why do intro to ling professors insist on not teaching us [ɹ]? why did i learn it as [r] when that’s a trill? We already had to learn that smorgasbord of vowels and diacritics, what difference would teaching us [ɹ] be?

The excuse that my professors often used was that [r] is quicker and easier to write than [ɹ]. I know it seems like a silly thing to worry about when they're the exact same symbol, just rotated on an axis - and if you're learning the whole IPA, there's a whole slew of other symbols that you have to get used to writing, too, so why not add this to the list? But if I'm completely honest, it was true for me. It saved some time for me when I was transcribing speech - especially running speech. And it works perfectly well for dialects or languages in which true [r] is absent. In the end, our professors were conscientious enough to teach us to make clear notes about when we were using [r] in place of [ɹ] when writing academic papers.

What is language? 8 myths about language and linguistics

What is language?

Language is an arbitrary, conventionalized association between a symbol and a meaning: there’s no necessary connection between the meaning of a word and how it’s represented in language (spoken, signed, or written). This idea comes from Saussure.

If there was a necessary connection between symbol and meaning, we would expect there to be only one possible language. Even for domains where there’s a closer link, such as onomatopoeia and the first words that a baby speaks (often mama, baba, papa, dada since these are easy to articulate), there are still differences cross-linguistically. And for other words, such as dog, chien, perro, languages differ even more.

The conventionalization criterion distinguishes language from other, non-linguistic forms of communication, such as body language and gesture. Two monolingual speakers of English are equally likely to produce similar or dissimilar gestures in describing a given situation (such as a ball rolling down a hill) as a monolingual speaker of English and a monolingual speaker of another spoken language, but two speakers of ASL will produce signs to describe that situation in a way that are systematically similar to each other and different from another sign language such as BSL. 

What is grammar?

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Breath of Life workshops are a great way of connecting people interested in revitalizing their language with archived linguistics materials. I’ve never been to one, but I’ve heard good things. 

From the website and Facebook page of the Oklahoma Breath of Life workshop: 

There’s also another Breath of Life workshop in California in June. Registration for both is in mid-April, and both have some financial aid available. A longer discussion of the 2012 Oklahoma workshop is in this paper by Coleen Fitzgerald and Mary Linn. For more general language documentation/revitalization, there’s also CoLang, which I have been to and throughly recommend. 

This is held at my school and headed in part by one of my favorite professors. If you have $500, it is 100% worth your time.

Preferred Gender Pronouns

Okay, I need help linguistics of tumblr. I am trying to write (or at least propose) a paper on the need/evolution/existence of preferred gender pronouns but cannot for the life of me find any other research on the topic. I know (or at least am quite sure) research exists, but where is it hiding? Would anyone happen to know where to look?

Have you tried ProQuest? It's an online database of theses, abstracts, and academic articles with an entire section dedicated to linguistics and language behavior. If you've ever performed searches on other sites like JSTOR, or even GoogleScholar, you should be able to navigate the site just fine. Last semester I wrote a research paper over what I thought was a fairly obscure topic, and this semester I'm doing something similar, and ProQuest has continually surprised me with how many useful articles it spat out at me. Now, I've only ever accessed ProQuest through my university, so I'm not sure if it's open to the general public - but on that note, I don't know if you're also university student, and if you are, if your university has the same access to certain research as mine. Let me know how it goes!