wordwatching

At the crossroads of language and culture

Dedicated to the study of language variation and change in American English, with special regard to the West, pop lyrics, and social media.

Like all languages, English is ever-changing, sometimes in significant and obvious ways, and at other times in much more subtle ways. This blog will focus on some of the changes that English has undergone as well as some that are currently underway, noting variation in today's use of the language that might also result in future change. To illustrate, I will draw from several corpora (large collections of text) that are important to my everyday work. These include the Linguistic Atlas of the Western States, the Brown and Frown corpora, the Enron email corpus, Twitter, and a collection of lyrics from American pop music that I am currently compiling. I will also report on language use in literature and other media. I'm looking forward to sharing my findings with you through prose, maps, charts, and audio files.