Linguistics Research

Current or previous Linguistics Research

The Look and Song of Language

Keywords:

  • bigrams
  • trigrams
  • computational linguistics
  • phonotactics
  • English
  • French
  • Spanish
  • Scots

In a nutshell

How do you we recognize our languages? Throw away any knowledge of grammar and syntax, it boils down to sounds; we recognize a language by the sounds it produces. And we can find an equivalent way to identify a language in the written form — we just have to analyze the bigrams, trigrams, and sometimes their placements.

Using the Methodius Library and Methodius CLI, I sought to answer these questions

Learning More:

I wrote a blog post that documents the results of my analysis, including a survey I conducted where I asked folks to construct new words according to the dominant bigrams of English.

Publication

Not submitted to any journals.

Methodius CLI

Bro, Don't Call Me Bruh: Exploring preferred Bronouns

Keywords:

  • sociolinguistics
  • Social Media
  • Bluesky
  • bro
  • bruh
  • pronouns
  • vocatives

In a nutshell

What is the difference between bro and bruh? Despite their shared etymology, how are they different? Do they communicate different feelings? Are they used in different contexts?

I captured close to 150,000 posts from the social media network Bluesky which contain dude, bro, bruh, chat, sis, and fam. I conducted multiple types of feature analysis to determine that bro and bruh are in fact used very differently.

Publication

Presented at the International Conference of Language and Social Psychology in May of 2026

Paper submitted to the Journal of Language and Social Psychology in June of 2026. Awaiting publication.

Databases Jupyter Notebooks Scraper