Language Log

I, for one, don't think it's the least bit funny.

Uyghur pronounciation

The way Uyghurs speak Mandarin is now a joke
For many it’s not funny, given the political heat around language choices

Economist (Nov 13th 2025)

The article begins with a viral joke, which Economist doesn't bother to explain (I will, though, at the end of the first paragraph):

Scroll through posts about Xinjiang on Chinese social media and an odd phrase soon appears: “Apple U”. It is a pun that mimics how some Uyghurs, the largest ethnic minority in Xinjiang, a region in China’s far north-west, pronounce “Hey, friend” in Mandarin. This meme is part of a growing trend online for using nang yan wen, or “naan Mandarin”—a way of writing and talking that wags have named after Xinjiang’s staple flatbread. Videos tagged with the term have amassed more than 1.7bn [VHM: !!!] views on Douyin, TikTok’s sister app in China, since the start of the year.

Fritz Newmeyer suggested that I post this.

The Linguistic Society of America will be offering a quasi-hybrid registration option for the 2026 Annual Meeting, to be held January 8-11, 2026.

For those of you who cannot travel to New Orleans in person, attending remotely through the quasi-hybrid registration option will give you virtual access to all plenary talks, plus access to four concurrent session rooms where a continuous schedule of sessions selected to reflect the full array of disciplinary subfields will be offered across all four days of the meeting.

As a virtual attendee, you will be able to see the speakers, ask questions, and hear questions from the live audience. This year’s virtual option is a pilot test for a cost-effective approach to hybrid meetings. If it is successful, we will expand the number of hybrid rooms in coming years. Please tell your international colleagues or anyone who is concerned about traveling for any reason about the virtual registration option and encourage them to join us!

You can filter the 2026 LSA Annual Meeting Program for the Track "Hybrid" and see the 45 sessions that virtual registrants will be able to attend, which includes all plenaries plus four continuously scheduled concurrent session rooms.

The links to access the sessions will be in the meeting app, which everyone who registers for the meeting will be able to download.

The genius logic of the NATO phonetic alphabet (title of the YouTube video)

In the comments on "Final prepositions again", AntC alerts us to Elle Cordova's latest, part III in the Grammarian Saga: "Grammarian vs Errorist showdown at the secret L'error".

"Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year Is…"

Each year, Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year and short-listed nominees capture pivotal moments in language and culture. These words serve as a linguistic time capsule, reflecting social trends and global events that defined the year. The Word of the Year isn’t just about popular usage; it reveals the stories we tell about ourselves and how we’ve changed over the year. And for these reasons, Dictionary.com’s 2025 Word of the Year is 67.

Macquarie Dictionary's WOTY shortlist also included six-seven; Sam Altman is apparently planning to name his next AI model GPT-6-7; and a news search will give you plenty of other relevant stories, from basketball scores  to "6-7 in the Bible".

Since Victor recently spent 1100 words on various people's "best approximations of how they think they are saying 'Canton'", "expressed in common spelling (not a phonetic alphabet)", and has resisted requests to provide audio, I thought I'd provide some examples of how a Canton resident pronounces the city's name. As I've explained many times, I don't think that IPA transcriptions are an effective way of representing how people actually talk, and this case will continue to support that view. Instead, a good place to start is a sample of audio clips along with graphical representations of waveforms, spectrograms and other kinds of acoustic analysis — and there are several possible directions to go from there.

From Dan Fagin, "We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies. It’s a Revelation.", NYT :

For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America […]

The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. […]

Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice.

[Preface:  The nitty-gritty questions about pronunciation discussed below are expressed in common spelling (not a phonetic alphabet) because the people who have written them down here are non-phoneticians.  What they have recorded are their best approximations of how they think they are saying "Canton".]

After reading "'Cant-idates'" (11/12/25) and "Can't even" (11/13/25), I submitted this comment:

As for "can't", there are quite a few "Cantons" in America. I'm from the one in Stark County Ohio, and some of the people there pronounce the name not as "Can-ton", but as "Cant-un".

This prompted Mark Liberman to ask:

Is that your way to representing [ˈkænʔn̻], i.e. the second syllable as a glottal-onset syllabic nasal?

In "Prepositionssss…" (9/2/2011), we quoted from the 1995 Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage,

Members of the never-end-a-sentence-with-a-preposition school are still with us and are not reluctant to make themselves known…

This follows M-W's note that

…recent commentators — at least since Fowler 1926 — are unanimous in their rejection of the notion that ending a sentence with a preposition is an error or an offense against propriety. Fowler terms the idea a "cherished superstition."

And that same 2011 post ends with a list of links discussing the superstition's origin and progress, going back to John Dryden's 1672 attempt to demonstrate that "he is a better poet and playwright than Jonson, Fletcher and Shakespeare were".

Today I observed this superstition rising again from the grave.

Macquarie Dictionary is soliciting votes for its 2025 Word of the Year choice — the shortlist is here.

Yesterday's Dinosaur Comics:

After coming face to face with the unavoidable debacles inherent in mechanical Chinese typewriters (not to mention many other pitfalls of the writing system), Language Log readers will not be surprised to learn that sinographs were not well suited for telegraphy:

In the comments on "Cant-idates" (11/12/2025), there was some back-and-forth about how much phonetic residue Americans generally leave of the word-final /t/ in sequences where can't is immediately followed by a vowel-initial word.

In defense of the answer "not much", I pulled three examples of "can't even" (literally) at random from the NPR podcast corpus I've used in previous posts (and in teaching corpus phonetics).