General Blog Update

I hope you've all enjoyed the HURRY-FURRY post as much as I enjoyed compiling it. It's kind of remarkable how despite being a systematic change that results in a noticeable change between modern General American accents and older American ones (not to mention non-American ones), I've never heard a layman talk about it. I wonder whether dialect coaches for American actors doing English parts teach them this distinction. If not, they could always learn from this page. ;)

I've been wanting to do some 'recommendations' for pages I find interesting. There aren't that many sites about linguistics that are interesting to both laymen and linguists, so it's a real joy to find some. In that spirit, I'd like to share the following blogs which are new to me, and which will hopefully be of interest to you as well.

Geoff Lindsay is a dialect coach who writes about curiosities in English varieties on his website, English Speech Services. I enjoyed this recent post on whether Meghan Markle is acquiring more British-like intonation, and the history of the fall-rise intonation in English English. He has some other very interesting posts, and I encourage you to check them out!

Lisa Loves Linguistics is a site looking at the sociolinguistics of pop music, much like this site! She has a focus on Caribbean Englishes and how they're used to construct identity in a globalized pop context. If you're a fan of Rihanna, she's done some posts about that, too.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to the following two blogs. They are unfortunately defunct, but they have nevertheless been excellent informative sources for me and were quite inspirational in my own journey to start a linguistics blog.

Dialect Blog was run by Ben T. Smith, who became interested in dialects through his work as an actor. The site was briefly down for a month in 2019, which utterly broke my heart! Thankfully, it's back now. For a sample post, check out this one on the origin of pirate English.

John Wells's phonetic blog is the aptly named blog about phonetics run by phonetician John Wells. He wrote 'Accents of English', one of the books I constantly cite. I recommend this post on dark vs light l in English.

There are many more wonderful linguistics blogs to share, but I'd like to make this a semi-recurring post so as not to dump every blog that's ever crossed my fancy on you. There's plenty of time to recommend more linguistics blogs. And if you have one that you'd like to recommend, I would love to hear about it!

- Karen