Amalia Skilton
amaliaskilton.bsky.social
Amalia Skilton
@amaliaskilton.bsky.social
Chancellor’s Fellow (asst prof) in Linguistics @ Edinburgh 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 | blogs.ed.ac.uk/amaliaskilton | Indigenous languages of the Americas, language in interaction, psycholinguistics | 🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈 she/her
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The holidays came early 🎉:*Bridging Child Language Research to Practice for #Indigenous #Language #Revitalization* is officially out!

Makes great reading for your spring semester courses 🐦🐦, especially because it’s free to read forever with LD&C/U Hawai’i Press.
SP30: Bridging Child Language Research to Practice for Indigenous Language Revitalization - LD&C
Amalia Skilton, Ryan E. Henke, Melvatha R. Chee
nflrc.hawaii.edu
Was just at a conference party hosted by a Texas public university. They had an open bar and in general, did not seem to be hurting for money. Only people who aren’t.

Does Abbott want UT/A&M to be comm colleges or moneyed conservative think tanks? I suspect the 2nd 🧪
One reasonable way to look at this is that Abbott is working to make Texas universities regional institutions rather than world-class ones. He does not want them competing for the most talented researchers.
“State government must lead by example and ensure that employment opportunities — particularly those funded with taxpayer dollars — are filled by Texans first" said Abbott.
January 28, 2026 at 12:19 AM
I could name 1,000 other improvements to LaTeX more useful to me than embedding a synthetic text generator into a TeX editor.

Then improvement 1,001 would be that we stop using LaTeX because we have a half decent technical word processor for 🐦🐦. Sorry not sorry!!
“The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center inside software that scientists use to write up their work in much the same way that chatbots are now embedded into popular programming editors.

It’s vibe coding, but for science.”
OpenAI’s latest product lets you vibe code science
Prism is a ChatGPT-powered text editor that automates much of the work involved in writing scientific papers.
www.technologyreview.com
January 28, 2026 at 12:07 AM
PBS KIDS bringing the multimodal analysis and also a great framing. 10/10 #lingcomm 🐦🐦
January 15, 2026 at 12:23 AM
Every old imperialism is new again this year
January 7, 2026 at 2:54 AM
Reposted by Amalia Skilton
In celebration of Mamdani's first day in office, the map from our 2016 NYC atlas celebrating Queens as the most linguistically diverse place on earth. (800 languages spoken in NYC, according to NY's Endangered Language Institute, which collaborated with us on this map.
January 3, 2026 at 3:21 AM
Reposted by Amalia Skilton
oh shit tomorrow is circle back day already
January 4, 2026 at 4:12 PM
Passing a swim test. I failed so many swim classes 🏊‍♀️🚫
How else can professors prove "merit" besides SAT scores? Wrong answers only. I'll go first: ability to do sixth-grade geometry homework (two professors in my house fail)
January 3, 2026 at 5:09 AM
Reposted by Amalia Skilton
Language champions from 18 countries will be joining the 2026 Ready to Revitalize program - and we have just TEN DAYS left to raise funds for their grassroots #languagerevitalization projects!

🌱 Will you support the revitalization of Indigenous and endangered languages around the world?
Raise to Revitalize
Support Global Indigenous Language Revitalization
givebutter.com
December 22, 2025 at 11:23 PM
“A Head Start program located on a Native American reservation was told to remove sections from its application that are necessary for the program to prioritize services for tribal members and their descendants – something allowed by federal law.”
Head Start centers told to avoid 'disability,' 'women' and more in funding requests
New court documents reveal a list of nearly 200 words or phrases the Trump administration told Head Start programs it does not want to see in their funding requests.
www.npr.org
December 16, 2025 at 1:01 AM
The holidays came early 🎉:*Bridging Child Language Research to Practice for #Indigenous #Language #Revitalization* is officially out!

Makes great reading for your spring semester courses 🐦🐦, especially because it’s free to read forever with LD&C/U Hawai’i Press.
SP30: Bridging Child Language Research to Practice for Indigenous Language Revitalization - LD&C
Amalia Skilton, Ryan E. Henke, Melvatha R. Chee
nflrc.hawaii.edu
December 10, 2025 at 9:57 PM
Bottle feeding is only unsafe if you lack access to clean water or a way to clean the bottles.

That does happen in the world (and I have seen it) but not often in America. Unless RFK is going to make untreated water great again next?
RFK Jr: "All of the ingenuity of corporate America has not produced an infant formula that is superior in nutrition and all the qualities that we want to the infant formula that God made, which is the infant formula in a mother's breast."
December 8, 2025 at 11:54 PM
5 year postdoc position here at Edinburgh with my colleague Bert Remijsen 🐦🐦
Postdoctoral Researcher
The Linguistics & English Language Department in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences are seeking a full time, fixed term Postdoctoral Researcher. This post is available from 1st...
elxw.fa.em3.oraclecloud.com
December 5, 2025 at 5:47 PM
Love that small government supporting women by telling the Girl Guides (Girl Scouts) they can’t let in trans girls. Me and all the tomboy little girls who will now be interrogated about their haircuts feel very supported
December 2, 2025 at 8:19 PM
Amazonia edition:

Capybara
Dolphin
Silky anteater
Squirrel monkey
Chameleon
Introduce yourself with 5 animals you've seen in the wild:

Caribou
Ravens
Seals
Kea
Turkeys
Introduce yourself with 5 animals you've seen in the wild:

Moose
Humpback whales
Giraffes
African Elephants
West African or Nile monitor lizard
November 28, 2025 at 11:25 PM
Reposted by Amalia Skilton
Happy World Linguistics Day from Edinburgh, UK, specifically from the University of Edinburgh's excellent and lovely linguistics department!
Happy World Linguistics Day from Montreal, Canada!

(I wonder how many different places we can get world linguistics day wishes from this year!)
Happy World Linguistics Day from Melbourne, Australia!
November 26, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Different data set but idea fundamentally very similar to Purnell et al 1999 (Baugh’s housing market phone calls study).
We have a new paper in Science Advances proposing a simple test for bias:

Is the same person treated differently when their race is perceived differently?

Specifically, we study: is the same driver likelier to be searched by police when they are perceived as Hispanic rather than white?

1/
November 24, 2025 at 11:23 PM
Most fun field trip ever. I wonder if they drew straws for who got to be pregnant vs. be Batman.
Science will often take you to unexpected and delightful places. In this study, researchers hypothesized that riders in a crowded subway car would be more likely to offer their seat to a pregnant person if there were someone in the subway car dressed as Batman 🧪🦇

www.nature.com/articles/s44...
November 23, 2025 at 12:41 AM
Shots fired in the #rstats vs python wars
Hadley Wickham made a GenZ version of dplyr 😂

hadley.github.io/genzplyr/
November 21, 2025 at 7:54 PM
Out next month! So excited for the whole world in 🐦🐦 and language #revitalization to read what our authors have to share!
October 30, 2025 at 6:40 PM
WE - people writing today - get to define by our citations what will be considered the canon in the future.

When I think something deserves to be seen as canonical, then I cite it and assign it with wild abandon.

When I think the current canon doesn’t deserve that status, I pay it no mind.
Feels like some fields are big on citing only by precedence, but don't realize there's another side which is NOT citing the work that is outdated, misleading, had poor methods in the first place, or otherwise made choices an author considers poorly done. I exercise this judgment constantly
October 29, 2025 at 7:46 PM
Kinship terms finally getting the attention they deserve #AnthroSky
i cannot believe that “mamdani calls a close adult relative an ‘aunt’ even if they are not literally their parent’s sister” is what counts as a “scandal” these days
October 28, 2025 at 9:40 PM
Tired: Making low income people manually file taxes before they receive benefits via the tax code (USA)

Wired: Automatic filing to receive benefits via tax code (Canadian proposal)

Inspired: Delivering cash benefits as cash and not via the tax code
Canada doing automatic filing to ensure people get benefits distributed via the tax code while the US abandoned Direct File
Automatic tax filing for low income, permanent school food program coming in budget: PM Mark Carney #Canada

PM Carney said the federal govt is renewing the “Canada Strong Pass” which lowers the cost for families to visit museums, historic sites, parks & travel.

www.ctvnews.ca/politics/art...
October 10, 2025 at 6:28 PM
There is a name for people who write in short blocks. Authors!

If you write in long sessions only, you will end up either unpublished, or disappointed

For an overview of the psych research on this I love Paul Silvia’s /How to Write a Lot/
October 7, 2025 at 7:30 PM
I have seen a couple budgets of alternative colleges/similar programs that are completely free to every student. Even they do not manage to spend $134k/student/year.

How is this even possible? Into the budget linked @ this article to see…
You'll be shocked to learn New College of Florida is on the brink of implosion just a couple of years after DeSantis engineered an extreme right-wing takeover

Fun fact: NCF's new overlords spend $134K per student (!!...the average at other FL publics is $10K) www.insidehighered.com/news/governa...
Spending Soars, Rankings Fall at New College of Florida
Student outcomes and rankings are slipping at the liberal arts college while spending is up. Critics believe the college is at risk of implosion, and some are calling for privatization.
www.insidehighered.com
October 2, 2025 at 9:38 PM
Reposted by Amalia Skilton
RIP Jane Goodall — she forever transformed what it means to do fieldwork.
www.theguardian.com/science/2025...
Jane Goodall, world-renowned primatologist, dies aged 91
Jane Goodall Institute says ‘tireless advocate’ for natural world died in California during US speaking tour
www.theguardian.com
October 1, 2025 at 6:42 PM