Blogs and podcasts often talk about language in the modern world. Many of the resources below are meant for a general audience, making them straightforward sources for the curious. These resources often give enough information for the reader/listener to follow-up with their own informed searches if they want more detail on the topic. They make for informative, comparatively quick reads on a variety of linguistic-related topics.

Language Log: A compilation of posts by linguists (including Geoffrey Pullum, Mark Liberman, Victor Mair, and Ben Zimmer) about varying topics. Each post is tagged by categories, which can be searched from a menu on the side of the blog.

Lingua Franca: A compilation of blog posts focusing on language and writing in academia. Contributors include professors of English, linguistics, journalism, and Latin American and Latino culture as well as writers and journalists.

Code Switch: Features posts about the dynamics of race, ethnicity, culture, and identity in modern society. These posts both implicitly and explicitly reference language and dialect use as they pertain to various identity topics.

 

Lexicon Valley: Slate’s blog and podcast about language

 

 

Arika Okrent at Mental Floss: A Chicago-based linguist who writes on various topics of language and dialect from pronunciations to ASL, etymologies to animal-directed speech.

Ben Zimmer at the Wall Street Journal (must sign in and/or subscribe for full access): Zimmer is the current executive editor of vocabulary.com and the Visual Thesaurus and previously worked as a language columnist for the Boston Globe and the New York Times Magazine. He writes on a variety of topics, usually (but not always) focusing on etymology and lexical usage/history.

World Wide Words: Though the author no longer updates the site, there is still 20 years worth of articles to browse. Compiled by Michael Quinion, posts cover topics of word and phrase etymologies and histories. Check the index if you know what phrase or word you are looking for, use a Google custom search on the side menu, or click the Random Page option on the right of the top menu if you’re feeling lucky or just want to explore (my random click just took me to “From Elvish to Klingon”).

All Things Linguistic: A daily blog run by Gretchen McCulloch that focuses mainly on a variety of pop linguistic topics with the goal of making linguistics more relatable to a general audience. McCulloch has a special interest in Internet language