Apparently there's a trend on Tik Tok where people lip-sync to Donald Trump, framing his speech as that of a teenager sharing some drama. [Published on 09-19-2024]

This article explores the linguistic features of a highly stylized register of English called 'International Art English'. Looking at a corpus of words taken from e-flux, an art publishing platform, Rule and Levine explore the history, vocabulary, and syntax of IAE. I think that this article not only showed the ways in which IAE was used to enforce the boundaries of the art world, but also showed how writers (speakers?) of IAE actively used it to construct a persona for themselves that drew upon stylistic features to reinforce relevant and desirable traits. They noted that IAE users used it to "signal the assimilation of a powerful kind of critical sensibility, one that was rigorous, politically conscious, probably university trained." This meshes well with the Eckert's belief that third-wave variationist papers focus on variation as the result of "lifelong projects of self-construction and differentiation." (Eckert 2012) by highly agentic speakers.

This article talks about the ever-growing form of image-based communication (emojis, memes, GIFs, etc.) in Internet language. As Montreal linguist and writer Gretchen McCulloch says: "as social life migrates online, visual forms of communication become increasingly attractive because they replicate some of the physical experience we've lost." This article presents a really interesting sort of dichotomy between image and speech, and even image and word (as seen on a page). McCulloch and Tumblr-based artist Kari Altmann imply that images are in a sense more natural to us, more so than words (which, in my personal view, I don't really see as that different from images? For example, how do we check to make sure a word is spelled right? We write it out and make a judgment based on what it 'looks like.') and maybe even (spoken) language. @_@ wow... such semiotics... (See what I did there?) One other thing McCulloch mentioned was how ironic it was that it was technology that transformed "images" (religious icons, etc.) into "words" in the first place (printing press) but it is now bringing it back. Anyway, really interesting read! [Published on 05-03-2015]

List of lexical items considered unique to Baltimorese, includes some altered spellings to demonstrate phonological features.

The official website of "Pittsburghese." Citation: Johnstone. 2009. American Speech. Pittsburghese Shirts.