Linguistics professor 👨🏻🎓 @KonstanzLing 🗣📜. Gamer 🎲🎮. Open Access 🆓 stan. Train 🚂 fan. Pirate 🏴☠️. Ace 🖤🐘🤍💜. LGBTQ+ 🏳️🌈 ally. He/him 🙋🏻♂️.
Konstanz, Germany
Joined February 2011
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My review of Katerina Somers's (2024) "How to create an early German scriptus" is now out ahead of print in Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. I'm particularly happy that this is an open-access review of an open-access book. doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2025-00…
Happy to be in sunny Padova to learn more about historical syntax and syntactic change at #DiGS27.
In the past I've live-tweeted these conferences here. I won't be doing that this time for various reasons. Feel free to imagine the exciting things that are being said. #DiGS27
The Companion to Diachronic and Historical Linguistics is now out, and I have a co-authored chapter in it, on grammar competition and variational learning. I was particularly pleased to be able to co-author with Joel Wallenberg and Caroline Heycock ... (1/)
This was an interesting one to write, as the grammar competition "worldview" it involves is one that I thought was misguided until about 2014–16. The main bit I'm responsible for is the section defending the approach against ... (3/)
... critiques of the kind that people like me had levelled against it in earlier work. Preprint here: walkden.space/Wallenberg_Kau… in case there's still anyone interested in historical linguistics on this site! (4/4)
George Wⓐlkden retweeted
I was explaining at dinner that linguists disagree radically about almost everything and one person said so what do they actually agree about? Just that languages exist? And I was like: Well you might want to sit down for this.
I only come back here every now and then, but whenever I do it reminds me that even at its best Twitter was a theatre for the most contentless parts of the culture wars.
This week it seems to be "Wealthy research funders have ulterior motives, shock horror".
George Wⓐlkden retweeted
We publish high-quality peer-reviewed open access books in linguistics. Given our commitment to quality, Twitter is no longer the right place for us. Starting 2026, we will no longer post on Twitter. Find us on Bluesky and Mastodon.
The first ever squib in JHS!
(We've had the squib option since our founding in 2011.)
This Post is from an account that no longer exists. Learn more
I've got a radical new idea for a novel. It's a detective novel about a murder but - and get this - the detective isn't a perfect person! He has problems in his personal life!
State of the former birdsite these days. When someone I don't know tweets something I don't care about, I get a notification. When someone tags me directly in a tweet about my research and that tweet gets 400+ likes, I don't get a notification.
George Wⓐlkden retweeted
Beowulf begins with the word "Hwæt" ("What"). It's one of the most iconic openings to any poem, its conjectured role as a 'call to attention' is a well-known fun fact shared by fans of ancient literature and English history...
It's also (in my opinion) completely wrong.
For a while now, scholars have been drawing doubts over this 200-year-old interpretation, and more recent scholarship has suggested more cautious translations than "LO!", opting more for something like "truly," or "well,".
I side with @gwalkden , however, who in 2013 demonstrates quite convincingly that even a comma after <Hwæt> is inappropriate. The word is probably not an interjection at all (at least not in the context of Beowulf line 1a)!
His article is here: walkden.space/Walkden_2013_h…
Colleagues of mine in the SILPAC project are looking for English-speaking children and adults to take part in a study! The study is quick and can be done via Zoom; see details below.
ALT Online study looking for participants. Contact [email protected] for details.
The first single-authored paper by a STARFISH doctoral student is out now, and it's a good one! doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2024-00…
In it, Gemma McCarley investigates rates of null subjects in a historical corpus of Latin American Spanish. (1/)
Importantly, this isn't found by stipulating that some texts or text-types are more oral than others, but by quantifying features known to be more typical of the oral modality ... (3/4)