Welcome to The Glottal Stop

Welcome, friends, to The Glottal Stop! It’s about time I unstop the old glottis and get out into the blogosphere, and I am excited!

As the title of my blog suggests, I’ll be talking a lot about language-related things here. I am an aspiring linguist, and I revel in picking apart language and all the interesting things people do with it. I’ll tell you more about myself as I go along, but for now here’s a vague introduction. I am a 20-something fellow with a social science BA and MA; I minored in linguistics and dabbled in sociolinguistics in grad school. I work doing history research for an institution in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is where I have lived most of my life. Sometimes I pine for my old linguistics classes, but I continue to read linguisticky books and take notes on interesting language things I see and hear in the world. I just may return to grad school to study linguistics, but until then, I look forward to using this blog as an outlet for my languagey musings.

I also look forward to being in touch with other linguisticky peeps out there and other folks with language blogs. Many of my postings will be full of questions or uncertainties, and I'm sure I will at some point write on some novel-seeming topic only to learn that someone wrote the exact same thing in, like, 1982! Any answers or guidance on things like this would be swell!

Oh, and about the name of my blog - I am not a phonologist, as one might guess by my choice of a voiceless glottal plosive for a title. I simply like the idea of a blog with a sense of place - in this case, a stop (as in a train or subway stop). So please make sure you pick up all your belongings from the train, and step onto the platform of The Glottal Stop!

Thanks for stopping by!