Hot Links on the Barbie

It's been about a year since The Search for the Missing Link, which itself uploaded a year after I started writing this column. And sure enough, I find that once again I have a "Miscellaneous" folder stuffed with good sites that haven't fit into an article yet. As before, I want to get these links out to readers while they're still valid, so I'm just going to dump them all into one article and have done with it for another year. Apparently, the folder-clearing column is destined to become one of the classic traditions of summer, alongside Canada Day, corn on the cob, and elderflower champagne.

I've been meaning to do a column on language and linguistics newsgroups since I signed on, but it seems like a more pressing topic is always shouldering it aside. To tide readers over in the meantime, I recommend checking out the Usenet's sci.lang newsgroup. Sci.lang is the global rendezvous of linguistics and language buffs in general. If you've got a question about any language, or language in general, chances are a sci.lang participant will be able to answer it or direct you to a specific group that can. In fact, if you query all sci.lang posts (just plug ~g (sci.lang) in the Deja News search bar and away you go) you inevitably find a few other interesting language newsgroups in the search results.

University College London's extensive Phonetics and Linguistics Department website is worthy of the august names on its roster. Typical of the fascinating articles available there are one on sex differences in language acquisition and another on English accent bigotry and the linguistic significance of the Teletubbies, among other subjects.

James Crawford's Language Policy Web Site is a rich source of information on linguistic politics in America, where multilingualism is still considered a radical and subversive idea. This site will eventually figure highly in an upcoming column about the myths and realities of bilingual societies. Until then, let me recommend Crawford's Canards page in particular.

How does a list of 83 terrific language-related links, spanning every conceivable subtopic of linguistics, grab you? Jasmin Harvey's page is language nerd Nirvana, and 17 kilobytes of sheer bliss. Plan on spending an evening there.

Reserve another evening for the 73 links on Dan Mosser's forthrightly-titled History of the English Language page. No language has enjoyed a more diverse or colourful history than English, and taken together, Dan's links cover just about all of it.