Language Log

Language Log is a collaborative language blog maintained by Mark Liberman, a phonetician at the University of Pennsylvania.

Most of the posts focus on language use in the media and in popular culture. Text available through Google Search frequently serves as a corpus to test hypotheses about language. Other popular topics include the descriptivism/prescriptivism debate, and linguistics-related news items. The site has occasionally held contests in which visitors attempt to identify an obscure language.

As of 2012 Denham and Lobeck characterized Language Log as "one of the most popular language sites on the Internet".As of June 2011 it received an average of almost 21,000 visits per day. In May 2006 Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum published a compilation of some of their blog posts in book form under the title Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log.

Specialties

Language Log was started on July 28, 2003, by Liberman and Pullum, a linguist then at the University of California, Santa Cruz (Pullum has since moved to the University of Edinburgh). One early post about a woman who wrote egg corns instead of acorns led to the coinage of the word eggcorn to refer to a type of sporadic or idiosyncratic re-analysis. Another post about commonly-recycled phrases in newspaper articles, e.g. "If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z", resulted in the coinage of the word snowclone. Both phenomena are common topics at the blog, as is linguification, or the use of metaphors that turn factual observations into claims about language in general (many of which are false).