Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)
sites.google.com/view/adamcschembri/home
Australian professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham, UK
Hearing person interested in sign languages & signing communities
🏳️🌈🇦🇺🇲🇹🇪🇺
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Just published "Negation in the worlds languages" (3 vols) edited by Matti Miestamo & Ljuba Veselinova with Héloïse Calame. #rcg #openaccess langsci-press.org/catalog/book...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Almost as good as my rule of thumb: has anyone you know ever written anything in it you want to cite? If not, then it’s not the Journal for you.
- 🚨Scientists 🚨: Tired of come-ons from journals & conferences that may or may not be predatory? A new tool called Aletheia-Probe could help. 🧪 By @silverjacket.bsky.social @nature.com www.nature.com/articles/d41...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)calling L1 speakers of British English, please help out my student Emilia on her dissertation study! 🐦🐦 it's a short (<20 min) and fun one on voice recognition, please share! lancasteruni.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Our paper (w/ @bodowinter.bsky.social and @mperlman.bsky.social) is finally out, officially 🥳. In it, we set ourselves the lofty goal of defining iconicity, focusing on its subjectivity, context-dependence, and gradability. Let us know if you agree with our definition? 🤔 doi.org/10.1093/oxfo...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Four years(!) after the chapter was originally written, the official publication is now live (pre-print has been out for some time though): doi.org/10.1093/oxfo... How can plurality be expressed with iconic forms across different modalities of human languaging? #linguistics
- 'I have more impact outside of university' Google Translate appears to do a reasonable job translating this article from Dutch into English, so, if you don't read Dutch, you can still check out this interview with my friend and former academic Onno: www.nemokennislink.nl/publicaties/...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)IGALA list: Deborah Cameron, one of the greatest feminist linguists ever, has passed away. Everybody interested in the relationship of #language and #gender, please go and read her witty and myth-busting blog: https:// debuk.wordpress.com/ . #linguistics #GenderLinguistics
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Day 1 of #BooksAreMyJam! Blueberry Maple jam, with Linguaphile: A life of language love by Julie Sedivy. A classic Canadian flavour duo + this book about @juliesedivy.bsky.social's relationship with language through her childhood in Montreal, later research as a linguist, and more
- I've finally managed to get my hands on a Bonne Maman #jamvent calendar this year! I also have...quite a lot of linguistically interesting books I've been meaning to post about lately So what if I did like...a jam x books challenge? A book from my shelves loosely inspired by that day's jam?
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)This is awesome! I have been curating a list of #linguistics journals, with information on their publishing model (and also on whether they admit submissions created by LaTeX, a high-quality, professional Open Source way to produce scientific documents). uni-duesseldorf.sciebo.de/s/BvRY0u3rDY...
- In the past decade or two, predatory publishers have built a parallel universe of publication opportunities preying on the least privileged & most vulnerable of our colleagues I got my hands on what passes for peer review at one such journal ideophone.org/on-plagiaris...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)In the past decade or two, predatory publishers have built a parallel universe of publication opportunities preying on the least privileged & most vulnerable of our colleagues I got my hands on what passes for peer review at one such journal ideophone.org/on-plagiaris...
- I've very much noticed this too so it's great to have some data-based infographics to back this up!
- About 6 months ago, I got so tired of getting mostly AI(-adjacent) papers in my Google Scholar Alerts for "sign language", so I added a new filter excluding a few keywords to get more relevant #linguistics papers. Now I checked the difference between the two alerts, and there's an obvious pattern.
- Are you on LinkedIn? Would love to share this infographic there.
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)I appreciate that some of you are outraged about the White House absurdity of keeping ASL interpreters out of press briefings — but please don’t call us “hearing-impaired.” It’s a slur. Nothing wrong with using “deaf.” Saves you extra space too.
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)In their article "Signs of Deaf Ni-Vanuatu", Jacqueline Iseli and Rachel McKee describe the sociolinguistic context of deaf people in Vanuatu who have limited opportunities to socialise together, and document signs used by 19 deaf adults across the country nzlingsoc.org/journal_arti...
- First paper of 2026 with Rhys Sandow, @jwgrieve.bsky.social, and Rose Stamp! www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
- The University of Birmingham is hiring through its 125th Anniversary Fellowships and Chairs scheme! www.birmingham.ac.uk/jobs/125th-a...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)The Linguistic Justice Foundation is looking for 60 people to make a $5 monthly donation to help support our work pursuing linguistic justice for everyone. Please donate if you can, shar eif you can't. www.zeffy.com/en-US/donati...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Happy to share the first version of my textbook "Quantitative Data Analysis for Linguists in R". stefanocoretta.github.io/qdal/ Comments and suggestions welcome! (on the GitHub repo: github.com/stefanocoret...) The textbook takes you from 0 to basic stat modelling with Bayesian regression.
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Innovations in Linguistics Education is a new Diamond Open Access journal, is dedicated to the teaching of linguistics. journals.ed.ac.uk/innovations I'm really excited to see a new journal in this space!
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)"[L]inguistics is uniquely positioned to teach us both about what all humans share and what makes cultures and individuals distinct" @adamcschembri.bsky.social expressed it so nicely, read more here: www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2025/ho...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)I'm making plans to teach a sociolinguistics class next year at the LOT Summer School in Groningen -- pls let me know about any cool new stuff I should include! #linguistics
- Happy World #Linguistics Day! www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/2025/ho...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Happy World Linguistics Day! ⭐🎉🎊
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)🚨NEW PUBLICATION ALERT!🚨 The 'Design Features' of Language Revisited (w/ @mperlman.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social Koen de Reus & @limorraviv.bsky.social) Feature Review out now in #OpenAccess in @cp-trendscognsci.bsky.social! #language #linguistics Paper: doi.org/10.1016/j.ti...
- My L1 is Australian English. I have basic conversational French. I can sign comfortably in Auslan and British Sign Language (closely related varieties) on a range of topics. I have some conversational American Sign Language and I can give basic presentations on my research in International Sign.
- How many languages do you actually speak? I'll go first. Me: 4 #language #languages #languagelearning #linguistics #polyglot #writing #writingcommunity
- $2400 a year to subscribe to Ethnologue. Scandalous.
- Accent perception is wild. In the same evening, I meet two new people, both native speakers of British English and from Birmingham (UK): one asks me if I was born and raised in the city, while the other asked which part of Australia I was from!
- I speak with a clearly Australian English accent by the way, although not a particularly broad one.
- I remember being at an HIV workshop years ago where there was discussion about replacing the term 'promiscuous' with 'popular and affectionate'. Why didn't this make it into 'Word of the Year'?🤣
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Happy International Day of LGBTQIA+ People In STEM! How are you celebrating it? #LGBTQSTEMDay #PrideInSTEM
- It’s National #Linguistics Day next week: what are you doing to celebrate it?
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)I’m excited to see Ofqual officially set out the rules for the brand new GCSE in British Sign Language. It’s inspiring to see a qualification that recognises the linguistic, cultural, & social importance of BSL finally taking shape. 🔗 tinyurl.com/5y33p6re 🧵👇 #langsky #linguistics #GCSE #BSL
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)We're excited to re-launch the journal "Innovations in Linguistics Education", a forum for evidence-based research in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) in linguistics! We open for submissions in January 2026. journals.ed.ac.uk/innovations/
- So looking forward to teaching an introductory course on sign language linguistics to MA and PhD students in linguistics at the LOT Summer School at the University of Groningen 15-19 June 2026! Now to decide what to include, and what to exclude, in just 10 hours of classes. . .🤔
- AI sign language projects are definitely unintentional language planning projects.
- 🔔new paper alert🔔 I argue that language technologies are usefully understood as a type of language management (i.e., ways of changing how people use and think about language) -- especially in the workplace -- connecting critical work on AI with language policy www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
- I guess ADHD means completely forgetting that you got invited to teach on a summer school in 2026 and then getting a delightful surprise when you get an email reminding you of it. 😂
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)This 👇🏻 sometimes I talk to PhDs whose whole project needed as much data processing as I did for just one subsection
- PhD students - please don't compare yourselves to other PhD students. Some topics really are more challenging than others! If, for example, you're working on an under-described and under-documented language, never compare your work with people working on English. It's almost not the same discipline!
- PhD students - please don't compare yourselves to other PhD students. Some topics really are more challenging than others! If, for example, you're working on an under-described and under-documented language, never compare your work with people working on English. It's almost not the same discipline!
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Let's talk about why "just spell it how it sounds" is actually not straightforward, especially for a large language like English. The big questions are: "How it sounds" when spoken*by whom*? And who gets to choose? #linguistics
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Pleased to announce that I passed my PhD viva today!
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)early career scholar and their first publication
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)At this year's @lingcomm.bsky.social conference, we learned that the UK has been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th, and everyone immediately went, hey, can't we make that World Linguistics Day? Well, now it's only 20 days away, so time to get your celebration plans in order!
- Abstracts with colleagues submitted for Evolang and ICLaVE 2026 conferences. Looking forward to both (haven't been to an ICLaVE for years!)
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Ten more days to check out The Barbican's Voiced: The Festival for #EndangeredLanguages 🗣💬 #langsky www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/202...
- Congratulations to my @unibirmingham.bsky.social colleague @heidiproctor.bsky.social who passed her PhD viva at @dcal-ucl.bsky.social and is now Dr Heidi Proctor! Heidi's PhD is on noun phrases in British Sign Language.
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)France’s Sorbonne University about to leave Times Higher Education (THE) Rankings: "These rankings are...black boxes that operate in a closed system” sciencebusiness.net/news/univers...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)New paper with @ryanlepic.bsky.social: doi.org/10.1515/ling.... Our previous research showed that ✨️inherently plural meanings✨️ favor two-handed signs across sign languages, now we see that hearing non-signers also produce more two-handed forms when asked to gesture plural meanings! 👐🏼 #linguistics
- Should #LingComm accounts with lots of followers on social media be called 'lingfluencers'? 😂
- Congratulations Nick Evans: the first Australian linguist to get this award, I believe. www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/prizes-medal...
- wow.
- New paper led by Dara Etemady: Statistical reporting inconsistencies in experimental linguistics. Almost half (49%) of all articles contained at least one inconsistent p-value. 12% contained an inconsistency that may have affected the statistical conclusion." escholarship.org/uc/item/3736...
- Any reason to not think that L2M2 bimodal bilinguals also benefit to some extent?
- Emmorey et al (2008) was wrong (underpowered)! New paper by Asanowicz et al. shows that bimodal bilinguals (Codas), like unimodal bilinguals, exhibit enhancements in specific aspects of executive control. Codas also showed unique effects of visuospatial attention. psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
- Why is 'meh' not a word?
- The rise of "meh" as a conventional spelling of a non-speech vocalization languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71617 #linguistics
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)
- So lucky that I just noticed a typo in my feedback while grading a student's master dissertation on Willingness to Communicate (WTC) in Chinese learners of English. I was about to compliment them on identifying '...an important gap in the WTF literature'. 😂
- It should not have to be said, but actually thanks @johnbasil.bsky.social for including signed languages in this article!
- Social functions of language may drive faster change and faster diversification in some features. Thanks to growing diversity in variationst sociolinguistics, I gathered studies of 63 languages from 28 families. Here I sketch some potential patterns compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)On a happier note, new paper alert! Recently revised a piece with collaborators @chirila.bsky.social, Sunny Ananthanarayan, and Sophie Pierson on the digital infrastructure for language documentation. Accepted pending revisions at Language. MS: blogs.ed.ac.uk/amaliaskilto...
- I spent the International Day of Sign Languages using Auslan (the majority sign language of Australia) at the inaugural Auslan Teachers Conference in Melbourne, Australia.
- It's the #InternationalDayOfSignLanguages! The GIF below shows a commonly used international sign for 'sign language'. But is there only a single, universal sign language? Of course not, there are many! #Linguistics
- Happy #EuropeanDayOfLanguages: I have English as my L1, and I also sign British Sign Language, speak conversational French, and wish to learn more Maltese (my father's first language).
- Since today is the #EuropeanDayOfLanguages, let's not forget that you are not required to keep your languages separate, pure, intact or in any way feel inadequate about your way of using your own language/s. And don't let anyone take away your co-ownership of the languages you have.
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Very excited to announce that yesterday I submitted my PhD thesis: The Linguistic Life of the Kufr Qassem Deaf Community: Language Emergence, Variation, Change, and Persistence. I dedicate this thesis to my people: the resilient Palestinian people
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)🚨 Open PhD position in sign language #linguistics 🚨 The focus should be on the structure of signed languages, or connect to other research profiles at the department (e.g. computational linguistics, acquisition, typology, multilingualism) su.varbi.com/en/what:job/... Deadline: 15 October 2025
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Was fun working on this paper on negation in BSL led by Gab Hodge and w/ Kearsy Cormier and @adamcschembri.bsky.social! Paper is open access and available here: doi.org/10.1515/opli...
- New paper with Gab Hodge, Bodo Winter, and Kearsy Cormier on negation in British Sign Language in England: we find the most common strategy is a manual negator, headshake, and mouthing an English negator, with relatively few clauses only marked by headshake 1/2 www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)September issue of @jslx.bsky.social is out with some very touching contributions @lhlew.bsky.social @betsysneller.bsky.social #linguistics
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Want to know more about the Family ASL project? Check out our new paper “Language and Cognitive Development in Bimodal Bilingual Deaf Children in Hearing Families: Three Case Studies.” It’s part of a special issue on Lang & Cog Dev in Deaf Children www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/15...
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)UPDATE: Abstract deadline: Nov 1, 25! Invited speakers: Corrine Occhino, Dagmar Divjak, Idan Blank, Randy Allen Harris, Gary Lupyan, Laura Michaelis, Kanishka Misra ! @dagmardivjak.bsky.social @randyallenharris.bsky.social @congramqueen.bsky.social @glupyan.bsky.social @kanishka.bsky.social
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)Our paper is finally out online! Find it here: www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #linguistics
- Our paper (Hannah Lutzenberger, Marah Jaraisy, Rehana Omardeen & Adam Schembri), "Deconstructing notions of morphological 'complexity': Lessons from creoles and sign languages" has been accepted! @adamcschembri.bsky.social @marahjaraisy.bsky.social #linguistics
- Reposted by Adam Schembri (ˈʃɛmbɹi/ˈʃkɛmbri)
- A preprint version of our paper "Deconstructing notions of morphological ‘complexity’: Lessons from creoles and sign languages" is here: it's soon to appear in print in the Journal of Linguistics. drive.google.com/file/d/1BEfZ...
