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"Extravagance" in language change has made it into the New York Times, and John McWhorter even includes a link to my 1999 article on the irreversibility of grammaticalization (www.nytimes.com/.../gen-z-sp...). The basic idea ("Talk in such a way that you are noticed") comes from Keller's 1994 book.

Happy birthday!

Maybe I have misunderstood the role of functional heads in mainstream generative syntax, but if they are intended as hypotheses, or together as a theory, then this theory should be empirically verifiable – as I discuss in this forthcoming paper: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010....

ufal.mff.cuni.cz/grants/cross...

In this interview, Verkerk and Gray answer some of my questions about their amazing 2026 paper, in which they show that many of the Greenbergian universals are robustly supported by the Grambank data. Thanks to Russell and Annemarie! dlc.hypotheses.org/4383

An interview with Annemarie Verkerk and Russell Gray on “Enduring constraints on grammar” (2026)In the following interview, Annemarie Verkerk and Russell Gray answer Martin Haspelmath's questions about their paper "Enduring constraints on grammar revealed by Bayesian spatiophylogenetic analyses"...dlc.hypotheses.org

In September 2024, Gilles Authier organized a great workshop on the diachrony of flagging at the Collège de France in Paris. My contribution is now available on Lingbuzz: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010...

"Reconciling the Saussure brothers" – plenary talk at IMM 22 in Budapest (nytud.hu/esemeny/22nd...). The presentation is here: zenodo.org/records/2076...

"CLDF Meta" (meta.clld.org) links to data from over 800 CLDF datasets that have been released on Zenodo (e.g. WALS, APiCS and Grambank). There are links to data on over 9000 languoids, e.g. 98 entries on Ambulas (to take a random language). Great work by my colleague Johannes Englisch!

Thanks to Ryan Nefdt for inviting me to contribute to this work on "philosophy of linguistics"! global.oup.com/academic/pro... In this paper, I note that in generative as well as in other work, most of the progress seems to have been made by adding breadth, not depth: ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008...

This is a clear tendency: While the 1990s saw the peak of generative comparative syntax (or g-syntax), the last two decades have been dominated by analyses of particular phenomena in individual languages (p-syntax) – with limited repercussions on general theories. sites.google.com/view/salzbur...

Maybe one of the biggest obstacles for progress in science comes from entrenched stereotypes? In linguistics, we have, for example, (1) the word stereotype, (2) the grammar/dictionary stereotype, (3) the building-block stereotype, and (4) the speaker directionality stereotype dlc.hypotheses.org/4343

Four stereotypes that have guided morphosyntactic thinkingThinking about language structures is made difficult not only by their incredible complexity, but also by entrenched ways of thinking about grammatical and lexical patterns. Linguists do not investiga...dlc.hypotheses.org

I'm not sure if I like this militaristic design, but the OLH's cause is a just one, I think. There's no reason why academic publishing should work like commercial publishing. www.openlibhums.org/news/932/

Languagehat.com is an interesting blog with much discussion worth looking at. They recently discussed my "Grammaticon", and Eddyshaw's question is a good one: languagehat.com/the-grammati... The answer is that comparative-concept definitions must be sharp, but descriptive categories are different.

Diana Forker talks about linguistic diversity in the Caucasus www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3Qo...

Podcast interview with Anna Wierzbicka (*1938), where she talks about her view of semantics, and how it all began: In Moscow in 1964, where she met Igor Mel'čuk and Yuri Apresjan. hiphilangsci.net/2026/04/15/p...

A new version (2.0) of Frank Seifart's Affix Borrowing database, now co-authored with Francesco Gardani: afbo.info

Version 1.0 of the Grammaticon is now online! This has been in the making for over eight years. Quite a few of the entries are still preliminary, but I hope to expand and improve it over the coming months and years. Comments are welcome! An intro text is here: dlc.hypotheses.org/4316

List of accepted papers at ETT (Emerging Topics in Typology), Mainz, July 2026: ett-2026.sciencesconf.org/resource/pag...

William Croft on comparative concepts: www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...

Marconi’s lectures on typology and diachrony - YouTubewww.youtube.com

How "Cognitive Linguistics" started as an organized enterprise: dlc.hypotheses.org/4252

Witnessing the birth of “Cognitive Linguistics” 37 years agoIn early April 1989, the international “Cognitive Linguistics” movement was born. Probably not everyone knows that it has a precise birthday, so let me recount the event here from my own perspective –...dlc.hypotheses.org