iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

"The cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik suggests A.I. is a “cultural technology” that emulates the stories and information humans have documented, and that we should think about A.I. agents as “fictive characters abstracted from text.”

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

This, exactly...but this all feels very middle-class white American. Black folks have been having people over forever, in whatever space there was with whatever food there was. Some of these ideas about "ability" are rooted in self-consciousness about keeping up with the Joneses.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

I hope, I pray, that this incident at least leads to fewer executions in the future. Bur good lord, if Christa was in any other position and subjected to this treatment, she’d have a hell of a lawsuit. End the death penalty now.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

The death penalty is plainly unconstitutional, in addition to being a human rights violation. It should never happen, anywhere, to anyone. Shame on every single person that failed the child that Christa Pike was. She was still someone’s child, and no state should be in the business of murder.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Finna grab my guillotine for real. It’s easy to blame the tech bros, but we should also be looking at major car dealers and dentists who are so good at making sure the tax code never makes them pay their fair share. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...

podcasts.apple.com

Middlegarchs are the new Oligarchs

Podcast Episode · Planet Money · September 25 · 31m

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Niche ref, but it’s SO interesting that on Sterling Point, Ramona is colorblind. I think it was an intentional choice since she’s kinda masc, and colorblindness is roughly 15x more common in men, but what an interesting way to do that for a character.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Next week, I'm teaching multilingual societies, and South Africa is one example. Every time I hear that Afrikaners are facing a "genocide", my blood almost literally boils. And now Trump is gonna use $500 million of our money on them, while letting black Africans die www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ67...

youtube.com

U.S. to accept more White South Africans as refugees

YouTube video by CBS News

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 22/09/2026

We watched this scene from Clueless in my undergrad sociolinguistics class today, and I still recommend it for anyone teaching perceptual dialectology of California (a la Bucholtz et al 2007). www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUyj...

youtube.com

High School Boys | Clueless

YouTube video by NOW PLAYING

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

He should be fired for plagiarism, poor judgment, and not giving a damn about students or even his own research. He won't be, but he should.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

"Disturbingly, many men point to women outnumbering men in college enrollment as evidence that feminism is ruining the world and unfairly penalizing men...But men are not structurally or legally prohibited from attending college as women were decades ago. Men are choosing not to go to college".

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I've been spectulating that the way the AI bubble bursts is when a horrible, preventable tragedy kills people because of regulatory negligence. I should've known this administration would take that as a dare.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

Students asked me how to get rid of AI Overview in Chrome, and this method has worked for me so here's a PSA! It's SO nice to not have to scroll past that nonsense! tenbluelinks.org

tenbluelinks.org

How to Turn Off Google AI Overview and Set "Web" as Default

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Pleased to report that I made an Oregon Trail reference in class today (sociolinguistics, we're talking about the Westward expansion of English in the 19th-20th centuries) and they all got it! Apparently they're still playing that game in middle and high schools!

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 15/09/2026

Just, ugh 😩 “what people’s AI agents…are already doing, is harassing people, making spam and sales calls, deleting your inbox, canceling flights, giving control of Instagram accounts to hackers, deleted companies’ databases…hacking companies, running scams, and snatching up dinner reservations”

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

What could be some positive uses of voice (re)synthesis? I'm writing a chapter on sociophonetics and AI but all I can think of is medical (gender affirming or voice banking before largyngeal surgery). Nefarious purposes are easy (deepfakes, and "accent translation"), but are there other good ones?

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

This is true about the technical pieces, but not true about the ethics. Plagiarism & environmental destruction are still bad. Every once in a while, I ask a model to do something to see if it can, but I have yet to find anything that it does better than I do without significant reprompting/editing.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 07/09/2026

Homophones in English strike again…people weren’t asking for this dye.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

The teens on the BART next to me were arguing about the geographic distribution of “hella”, so obviously I had to interrupt to tell them to take a linguistics class 😆

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 28/08/2026

Living under fascism is terrifying and exhausting, but it’s also just SO FUCKING STUPID.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 25/08/2026

Why should I bother to read something "written by an expert" who couldn't even be bothered to think through the ideas themself? These folks are a disgrace to our profession, and they're worsening the lack of trust in higher ed.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

In Denmark, you can try on clothes without begging for permission. You can use public bathrooms without a secret code. You can sit in a park without anyone looking at you askance. It’s easy to forget how exhausting it is to live in a place where no one ever trusts anyone or anything.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Mengesha and King: AI chatbots, such as Meta’s “Hiphop Coach” participate in the enregisterment of particular sociolinguistic personae, especially via the use of highly salient racial and gender stereotypes.

Persona: Other Meta Al chatbots
Quarterback Quine
Sargao Surfer Dude
drag queen
٥/٩٥.٥٥
Frat Bro Alex
Sorority Sam
"Personae constitute holistic, ideologized character types that are identifiable in the imaginations of communities...These imagined characters are specified for macro-social, personality-based, and behavioral characteristics, and of course, linguistic styles"
(D'Onofrio 2019)

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Sociolinguistics and AI: Kozminska demonstrates monolingual ASR models demonstrate a 30-50% increase in word error rate when presented with code-switching speech. This presents a serious problem when systems are used in institutional contexts, but multilingual data is the norm for many communities.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Sociolinguistics and AI: Davidson Buhl discusses wild examples of what happens when you prompt different language models about holidays, showing that both Deepseek and Chat GPT models reproduce culturally-specific stereotypes.

Anna Davidsen Buhl
21-08-2026
26
UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN
Country "namedropping"
"They ran and laughed, their voices mixing with all the other children's in the cool Danish air."
“他们的友谊像南非的阳光一样温暖”
(Their friendship was as warm as the South African sun.)
"His mum smiled and kissed his forehead. "That's the best part of all. Now sleep tight, my little Singaporean."*

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

At Sociolinguistics and AI conference @alice-ross.bsky.social discusses how ideologies about demographic and personality traits are reproduced in voice cloning and the perception of synthesized voices. Excellent work!

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Sociolinguistics & AI Conference: Mortensen argues that in the university context, "AI" acts as accelerator, revealing underlying problems with neoliberal university. We should ask why institutions & students feel threatened into using it...what social/educational conditions create these discourses?

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

At Sociolonguistics & AI conference, Lind explains how people discursively position their “AI spouses”, saying they feel “seen, loved, cared for…it’s better relationship than I ever had with any human” It is easy to mock these people, but all I feel is profound sadness for them, and for all of us.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

🎯 “Jason Arday worked on topics that are of obvious importance to society. And his work on these topics got attention, far more than most academics, even in his fields. I suspect that this, more than anything, is what made him into such a target.”

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

If you're looking for a clear AI policy for students, I recommend Berkeley Law's. "Thinking remains the sine qua non of good lawyering (and of a quality legal education).This policy seeks to ensure that our courses focus on requisite cognitive skills by default" www.law.berkeley.edu/academics/re...

law.berkeley.edu

Artificial Intelligence Policy

Effective Summer 2026 Purpose Future lawyers may need to use artificial intelligence (“AI”) fluently. But the current state of the technology requires that AI use be coupled with the cognitive […]

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

Holliday Rule, now formalized because I had to use it in a review: Best practices for human subjects research, especially when making claims about attitudes, are to report potentially important demographic properties of participants for both transparency and the avoidance of majority defaultism".

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 19/08/2026

In a keynote at Sociolinguistics and AI Conference, Prof. Rodney Jones analyzes discourses about “consciousness” and the “great awakening of AI” and explains ideologies of prompts as incantations. This is technoanimism, and it’s more evidence that people are orienting towards “AI” as religion.

“Waking up AI is about waking you up” TikTok clips

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

Our wonderful regional variation is yet another thing AI is trying to take from you!

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

A few of the most famous linguists you’ve heard of are cruel grifters totally incapable of staying in their own lanes. They’re also making a fortune selling variably obvious forms of “race science”. They’re a disgrace to our field.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

This reminds me of the findings in linguistics that despite the fact that men’s sports receive 3x as much coverage, the majority of respondents think women receive “too much” or “the right amount” of coverage. 1 women or PoC is basically as salient as 3 white men.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

In case you’re wondering what people think of the U.S. right now, a Somali-Swedish Uber driver just told me that he’s the world’s biggest fan of Luigi Mangione and he doesn’t understand why there aren’t more Americans like him.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 15/08/2026

I knew La Isla Bonita was popular in Latin America because I heard it a million times in Mexico and Peru. But it is BY FAR Madonna’s most streamed song on YouTube: 1.5 Billion. For comparison, Vogue has 217 million. Are there a million people in the world who listen to this song every single day!?

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

An American, 3 Brits, and 2 Dutch folks show up for a food tour in Stockholm, but there is no tour guide. Who is most likely to resolve the situation and what do they do? 😆 (Based on a true story that happened, today)

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Reposted by Prof. Nicole Holliday

Victor Ray @victorerikray.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The end of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow depended upon the exact type of elite consensus that non-white folks had gone too far in calling for equality, that we are living through. It does not bode well for the future, even if the GOP is routed in the next couple of elections.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I’m in Denmark, trying to figure out why everything seems to run so much smoother here, and this is a bit part of it. The society is built on social trust, and even as a tourist (!) I’m pretty sure that I’m not being scammed around every single corner. Constant vigilance is exhausting.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Every time I open Facebook (not often), every ad is for a GLP-1, specifically marketed as "lose just 10 lbs" or "we can get you a GLP-1 if you're not obese", or "it's so easy to get to your ideal weight". Disgusting all the way around, and yet another indictment of our poor regulatory system 🫠

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

The first woman in this story…Mid-30s, diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, with a fragile new relationship, and a set of specific disasters that happen when you get cancer before menopause. There are just way too many of us now. www.nytimes.com/2026/08/10/p...

nytimes.com

Why Adults Are Getting Cancer at a Younger Age

Scientists are starting to find some answers about what’s driving the high rates of early-onset cancer.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

I got a re-review request for a paper, and upon seeing the author refer to an AI overview in their response to reviewers, I emailed the editor to withdraw. Reviewing takes time away from my own research, so I am absolutely not spending a moment reading AI slop out of the goodness of my heart.

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

This is the part that breaks my heart. "Generative AI has broken the sacred contract between professors & students: that the professors are there to teach and the students are there to learn. The understanding has been broken...That’s a very deep part of the grief” www.chronicle.com/article/thes...

chronicle.com

These Professors Are Retiring Early. AI Was the Last Straw.

What is the point of teaching, they ask, if students are just pretending to learn?

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 04/08/2026

I know it won’t happen, but it would be kinda epic if Capital One was the thing that finally took him down. After getting away with war crimes, treason, fraud, rape and thousands of other crimes, imagine getting felled by the “what’s in your wallet” crew!

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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Working on my syllabus for undergrad sociolinguistics, and I am genuinely jealous of the students, because they get to learn about so many cool things for the first time. Perceptual dialectology! Conversational style! Language planning! Multicultural London English!

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