way̓ everyone,

How are you doing? Today's Fem Fri is all about language and language learning, and I am very excited to share it with you.

Let's start with language revitalisation. This is the incredible (and hard!) work of stopping a language from going extinct, and it's what LaRae Wiley of the Salish School of Spokane is doing with the Interior Salish languages. I first read about her school in Anne Helen Petersen's newsletter, and this week I interviewed LaRae about her work. The link is up next but first you may like to know the Salish for computer, which is is málx̌aʔs c̓asyqn, "fake head". Lots to enjoy in the echoes of artificial intelligence here, as well as the idea of a computer as something that you think with, rather than something that things for you. Plenty for the language fans here as well as the fans of community and grassroots organising:

In the wider community as well, there's been a ripple effect. When there are rallies around indigenous causes, there are people who will stand up and speak the language, introduce themselves in the language. They see that it's important to use what they have.

https://medium.com/@Vincennes/interview-with-larae-wiley-co-founder-of-the-salish-school-of-spokane-93f7fc092b9d

Oh and this morning's greeting, way̓, is the Salish for hullo! Don't worry I'm not going to turn the newsletter into Flickr. It seems relevant for today though.

From a language that's being carefully nurtured back to common usage to a language that flares up and then goes out of fashion almost immediately – here's Gretchen McCulloch, linguist of the internet! Her book arrived for me yesterday and I'm very excited to read it. I also love this quotation from her on language as a team sport:

I’ve never met someone who isn’t at least somewhat intrigued about why certain people say certain things or how kids can make sense of language when we’ve spent decades building computers that are only beginning to get there. I think people get put off by dull or judgemental explanations, but we all have the potential to be fascinated by language as a living, collaborative phenomenon.

https://grammarist.com/interviews/interview-with-gretchen-mcculloch/

For some McCulloch Classic, how about this Toast article which I remembered as the story of the singular "they" but which is much more the story of the English language in general:

[W[hat you really have is an extended period of several centuries in which many people were more-or-less proficient in both Norman French and Anglo Saxon, which in actual fact meant speaking the highly intermingled versions known as Anglo-Norman and Middle English. But words that belong to one gender in one language don’t necessarily belong to the same gender in the other. To use a modern example, the word for “bridge” in French, pont, is masculine, but the word for “bridge” in German, Brücke, is feminine. If you couple this with the fact that people had begun to stop pronouncing altogether the endings that indicate a word’s gender and case, you can see how these features became irrelevant for the language in general.

http://the-toast.net/2014/06/02/a-linguist-gendered-pronouns/

That's extremely relevant to our next link, which is about Old English! A language that did not die but that evolved into something else. Eliis Saxey has been learning Old English (which is, as you might know from the above link, QUITE HARD compared to New English) and they put together this interactive piece about the language, its poetry and the process of learning itself. Enjoy:

GDocs Link

Have a super day,

Alex xx.