”Ryssiä”

This is a finnish slang verb for failing, to fuck it up.

It literally translates: ”to Russian it”
#folkwisdom #finnish #linguistics #russia

Linguists, animal lovers, and infographic designers--this article is for you. A beautiful, scrolling animation providing a visual analysis of animal sounds across cultures. Meet: cat! duck! and pig! (if they spoke in IPA). https://pudding.cool/2025/03/language/ #linguistics #anthropology #design #animals #animation #cat

After almost three decades of R&D work, Peggy van der Kreeft, ReCo's grande dame of human language technology, is about to retire.

High time for an extensive conversation: https://innovation.dw.com/articles/interview-peggy-van-der-kreeft

Hi, I'm Linus and my main interest right now is #OpenStreetMap . I also enjoy #music, #astronomy, and #linguistics.

I'm #danish and speak #german and #english as well. If anyon has tips for mastodon, please shoot them at me.

Very happy to announce that my employers, the Austrian Academy of Sciences' Institute for Iranian Studies, are finally off X and onto a range of other platforms including the Fediverse.

If you have any interest in (or want to find out a bit more about) the cultures and languages of the Caucasus, Iran, and central Asia, then please do go and follow them @IranianStudies :)

Boosts appreciated!

As a kid trying (failing dismally) to learn French, I never got my head around the gendering of nouns. Coming from a language that doesn't have that it just seemed rather bizarre. However it seems to be a very common practice in languages and I wonder if anyone can tell me if 'most' languages have gendered nouns or whether (like English) they don't?
#linguistics #askfedi

Probably about time for a new (re) #Introductions post to pin! Been bumbling around on Mastodon since November 2017 on one server or another, and happy to get cozy in a smaller server this time.

I’m not a heavy poster, but lean mostly towards #SciCom and pictures of the #critters and #wildlife I spot in my central Florida backyard or from adventures on my #camping trips.

I’m currently a #caregiver, formerly a professional #Library knowledge ninja. Strong believer in the #RightToRepair and lifelong #Sewcialist. I love fixing and mending things.

My #NeuroSpicy flavour is #80HD, so it may be unsurprising that my academic studies and interests are hella broad. I spend a lot of time digging into local ecology and #HabitatRestoration and preservation. I’m a #space and aeronautics nerd, but I'm also a #Polyglot with an academic background in #linguistics, adult literacy, and ESL. The other part of my academic background is the technical side of theatre.

OK, so here's a #linguistic thought that kicks around my head from time to time.

When a #transgender individual assumes or reveals a new identity corresponding to a new gender, they frequently choose a new name corresponding to the new gender. For example, a man named Brian might become a woman named Brenda. Or Sharon. Or any number of things. But she won't be named Brian. Or José. Or Ichiro.

It seems far less common to challenge the idea that names are inherently gendered than that people are.

If you're a #language nerd like I am, then you won't have missed the @mozilla #CommonVoice v19 #speech #dataset release - which now features 131 languages! Here's my #dataviz, done in @observablehq of the v19 #metadata coverage.

I've updated the visualisation this time around with human-readable language names instead of their ISO-639 or BCP-47 language codes to make it it easier to read.

There's some interesting observations:

Catalan (ca) continues to be leader in terms of data - speaking volumes about the efforts to revitalise culture and language in Catalunya. It's also one of the few languages that has data for all age groups, particularly older speakers - this sort of data is missing for most other languages.

Kiswahili (sw) is one of the languages where there is more data for female-identifying speakers than for male-identifying speakers - although Japanese (ja), Western Mari (mrj) and Luganda (lg) do pretty well here, too!

Sentence domains can now be categorised, and although most new sentences are "general", Albanian (sq) has a lot of sentences related to law and government.

Tsonga (ts), a Bantu language spoken in Southern Africa, has dethroned Icelandic (is) as the language with the highest average utterance duration. I don't know enough about Tsonga to speculate why - it's a somewhat agglutinative language, but many Tsonga works are generally short.

Bengali / Bangla (bn) has a significant amount of data that is not yet validated, and therefore does not appear in training / dev / test splits. There is a similar case for many languages new to Common Voice - it takes time to validate.

The language with the highest number of average contributions per speaker is Taita (dav), a Bantu language from Kenya.

What do you make of the data visualisation? Are there any other insights you can see?

Big thanks to the CV team for all their efforts - EM, Jessica Rose, Dmitrij Feller and Justin Grant.

#linguistics

https://observablehq.com/@kathyreid/mozilla-common-voice-v19-dataset-metadata-coverage