that munanga linguist

The high rate of language loss and endangerment across the world is becoming more widely known. In the sociolinguistics course I am teaching, we discuss this as a follow on from topics such as multilingualism and looking at what happens when languages come into contact with each other. Sometimes you get stable multilingual societies. Sometimes pidgins and creoles arise. Sometimes you see code-switching phenomena. And sometimes, languages become weaker, become threatened, endangered and may cease to be spoken and known at all. (None of these are mutually exclusive, by the way). When we consider language loss, we talk about why we should care (and whether we should care it all). When I asked students to think of reasons to care, the more immediate responses seem to relate to knowledge systems: that each language represents something valuable to humanity in terms of knowledge systems encoded in that language, and that that knowledge is of great value to the speech community too.  ...

Spoonerisms are awesome linguistic anomalies. It's a speech error you make when you accidentally swap two sounds around in words that are next to or near each other and end up saying words that make zero sense (or maybe the sound-swap results in words that actually still make sense but far from the intended meaning). Some examples? When I searched online for examples of spoonerisms, they were mostly examples where the sound-swap resulted in a sentence that still made sense but resulted in an unintended meaning or examples that were curated artificially . Not much looked like spoonerisms that were genuine speech errors. We'd all be familiar with spoonerisms and can probably remember hearing them or recall one slipping out of our own mouths. But, in my experience at least, they're rare. Maybe once I year I'd remember hearing one... maybe every couple of years I'd remember doing one accidentally? Would it be about the same for you? The apparent rarity of genuine...