Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Sometimes, a phrase seems to leap off the page and lodge into your mind, crisp and shining like a precious jewel. Other times, you're reading something and it just won't stick, your eyes wandering away no matter how hard you try. In this bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, who's a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the author of two general-audience linguistics books, Memory Speaks and Linguaphile. We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry...

Sometimes, you're talking with someone and you just seem to click. Other times, you just can't seem to get comfortable: they're standing too close or too far away for comfort, making too much or too little eye contact, touching or not touching you in a way that just doesn't quite feel right. But where do our senses of what feels comfortable in a conversation come from, and how can they be so different from each other? In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all...

What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who spoke it? In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about a crossover episode with Claire Aubin of This Guy Sucked! Lauren's Guy who Sucked is Daisy Bates, who did a lot of early 20th century work documenting over 100 Indigenous languages in western and southern Australia, while also directly adding to policies and narratives that continue to harm Aboriginal Australians to this day. We talk about Lauren's history with the original archive, how...

begonia: a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see ‘coral’ 3B), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet William, called also ‘gaiety’. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about trying to pin down definitions for colour terms with Kory Stamper, author of the new book TRUE COLOR! Kory is a lexicographer and was Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster for almost two decades. Her first book was Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, which we also loved, and now Kory is back with the fruits of her dive int...

In some communities, everyone regularly uses two languages or varieties according to the social situation, with one of them being more prestigious (and more likely to be written down) than the other. This particular kind of multilingualism is known as a diglossia. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about diglossia! We talk about why diglossia is the answer to so many questions Gretchen gets asked at parties, what "high" and "low" versions of a language have to do with mountains, where the four "classic" cases of diglossia come from (Arabic, Greek, Haitian, and Swiss...

Language is all around us. This sentence right here, is language! But between the raw experience of someone saying something and a linguistic analysis of what they've said, there are certain steps that make it easier for that analysis to happen, or to be understood or reproduced by others later. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how language becomes linguistic data. We talk about making recordings of language, transcribing real-life or recorded language, annotating recordings or transcriptions, archiving all those materials for future generations, restoring archival materials from decaying formats, and presenting this...

Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about surprise. We talk about surprise voice and context, writing surprise with punctuation marks and emoji, anti-surprise and sarcasm, and measuring the special little surprise blip (technically known as the n400) in your brain using an EEG machine. We also talk about grammatically indicating surprise, aka mirativity, and whether that's its own thing or part of a broader system related...

Before there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have long been fascinated by the quest to get a glimpse into what Proto-Indo-European must have looked like through careful comparisons between languages we do have records for, and this very old topic is still undergoing new discoveries. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the process of figuring out Proto-Indo-European with Dr. Danny Bate, public linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is..., and author of the book Why...

We often invoke the idea of language by showing the mouth or the hands. But the nose is important to both signed and spoken languages: it can be a resonating chamber that air can get shaped by, as well as a salient location for the hand to be in contact with. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the nose! We talk about why noses are so popular cross-linguistically (seriously, nasals are in 98% of the world's languages), what the nose looks like inside (it's bigger than you think!), and increasingly cursed methods that linguists...

Linguistic research has its highs and lows: from staging a traditional wedding to learn about ceremonial words to having your efforts to found a village school disrupted by civil war. Linguistic research can also be about highs and lows: in this case, looking at how high and low tones in Babanki words affect their meaning. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about the highs and lows of fieldwork in Babanki with Dr. Pius Akumbu, who's a linguist from Babanki, Cameroon, and a Director of Research in African Linguistics at CNRS in the LLACAN Lab (the Languages and...

When we try to represent languages on a map, it's common to assign each language a zone or a point which represents some idea of where it's used or where it comes from. But in reality, people move around, and many cities are host to hundreds of languages that don't show up on official records. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about urban multilingualism! We talk about a recent book we've been enjoying called Language City by Ross Perlin, about the over 700 languages spoken in New York City, as well as how we've noticed...

We asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said 'no'. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no'. We asked you if an ice cream sandwich was a sandwich and things...started to get a little murky. This isn't just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more! So wait...does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken language?? It's okay, linguistics has a solution! In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne...

TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are an evolving genre of media: short-form, vertical videos that take up your whole screen and are served to you from an algorithm rather than who you follow. This changes how people talk in them compared to earlier forms of video, and linguists are on it! In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the linguistics of tiktok with Adam Aleksic, better known on social media as etymologynerd. We talk about how Adam got his start into linguistics via etymology, the process that he goes through to make his current videos get...

When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have considerable written traditions, and engaging with writing as part of teaching these languages to children is important for all of the same reasons as we teach writing in majoritarian languages. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about multilingual literacy with Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, who’s a professor of Sámi languages at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. We talk about growing up with a mix of Northern Sámi, Finnish, Norweg...

Gestures: every known language has them, and there's a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren's new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide...

It's a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you'd been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten by a radioactive spider. But what's the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science and fiction of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. We talk about a range of different things that people mean when they refer to this hypothesis: a sciencey-sounding way to introduce obviously fictional concepts like time...

When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which there are both micro levels (like sounds, handshapes, and morphemes) and macro levels (like sentences, conversations, and narratives). In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take advantage of the...

This is our hundredth episode that's enthusiastic about linguistics! To celebrate, we've put together 100 of our favourite fun facts about linguistics, featuring contributions from previous guests and Lingthusiasm team members, fan favourites that resonated with you from the previous 99 episodes, and new facts that haven't been on the show before but might star in one of the next 100 episodes in greater detail. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about brains, gesture, etymology, famous example sentences, languages by the numbers, a few special facts about the word "hundred" and way more! This episode is both a...

If it wouldn't be too much trouble, if you have a spare half hour, could we possibly suggest that you might enjoy listening to this episode on politeness? Or, if you'd prefer a less polite version, "Listen! Now!" In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what politeness and rudeness are made up of at a linguistic level. We talk about existing cultural notions of "saving face" and "losing face", aka the push and pull between our desire for help vs our desire for independence, and how they've been formalized in a classic linguistics paper...

When a human learns a new word, we're learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer "learns" a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn't have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspective, just as plausible from the computer's. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about how computers process language with Dr. Emily M. Bender, who is...

Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog... In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic and ~spooky~ about possession! We talk about how the haunting type of possession and the linguistic type of possession do share an etymological origin, but how the term "possession" itself is misleading, because possessive constructions are used to express all sorts of relationships between nouns, including part-whole (eye of newt), material (a cauldron of silver), interpersonal (the wizard's apprentice), and general association (the school of magic). We also talk about the three big ways...

We're taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don't forget to hold on! In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It's easy to think of literary comparisons like "my love is like a red, red rose" but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English speakers often talk about ideas as a journey (the metaphor train) or as if they're visual - clear or murky or heavy or maybe fuzzy, but not as fluffy or...

Imagine you're in a field with someone whose language you don't speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says "Gavagai!" You probably assumed they meant "rabbit" but they could have meant something else, like "scurrying" or even "lo! an undetached rabbit-part!" In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we manage to understand each other when we're learning new words, inspired by the famous "Gavagai" thought experiment from the philosopher of language VWO Quine. We talk about how children have a whole object assumption when learning language, and how linguists go about learning...

When we're talking about an activity -- say, throwing teacups in a lake -- we often want to know not just when the action takes place, but also what shape that action looks like. Is this a one-time teacup throwing event (I threw the teacup in the lake) or a repeated or ongoing situation (I was throwing the teacup in the lake)? Both of these actions might have happened at the same time (they're both in the past tense), but this different in shape between them is known as aspect. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne...

There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone's voice, it's useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they're wearing and who they're talking with. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how nonbinary people talk with Jacq Jones, who's a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. We talk about their research on how nonbinary and binary people make choices about how to perform gender using their v...

Sometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making "brunch" from breakfast+lunch. Other times, words are smooshed together gradually, over a long period of speakers or signers discovering more efficient ways to position their mouth or hands, such as pronouncing "handbag" being pronounced more like "hambag". In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about smooshing words together. We talk about the history of portmanteau words like motel and chortle, the poem Jabberwocky, and why some portmanteaus, like Kenergy from Ken + energy, sound really satisfying...

When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "everything". That's because words like "everything" and "all" really mean something more like "everything typical in this situation". Or in linguistic terms, we say that their scope is ambiguous without context. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we can think about ambiguity of meaning in terms of scope...

On Lingthusiasm, we've sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibility, one that can produce several sounds at the same time which combine into what we perceive as a vowel. Behold, our latest, greatest metaphor (we're so sorry)... the meat bagpipe! In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and...

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral...

It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don't even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren...

Language lets us talk about things that aren't, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that's an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it's a hypothetical situation (such as "if it rains, we'll cancel the picnic" - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen. But also they might!). Languages have lots of different ways of talking about different kinds of speculative events, and together they're called the irrealis. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about some of our favourite examples...

Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country...

When you have a sentence like "I visit them", the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from "they visit me". However, in a sentence like "I laugh", you don't actually need those signals -- since there's only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read "Me laugh" or "Laugh me". And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like "laugh" patterns with the object (me) rather than the subject (I) of a transitive verb...

Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you're pointing at. Humans are really good at producing and understanding pointing, and it seems to be something that helps babies learn to talk, but only a few animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can't. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of ways of pointing, and their relative prominence varies across cultures: you can point to something with a finger or two, with your whole hand, with your elbow, your head, your eyes and eyebrows, your lips, and even your...

Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major research universities that do most of the academic studies about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more about language learning in a broader variety of sociocultural settings. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro, who’s an assistant p...

Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or different varies depending on what we’re investigating. For example, to compare varieties of English, we might have everyone read the same passage that contains all of the sounds of English, whereas to compare the way people gesture when telling a story, we might have them all watch the same silent film and re-tell it back. In this episode, your h...

In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about auxiliaries! We talk about what we can learn about auxiliaries across 2000+ languages using a new linguistic...

The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, place bets, establish names, and otherwise alter the fabric of our relationships. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about word magic! We talk about how the word magic systems are set up differently in...

Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonation. When the pitch affects the meaning of an individual word, such as the difference between mother (high mā) and horse (low rising mǎ) in Mandarin, linguists call it tone. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about tone, intonation, and the combination of the two. We talk about various meanings of intonation, such as question, li...

Communicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say -- it’s also about the many subtle ingredients that go into a message, from how you keep your audience in mind to how you portray the actions of the people you’re talking about. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Gabrielle Hodge, a deaf researcher and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in research relating to d/Deaf people, signed languages, and communication, and has worked with Auslan and British Sign Language (BSL) in Australia and the UK. We talk about Gab’s work a...