, and even share a map on Facebook!

Another feature of LL-MAP that has recently been released is the Scholar’s Workbench.  In this workspace, scholars can upload their own data or use existing datasets to create new maps showing their hypotheses about linguistic phenomena. In this workshop, we will be demonstrating the possibilities of this dynamic and user-friendly uploading facility. In a hands-on demonstration, participants will go through the process of turning data into a language map by uploading a data set as well as styling and describing it.

Registration is free but space is limited. Please go to the following web address to register:

http://llmap.org/llmap-flyer

For questions, contact Amy Brunett (brunett@linguistlist.org).

Schedule:
April 13, 2012, 11 AM –1 PM
Halle Library, EMU, Room 111

About the LL-MAP database…..11:00-11:15
How the Scholar’s Workbench works…..11:15-11:30
The Uploader in action: Hands-on demo…..11:30-12:30
Questions/feedback…..12:30-1:00

At January’s LSA meeting, we invited visitors to our office hours to record vlogs (an adorable portmanteau of video + blog, for those new to the term) describing what they like about LINGUIST List.  Several folks were kind enough to sit down and record some video testimonials.  A few choice quotes:

“I just want to give a shout out to LINGUIST List for all they’ve done to help facilitate linguistic communication within the field.”  -Gary Holton, Alaska Native Language Center

“It’s really useful as a discipline to have a clearinghouse of all this information.  A lot of other disciplines don’t have that… I’m really glad LINGUIST List exists.”  -Stephanie Morse, University of California, Santa Barbara

“Do you want to find out what people are talking about in linguistics?  You can go to LINGUIST List. It’s a great resource.  It’s made a huge difference for me.”  -Marianna Di Paolo, Center for American Indian Languages

“I look at LINGUIST List every single day.  It’s my link to the world of linguistics.” -Julia James, Independent Researcher 

We’d love to hear from other users! Send us your videos with accolades, suggestions, or general comments about LINGUIST, and we’ll feature them on the blog and Facebook!

That is partly why we are so delighted to feature as our Linguist of the Day Dr. Jean Berko Gleason, who in addition to the Wug Test has done a great deal of amazing work in the field of psycholinguistics.  She shares with LINGUIST readers the story of how she came to be a linguist, excerpted here:

“The languages, and the literature we read, The Wild Duck in Norwegian, for instance, and parts of the Mahabharata in Sanskrit were absorbing, but they were not really what I was looking for. Quite by happenstance, I enrolled during my senior year in a new course called the Psychology of Speech and Communication, taught by a young assistant professor named Roger Brown, who had recently arrived from the University of Michigan.  The lectures were a revelation, beautifully organized, and full of startling ideas…”

Read more at the Hall of Heroes!

My path to linguistics was probably a bit unusual. I was already 24 when I started studying linguistics in 1978. I was fortunate to receive three key pieces of advice that led me into the field.

I was stubborn, independent and in retrospect, stupid when I was a teenager in Japan. I pretty much ignored schoolwork and spent much of my time reading novels and philosophy books. That continued until I suddenly felt that there were more things I ought to know and that I wanted to be “taught.”

What were the three pieces of advice?  Read more and find out!