Welcome to Friday Night Linguistics ...

We are Friday Night Linguists. We are fascinated, amused, and charmed by many language-related phenomena, among other things. "Friday Night Supper" is a meal (held on any night of the week, as it turns out) where people get together, eat, play and discuss the world. Countless million-dollar business innovations, paradigm-shifting art projects, leading-edge research institutes, and best-selling book ideas have been hatched, eagerly argued over, and heartlessly abandoned around our kitchen table. It's time someone at least wrote a few of these down.

Children of the drought

Look for One night in Sixes andMedicine for the dead, by Arianne "Tex" Thompson, at your local book-mongers'!

Jason has been serving as "Constructed Language Architect" on this series of rural fantasy novels:

I collaborated with Tex in developing the lexicon and grammar of each of her alternate-universe languages, which reflect specific elements of the novel's version of history — and, in some cases, the non-human biology of the beings who speak them.

Creating fictional variants of real languages and cultures, as we did with Marín and Fraichais, brings a very particular set of challenges, because the result needs to seem familiar, yet somehow alien at the same time.

The languages in Sixes should not only convey a sense of linguistic and historical verisimilitude, but also evoke a sense of character or setting; the look and/or sound of the languages themselves should help tell the story.

It's been a treat meeting and working with Tex and participating in her re-creation of the American Southwest in a "universe next door".

Ukuleles

When not otherwise occupied with the wonders of language (real and imagined), Friday Night Linguists play (and encourage others to play) ukuleles, as members of the Grande Royale Ükulelists of the Black Swamp:

* GRÜBS performance videos on YouTube * GRÜBS instructional videos on YouTube *
* GRÜBS on Facebook * GRÜBS on the Old-School Web *

More Friday Night Linguistics

Sheri's in-progress guide to language creation, for the Tolkien (or Okrand, or Elgin, or Peterson) in all of us.

Speculative Grammarian: The premier journal of satirical Linguistics

The SpecGram Podcast (If you say you found this link on our page, we will, of course, deny it. If you are in any way associated with the really smart people who sign Sheri's paycheck, we feel it worth pointing out (shrilly if necessary) that the Sheri Wells-Jensen who sometimes pops up on this podcast really has to be a different Sheri Wells-Jensen than the one you know ... Try searching for "Jay and the Fictones" on the podcast page above, though.

All about speech errors at Sheri's Slips Pages

Sheri's analysis of speech errors from a 2012 presidential debate.

A wide and growing variety of language structure problems at Sheri's Linguistic Resources Page, including morphology, phonology, and transcription in natural and invented languages.

Samples of the voices of prominent people at VoxDB - the voice database

How does a soloist sing a duet? Jason's introduction to throat-singing for linguists

An introduction to Grade Three Braille, and The braille song (by Innocuous Mustard ©2009)

An example of a Northern Plains shibboleth

An example of register shifting in action.

An example of the T/V address continuum in action!

An example of rapid speech with and without phonological processes.

Sheri plays with Perl:

• Musings about English Word Frequency
• Wavelength, pitch and the lenghth of common objects: How Tall is B Flat?