The Ideophone is an irregularly updated blog by Mark Dingemanse, Associate Professor in Language and Communication at Radboud University Nijmegen and PI of the Elementary Particles of Conversation project. I’ve been blogging since 2007.

You can reach me at `firstname.lastname@ru.nl`. If you’d like to learn more about my work, check out my publications (for the academic point of view) or my press page (for my mission to make linguistics accessible to popular audiences).

Fun fact. I started blogging as a fresh PhD candidate back in 2007. After a few months, my then-promotor called me into his office. He was worried I might be wasting my time and giving away my best ideas. Why was I not writing papers?

I did not stop; I was having too much fun. A year later I submitted one of my posts as a commentary and it was published in Science. He called me into his office again and conceded that blogging was not so useless after all.

Technical

This blog is built with open software. Like my personal site, it runs on WordPress, specifically a self-hosted WordPress Multisite installation, and it uses a customized child theme of Primer.

A subset of posts has DOIs as part of a service from Rogue Scholar, which takes care of long-term archiving and consistent metadata. Some people have even been citing posts on this blog, as can be seen in this Google Scholar profile.

For basic visitor statistics I use Matomo, an excellent open source alternative for Google Analytics. IP addresses are anonymized and data never leaves the server. For speed, I use Redis Object Cache and try to minimize the number of plugins I run.