January 1	1814: The first newspaper published in Welsh, the Seren Gomer, begins publishing. 1824: The Camp Street Theatre becomes the first to offer plays in English in New Orleans. 1997: A new South African constitution comes into force, making South Africa the first country in the world with eleven official languages.
January 2	1635: Cardinal Richelieu founds the the Académie Française to safeguard the alleged purity of the French language. [enligt andra uppg 29 januari!] 1935: The trial of Bruno Hauptmann begins in New Jersey. He was accused of kidnapping and murdering the 19-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh, the US aviator. Found guilty, he was executed in April of the following year. The case against Hauptmann included (much questioned) linguistic evidence.
January 3	1938: BBC begins broadcasting in foreign languages for the first time. The emissions are in Arabic, and directed towards the Middle East. 1960: Italian presidential decree n^o 103 permits the official use of French, German and Slovenian in parts of Italy.
January 4	1785: Jakob Grimm, one of the Grimm brothers with the famous tales, but also a linguist, is born in Hanau, Germany. 1813: Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, amateur linguist and prince of France is born . 1894: In a letter to Antoine Meillet, Saussure underscores the importance of polictics and external history in historical linguistics. 2002: At its San Francisco meeting, the American Dialect Society votes daisy cutter (=large bomb that explodes a meter or so above the ground) as the euphemism of the year.
January 5	1996: A monument to Ivar Aasen, the creator of Nynorsk, is unveiled near the central railway station in Oslo. 2001: Four people are charged with public order offences after a rally in Cardiff by the Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, the Welsh Language Society.
January 6	1865: Birth of Russian linguist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr.
January 7	1858: Eliezer Yitzhak Perelman, better known as Ben Yehuda and the reviver of Hebrew, is born in the Lithuanian village of Luzhky. 1927: Never before has human language crossed such a vast distane – the first transatlantic phone call is made between New York and London. 1954: At the IBM headquarters in New York, state-of-the art machine translation is demonstrated, as a computer manages to a achieve a somewhat crude translation of a number of Russian sentences into English.
January 8	1800: The "wild child" Vicotr, a language-deprived child found in southern France, is transferred to a monsieur Vidal in St-Sernin, where he remains for less than a month. 1996: Catawba goes extinct, as the Red Thunder Cloud, the last (although not native) speaker passes away.
January 9	1800: Lucien Bonaparte, French minister of the interior, is informed about the capture of Victor. 1905: Count Zech, governor of Togo, forbids education in any other non-native language than German.
January 10	1846: August "Wave Theory" Schleicher defends his Ph. D. thesis in Bonn. 1950: American sinologist Erwin Reifler produces a 55-page study on machine translation, in which he for the first time formulates the conceptions of pre- and post-editing.
January 11	1951: Law n^o 51-46, better known as the loi Deixonne is passed in France. Concerning the teaching of minority languages, its aim is first and foremost to promote French, though it also speaks of protecting regional languages.
January 12	1912: Birthday of American linguist Mary Haas. 2000: The First International Conference on Linguistics in Southern Africa begins at the University of Cape Town.
January 13	1795: In United States, a parlamentary voting gives rise to the urban legend that German was about to become the country's official language. 1859: Birth of Paul Passy, French linguist and phonetician, and – not least -- the founder of the International Phonetic Association. 1900: Emperor Franz Joseph decrees that German be the language of the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. 1943: Spanish Vasconist Koldo (Luís) Mitxelena is released on probation from his political imprisonment.
January 14	1912: Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr becomes extraordinary academy member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1987: In Seoul, 21 year old Linguistics student Park Chong-Choi is suffocated during police interrogation for alleged pro-communist activities. Understandably, this leads to the country's biggest demonstrations for six years, involving hundreds of new police arrests. 2000: Death of Alvin Liberman. 2001: 9^th Inuktitut Language Week celebrated throughout Nunavut January 14-20.
January 15	1961: Knut Bergsland and Hans Vogt submit their classic article "On the validity of glottochronology" to Current Anthropology. 1999: Portuguese president Jorge Sampaiq promulgates a law stipulating that Mirandese (which one might argue is a dialect of Spanish) be the official language in the region of north-eastern Portugal where it is spoken.
January 16	1907: Saussure begins his famous course in general linguistics at the university of Geneva. 1952: New Dutch bible translation finished. 1991: The Algerian government decides to outlaw the use of French in official contexts. 1995: New Hawaiian constitution declares that both English and Hawaiian shall be regarded as official, with English, of course, being slightly more so...
January 17	1837: Birth of François Lenormant, the first (at least in quite some time) to understand the Akkadian inscriptions from Mesopotamia. 1916: Charles Hockett is born.
January 18	1779: Birth of Peter Mark Roget, the author of Roget's Thesaurus. 1965: Birth of Lucy, the chimpanzee taught American Sign Language by Roger Fouts. 1968: In a letter to Noam Chomsky, Jim McCawley assures the addresse that “There is no truth to the nasty rumor going around that the CIA is subsidizing my research in hopes of thereby diverting your energies from [protesting against] the [Vietnam] war”.
January 19	1939: The first session of what became known as "the Monster Study" is held by Mary Tudor of the University of Iowa. The experiment aims at making orphan children stutter in order to test a theory that stuttering is caused by people in the enviroment. 1999: At its 656^th meeting, the European Union Committee of Ministers decides to officially proclaim 2001 the "European year of languages". 2000: American linguist Victoria Fromkin draws her last breath.
January 20	1999: The German state of Saxony confirms the right to use Sorbian, in public as well as in private.
January 21	1969: The IASS-AIS (International Association for Semiotic Studies – Association Internationale de Sémiotique is officially established in Paris. 1998: Equatorial Guinea adopts French as its second official language.
January 22	1909: Morris Swadesh is born in Holyoke. 2000: Turkey signs the European Minority Language Convention.
January 23	1948: Swedish gets a new word, as professor Ture Johannisson in the daily Svenska Dagbladet proposes that the shorter plast be used instead of the English loan plastic. 1998: The German government recognises four official minority languages: Danish, Frisian, Sorbian and Romani. 1998: After having been presented with strong linguistic evidence, Ted Kaczynski confesses being identical with the infamous Unabomber terrorist.
January 24	1984: New Luxembourgian language law recognises three languages: Luxembourgian, French and German.
January 25	In Scotland, the national poet is honoured by the celebration of Burns' Night, which, apart from poetry recital in Scots gives the Scotsmen a suitable excuse for consuming food and whisky. 1921: Karel Capek's play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots) premieres in Prague, and includes the first use of the word robot. 1939: Birthday of controversial Australianist Bob Dixon (born in Gloucester, England). 1967: From this day, Swedish laws no longer contain plural forms of verbs, long since absent from spoken language.
January 26	1850: 1st German-language daily newspaper in the US begins publishing in New York. 1884: Birthday of Edward Sapir. 1907: The première of J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World at the Abbey Theatre in leads to rioting, as the audience took offence at the 'foul language'. Following performances had to be guarded by police. 1965: Rioting erupts in India after Hindi having been declared nation’s official language.
January 27	1794: Bertrand Barère presents a report on langauges to the Revolutionary Convention in Paris, in which he argues in favour of a French-only policy: "The first two National Assemblies have already spent far too much on translations of laws into the various tongues of France. As if it were up to us to maintain the barbarous jargons and crude dialects that cannot but serve the cause of fanatics and contra-revolutionary elements!". 1970: Founding of the Sociedad Española de Lingüística.
January 28	1993: Both English and Spanish are recognised as official languages of Puerto Rico.
January 29	1930: Ascensión Solorsano de Cervantes dies at the age of 74. She was the last speaker of Mutsun, a variety of Costanoan once spoken just south of San Fransico 1999: Portugal passes a law recognising the linguistic rights of its Mirandese-speaking community. 2003: After being threatened by a boycott, Microsoft Corporation agrees to publish an edition of the Office software in Nynorsk, the other standardised variety of Norwegian.
January 30	1940: Benjamin Lee Whorf submits his article "Science and linguistics" to Technological Review.
January 31	1932: The final step in Turkey's transition from Arabic to Latin writing is taken.
February 1	1991: A new Koasati Grammar by Geoffrey Kimball is published by University of Nebraska Press.
February 2	1786: William Jones delivers his famous Third Anniversary Discourse as president of the Asiatick Society of Bengal. It is here that he makes public his ideas about Latin, Greek, Gothic and other European languages being genetically related to Sanskrit and Persian. 1887: The use of Native American languages in schools is prohibited in the USA. 2001: Sotiris Bletsas receives a 15 month suspended jail sentence by a court in Athens after having distributed a leaflet claiming that there exist linguistic minorities in Greece.
February 3	1920: Birth of George Miller. 1975: First ever broadcasting in Creole from the Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation, in which politician Anerood Jugnauth strongly condemns the American occupation of the Diego Garcia archipelago. 1997: Playboy magazine begins publishing in Croatian. 2001: Benjamin Varner is found dead at Gallaudet University in Washington, where he was a student. Upon his arrest, the murderer Joseph Mesa later blames his action on voices in his head. Since Mesa is deaf, however, these were not literally speaking voices, but glove-clad hands urging him to kill – in American Sign.
February 4	1800: Victor the wolf-child is transferred from St-Sernin to the deaf school in neighbouring Rodez. 1809: Birth of Arthur James Johnes, who 35 years later authors Philological Proofs of the Original Unity and Recent Origin of the Human Race, Derived from a Comparison of the Languages of Asia, Europe, Africa, and America; being an inquiry how far the differences in the languages of the globe are referrible to causes now in operation. 1939: Death of Edward Sapir.
February 5	1835: The French music journal Le Pianiste is delighted about Jean-François Sudre's creation of Solrésol, an international auxiliary language based on music. In the journal, Sudre is hailed as the Gutenberg of his days. 1967: Quang Phuc Dong of the “South Hanoi Institute of Technology” (S.H.I.T.), nom de plume of no other than Jim McCawley submits the final version of English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects to a Festschift devoted to – Jim McCawley. The paper is a study of the syntax of the word fuck, and includes momorable examples such as *Fuck you or I'll take away your teddy-bear, *Wash the dishes and fuck you, *Fuck communism on the sofa, and – not least – Fuck all irregular verbs. 2003: The Russian Duma passes a law which outlaws the use of foreign words "where suitable Russian ones exist".
February 6	1927: Estonian national broadcasting corporation Eesti Raadio transmits its first programme in Esperanto. 1990: Welshman Steve Briers, the world's fastest backwards talker, accomplishes a backward recital of the lyrics of the Queen album "A Night At The Opera" in 9 minutes and 58,44 seconds.
February 7	1639: The Académie Française begins working on its Dictionnaire de la Langue Françoyse. [check spelling] 2002: Jerrold Katz dies from bladder cancer in New York at the age of 69.
February 8	1864: Beginning this day, lectures are regularly given at the Société de Linguistique de Paris. 2002: A new Ph. D. program in linguistics, available from the autumn of that year, is approved by the Gallaudet University Board of Trustees. Gallaudet University is unique in having a sign language as its main medium of teaching.
February 9	2000: The Taiwanese minister of education declares that the study of minority languages shall be obligatory in Taiwanese schools from the following year.
February 10	1965: After having been confronted with linguistic evidence, British authorities conclude that the murder confession produced by a Timothy Evans was probably a fake, and a year later, Evans is pardoned. The pardon came a bit too late, though, as Evans was hanged in 1950.
February 11	1943: The Swedish School Teachers' Written Language Committee suggests a spelling reform, which is met by stiff public opposition. 1992: A twelve-day sociolinguistic survey is begun in a number of villages in central Chad by the Société Internationale de Linguistique and the Institut Supérieur des Sciences et de l'Education.
February 12	1948: Andrew Booth sends his first report on his work on machine translation to the Rockefeller Foundation, from which he receives his funding. 1998: Alija Izetbegovic appeals to the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Hercegovina to abolish the constitutional articles declaring only Bosnian and Croatian official in the Federation and only Serbian in the Republika Srpska.
February 13	1834: As the first issue of Ka Lama Hawaii leaves the printer's, Hawaiian joins the group of languages in which newspapers are published.
February 14	1941: Benjamin Lee Whorf submits his article "Languages and logic" to Technological Review.
February 15	1759: The German classical philologist Friedrich August Wolf is born. 1878: In a paper presented to the Philological Society in London, reverend W. E. Cousins decisively demonstrates the Austronesian affinities of Malagasy.
February 16	1795: American congress decides to publish federal statutes in English only, rather than, as had been proposed, in both English and German. It is this voting which is believed to have given rise to the legend of German nearly becoming the official language of the United States. 1952: Sheikh Mujib starts a hunger strike in support of the demand of Bengali being made the state language of East Pakistan.
February 17	440: Death of Saint Mesrop Mashtots, the monk who is accredited with having invented the Armenian script and helped establish Armenia's golden age of Christian literature. 2004: Opening of the Punjab Mother Language Festival 2004 in Delapur, a " festival to celebrate linguistic diversity and rich literary and cultural heritage of the Punjab".
February 18
February 19	1821: Death of August Schleicher, the man behind the Stammbaumtheorie. 1888: Otto Jespersen receives a letter from Vilhelm Thomsen, who suggests that Jespersen should concentrate on English language and literature. 2001: In New Delhi, the internet provider Rediff announces that it is now able to handle no less than eleven Indian languages.
February 20	2001: The Slovak government signs the European Charter for Regional and Minority Languages.
February 21	In November 1999, this day was declared by the United Nations as the official "International Mother Language Day" to be celebrated world-wide. The day is chosen in nonour of the "Language martyrs" of Bangladesh, and has been celebrated locally since 1953, the first anniversary of the death of the language martyrs. 1828: Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper printed in a American Indian language, begins publishing.
February 22	1835: Jean-François Sudre again demonstrates his artificial language Solrésol publicly. This time, he silently communicates with his blidfolded students, in order to demonstrate the language's usefulness to the deaf-blind. 1913: Death of Ferdinand de Saussure. 1999: The Bulgarian government recognises Macedonian as a language in its own right, rather than a mere dialect of Bulgarian.
February 23	1948: During a session of the Pakistan Constituent Assembly in Karachi, Dhirendranath Datta argues strongly in favour of using Bengali in the assembly alongside English and Urdu. His resolution arouses exceptionally strong feelings among the delegates.
February 24	1835: The first Indian language monthly of the United States, the Siwinowe Kesibwi (Shawnee Sun), begins publication. 1950: Birth of Syntactician and computational linguist G. J. M. Gazdar. 1964: Noam Chomsky begins a series of six weekly lectures at the Christian Gauss Semeinars in Criticism at Princeton. 2002: The Israeli postal authorities issue a stamp honouring the Ladino, i. e. Judeo-Spanish language.
February 25	1977: Ebo Hawkson, Ghana's deputy chairman of the National Commission on Culture makes a speech in which he urges Africans to make ex-colonial languages their own by not always following European norms. 1988: The Canadian Supreme Court concludes that all provincial laws of Saskatchewan are void, having been written in English only, rather than in English and French. A hastily adopted additional bill is necessary in order to restore the validity of Saskatchewan legislation. 2000: At the Expolangues exhibition in Paris, David Dalby launches his Linguasphere Register – an Ethnologue-like comprehensive survey of the world's languages.
February 26	1994: A new alphabet for the writing of Karakalpak is adopted. 1998: The Constitutional Court of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia-Hercegovina abolishes the 25 June 1996 law that had prescribed the Ekavian variety (the one used in Serbia) of Serbo-Croatian in schools, administration and the media. From now, Jekavian, the dialect used by most Bosnian Serbs, may again be used.
February 27	1897: Alfabetarja e gjuhës shqipe, the first school book in Albanian is published in Istanbul. 1953: In Britain, a proposal to simplify English spelling passes its first test. By 65 votes to 53, the House of Commons votes to approve the Simplified Spelling Bill for consideration by parliamentary committees. Remarkably, the bill receives support from parties which are normally opposes to one another's ideas. One of the conservative supporters is James Pitman, grandson of Isaac Pitman of Pitman Shorthand fame. 1969: It is decided to establish a Division of Linguistics and Language Training at York University in Toronto. 1992: American linguist and politician Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa dies.
February 28	1759: Pope Clement XIII allows the Bible to be translated into various languages.
February 29
March 1	1983: Russ Rymer publishes a book on Genie, the confined child of California. 1987: The Nordic Language Convention comes into force. It allows citizens of the five Nordic countries to use their respective mother tongues (provided it is one of Swedish, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic or one of the two standardised varieties of Norwegian) in contacts with authorities in the neighbouring countries. 1995: Randy Harris publishes The Linguistics Wars on the history of linguistic disagreement in the past couple of decades. 2001: The Centre for Linguistics is created at the Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands, uniting linguists from the University's different departments.
March 2	1989: The Navajo Code Talker Monument is erected. [get details]
March 3	1894: First Greek-language publication in the U. S., the New York Atlantis, begins. 1930: Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr becomes vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences 1997: In collaboration with the University of Bayreuth in Germany, the first-ever International Colloquium on Gur Languages is held at the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.
March 4	1832: Death of Jean-François Champollion, who played a major role in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. 1947: This day has been suggested as the birthday of machine translation, for it is on this day that Warren Weaver, director of the Natural Sciences Division of the Rockefeller Foundation, writes to the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener that "I have wondered if it were unthinkable to design a computer which would translate. Even if it would translate only scientific material (where the semantic difficulties are very notably less), and even if it did produce an inelegant (but intelligible) result, it would seem to me worth while". 1968: Mauritania declares Arabic as co-official alongside French.
March 5	1990: Upheaval in Bulgaria of laws aimed at linguistic discrimination of the Turkish-speaking minority. 1996: Today's New Zealand census is the first ever to include a question on language. It turns out that 95% of the population are Anglophones, and that they constitute one of the least multilingual populations in the western world. 2001: The state of New York adopts English as its official language.
March 6	1947: Andrew Booth meets Warren Weaver for the second time, and this time they preliminarily agree on the Rockefeller Foundation funding British research on machine translation. 1995: The Estonian parlament adopts a law according to which all languages other than Estonian are designated "foreign languages". Nevertheless, a third of all Estonian residents are insolent enough to have acquired one of these as their mother tongue.
March 7	1714: The peace treaty of Rastatt between French king Louis XIV and Holy Roman Emperor Charles VI is signed in French. This is allegedly the first time that a language other than Latin is used for the text of an international treaty. For another two centuries, French continues to be the foremost language of international diplomacy. 1909 Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr becomes adjunct of the Historical-Philological Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
March 8	1827: Birth (in Berlin) of Wilhelm Bleek, the "father of Bantu philology". 1850: August Schleicher becomes professor of Classical Philology and Literature in Prague. 1866: The Société de Linguistique de Paris is officially founded. 1945: Geoff Pullum is born in Irvine, Scotland. 1986: Official establishment of the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong. 2001: Peter Wakeford, mayor of Southampton, celebrates the European Year of Languages by releasing 500 helium-filled balloons outside Southampton’s West Quay shopping centre.
March 9	1950: London van driver Timothy Evans is hanged, after having been found guilty of murder of his wife and child. Linguistic evidence later suggests that he was in fact innocent. 1956: The German hellenist and comparative linguist Paul Kretschmer passes away in Vienna. 2000: Hundreds of nationalist protesters in the Ukrainian city of Lviv demand the closure of all Russian-language publications. Others in Kyiv urged that Russian be banned from television as well.
March 10	1876: Human speech is transmitted electronically for the first time, as Alexander Graham Bell over the phone utters "Come here, Watson, I want you" to his assistant. 1897: Antoine Meillet gets his Ph. D. 2000: At the age of 26, Nim Chimpsky dies of a heart attack in Tyler, Texas.
March 11	1914: George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with a phonetician as one of the leading characters is performed for the first time in the author's home country. Its original premiere took place in Vienna. 1986: The French language law of 1975 is supplanted by a new decree, intended to lead to the "enrichissement de la langue française". 2000: Edgar Polomé, who – among other things – established the first linguistics department in Belgian Congo dies in Houston, Texas.
March 12	1881: Turkish language reformer Kemal Atatürk is born. He replaced the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet. 1998: Russian-born typologist and field linguist Alexandra "Sasha" Aikhenvald becomes a naturalised Australian.
March 13	1519: European study of Mesoamerican Indian languages begins, as the Spanish encounter and question their fellow countryman Jerónimo de Aguilar, who, as a survivor of a shipwreck has learnt Mayan. 1845: Birth of Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, forerunner of the structuralist school, and accredited (albeit wrongly) with having launched the term "phoneme". 1938: Kremlin decrees that Russian become a compulsory school subject in all union republics.
March 14	"Native Language Day" is a national holiday in Estonia, a country which denies the linguistic rights of the third of its population that happens to have the "wrong" native language. 1857: Birth of Rudolf Thurneysen, one of the first to apply the newly established principles of historical linguistics to Celtic languages. 1901: Publication of the first issue of Finnisch-Ugrische Forschungen. 1902: The Danish newspaper Politiken presents the new coinage bil, which still remains the normal word for 'car' in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. While most other European languages derived the corresponding words from the beginning of Latin or French automobile, the Scandinavians from this day use the last part of the same original word.
March 15	1849: Italian cardinal and polyglot Guiseppe Gaspare Mezzofanti dies. 1939: Just before the Nazi occupants arrive, Roman Jakobson leaves his home in Brno, Czechoslovakia, and flees to Denmark. 1969: MIT Press releases a paperback edition of Chomsky's Aspects. 1990: In Bologna, Italy, the band Clock DVA records records a live album, of which one of the tracks is named Syntactics.
March 16	1849: Birth of Karl Brugmann, German neogrammarian and comparative linguist. 1931: The Dutch language lovers' society Genootschap Onze Taal is formed.
March 17
March 18	1909: Leonard Bloomfield marries Miss Alice Sayers of St. Louis. 1997: The Netherlands officially recognises Frisian, Yiddish, Saxon and Limburgian as minority languages.
March 19	1884: Elias Lönnrot, standardiser of Finnish dies.
March 20	The Journée de la Francophonie, celebrating the coopertaion between French-speaking countries, is observed world-wide since the first meeting between Francophone heads-of-state in 1970 in Niamey (Niger). 1904: Burrhus Frederic Skinner, to whose work Chomsky's nativist theories was in part a reaction, is born. 1978: Genie is transferred back to her biological mother. 1997: Geoff Pullum sends a letter to the Economist with "a meaningful contiguous minimal word quintuple -- 7-character words, no less, and the differentiating characters were vowels, all in the same position", a letter, Pullum adds, which "could have placed the Economist permanently in the linguistic book of records", although, he complains, "there isn't one". If only he knew. The quintuple in question regarded a mistake in the Russian oil inustry, due to which crude flows of oil from different oil fields all come out swirled into a single light-coloured blend. Pullum commenst that he cannot recall "a blinder blander blonder blender blunder". 2000: Beginning of Provincial French Pride Week in New Brunswick, Canada.
March 21	1924: First non-English language course broadcast on U. S. radio by WJZ of New York. 1948: At Maidan Racecourse in Dhaka, Urdu is – despite Bengali protests – declared the one and only official language of both east and west Pakistan. 1995: A symposium on allophones of /r/ in Dutch is organised in the Netehrlands. 2003: Swedish leftist hardcore rockers International Noise Conspiracy releases the EP Bigger cages, longer chains, which includes a filmed Noam Chomsky lecture as a bonu track.
March 22	1945: The Arab league is founded. Today, it groups 22 states having the Arab language in common.
March 23	1948: Faroese is declared the "principal language" of the Faroe islands. 1997: The "European Language Day" is celebrated for the first time, thanks to an initiative by the European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages. This celebration is not to be confused with the "European Day of Languages" of 2001, although in that particular year, the festivities were merged and held on September 26.
March 24	2001: Deaf people in Manchester march for the recognition of British Sign language as an official language of the country.
March 25	1916: Ishi, the last speaker of Yahi dies of tubercolosis at the the medical college on Parnassus in San Francisco.
March 26	2000: End of Provincial French Pride Week in New Brunswick, Canada.
March 27	1869: The Société de Linguistique de Paris decides to publish a newsletter three times a year. 2001: In Pecrot, eight people fall victim of Belgium's worst railway crash in a quarter of a century. Later investigations establish language difficulties as the reason behind the tragedy – a signalman had received warnings in French, but he himself only spoke Dutch. 2004: After a two-year illness, British-American historical linguist and Vasconist Larry Trask deceases at the age of 59.
March 28	Starting in 1954, this day marked the beginning of the Philippine Linggo ng Wika, or National Language Week. In the following year, the celebrations were moved to mid-August. 1980: Opening in Nijmegen of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.
March 29	1955: A Dano-German convention on the linguistic rights of the German-speaking population in southern Denmark is signed.
March 30	1937: Otto Jespersen is widowed, as his wife Ane Marie deceases. 2000: The Michif Working Group holds its first meeting in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, to discuss the possibilities of reviving the the unique intertwined language Michif. 2000: Alexandra Aikhenvald's typological survey of classifiers is published by Oxford University Press.
March 31	Australia’s “Assembly of First Nations” celebrates the ”Official Aboriginal Language Day”. 1966: The Haut Comité pour la défense et l'expansion de la langue française is created. 2002: A commision appointed by the Swedish government delivers its report on the possibilities of strengthening the position of Swedish vis-à-vis English in the country.
April 1	1844: French linguist Pierre Étienne (a. k. a. Peter Stephen) Duponceau, to whom we owe the term "polysynthetic", dies in Philadelphia. 1886: In Paris, a decision is taken to publish a small journal about phonetic transcription and the teaching of foreign languages. This journal is one of the forerunners of today's Journal of the International Phonetic Association. 1887: Leonard Bloomfield, who in his 1933 book "Language" set the standards of teaching in linguistics for decades to come, sees the light of day in Chicago. 1936: Orissa is recognised as a separate state – the first one in India to have its boundaries defined on linguistic grounds. 1956: Noam Chomsky completes the preface of his classic Syntactic Structures, although the book is not published until the following year. 1993: Ron Wardhaugh's textbook Investigating Language is pulished by Blackwell. 1994: Raymond Rising of the Summer Institute of Linguistics is kidnapped in Colombia by six members of the FARC guerilla.
April 2
April 3	1952: British Mathematician Alan Turing, without whom computational linguistics might not be, is convicted of homosexuality.
April 4	1861: Paul Broca attends a talk by Ernest Aubertin at the Société d'Anthropologie which inspires him to research the localisation of language in the brain. 2001: Singaporean Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong launches the "Speak Good English" campaign, aimed at eradicating the local variety, called "Singlish".
April 5	2001: Most of the pupils of a school in Tidaholm, Sweden, participate in a manifestation against foul language. After having written down the nastiest words they could think of, the pupils and their teachers set fire to them in the school yard.
April 6	1830: Thomas Gallaudet – responsible for the introduction of French sign language in the United States – resigns from his as principal of the American School for the Deaf in Hartford. 1921: Death (in in New York City) of Maximilian Berlitzheimer, founder of the Berlitz Language Schools. 1990: The law on official language usage in Canada's North-West territories is revised.
April 7	1867: Danish linguist Holger Pedersen is born. 1906: Swedish Minister of Education, Fridtjuv Berg signs a governmental decree on a modernised spelling standard. Among its more notable features is <v> rather than <fv> for /v/.
April 8	1726: Peter, the Wild Boy of Hanover, is displayed to the British King in St. James's Palace. 1970: Czech Indo-Europeanist Julius Pokorny, mainly known for his voluminous etymological research, dies in Zürich. 1982: John Wells's four-volume Accents of English is published by Cambridge University Press. 2002: The Algerian parliament decides to give official recognition to Tamazight, the language of its Berber minority. 2002: The first ever African-medium daily in South Africa is launched. Isolezwe (‘the eye of the Nation’) is entirely in Zulu.
April 9	The death day (1557) of Michael Agricola, the first to translate the Bible into Finnish, is celebrated as the Finnish Language Day – a public holiday. April 9 is also important to Finnish for another reason, as Elias Lönnrot, standardiser of Finnish was born this day in 1802. 1955: Ken Hale says "yes" to his Sara. 1981: Nature. poublished a 207 000 letter description of the nucleotide links making up human mitochondrial DNA which later makes it into the Guinness Book of World Records as the longest word there is.
April 10	1982: Governor Bruce King declares a Navajo Code Talkers Day in New Mexico. Later in the same year, American president Ronald Reagan declares a nationwide counterpart. 1991: The MIT Press releases a paperback reprint of Chomsky & Halle's classic The Sound Pattern of English.
April 11	1797: British naval forces land 2 248 deported Garifunas (or "Black Caribs") from St. Vincent on the island of Roatán in present-day Honduras. So begins the presence in Central America of a black people speaking an Amerindian language. 1861: An aphasic patient named Leborge, but better known as "Tan" (since that was pretty much the only syllable he was capable of uttering) is brought to Paul Broca. After his death on April 17, Broca identifies the language centre of the brain which still bears his name. 1980: Norway adopts its first language legislation, making the country officially bilingual in Bokmål and Nynorsk.
April 12	1963: Polish logician and semanticist Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, also known as the inventor of Categorial Grammar, dies. 1968: The world's first international conference on pidgin and creole languages in Mona, Jamaica, closes. 1993: A new alphabet for the writing of Turkmen is adopted. Among the usual Latin character set, it also includes the curious symbols <$>, <£> and <¥>.
April 13	1814: The racehorse Dr. Syntax runs its first race. He subsequently won the Preston Gold Cup eight consecutive years – a record that remains unbeaten to this day. 1897: Otto Jespersen marries Ane Marie Døjrup.
April 14	1828: The first edition of Noah Webster's dictionary is published as The American Dictionary of the English Language. 1852: Birth (in Mühringen, Germany) of Maximilian Berlitzheimer, founder of the Berlitz Language Schools. 1917: Death of Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto. 1925: Birth of psycholinguist Roger Brown.
April 15	1755: Dictionary of the English Language published by English lexicographer Samuel Johnson. 1958: The European Community decides that all the official languages of the member states shall also be official languages of the Community. 1966: As one of the last institutions to surrender, the Swedish surpreme court opts to no longer use plural forms of verbs, a feature which has been absent from spoken Swedish for centuries.
April 16	1890: Russian structuralist Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, one of the founders of the Prague school is born in Moscow.
April 17	1998: The First European NLP Forum Conference begins in Copenhagen. 2001: The idea of writing this very book is born.
April 18	1861: Paul Broca performs an autopsy on an aphasic who had died the previous day. He thus "disvovers" the area in the brain in which much language processing is done, and which is now named after him. 1949: Leonard Bloomfield, who in his 1933 book "Language" set the standards of teaching in linguistics for decades to come, deceases in New Haven. 1986: The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics moves to a new building. 2002: Chinese authorities announce that they plan to spend the equivalent of one million dollars on preserving the Nüshü script, a unique script of the Hunan province used only by women.
April 19	1928: The last fascicule of the Oxford English Dictionary is completed. The entire work is not published until 1933.
April 20	1879: Jules Gilliéron submits his thesis on the dialect of Vionnez. 2000: Michael, partner of Koko, and one of the few gorillas to have learned American Sign Language, passes away at the age of 27.
April 21	1899: Otto Jespersen becomes a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences.
April 22	1913: Birth of phonetician and Romanist Bertil Malmberg. 1991: Esperantists gather in the village of Kelmis in Western Belgium to honour the state of Amikejo. In the early 20^th century, the former Neutral Territory of Moresnet, in which Kelmis is located, turned into the Free State of Amikejo – the only known state with Esperanto as its official language.
April 23	1801: Jean-Marc Itard publishes his book on Victor, the wolf-child of southern France. Disappointinly, Victor never learnt to speak. 1925: British neo-Firthian linguist Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday is born in Leeds.
April 24	1869: A monsieur A. Dufriche motions that the infamous second article of of the consititution of the Société Linguistique de Paris be revoked. The second article was the one which banned discussion on the origins of human language, as well as proposals for a new international auxiliary language. Dufriche's motion fails, and the article therefore remains in vigour. 1897: Benjamin Lee Whorf, who formulated the strong version of the notorious Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is born in Massachusets.
April 25	1925: Child language acquisitionist Roger Brown is born in Detroit.
April 26	1968: A government decree requires that all Algerian officials master Arabic.
April 27	1971: British police remove Welsh demonstrators from the entrance of a courtroom after they disrupt proceedings inside. Put on trial are eight members of the Welsh Language Society, accused of "conspiring to damage, remove or destroy" English language road signs in Wales. 1996: The North American language Quinault becomes extinct with the death of its last speaker Oliver Mason 1998: In the first inter-species internet chat ever, Koko the gorilla answers questions from the curious public. Not everybody is impressed by her performance – her response to the question "Koko, are you going to have a baby in the near future?" is "Pink".
April 28	1789: In the morning, twelve of the crew members of HMS Bounty stage a mutinuy that is to lead to the creation of a new language. They settle on the uninhabited Pacific island of Pitcairn, where some of their descendants still speak Pitcairnese. 1908: Foundation of the UEA, the Universal Esperanto Academy.
April 29
April 30	1943: Otto Jespersen, Danish linguist and anglicist, and inventor of the artificial language Novial, passes away. 1947: In a reply to Warren Weaver's letter of March 4, Norbert Wiener replies that he is sceptical about the possibilities of machine translation.
May 1	1893: At the age of 33, Otto Jespersen becomes chair of English at the university of Copenhagen. 1964: A programme written in Basic is run for the first time. 1997: David Crystal's impressive Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language is published by the Cambridge University Press.
May 2	1866: Birth of German hellenist and comparative linguist Paul Kretschmer.
May 3	1806: Jean-Marc Itard delivers his second report on Victor the Wild Child.
May 4	1919: The so-called 'may-fourth movement' is founded among students in Beijing. Its main goal is to protest against Japanese imperialism, but the movement also plays a role in linguistic history in working for a writing reform. As a result Bái-huà ('colloquial language') is recognised as the standard written form of Chinese in 1992. 1929: Birth of Audrey Hepburn, who played the role of Eliza in the film My fair lady, one of the all to few films featuring a linguist hero. 1943: Otto Jespersen is buried at the Lundehave cemetary. 1968: American linguist Frederick Newmeyer presents his first public talk, "Durative keep in English" at the University of Illinois.
May 5	1539: French king Francis I signs the Ordonnance de Villers-Cotterêts, which makes French, rather than Latin, the official language of the Kingdom of France. 1998: Ted Kaczynski is sentenced to four life terms for the terrorist attacks hitherto ascribed to the so-called Unabomber. Linguistic evidence played a major role in the Kaczynski case.
May 6
May 7	2001: Joseph Greenberg, Professor emeritus in lingusitics of Stanford, deceases at the age of 85, of pancreatic cancer
May 8	1876: Ethnic and linguistic cleansing of Tasmania is completed, as Truganini, the last speaker of a Tasmanian language (also the last full-blooded Tasmanian) goes to meet her maker. 1913: In a letter to Edward Sapir, Alfred Krober reports that he believes to have found that Klamath-Modoc is related to one of the language families in California. 1924: Africaans became official language of South Africa. 2000: Poland adopts the "Law concerning the Polish language", which, among other things, aims to "combat vulgar language use".
May 9	1753: In a letter to British parliament member Peter Collinson, Benjamin Franklin expresses his worries about the future United States becoming German-speaking. Not only do the German immigrants not speak English, but they are also "generally the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation". 1938: Dictating for his wife from his sick bed, Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy composes his last letter to Roman Jakobson. 1950: A. S. Chikobav criticises "Marrism" in the Pravda. This is the beginning of a debate on the so-called Japhetic language family, a debate which rages until June 20th, when Stalin himself sides with the critics. 1973: Publication of Roger Brown's classic "The First Language: The Early Stages", in which the language acquisition of Adam, Eve, and Sarah is studied.
May 10	1839: For the first time, the Bible becomes available in Hawaiian. 1917: Birthday of phonetician Alvin Liberman. 1986: The Australian language Jiwarli becomes extinct as its last native speaker, Jack Butler, dies at the age of 85.
May 11	2001: Armenia signs the European minority language convention.
May 12	1891: Otto Jespersen defends his Ph. D. thesis Studier over engelske kasus. 1906: "Great name changing day" – 24 800 Finns switch from Swedish to Finnish-sounding surnames. 1948: Andrew Booth's computer intended for machine translation experiments becomes operational.
May 13	1876: Ferdinand de Saussure joins the Société Linguistique de Paris. 1942: Franz Boas gives his last public lecture. 2000: First international conference on Kurdish linguistics kicks off at the University of Kiel, Germany.
May 14	Sign Language Day in Sweden, comemmorating the official recognition of Swedish Sign by the parliament in 1981. 1978: The replacement of English he and she with an epicene 3^rd person pronoun is much discusssed among the pages of the New York Times. Most noteworthy of today's contributions is that Lawrence Ross of Huntington, New York, who offers sap (from homo sapiens).
May 15	1848: Carl Wernicke – who later identifies "Wernicke's area", an important language centre of the brain – is born.
May 16	1998: The first American "Linguistic Olympics" takes place in Eugene, Oregon. The competition had been held in Russia since 1965.
May 17	1996: Death of American linguist Mary Haas.
May 18	1842: At 1 p. m. , in the rooms of the Statistical Society, 4 St. Martin's Place, London, the Philological Socity is founded 'for the investigation of the Structure, the Affinities, and the History of Languages; and the Philological Illustration of the Classical Writers of Greece and Rome'. 2001: The ”Plain language group”; appointed by the Swedish government, arranges a conference on the theme ”Plain Language Opens Sweden”.
May 19	1859: Paul "Broca's area" Broca holds his first meeting together with the Société d'Anthropologie which he has just founded. 1965: Publication of Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.
May 20	1980: Francophone Québec votes in favour of remaining a Canadian province. Eliza Doolittle Day, encourages "proper use" of language [CHECK] 1999: Opening of the first international conference on language teacher education at the University of Minnesota.
May 21	1994: Solemn inauguration of the monument to the Estonian language in Kadrina, Estonia. 2002: Joseph Mesa is convicted for the murder of two of his classmates. He is sentences despite his plea of insanity, according to which the murders were inspired by voices in his head. Since Mesa is deaf, however, these were not literally speaking voices, but glove-clad hands urging him to kill – in American Sign.
May 22	1992: Chomsky's mentor Zellig Harris dies.
May 23	1947: Linguist Bernard Comrie is born in Sunderland, England. 1999: Closing of the first international conference on language teacher education at the University of Minnesota. 2002: The Australian language Gagadu vanishes as its last speaker Big Bill Neidjie draws his last breath.
May 24	The Day of Slavic Writing is a national holiday in Bulgaria, to commemorate the invention of St. Cyril and St. Method in the 9^th century. 1873: In a talk before the Société Linguistique de Paris, A. Dufriche-Desgenettes makes the first documented use of the word phonème. 1917: A Russian orthography reform is officially accepted by a Special Meeting of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. 1936: At the Shantok Burial Ground in Uncasville, Connecticut, a monument is erected to Fidelia Fielding (1827-1908), the last speaker of Pequot-Mohegan.
May 25	1917: The town of Minsk in Belarus gives official recognitions to Yiddish. The special status of Yiddish in the republic is later manifested in the coat-of-arms, which bears the inscription "Workers of the world, unite" in Russian, Belarussian, Polish and Yiddish. 1925: Otto Jespersen gives his last lecture at the university of Copenhagen. 1948: Andrew Booth's computer intended for machine translation experiments is demonstrated to representatives of the Rockefeller foundation, which finances the project.
May 26	1828: The wolf-child Kaspar Hauser is discovered in Nuremberg, Germany. 1998: In a manifestation called the "National Sorry Day", Australia offers an apology to the Aboriginal population for the policy (lasting into the early 1970's) of removing children from Aboriginal families to Anglophone households. Among numerous other disastrous outcomes, this policy was responsible for the extinction of many Aboriginal languages.
May 27	1879: Birth of Karl Bühler, the German psychologist to present his "Organon" model of language in 1934.
May 28	1863: At Antoine d'Abbadie's place, messieurs de Cliarencey, d'Abbadie, Cliodzko and Selicebel agree to found a linguistic society. This later develops into the famous Sociéte de Linguistique de Paris. 1915: Birth of Joseph Greenberg in Brooklyn, New York. 1945: One of the last strongholds of number inflexion in the Swedish verbal system falls, as the major Swedish news agency Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå bigins using singular forms even with plural subjects.
May 29	1996: In a speech in Quimper, Brittany, French president Jacques Chirac admits that France might sign thet European charter on miority languages.
May 30
May 31	2001: A new Bolivian penal law authorises the use of an interpreter in cases where the defendant does not speak Spanish.
June 1	1889: Birth of Charles Kay Ogden, who proposed "Basic English" as a new international lingua franca. 1981: The first English language daily newspaper in the People's Republic of China, the China Daily, begins publication. 1987: Stanford University Press published Joseph Greenberg's controversial Language in the Americas. 1991: Geoffrey Pullum's entertaining and oft-cited The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language is published by the University of Chicago Press. 1993: Within the Lojban movement, a language reform known as The Great Rafsi Reallocation goes into effect. 1999: The Nepalese Surpreme Court rules the use of minority languages in the country's administration "non-constitutional and illegal". 2001: Johanna Rubba is awarded Tenure and promoted to Associate Professor at the English Department of California Polytechnic State University. 2002: For the first time since its inception in 1996, the Terralingua organisation, promotor of linguistic and biological diversity, gets an office, located in Washington.
June 2	1989: The French government issues a decree on the creation of the Conseil supérieur de la langue française.
June 3	1756: Death of the first first known female Anglicist, Elizabeth Elstob, author of Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue. 1760: Birth of French linguist Pierre Étienne (a. k. a. Peter Stephen) Duponceau, to whom we owe the term "polysynthetic".
June 4	1992: A pregnant British woman named Paula Gilfoyle is found hanging in the garage of her home in Upton. On the basis of linguistic evidence, her husband is found guilty of having dictated the suicide note (undoubtedly in her own handwriting) to her. The case remains deeply controversial, though.
June 5	1956: Sri Lanka's Official Language Act declares Sinhala the only official language. This situation prevails until 1987, when Tamil is recognised as co-official.
June 6	1799: Russian national poet Alexander Pushkin is born in Moscow. He is commonly acknowledged to have given the Russian standard language its current form. 1829: The last known speaker of Beothuk, a woman named Shanawdithit succumbs to tuberculosis in St. John's, Newfoundland.
June 7	This is the memorial day of St. Gotteschalk, the official patron saint of linguists. After having served as a translator in missionary work, he was murdered on June 7, 1066 in Pomerania. 1894: William Dwight Whitney dies in New Haven, Connecticut. 1934: Wycliffe Bible Translators begins its first linguistics course at Sulphur Springs, Arkansas. 1951: Birthday of sociolinguist Deborah Tannen. 1952: As a result of having been is convicted of homosexuality, Alan Turing commits suicide.
June 8	1889: Ferdinand de Saussure gives a lecture on Lithuanian accent before the Société Linguistique de Paris. 2000: The European Union Education Council adopts the decision of the Committee of Ministers to officially proclaim 2001 the "European year of languages". 2002: A Japanese 32-year-old turns himself in to the police after having killed another person with his umbrella. The reason was that the victim had not used the correct appropriate honorifics.
June 9	1912: Birth of Kenneth Lee Pike, the father of tagmemics. 1977: The new "Guidelines for Nonsexist Language in APA Journals" is published in The American Psychologist by the American Psycological Association. 2004: In a historic liberalisation move, Turkish state television makes its first broadcast in Kurdish, a language until recently banned not only from the media, but from all public life.
June 10	1898: The Dalmatian language becomes extinct as its last speaker Tuone Udaina (a. k. a. Antonio Udina) passes away at around 6:30 p. m. after having stepped on a land mine. Fortunately, Udaina had acted as an informant prior to his death, although he certainly was not an ideal one – he was not a native speaker, had not used the language for 20 years, and was deaf and toothless.
June 11
June 12	1887: Czech Indo-Europeanist Julius Pokorny – mainly known for his voluminous etymological research – is born in Prague. 1997: Dragon Systems launches a new computer programme for speech-recognition, which has a vocabulary of 30 000 words.
June 13	1972: Georg von Békésy, Hungarian-born auditory scientist, passes away. 1996: A new Cambridge textbook, this time Sociolinguistics by Richard Hudson, is published.
June 14	1601: The Catholic church publicly burns Hebrew books and manuscripts in Rome. 2001: A new online edition of the Oxford English Dictionary becomes the first edition to contain important amounts of current slang terms.
June 15	1983: The local government of Galicia in Spain proclaims Galician the official language of the region.
June 16	1783: Lexicographer Samuel Johnson is hit by a stroke that leads to a aphatic condition that temporarily renders him unable to handle language. Fortunately, he quickly recovers. 1902: Bertrand Russell writes to Gottlob Frege for the first time. 1911: The Concise Oxford English Dictionary is published. 1976: After a decision that half of the school subjects be taught in Afrikaans, 15 000 South African students riot in what has become known as the Sowto Uprising. Nationwide, the riot caused hundreds of casualties. Since 1996, the day is celebrated as the South African Youth day. 1998: In a BBC poll, 63% of the (presumably mostly British) respondents would favour the use of English as the one and only official language of the European union.
June 17	1890: John Rupert Firth, British phonetician and originator of the "London school of linguistics", is born in Yorkshire. 1996: SIL field linguist Raymond Rising is released from captivity in Colombia, where a guerilla movement had held him hostage for more than two years.
June 18	1928: The “Terry expedition” sets out to chart some little-known territories in Australia. Among other things, it produces the first known documentation of the Warlpiri language. 1936: Mangei Gomango has a vision of an orthography, the Sorang Sompeng, for Sora, a Munda language of India. His orthography is still in use today. 1977: Marc Okrand, later of Klingon fame, defends his Ph. D. thesis "Mutsun Grammar" at the University of California at Berkeley. The now extinct Mutsun was a variety of Costanoan once spoken just south of San Fransico 1952: Organised by pioneer Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, the first ever conference on machine translation kicks off at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1996: Rwanda adopts English as its third official language. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a country which has not been under Anglophone occupation does so.
June 19	1897: Irish estate manager Charles Cunningham Boycott is subject to protests from his tenants, and the incident establishes Boycott's family name as a new noun in the English language.
June 20	1913: Commenting on their own attempts to simplify John Wesley Powell's classification of American Indian langauges, Alfred Kroeber writes to Edward Sapir that "we have finally got Powell's old fifty-eight families on the run, and the farther we can drive them into a heap, the more fun and profit" 1938: Andorra decides that official advertising must be in Catalan. 1950: In Pravda, Stalin publishes a piece which dissmisses pretty much everything that Nikolai Iakovlevich Marr – until then the guru of Soviet linguistics – had ever said. As the column was graphically indistinguishable from other entries on the same page, it took an attentive reader to realise that what was claimed was the new Truth. 1961: Samuel Kirk and James McCarthy publish an experimental edition of the "Illinois Test of Psycholinguistic Abilities", used in diagnosing learning disabilities.
June 21	1966: The chimpanzee Washoe is adopted by Allen and Beatrice Gardner, and begins her training in American Sign Language at the University of Nevada at Reno.
June 22	1767: Wilhelm Humboldt is born in Potsdam, Prussia. 1902: Gottlob Frege replies to Bertrand Russell's letter, which he has just received. 1993: Slovakia issues a stamp commemorating "150 Years of the Slovak Language". 1994: At the Annual Meeting of the International Society of Humor Studies in Ithaca, New York, the first ever symposium on "the linguistics of humor" takes place.
June 23	1916: Birth of historical linguist Winfred Lehmann in Surprise, Nebraska. 1940: Semanticist Barbara Partee is born in Englewood, New Jersey
June 24	1961: Following increasing tension between its two main language groups, Belgium abolishes its linguistic census.
June 25	1938: Russian structuralist Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy, one of the founders of the Prague school goes to meet his maker. 1992: The International Association for Chinese Linguistics is founded in Singapore. 1994: The first Federation of Teachers of Languages in Latin America (FUPL) is founded, and the event is declared to be of national interest by the president of Uruguay. 1998: Indonesian official news agency Antara reports that two new languages – Vahudate and Aukedate – have been "discovered" in the Mamberamo river area of Irian Jaya.
June 26	1992: The local parlament of Corsica adopts a motion giving official status to the local language. This decision is not approved by the French government.
June 27	1915: Germany annexes the village of Moresnet in present-day Belgium, and thereby puts an end to the only state with Esperanto as its official language.
June 28	1824: Birth of Paul Broca in Sainte-Foy-la-Grande in Dordogne (France), discoverer of one of the most important language centres in the brain. 1996: The Ukrainian parliament adopts a new constitution, which declares Ukrainian as the only state language. 1999: The IPA releases its Handbook of the International Phonetic Association: A Guide to the Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
June 29	1919: Death of Karl Brugmann, German neogrammarian and comparative linguist.
June 30	1921: The Californian language Tataviam becomes extinct. 1998: British teenager Derek Bentley, convicted and hanged for killing a policeman in 1952, is posthumously pardoned, thanks to evidence from forensic linguistics.
July 1	1912: Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr becomes an ordinary academy member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1966: The department of linguistics at the University of California at Los Angeles is officially founded. 1989: Ken Hale's grant to study Misumalpan languages expires. 1990: Harvard University Press publishes Phil Leiberman's The Biology and Evolution of Language. 1996: New Zealand historical linguist Lyle Campbell begins a twelve-day visit at the Australian Linguistic Institute in Canberra. 1997: Hong Kong University gets a linguistics department. 1999: The Mauritius Broadcasting Corporation begins the first regular televisied news broadcast in Creole, the only language understood by the entire population.
July 2	1907: Ferdinand de Saussure becomes professor of linguistics at the Université de Genève. 1949: Spanish Vasconist Koldo (Luís) Mitxelena marries Matilde de Ilarduya.
July 3	1997: Slovenia signs the European charter on regional or minority languages. 2004: This year's Finnish dialect speaking chamionship is held in Merikarvia.
July 4	1992: Death of David Abercrombie, a major figure in British phonetics.
July 5	1726: Peter, the Wild Boy of Hanover, is baptised in London. 1998: A new language law is passed in Algeria, emphasising Arabic as the country's sole official language. 2004: In his farewell address as the chairman of the African Union, Mozambican president creates quite a fuss by addressing the meeting in Swahili. Despite Swahili being the most widely understood language African language, the official languages of the African Union are Arabic, French, English and Portuguese.
July 6	1999: The language technology enterprise Ectaco releases an English-Yiddish Electronic Dictionary.
July 7	1969: Canada's House of Commons approves equality of French-English language across the country. 1971: Famous Californian "wolf-child" Genie moves in with her teacher, Jane Butler.
July 8	1840: German linguist August Leskien is born.
July 9	1858: Franz Boas is born in Germany. 2001: Idan Landau, Israeli syntactician and captain of the reserve who is imprisoned for 14 days for refusal to serve in the occupied territories.
July 10	1952: Michael Ventris announces his conclusion that the thitherto mysterious Linear B inscriptions represent a form of Greek.
July 11
July 12	1922: The English architecht and decipherer of the Linear B writing, Michael Ventris, is born. 1932: Kemal Atatürk founds the Turkish Linguistic Society.
July 13	1900: A French government decree "accepts the use of pas alone [i. e. without an accompanying ne] as the general sentence negator". 1933: Birth of Beatrice Tugenhat Gardner, who, along with Allen Gardner, tought American Sign Language to a the chimpanzee Wasshoe.
July 14	1937: Sino-Tibetanist James Matisoff is born in Boston.
July 15	1930: Philosopher/linguist Jacques Derrida, is born in el Biar, Algeria. 1949: Warren Weaver issues a memorandum in 200 copies on the progress in machine translation made by Andrew Booth. This is the first time that the possibilities of machine translation reaches anyone outside the innermost circles of this pioneer project.
July 16	1860: Otto Jespersen, Danish linguist and anglicist, and inventor of the artificial language Novial, is born.
July 17	1996: At a meeting in Lisbon, the Lusophone union Comunidade dos Países de Língua Portuguesa (C. P. L. P.) is formed by seven Portuguese-speaking nations.
July 18	1889: On a field trip to Mongolia, Nikolay Yadrincev discovers rock carvings which later prove to be in a 8^th century Turkic language. The discovery so-called Orkhon inscriptions mark the start of scientifc comparative Turcology. 1906: American linguist and politician Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa is born. 1966: Belgium passes a law on the use of languages in national administration. 1982: Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson deceases in Boston.
July 19	1799: The Rosetta Stone, an essential key to the decipherment of the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, is discovered near the Nile.
July 20	1794: The revolutionary government declares that official announcements in newly constituted French republic must be made in French, and in no other langauge. The punishment for not abiding the law is six months of imprisonment. 1800: Victor the wolf-child is taken to a deaf school in Paris. 1913: Edward Sapir writes in a letter to Paul Radin that he now "seriously believe[s] that Wishosk [=Wiyot] and Yurok are related to Algonkin". 1946: In New York, Andrew Booth meets Warren Weaver for the first time. Although they do not discuss the subject on this particular day, theircontacts is later to lead to the first relatively functional machine translation systems. 1967: In Mexico City, Morris Swadesh passes away. 1994: The parliament of Tajikistan rejects a proposal to grant co-official status to Russian.
July 21	1877: Ferdinand de Saussure gives a lecture on Indo-European vowels before the Société Linguistique de Paris. 1890: The First Annual Convention of North American Volapükists is announced. 1918: Upheaval of the Russian ban on Hebrew and Yiddish periodicals. 2001: Israeli syntactician and captain of the reserve, Idan Landau, again becomes a free man, after having been imprisoned as a result of his refusal to serve in the occupied territories.
July 22	Spooner's Day is said to be celebrated on this day, I'm just not sure by whom. In any case, it commemorates the birth of Reverend William Archibald Spooner, the king of slips-of-the-tongue. 1922: Nikolay Trubetskoy writes a letter to Antoine Meillet about palatalisation in proto-Slavic. 1933: The French-Armenian inventor Georges Artsrouni patents a translation machine. 1936: Chomsky's archenemy to be, behaviourist Burrhus Frederic Skinner first meets his future wife. 1960: Mouton offers to publish Chomsky's The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory, but the negociations come to nothing.
July 23	1833: Jean-François Sudre, inventor of the artificial language Solrésol, presents his creation to the press and to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts 1999: The BBC reports that in a survey of more than 100 writers, actors and journalists, British Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott wins the title "The public figure who most mangles the English language". The poll respondents consider current English "riddled with misplaced apostrophes, split infinitives, cliches, American forms and political correctness".
July 24	1986: In Mali, a decision is taken to establish the Direction nationale de l'alphabétisation fonctionnelle et de la linguistique appliquée. Its goal is to make people literate in the mother tongues instead of – as has hitherto been the case – in French.
July 25	1799: Three hunters come across the wolf-child Victor in a forest in southern France. They capture him, but he later manages to escape. Victor is one of the most well-known cases of a child growing up deprived of langauge.
July 26	1869: In England, the Disestablishment Bill was passed, officially dissolving the Church of Ireland. Organized opposition to this legislation coined a word widely believed to be the longest in the English language: antidisestablishmentarianism. 1887: The first Esperanto textbook is released on this date. 1941: Benjamin Lee Whorf, who formulated the strong version of the notorious Sapir-Whorf hypothesis dies in Connecticut. 1999: The first issue of Esperanto Studies is published by Bambu Publications in Bulgaria.
July 27	2001: The Gaelic League of Ohio inaugurates its local Irish Language Weekend. 2001: At his 80^th birthday, Eugenio Coseriu is awarded the Gran Cruz de Alfonso X el Sabio, the highest Spanish cultural award.
July 28	1970: Geoff Pullum is awarded a Certificate of Proficiency in the Phonetics of English at the University College London.
July 29	1987: Sri Lanka grants co-official status to Tamil.
July 30	1905: Ludwig Zamenhof, creator of Esperanto, enjoys a lunch in the Eiffel tower.
July 31	1896: A journalist of the Turkish newspaper Terakki writes an article in which he suggests that profane writing be in Latin, rather than Arabic script.
August 1	Beginning this day, the Welsh celebrate their one-week Welsh language festival called "National Eisteddfod". National alphabet day in Azerbaijan, commemorating the replacement of cyrillic with Latin script in 2001. 1996: Merrit Ruhlen's opus on Proto-World, The Origin of Language is published. 1998: Introduction of the German spelling reform. 1999: The Chung-Yuan Christian University of Taiwan establishes a Department of Applied Linguistics and Language Studies.
August 2	1884: In the The Critic, the word thon is proposed as a gender-neutral pronoun to replace the he and she of English. 1894: The Saussures are blessed with a boy child. The son, named Raymond, later becomes a renowned psychoanalyst.
August 3	1787: Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Ferdinand's great-grandfather, ascends Europe's highest mountain, the Mont-Blanc. 2002: The Turkish parliament votes in favour of an upheaval of the ban on the Kurdish language.
August 4	1994: France passes the much criticised so-called Loi Toubon, which regulates the use of foreign languages in France.
August 5	1813: Ivar Aasen, the creator of Nynorsk, is born in Ørsta. 1890: James Edwin Danelson sends out a circular regarding the formation of a Volapük club in New York.
August 6	2002: In a unanimous city council vote on, the city of Moncton in New Brunswick, declares itself Canada’s first officially bilingual city.
August 7	1973: Ugandan dictator Idi Amin proclaims Swahili as the "national language" of his country. 2001: The Japanese company Takara releases a device called "Bowlingual", which is said to translate dogspeak into human languages. Attached to the dog's collar, Bowlingual analyses the dog's barks and growls and delivers them to the owner clad in Japanese or English words.
August 8
August 9	1896: Birth of Swiss child language investigator Jean Piaget. 1928: Turkish leader Kemal Atatürk announces his decision to switch from Arabic to Latin script. 1940: Death of Rudolf Thurneysen, one of the first to apply the newly established principles of historical linguistics to Celtic languages.
August 10	1997: Beginning of the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Düsseldorf.
August 11	1628: Pidgin Delaware is attested for the first time, as the Dutch minister Jonas Michaëlius writes a letter from New Netherlands (now New York), saying that the natives seem to address Europeans in a reduced version of their own language.
August 12	2002: Ectaco, Inc. launches an English-Albanian bidirectional dictionary for use with the handheld Palm computers.
August 13	Since 1955, this day marks the beginning of the Philippine Linggo ng Wika, or National Language Week. 1908: At the Hôtel Bergerhoff in the Neutral Territory of Morsenet in eastern Belgium, the statehood of Amikejo, the world's first (and only) Esperanto-speaking country. 1971: Jane Butler's application to adopt the 14-year old language-deprived child Genie is rejected, and instead, she is turned over to David and Marilyn Rigler, her new foster parents. 1982: The Comparative Syntax Festival begins at the Universität Salzburg, Austria. 2003: Amerindianist Marianne Mithun becomes an honorary doctor at La Trobe University, Australia.
August 14	This is National Navajo Code Talkers Day in the United States, commemorating the Navajos who used their language as a weapon against the Japanese during World War 2. 2001: Ectaco, Inc. releases a speech translator. Weighing only 110 grams, the device is claimed to be able to translate spoken English into spoken French, Spanish or German.
August 15	1877: A letter from inventor Thomas Alva Edison to T.B.A. David, president of Pittsburgh's Central District and Printing Telegraph Company includes the first written attestation of the word hello. 1975: In the search for a gender-neutral pronoun to replace he and she, H. R. Lee of Virginia proposes se ([si]) in Forbes. 1981: Phonologist and Bantuist Larry Hyman gets 5000 U.S. Dollars to investigate the prosodic stucture of Luganda.
August 16	1800: At 10 p. m., Victor the wolof-child arrives at the deaf school in Paris.
August 17	1875: Death (in Cape Town) of Wilhelm Bleek, the "father of Bantu philology". 1987: At the 8th World Congress of Applied Linguistics in Sydney, Michael Halliday is honoured with a two volume festschrift, entitled "Language Topics".
August 18	1990: Death (of leukemia) of Burrhus Frederic Skinner, to whose work Chomsky's nativist theories was in part a reaction.
August 19	1922: Austrian-Australian linguist and polyglot Stephen Wurm is born. 1989: Opening of the IPA convention in Kiel. The association's centenniary is celebrated by a revision of the International Phonetic Alphabet. 2000: The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Hercegovina abolishes the constitutional articles declaring only Bosnian and Croatian official in the Federation and only Serbian in the Republika Srpska.
August 20	1935: SIL founder Kenneth Pike visits Mexico for the first time, together with his future wife.1977: The Voyager II is launched. In an attempt at extraterrestrial communication, the spacecraft contains recordings in several human languages, and a metal plate with pictograms on it.
August 21	1966: At an age of merely 32, nostratist figurehead Vladislav Illich-Svitych dies in an automobile accident. 2002: Bror Rexed, the man held responsible for the introduction of du (T-form) rather than ni (V-form) in Swedish, passes away at the age of 88.
August 22	1846: The first attestation of the word folklore appears in a review by Ambrose Merton (a.k.a. William John Thomas) in Athenaeum. The work reviewed is one of the folktale collections by the Grimm brothers. 1915: Ishi, the last speaker of Yahi, has to terminate work with linguist Edward Sapir, as his is hospitalised anew. 2001: The Michelin group of France receives WorldLingo's Multilingual Email Award. WorldLingo regularly tests various major companies' ability to reply to email sent in foreign languages, and Michelin managed to provide an answer in German in just one hour and 17 minutes. 2004: Christine Ohuruogu runs for Britain in the Athens Olympics. Being one of the world's fastest linguists, her 51-second dash gives her the fourth place in the women's 400m semi final.
August 23	1975: In the ongoing debate on epicene pronouns in English, Christine Elverson of Skokie, Illinois, in the Chicago Tribune suggests the forms ey, eir and em.
August 24	1983: In a letter to his former teachers Tom Wasow and Ivan Sag, Stanford linguistics graduate Chistopher Culy reports from Mali that Bambara might match the description of a context-free language. 1995: The Uzbek alphabet is revised. 2000: Oxford University Press publishes Daniel Nettle's and Suzanne Romaine's Vanishing Voices, a book on the earth's decreasing linguistic diversity.
August 25	1902: The first Arabic language daily newspaper of the United States begins publication in New York. 1997: The BBC reports that the characters of the popular children's show The Teletubbies are to use a more adult-like language after complaints that the childish speech of Tinky Winky, Laa Laa, Dipsy and Po might influence or deteriorate that of their viewers.
August 26	1977 : The provincial parlament of Quebec adopts bill 101, which makes French the only official language of the province.
August 27	1987: A wolf child, in this case a young girl raised by pigs, is reportedly encountered in China.
August 28	1922: The Department of Philippine Linguistics is founded at the University of the Philippines.in Quezon City. 1995: At the University of Cenderawasih in Jayapura, the first International Conference on New Guinea Languages and Linguistics is held.
August 29	Telugu Language Day is celebrated in the parts of India where Telugu is spoken. 1911: A speaker of Yana, later known as Ishi, is encountered in Oroville, California. Until this date, the tribe and the language had been belived to be extinct for several decades.
August 30	1800: Victor the wolf-child meets French minister of the interior, Lucien Bonaparte.
August 31	This is Limba Noastra (our language) day to Moldavians. Since 1989, it has been a national holiday to comemorate the reintroduction of the Latin script, which occurred in that year. August 31, 1989 was also the day when an amendment was added to the Moldavian constitution, recognising the identity between Moldavian and Romanian. The Romanian dialect spoken in Moldavia was proclaimed a language in its own right during the Soviet régime, in order to minimise demands for independence or retrocession.
September 1	1904: Helen Keller graduates cum laude from Radcliffe College at age 24. She is, so far as I know, the first tactile signer to do so. Her reading was done through Braille script, and the lectures were spelt into her hand by her teacher. After graduation, Keller became a well-known socialist agitator. 2000: Randy LaPolla gets a grant to compile a dictionary of the Chinese language Rawang.
September 2	1957: Together with George Suci and Percy Tannenbaum, Charles Osgood publishes The Measurement of Meaning, in which the connotative meanings of words are investigated. 1961: Ken Hale fills the position of assistant professor of anthropology and linguistics at the University of Illinois in Urbana. 1993: A new alphabet for the writing of Uzbek is adopted.
September 3	1874: German linguist Hans Conon von der Gabelentz dies. 1999: In Moncton, New Brunswick, 52 heads-of-state are welcomed by secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali to the Eighth Conference of the Francophonie, that is, the association of French-speaking countries. Or perhaps rather, more or less French-speaking countries, as Albania and Macedonia, desperate for international friends, are admitted as associate members.
September 4	1911: Ishi, the last speaker of Yahi, who has miraculously survived the extermination of the rest of his people is donated (sic) by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to the University of California Anthropology Museum. 1930: The first conference on Plains Indian Sign begins in Browning, Montana, attracting members from 14 different tribes. This is probably the world's first conference on a pidgin language.
September 5	1933: In Moscow, Petr Petrovich Smirnov-Troyanskii patents a translation machine.
September 6	1956: The English architecht and decipherer of the Linear B writing, Michael Ventris, dies in a car crash, at a mere 34 years of age.
September 7	1999: American band "The Magnetic Fields" releases the album 69 Love Songs, featuring the song Death of Ferdinand de Saussure. 2002: Eugenio Coseriu passes away in Tübingen, Germany, at an age of 81.
September 8	Declared by UNESCO as the International Literacy Day. 1914: In a letter to fellow lumper Edward Sapir, Alfred Kroeber wonders if there is no way of relating the extinct Beothuk to some existing family, so that the number of language families in North America can be reduced even further.
September 9	1945: The word "bug" gets a new application when U. S. Navy Lieutenant Grace Murray Hopper finds an actual bug stuck in a computer relay. 1975: English ethnographer Eric Thompson, who succeeded in deciphering the Maya hieroglyphs, dies.
September 10	1976: John Searle reviews Chomsky's Reflections on language in the Times Literary Supplement.
September 11	1956: Noam Chomsky gives an MIT symposium on information theory. It is considered by some as one of the milestones in cognitive science.
September 12	1869: Peter Mark Roget – after whom the Roget's Thesaurus is named – dies.
September 13	2004: Germany's Deutsche Welle adds one more language to the 30 already used for broadcasting – Klingon.
September 14	This is the birthday of to major figures of 19^th century German and international linguists. In 1769, Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt is born in Berlin, and in 1791, Franz Bopp is born in Mainz. 1999: The Nepalese capital Kathmandu is brought to a standstill by a strike provoked by a ban on the use of ethnic languages in official work.
September 15	1845: Birth of Henry Sweet, English linguist and phonetician. Sweet was the real-life model for Henry Higgins of Pygmalion. 1975: In what is surely one of the more facetious attempts to coin an epicene pronoun to replace he and she, Joel Weiss of Northbrook, Illinois blends he, or, she and it into h’orsh’it. 1999: The Turkish government's Directorate General of Press And Information reports that Turkish is now spoken by no less than 200 million people, making it the 7^th language of the world in terms of number of speakers. Most non-Turkish estimates puts the number at slightly more than 60 million, putting it on the 19^th place among the world's languages. 2002: Parlamentary elections in Sweden. The liberal party Folkpartiet gets a surprisingly high percentage of the votes, due to their proposal that knowledge of Swedish be a prerequistite for citizenship.
September 16	1940: Benjamin Lee Whorf submits his article "Linguistics as an exact science" to Technological Review. 1991: George Miller is awarded the National Medal of Science by American President George Bush Sr. 1994: On the Linguist List, Dan Everett announces the discovery of a hitherto undocumented speech sound, a voiceless dental stop articulated simultaneously with a voiceless bilabial trill. He had come across the sound in the Amazonian languages Wari' and Pirahã.
September 17	1774: Birth of Cardinal Mezzofanti, legendary Italian polyglot.
September 18	1954: Steven "The Language Instinct" Pinker is born in Montreal.
September 19	1921: Birth of psycholinguist Eric Lennenberg. 1997: During the International Congress of Esperantists in San Fransisco, mayor Willie Brown declares an “Esperanto Day” in the city. 2000: The Municipal Assembly of Maputo, capital of Mozambique, decides to tolerate the use of the city’s main vernacular, Ronga, both within the assembly itself, and in contacts with citizens. Hitherto, only Portuguese had been allowed.
September 20	1863: Death of Jakob Grimm. 1884: In The Current, Emma Carleton suggests ip as an epicene pronoun in place of he and she. 1916: German linguist August Leskien dies. 1954: The first Fortran programme is run. For a long time, Fortran then remains the dominant programming language.
September 21	1936: At an age of 70 years of age, Antoine Meillet turns his toes up in Châteaumeillant. 1938: In the Liverpool Echo, a Gregory Hynes proposes se, sim and sis as gender-neutral pronouns to replace he, she and their variants. Exactly half a century later, Eugene Wine of the Miami-Dade Community College in Florida suggests e, since other pronoun forms "have already been reduced to a single vowel sound".
September 22	1990: Steven Woodmore sets a new (though not uncontroversial) world record in speed talking. On the British TV show "Motor Mouth", he recites a 600-word piece from the 595-word "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in 56,01 seconds, yielding an average rate of 637,4 words per minute. [se korrigerande brev som jag fått från Woodmore]
September 23	1989: The not yet independet Kyrgyzstan declares Kirghiz its one and only official language.
September 24	2000: Basil "restricted code" Bernstein dies at the age of 76.
September 25
September 26	2001: As a part of the European year of languages, the European Union organises the European Day of Languages throughout its member states.
September 27	1790: Lexicographer Noah Webster is urged by his friend Daniel George to compile a dictionary. 1998: In a referendum, 56,4% of the voters in Schleswig-Holstein vote against the introduction of the suggested simplified German spelling.
September 28	1995: The Minimalist Program becomes available in paperback. 2001: Eric Plunkett is found dead at Gallaudet University in Washington, where he was a student. Upon his arrest, the murderer Joseph Mesa later blames his action on voices in his head. Since Mesa is deaf, however, these were not literally speaking voices, but glove-clad hands urging him to kill – in American Sign.
September 29	1693: The first first known female Anglicist, Elizabeth Elstob, later to write Rudiments of Grammar for the English-Saxon Tongue is born.
September 30	1920: In the wake of the First World War, Belgium abolishes the linguistic rights of its German-speaking minority. German regains its co-official status twelve years later.
October 1	1928: All Turkish authorities are required to conduct their business using Latin, rather than Arabic, script. 1953: Andhra Pradesh becomes the first Indian state to be formed on the basis of linguistic frontiers.
October 2
October 3	2001: Media all over the world report the finding of the "language gene". The truth behind the claim is that a group of British scientists under the leadership of Anthony Monaco had found that a gene called FOXP2 causes certain verbal dysfunctions when mutated.
October 4	1957: The first man-made satellite is launched. For two reasons, this event is often mentioned in linguistics textbooks. First, overnight, it introduced the word Sputnik in scores of languages. This word is therefore mentioned as one of the rare examples where the appearance of a certain word can be dated. On October 3, few people had heard it, the next day it was part of the vocabulary of most westerners. Secondly, the shock experienced by Americans when realising that other nations were as technologically advanced as theirs is often said to have provided the real impetus for the start of computational linguistics and machine translation – few American scientists knew any Russian, and could thus not keep themselves updated on the developments in Soviet research. 2001: Turkey announces constitutional changes, which, among other things, will lead to the an end of the ban on Kurdish language usage in media.
October 5	2000: The Swedish government appoints a commision intended to investigate the possibilities of protecting the Swedish language against the onslaught of English.
October 6	1999: The governor of Mardin state, Turkey, issues an official memo insisting that teaching of the Syriac language in the local monasteries' boarding facilities be put to an end, since they violate Turkish law.
October 7	1992: Tevfik Esenç, the last speaker of Ubykh, dies in Istanbul. Ubykh is known mainly for its aweinspiring phoneme system, consisting of two vowels and about 80 consonants. As i happens, Esenç died on the very same day that linguistic fieldworker Ole Stig Andersen arrived in order to interview him. As it happens, Esenç died on the very same day that linguistic fieldworker Ole Stig Andersen arrived in order to interview him.
October 8	1868: Preaching in Salt Lake City, Mormon leader Brigham Young proposes a new phonetic alphabet to be used among his followrs. The alphabet is deviced, but little used, and later abandoned. 1992: Peter Bakker of Amsterdam defends his thesis on Michif, the unique French-Cree mixed language of USA and Canada. 1994: Swedish phonetician and romanist Bertil Malmberg dies at the age of 81. 2001: Death of Ken Hale.
October 9	The launching of the Hankul alphabet in 1446 is comemmorated in Korea as the "Korean Alphabet Day" – until recently a national public holiday. 1940: Nazi representative Rudolf Schlichting writes home to Germany from occupied France, suggesting that the allegedly positive Breton attitude vis-à-vis Germans could be exploited in the eradication of their language. "In one generation, Brittany will be a predominately German country", Schlichting notes with obvious satisfaction.
October 10	1922: The British authorities in Palestine define the three official languages of the League of Nations mandate as Arabic, Hebrew and English.
October 11	1896: Russian-American linguist Roman Jakobson is born in Moscow. 2002: Two members of the Centre parti proposes that the Swedish government includes Swedish Sign among the country's officially recognised minority languages.
October 12	1967: Noam Chomsky publishes a "call to resist illegitimate authority" in the New York Review of Books. It is signed by thousands. The demonstrations following finally lead to Chomsky's arrest.
October 13	1807: German linguist Hans Conon von der Gabelentz is born. 1881: The Hebrew language is officially revived as Eliezer Ben-Yehuda and his friends agree to only use Hebrew in their conversations. 1971: Susan Curtiss notes that Genie for the first time really reacts to the stories that are being read to her.
October 14	In British Columbia, Canada, this is ”Aboriginal Language Day”.
October 15	1997: The Crimean parliament votes to make Russian the peninsula's official language in place of Ukrainian. 56 of the parliament's 96 deputies approved the motion and four voted against.
October 16	1913: George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with a phonetician as one of the leading characters is premiered in Vienna. Only the year after does it hit a London stage. 1997: Release of Steven Pinker's How the Mind works. 2000: The band Jega (actually a pseudonym for Dylan Nathan), which plays instrumental electronic music, releases the album Geometry, which is remarkable for containing a song called Syntax Tree.
October 17	1920: The Indian wolf-children Amala and Kamala are discovered by a reverend Singh. 1979: American creolist David DeCamp dies, at a mere 52 years of age.
October 18	1994: Geoff Pullum joins the Editorial Board for Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics. 1994: The film Secret of the Wild Child, a documentary on Genie and Victor, two of the best documented cases of first language deprivation is aired in the USA on the PBS network.
October 19	1983: A milestone in linguistic oppression: Turkey adopts law no. 2932 on "publishing in other languages than Turkish". Not surprisingly, such publishing is declared strictly forbidden. More amazingly, its third article states that "The native tongue of Turkish citizens is Turkish" and that speaking any other language natively is illegal!
October 20
October 21	1989: An amendment to the constitution of Uzbekistan makes Uzbek the only official language.
October 22	1793: The city of Strasbourg orders the burning of all Hebrew literature. 1978: In the Unites States, the Court Interpreters Act is passed. Hereby, even long-time citizens of the country are allowed a certified interpreter if necessary.
October 23	1867: German linguist and Sanskritist Franz Bopp dies. 1909: Zellig Harris is born in Balta, Ukraine. 1980: Birth of Kanzi, the most talking ape there is.
October 24	2004: In collaboration with the Goetheinstitut, the Deutscher Sprachrat (German language council) decides that Habseligkeiten 'belongings' is the most beautiful German word among the thousands submitted.
October 25	1953: Danish linguist Holger Pedersen passes away.
October 26	Countries in which French-lexicon creoles are spoken celebrate the Jounen Kweyol Entenaysonnal (International Creole Day). 1492: The word "canoe" is attested for the first time in a European language (under the form "canoa") in the writings of no other than Christopher Columbus. 1789: Lexicographer Noah Webster marries miss Rebecca Greenleaf. 1925: David Premack is born. Among other things, he is known for having done language research with the chimpanzee Sarah. 1967: The Gardners deliver their first report on the chimpanzee Washoe's language acquisition progress to the Psychonomic Society. 1973: Ken Pike of the Summer Institute of Linguistics is awarded an honorary doctorate degree by the University of Chicago.
October 27	1995: In Washinton, the American National Zoo unveils its Orangutan Language Project, led by biologist Rob Shumaker.
October 28	1910: Saussure begins his third course in general linguistics at the university of Geneva. The notes from this course made by one of his students, Émile Constantin, are later edited and published by Roy Harris and Eisuke Komatsu. 1999: The domain name <pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.com>, including what is the longest word in many English dictionaries, is registred by a commercial company selling… domain names.
October 29
October 30
October 31	This day each year, the Conseil de la langue française must submit a report of its activities during the past year to the French government. 1996; Creation of Teilifís na Gaeilge, a TV channel broadcasting entirely in Irish.
November 1	1924: British sociolinguist Basil Bernstein is born. 1928: The Turkish parliament passes law 1353 on the use of the Latin alphabet in Turkey. This is actually but a recognition of the state of affairs – Turkish authorities have in fact used Latin script for more than a month. 1941: The American Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center begins teaching. The institute subsequently developed into the world’s largest foreign language institute. 1997: The most extensive description ever of the artificial language Lojban, The Complete Lojban Language, by John Woldemar Cowan is published by the Logical Language Group. 2004: The Michel Thomas Language Centre reports that – not unexpectedly – multilinguals are better paid than monolinguals. More interestingly, the report also suggests that people speaking more than one language are also perceived as sexier.
November 2	To the Croatians, this is the Anniversary of the Croatian Language, commemorating the orthography of Ivan Broz. 1949: Timothy Evans of London admits having murdered his wife and child, for which crime he was later hanged. On the basis of linguistic evidence, authorities later admitted that they had executed the wrong man, and in 1966, Evans was posthumously pardoned. 1950: Upon his death, George Bernard Shaw leaves a will which devotes money to the design and propagation of a new English spelling. Shaw – who was incidentally also born on this day – also has another linguistic connexion, in that he made Henry Higgins – the main character of his play Pygmalion – a phonetician. 1984: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy changes its editorial policies following advice by linguist Geoff Pullum. 2003: McDonald's demands that the word 'McJob' be removed from the 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. The word has found its way into the dictionary by being used for a low-paid, unqualified employment, but the hamburger gigant claims copyright on it, having registred McJobs as the name of its internal training programme.
November 3	1929: Death of Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, forerunner of the structuralist school, and accredited with having launched the term "phoneme". 1967 A young Háj Ross, clad in hippie-style clothing, protests against napalm production, a picture of which winds up in Time Magazine. 1998: Despite protests, English is made the the official language of government in Alaska. 2000: Death of Charles Hockett.
November 4	1970: At the age of 13, the most well-documented "wolf child", Genie, is discovered and taken care of in Arcadia, California. 1992: A new Lithuanian regulation states that place-names in the country should be in Lithuanian. 1994: First public preview of the Human Language Series trilogy – a film series on linguistics intended for laymen (but with a heavy Chomskyan bias!). This day, the first in the series, called Colorless Green Ideas, is shown at Boston University.
November 5	1891: Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, amateur linguist and prince of France dies. 1896: Lev Semenovich Vygotsky is born. Vygotsky left a remarkable imprint on the study of child langauge acquisition. 1995: The Kasbe (Luo) language of Cameroon falls into obsolescence, as its last speaker, an old man known as Bogon deceases.
November 6	Finland Swedish day: the Swedish-speaking minority in Finland celebrates itself.
November 7	1942 : An American president holds a speech in a language other than English for the first time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt addresses the Vichy troops in Northern Africa in French, urging them not to resist allied landings in Algeria and Morocco, and to instead take up arms against the Nazis. 1970: At a Pnomh Penh conference, it is suggested that the excellent linguistic rules of Khmer are far superior to those of any other human language.
November 8	1923: Welsh is broadcast for the first time by 5WA in Cardiff. 1962: The Belgian constitution defines four linguistic zones in the country: Dutch-speaking Flanders, French-speaking Walloonia, bilingual Brussels, and a tiny German-speaking area in the easternmost part of the country.
November 9	1883: Death of François Lenormant, the first (in quite some time, that is) to understand the Akkadian inscriptions from Mesopotamia. 1943: Lebanon launches a new constitution, in which both French and Arabic are recognised as co-official. The situation lasts for less than a month, when Arabic alone is declared the official language of the country. 1984: The debate on the need for a gender-neutral 3^sg pronoun in English continues. For once, a linguist makes his voice heard, as Steven Schaufele of the University of Illinois suggests borrowing of Old Norse (which has already contributed they and them to English) hann. 2003: Clinton Neakeahamuck "Lightning Foot" Wixon dies in Massachusetts. Wixon is thought to have been the last native speaker of Wampanoag.
November 10	1944: British-American historical linguist and Vasconist Larry Trask is born in upstate New York. 1993: While not being an EU member state, Norway promises that it shall give its Saami-speaking minority the same rights as minorities within the European Union. 2003: After demand from a certain fast food chain, the word 'McJob' is deleted from the web edition of Merriam-Webster's dictionary.
November 11	1866: Birth of Antoine Meillet. 2003: Several upset letters later, Merriam-Webster responds that 'McJob' will indeed be found in the next printed edition of its dictionary.
November 12	1912: The colonial authorities in Oubangui-Chari (now the Central African Republic) forbids the use of native languages in schools, since it is thought that this might interfere with their acquisition of French.
November 13	1952: Patricia Curran's dead body is found in The Glen, in Northern Ireland. A confession, which a linguistic analysis later found to be false, imprisons Iain Hay Gordon for 48 years, until he is found innocent in 2000. 1991: The new Ukrainian citizen law makes knowledge of Ukrainian a prerequisite of citizenship.
November 14	1993: Field linguist Charles Watson is kidnapped by the Islamic Abu Sayyaf guerilla on the Philippine island of Pangutaran. 1998: Congo-Kinshasa presents a suggested new constitution, in which not only French, but also English, is recognised as an official language. 2002: Despite its unwillingness to include Swedish Sign among the country's officially recognised minority languages, the Swedish parliament today launches a new version of its web site, in which parts are translated into Sign.
November 15	1969: In Tampa, Florida, Janis Joplin is arrested and accused of having used vulgar and indecent language onstage.
November 16	1974: A puzzle for future Alien linguists to solve, a message containing information on mankind and the planet we inhabit is broadcast to the M13 star cluster, 50 000 lightyears from us.
November 17	1794: The revolutionary government of France decrees that all education in the republic be in French only – at least in theory. Recourse to local language is tolerated when necessary. 1985: Birth of Panbanisha, the equally language-apt sister of Kanzi the Bonobo. 1999: The UNESCO decides to make February 21^st the official "International Mother Language Day".
November 18	1988: Lithuanian is declared the only official language of the not yet independent Soviet Republic of Lithuania. 1997: Liechtenstein signs the European Charter on Regional And Minority Languages, but declares at the same time that the tiny duchy does not have any minority languages on its territory.
November 19	1992: Phonetician John Ohala is appointed honorary doctor by the University of Copenhagen. 1998: A new minority language is officially born in previously monolingual Portugal, as the president of the national assembly, António de Almeida Santos, signs a document recognising the status of Mirandese. 2002: The applicant countries participate in a debate in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, and for the first time in the history of the European Union, simultaneous interpreting is provided in 23 languages.
November 20	1629: In a letter to Pierre Mersenne, René Descartes describes an idea of his according to which all concepts should be assigned a number code. This would allow translation between languages even if two persons don't speak each other's language the writer's message, clad in numbers would allow the receiver to substitute for the number the lexical item in his own langauge. 1889: Ferdinand de Saussure takes a sabbatical from Sorbonne, and is replaced by Antoine Meillet. 1916: Birth of Charles Osgood, inventor of semantic differential technique.
November 21	1800: The Société des Observateurs de l'Homme releases its psychological verdict on Victor the wolf-child: "enfant idiot". 1846: In a letter to his colleagues, American anatomy professor Oliver Wendell Holmes becomes the first to use the word anæsthesia. 1918: Edward Sapir writes to convince Alfred Kroeber that Salish must be related to other languages of North America, although no suitable relative has been found as of yet. 1991: Closing of the fourth Sommet de la Francophonie in Paris, which was attended by 50 governments of more or (in many cases) less French-speaking countries.
November 22	2001: John McCarthy's book A Thematic Guide to Optimality Theory is published. 2002: At the NATO summit in Prague, the organisations other official language, French, is used for once. The reason is that the French names of the participating countries permits the unwanted guest, Ukrainian president Kuchma to be placed further away from the representatives of Britain and the USA, the countries most opposed to his participation.
November 23	1964: The Vatican abolishes Latin as the official language of Roman Catholic liturgy.
November 24	1916: Birth of Frank Mihalic, compiler of the first Tok Pisin dictionary. 1967: Alvin Liberman, Franklin Cooper, Donald Shankweiler and Michael Studdert-Kennedy publish their classic article "Perception of the Speech Code" in Psychological Review. 1982: Basque and Spanish are both recognised as "official" languages of the Basque country, while giving only the former the status of "proper language of the Basque country".
November 25	1842: The British Philological Society holds its first meeting. 1850: Birth of Eduard Sievers, German phonetician and philologist.
November 26	1857: Ferdinand de Saussure is born in Geneva. He is pretty much the father of modern linguistics, in case you didn't know. Not celebrating this is not an option.
November 27
November 28	1915: A disappointed Alfred Kroeber reports to Edward Sapir that he is unable to find any relationship between Zuñi and other American Indian languages. 1980: Tahitian is for the first time recognised as the official language (along with French) of French Polynesia.
November 29	1922: The British mandate authorities recognises Hebrew as the official language of the Jews in Palestine.
November 30	1950: Abraham Kaplan of the Rand Corporation in Santa Monica, California, completes a seminal study on the role of context in machine translation. 1976: A Mexican law bans the use of non-Spanish advertising in the capital area. 1991: Phil Resnik and five of his colleagues are granted American patent no. 5 267 345 for a "Speech recognition apparatus which predicts word classes from context and words from word classes". 2001: Linguistics enter the world of sports equipment manufacturing as Adidas in Pusan (South Korea) unveils what is claimed to be the fastest football ever made. The reason for its spectacular speed, the company declares, is its "syntactic surface".
December 1	1985: The Amazonian language Hixkaryana gets an extensive treatment in a book by Desmond Derbyshire which is published this day by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. 1998: Dutch and Flemish lexicographers publicly present the final and complete version of the Woerdeboek van de Nederlandse Taal, the biggest ever Dutch dictionary. It has taken a century and a half to produce.
December 2	1620: First English-language newspaper, Namloos, published in Amsterdam. [CHECK] 1906: Antoine Meillet becomes a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1999: The Swedish parliament gives five minority languages official recognition: Standard Finnish, Meänkieli Finnish, Saami, Romani and Yiddish.
December 3	1876: German linguist August Leskien becomes a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, as does Elias Lönnrot, standardiser of Finnish.. 1993: A new law is adopted by the Italian government, intended to protect the Ladino-speaking minority of the Trento province. 2002: The South African government announces that to facilitate things, each department should choose one of the eleven official languages as its one and only working language. Critics believe that this is a first step towards an English-only policy.
December 4	1893: German linguist Friedrich Karl Brugmann becomes a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1927: Birth of William Labov. 1991: Both Romania and Croatia each adopt a declaration on linguistic rights of their respective minorities.
December 5	1858: Louis-Lucien Bonaparte, amateur linguist and prince of France becomes an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1948: A church service interpreted into a signed language is for the first aired on television. It is the Channel 11 of WPIX-TV that broadcasts from St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church for the Deaf in Jamaica, Long Island. 1996: A new law passed by the Iranian parliament bans the use of non-Persian words and names in the country.
December 6	Declared "Plain English Day" by the "Plain English Network", a British group whose aim it is to improve communications from the federal government to the public. 1868: Death of August Schleicher, the man behind the Stammbaumtheorie. 1877: The first recording of a human voice is made, as Thomas Alva Edison recites 'Mary Had a Little Lamb' into his Phonograph. 1995: Press Secretary Mike McCurry in his White House Press Briefing discussing Congressional Budget Office estimates and assumptions uses a very long word indeed: Floccinaucinihilipilification.
December 7	1928: Birthday of no other than Noam Chomsky. 1993: The Philippine Islamic Abu Sayyaf guerilla releases field linguist Charles Watson in Manila. He had been kidnapped three weeks earlier on the island of Pangutaran.
December 8	1966: The first linguistics class in Bolivia is held at the Instituto Nacional de Estudios Lingüísticos in La Paz. 2001: Death of Frank Mihalic, compiler of the first Tok Pisin dictionary.
December 9	1853: German linguist and Sanskritist Franz Bopp becomes a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1986: The Swiss Canton of Fribourg decides that real estate ownership registers be in the language of the municipality concerned.
December 10	1929: Birth (in Brooklyn) of psycholinguist and language acquisitionist Lila Gleitman. 1996: A Unicode standard is proposed for writing Solrésol, one of the most eccentric artificial languages there are. 1999: The University of Utrecht hosts the 10^th meeting of the Association For Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands.
December 11	1990: A resolution of the European Parlament establishes the status of the Community languages and Catalan. 1997: Death of American child language acquisitionist Roger Brown.
December 12	1857: German linguist August Schleicher becomes a Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1890: Logician and semanticist Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, also known as the inventor of Categorial Grammar, is born in Poland. 1913: First official use of Hebrew as a language of instruction in Palestinian schools. 1996: A new textbook in intonational phonology, written by Robert Ladd, is published by Cambridge University Press.
December 13	1897: Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Hans Conon von der Gabelentz become Corresponding Members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1949: The Public Health and Local Government Act of Northern Ireland forbids street signs in Irish. 1989: The first ever (according to the choir) concert sung in sign language is performed at the Gwyn Town Hall in West Glamorgan, Wales.
December 14	1921: Birth of James Deese, author of Psycholinguistics (1970). 1951: The Norwegian parliament decides to create a Norwegian Language Council. 1960: John Rupert Firth, British phonetician and originator of the "London school of linguistics", dies in Sussex.
December 15	Esperantists all over the world celibrate in memory of Ludwig Zamenhof, the creator of Esperanto, born in 1859. 1893: Danish linguist Vilhelm Thomsen announces that he has managed to decipher the Orkhon incsriptions, making it the oldest known Turkic text fragment. 1990: Inauguration of the "Linguist List".
December 16	1843: Italian cardinal and polyglot Guiseppe Gaspare Mezzofanti becomes an honorary member of the Russian Academy of Sciences. 1999: In Andorra promulgates the Law on the organisation of the usage of the Official Language, that is, Catalan. 2003: Joseph Mesa is arrested for two murders. He pleads insanity, blaming the murders on voices in his head. Since Mesa is deaf, however, these were not literally speaking voices, but glove-clad hands urging him to kill – in American Sign.
December 17	1832: After a brief exposure to one of the languages of Tierra del Fuego, Charles Darwin notes in his diary that it "barely merits classification as an articulated language". 1962: A new constitution of Monaco declares French as the official language of the duchy.
December 18	1987: The Perl programming language (developed by a linguist) is born. 1995: Andrew Spencer's Phonology is pulished by Blackwell. 1996: The school board of Oakland, California, votes to recognise "Ebonics" as a minority language. Thus begins a heated debate in the U. S. on whether African-American Vernacular English is a language in its own right, or simply a dialect of English. 2002: The "International Language Week" begins today. It occurs annually in the third week of December.
December 19	1927: Language usage in the Finnish parlament is fixed by law, and deputies are allowed to use either Finnish or Swedish.
December 20	1934: Death of Russian/Soviet linguist Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr. 2000: The British Court of Appeal overturnes the conviction of Iain Hay Gordon, sentenced for murder in 1953. A linguistic analysis suggested that his confession was fabricated by the police.
December 21	1940: The Société genevoise de linguistique is founded in Geneva, Saussure's birth town. 1996: Algeria's law n° 96-30 declares that all communication with authorities, companies and associations be in Arab, although the use of French or other languages is permitted in international contacts. 2000: Through the journal Nature, phoneticians of the Macquarie University of Australia let the world know that the speech of British queen Elizabeth II is less conservative than one might think. Over the past couple of decades, it has drawn closer to colloquial London English and further away from Received Pronunciation.
December 22	1845: The voice synthesiser Euphonium, is demonstrated to the public in Philadelphia. Using reeds, bellows and chambers to simulate the anatomy of the human speech organs, it is said to have been able to produce 16 syllables. 1942: Franz Boas dies. 2000: Vietnam announces that different 11 minority languages will be broadcast on National Television in addition to Vietnamese.
December 23	1790: Birth of Jean-François Champollion, who played a major role in the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
December 24	1949: Noam Chomsky marries Carol Schatz. 1974: Natively spoken Manx dies with its las speaker, Edward "Ned" Maddrell.
December 25	2000: Death of Willard Van Orman Quine.
December 26	1992: Niger adopts a new constitution, whose first article declares French the official language of the country. 1997: The reader Language and Gender, edited by Jennifer Coates, is released by Blackwell Publishers. 2001: The web site yourdictionary.com publishes its word-of-the-year list, including the "first ever suffix of the year", -stan (as in Afghanistan).
December 27	1942: Future cognitive grammarian Ron Langacker is born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. 1996: The Catalan government decides to support the use of Catalan in communities outside of Catalonia.
December 28	1937: President Quezon proclaims Tagalog the official language of the not yet independent Philippines [Kelz 2001, men han var inte hundra på att det var exakt det datumet]. 1989: Penguin publishes Colin Renfrew's "Archaeology and Language" in paperback.
December 29	1975: In Britain, the "Sex Discrimination and Equal Pay Acts" are passed. Among the results of this is the replacement of "firemen" by "fire fighters". 1995: Less than two years after its introduction, the new Karakalpak alphabet is revised. 1996: The civil war in Guatemala ends with a peace treaty which specifies, among other things, that 23 different indigenous languages be used in education along with Spanish.
December 30	1997: Yugoslav riot police are called upon to disperse students demanding Albanian language rights in Kosovo. 2001: The peace treaty in Afghanistan after the fall of the Talibans is delayed, because of problems with translating it into Farsi, the second biggest language of the country.
December 31	1898: English ethnographer Eric Thompson, who succeeded in deciphering the Maya hieroglyphs, is born. 1922: Birth of psycholinguist Wallace Lambert. 1975: France passes a new language law, the Loi du 31 décembre 1975 relative à l'emploi de la langue française. 1997: The United Bible Societies release their Scripture Language Report, in which it is stated that "at least a Portion of the Bible" has now been translated into 2 197 languages. 2000: SIL International President Emeritus Kenneth Lee Pike dies in Dallas.