Martin Haspelmath

Scientists are respected for their rigorous thinking and consistency. Four years ago, the Max Planck Society issued a statement against an illegal war (www.mpg.de/18354975/sta...). For consistency, I would now like to see an updated statement, because we want to be widely respected.

What if the use of psychoactive substances, particularly alcohol consumption, had been a factor in the rise of socio-political complexity throughout human history?

Addressing this question is not easy, but it is worth trying 👇🏼

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Do Great Apes Use Iconic Gestures? Iconicity is increasingly recognized as a core property of language, raising the evolutionary question of whether great apes use iconic gestures. This article challenges current theories of ape gestu...

"Do Great Apes Use Iconic Gestures?"

Insightful, detailed discussion by @mperlman.bsky.social. Great to see a bunch of threads of evidence—including comparison to human children—in one place.

wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Summer Schools: CauLaGe Summer Program 2026 Focus: - Field methods & glossing sessions - Team-based work with native speakers of Abkhaz - Hands-on linguistic analysis (morphosyntax, phonology, semantics) Description: The CauLaGe Summer Program is an intensive linguistic expedition. Participants will engage in fieldwork, linguistic analysis, and workshops led by experts in the field. While it is focused on a Caucasian language, the program is open to anyone who wants to gain hands-on experience in language documentation and analys

Summer Schools: CauLaGe Summer Program 2026

​١٠٩٢ - اَلْحَرْبُ غَشُومٌ لِأَنَّهَا تَنَالُ مَنْ لَمْ يَكُنْ لَهُ فِيهَا جِنَايَةٌ ، وَرُبَّمَا سَلِمَ الْجَانِي

No. 1092

"War is a tyrant"

al-ḥarb ghashūm

According to al-Maydānī this is said because "war takes those who have done nothing wrong, while the true wrongdoer passes through it safely."

Behind every medical advance, social study or cultural insight, there is research.

#ICREAcall supports researchers with 20 permanent positions in Catalonia's research system: 

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Social & Behavioural Sciences 
📚 Humanities 
🔬 Life Sciences & Medicine

https://www.icrea.cat/icrea-call/

The #DGfS2026 was warmly received by mayor of Trier in a very special location tonight! The old Roman Thermen am Viehmarkt is an interesting and impressive place, and even better when mingling with linguists like @lingucat.bsky.social

Kava drinking and its role in cultural evolution Did the consumption of the mind-altering beverage kava facilitate the emergence of complex, hierarchical societies in Oceania?

new research on kava drinking and its role in cultural evolution by @vaclavhrncir.bsky.social, @scottclaessens.bsky.social and colleagues at @mpi-eva-leipzig.bsky.social and partner institutions!! well done!!
www.eva.mpg.de/press/news/a...

Front cover of my book, titled "Comparative musicology: Evolution, universals, and the science of the world's music" (published today by Oxford University Press)

1st of my 4-page essay published in Nature today titled "Music is not a universal language - but it can bring us together when words fail" Picture caption: "Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (centre) performed in Spanish at the half-time show of the 2026 American Football Super Bowl LX."

My book is now published! 🌏🎶🧪

You can download it for free at academic.oup.com/book/62353 - I’d be grateful if you do!
I also published an accessible summary with audio/video today in @nature.com: www.nature.com/articles/d41...
Try reading that first, then give the whole book a read if you like it!

Der CfP für die Vielfaltslinguistik in Kiel (5.-6. Juni) wurde bis zum 28. verlängert. Ich kann leider dieses Jahr nicht dabei sein 😞 Die Vielfaltslinguistik ist eine der cutesten Linguistikkonferenzen, wenn ihr gutes Feedback und Socializing wollt

www.isfas.uni-kiel.de/de/linguisti...

Journal of African Languages and Linguistics Starting 2025, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics will be transferred to Gold Open Access on a year-by-year basis. All articles will thus immediately appear under the Creative Commons licens...

Also, did you know that our wonderful Journal of African Languages and Linguistics is open access?
Via subscribe to open (S2O) anyone has access this year! @degruyterbrill.bsky.social

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of t...

Hey linguists -- chickens can distinguish bouba and kiki:

www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

📣 "Linguistic Knowledge and Language Use" (CUP, 2024) now in Paperback!

The book is Open Access & can be downloaded for free from CUP's website. But if you prefer physical copies, this might interest you as it is 4x cheaper than the Hardback format!

Here: doi.org/10.1017/9781...

Book cover reading: Sara Nović, Mother Tongue, the letters in both Roman capitals and ASL manual alphabet handshapes overlaid

I'm sure I'll have more coherent thoughts later but this is just to say that I'm a third of the way through an advance copy of @novicsara.bsky.social's new book and I already need to tell you to read it

This study was an amazing collaborative experience. I'm really really grateful to all the wonderful people who contributed and made this happen.

It's the closest I have ever come to finding something like a "universal" in human cognition.

Bernd Kortmann's adverbial-subordinator data from his 1997 book are now part of the CrossGram database: all 2063 adverbial subordinators from 52 European languages (crossgram.clld.org/contribution...) plus 32 core meanings treated as language parameters + maps (crossgram.clld.org/contribution...)

Evolution of differential object marking in Macedonian dialects benjamins.com/catalog/dia....

Das Altuigurische spielt für die Turkvölker dieselbe Rolle, wie Latein für die romanischen Sprachen. Ein aktuelles wissenschaftliches Wörterbuch, gibt es jedoch nicht. Das Akademieprojekt „Wörterbuch des Altuigurischen“ um Jens Peter Laut ändert das nun und trägt zum Erhalt dieser Kultur bei.

The Importance of Biological Theory - Biological Theory Biological Theory -

I am happy to share this article, entitled "The importance of Biological Theory". It is my inaugural editorial as the new Editor-in-Chief of @biologicaltheory.bsky.social . In these complex and challenging times, theory is more important now than ever. Enjoy!

doi.org/10.1007/s137...

Bonmann, Riesberg and Himmelmann (2025) on DOM in Western Malayo-Polynesian (www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/lingty-2024-0002/html) – the dataset is now available in CrossGram: crossgram.clld.org/contribution...

A wonderful new resource: "The Balkan Linguistic Area" (ed. by E. Adamou & A. Sobolev: www.degruyterbrill.com/.../10.../97...) – dozens of linguistic features with areal maps. Inspired by our APiCS database (balcanica.rs/index.php/jo...), and also available as an online database: abla.cnrs.fr

Book cover of the collection entitled "Gender-inclusive language: Findings from 14 languages and open research questions", edited by Falco Pfalzgraf.

💡Learn about the use of gender-inclusive language across 14 European languages in this new book edited by Falco Pfalzgraf: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111701608/html#overview

@lhekanaho.bsky.social @sofialampro.bsky.social @genderedform.bsky.social @michael-hornsby.bsky.social

Gašper Beguš on Why Language Doesn’t Make Humans Special Yascha Mounk and Gašper Beguš also talk about what whale communication and the recent progress on AI tell us about the human brain.

I had an awesome conversation with Yascha Mounk. We talked about how our perspective on language, animals, consciousness, AI is changing. Have a listen:

www.persuasion.community/p/gasper-begus

My indefinite-pronoun data from 1997 are now part of the CrossGram database – not the well-known "implicational maps" (as CrossGram does not store images), but all 140 indefinite pronoun markers from the core set of 40 languages (crossgram.clld.org/contribution...), plus all 433 glossed examples.

Edward Gibson's new book has arrived on my desk – 350 pages on cognitively-oriented dependency syntax from MIT Press! mitpress.mit.edu/978026255357... For me, this is an exciting development, as I came to love dependency syntax in the 1980s, through European authors such as Tesnière and Mel'čuk.

I’m going to halve my publication output. You should consider slow science, too If we don’t slow down, the research enterprise is going to crash, argues Adrian Barnett.

Great piece on prioritizing quality over quantity in scientific publication.

For those of us with labs, this necessarily involves shrinking our group size. After I got tenure I started to downsize my lab and have not regretted it one iota. More time for each student & more time to think & write.

New paper (open access): revistes.uab.cat/isogloss/art...

An atlas of endangered languages by Tim Brookes. This title is embedded in a white organic blob shape on a green color field on which light colored letter forms have been arranged

A belated bday present came today: @timbrookes.bsky.social’s wonderful book celebrating human ingenuity and diversity. It’s well designed and well produced, too. A thing to admire. And provocative to boot!

Peer Review is broken because a generation of Editors were trained that peer review is sacrosanct. Thus we have Editors who are clerks, sending and re-sending manuscripts to reviewers until they are happy. That's not the job. Be an Editor, not a clerk. Use your skill and judgement. Make decisions.

Look at my baby! ☺️

I reedited Modole folk stories published 110 years ago

Old journals and archives are full of story collections in underdocumented languages, often difficult or impossible to access for both linguists and the speaker community. Using legacy material is valuable and sustainable 🙌🏻