Ready to dig deeper?

If you’re ready to dig deeper, I’d suggest some of these hand-picked blogs and publications:

• Language Log
  • The linguistics blog. A great resource and fun to read.
• Linguistic Mystic
  • This blog is great! If you like mine, you’ll love Linguistics Mystic–it’s very similar in content and tone, but with a lot more content. Plus there’s a bunch of computational stuff there, which I don’t do as much with. Check it out!
• The Lousy Linguist
  • Lots of snark, a little more technical.
• Language Hat
  • This is a super well-established ling. blog with a huge archive for you to explore.
• Replicated Typo
  • Slightly more technical, deals mainly with language evolution.
• Linguischtick
  
  • Great blog with excellent reviews of “grammar” books and significantly more syntax than you’ll find here.
• Language Hippie
  • The eponymous Hippie is a fellow William and Mary alumnus currently at the University of Buffalo, and he will hook you up with the whole “prescriptive vs. descriptive” debate in the snarkiest possible way. It’s a fun blog to follow and he doesn’t assume a lot of background training.

• The Sounds of the World’s Languages— Peter Ladefoged & Ian Maddieson
  • This classic text is like a botanical garden of different sounds that you can wander through at your leisure. Plus, there’s a ton of pictures of teeth and tongues and the insides of people’s mouths doing all sorts of interesting things. Phonetically interesting things.
• Acoustic and Auditory Phonetics— Keith Johnson
  • So the title might be a little scary, but it really is a great introductory text, particularly if you have a music or computer background. And, hey, if not, you’re about to learn all about digital sounds.
• Praat
  • One of the best things about phonetics? Almost every single piece of software you need to do a legitimate, publishable experiment is both free and well-supported. Praat will let you look at spectrograms (more on those in a future post), of course, but also do fun things like let you speed up and slow down noises without changing the pitch, “isolate” sounds in the speech stream and intentionally change the pitch of utterances.
• A Course in Phonetics – Peter Ladefoged
  • At this point, you’re probably all like, who’s this Ladefoged guy? Only the former king of phonetics, that’s who. (Not an actual title, but if it were, Ladefoged would have held it.) He consulted on the set of My Fair Lady. And this is the extremely readable introductory text he wrote. You should read it.
• The Sound Pattern of English– Noam Chomsky
  • So… I’m a little conflicted on this one. It’s a slog to read, it’s written for academics and therefore assumes all the background information and, frankly, there’s a lot of stuff in there that a lot of phoneticians and phoneticists working today would disagree with. So why is it up here? For better or worse, it’s pretty much the text that gave rise to modern phonology, and if nothing else, you should know it exists.