Feb-5 Recap

Happy end-of-the-week! Firstly, I'd like to welcome new readers who have come here through Twitter and found my Taylor Swift Dialect Dissection. I have received many kind comments from you about the article, so thank you very much for that. If you liked that, hang around: I have another dialect dissection coming soon. I also post about the intersection of linguistics and music in general (sometimes I cheat and look at other media, too), so if that's your cup of tea, we got the whole kettle.

If you're in the United States, your conversations this week have likely been dominated by the Superbowl and the Eagles victory. Maybe you've also talked about Justin Timberlake, who promoted his new album Man of the Woods at the Superbowl. My dad was surprised that Justin Timberlake was still making music. "Wasn't he popular in the 90s?" Yes, he was, and the 2000s, and spectacularly enough into the 2010s with 20/20 Vision. Those of you who've followed this blog for a while will remember that Justin Timberlake's performance on "It's Gonna Be Me" (or should I say, "It's Gonna Be May") was the inspiration for the first long read for this post, "Oh Babih Babay." It's always incredible to see such a long-lasting career, especially when the music industry is so vicious and youth-centered.

We briefly discussed the topic of accent discrimination on Monday. Now accent discrimination and how we perceive people with certain accents is a huge topic that could have several long reads - this is just a little introduction to the way that accent affects people in the courtroom.

For the portion of my audience that doesn't know what those funny letters I keep using my articles are, I've made a post about the International Phonetic Alphabet and how to learn it. One of my long-term goals is to make a reference section for those of you who aren't coming to this site with prior linguistics knowledge. Don't worry, I got you. For those of you who do know about this stuff already, I won't ever post more than one reference post a week. Remember, we were all once little linguistics babies.

The next Dialect Dissection is going very well, and I fully expect to have it up next week! If you want some hints as to who it's going to be about, perhaps check out my Twitter or Instagram for hints... If you'd like to know what I'm up to and working on that's not big enough to merit a mention in the recap, I recommend following me on your social media platform of choice.

Thank you all for another week, and I'll see you on Monday!

- Karen