It’s well known that some languages have multiple national standards, to the point where you can take courses in either Brazilian or European Portuguese, for example. Most language instruction services seem to choose one variety per language: when I studied Portuguese at the University of Paris X-Nanterre it was the European variety, but the online service Duolingo only offers the Brazilian one.

A few years ago I wrote about incorporating sign linguistics when I taught Introduction to Linguistics at Saint John’s University. The other course I taught most often was Introduction to Phonology. This course was required for our majors in Speech Pathology and Audiology, and they often filled up the class.

I’ve got great news! I have now released LanguageLab, my free, open-source software for learning languages and music, to the public on GitHub. I wish I could tell you I’ve got a public site up that you can all use for free. Unfortunately, the features that would make LanguageLab easy for multiple users to share one server are later in the roadmap. There are a few other issues that also stand in the way of a massive public service.

Viewers of the Crown may have noticed a brief scene where Prince Charles practices Welsh by sitting in a glass cubicle wearing a headset.  Some viewers may recognize that as a language lab. Some may have even used language labs themselves. The core of the language lab technique is language drills, which are based on the bedrock of all skills training: mimicry, feedback and repetition.

Language change has been the focus of my research for over twenty years now, so when I taught second semester linguistics at Saint John’s University, I was very much looking forward to teaching a unit focused on change.  I had been working to replace constructed examples with real data, so I took a tip from my natural language processing colleague Dr. Wei Xu and turned to SparkNotes.

Language is not just spoken and written, and even though I’ve been working mostly on spoken languages for the past fifteen years, my understanding of language has been tremendously deepened by my study of sign languages. At the beginning of the semester I always asked my students what languages they had studied and what aspects of language they wanted to know more about, and they were always very interested in sign language.

In September I wrote about how I used accent tag videos to teach phonetic transcription in my online linguistics classes. Since I could not be there in person, the videos provided a stable reference that we could all refer to from our computers around the country.

When I was teaching introductory linguistics, I had a problem with the phonetic transcription exercises in the textbooks I was using: they asked students to transcribe “the pronunciation” of individual words – implying that there is a single correct pronunciation with a single correct transcription.

Last January I wrote that the purpose of phonetic transcription is to talk about differences in pronunciation. Last December I introduced accent tags, a fascinating genre of self-produced YouTube videos of crowdsourced dialectology and a great source of data about language variation. I put these together when I was teaching a unit on language variation for the second-semester Survey of Linguistics course at Saint John’s University.

In January I wrote that I believe online learning is possible, but I have doubts about whether online courses are an adequate substitute for in-person college classes, let alone an improvement. One of those doubts concerns trust and intellectual honesty. Any course is an exchange. The students pay money to the college, the instructor gets a cut, and the students get something of value in return. What that something is can be disputed.