Lingthusiasm - A Podcast That's Enthusiastic About Linguistics

The Rift Valley area of central and northern Tanzania is the only area where languages from all four African language families are found (Bantu, Cushitic, Nilotic, and Khoisan). Languages in this area have been in contact with each other for a long time, especially in the minds of bi- and multilingual speakers, so it’s a really interesting place to learn more about why and how languages influence each other. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Hannah Gibson, a Lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics at the University of Essex, about her work on how word order differences between Rangi and Swahili, both Bantu languages, are related to the different languages that they’ve been in contact with. They also get enthusiastic about Bantu languages in general and especially how the famous Bantu noun class system works. (Swahili, for example, has 16 different noun classes. including humans, natural things that aren’t human, abstract nouns, places, and words that begin with ki-.) T

There are certain things that human societies, and therefore languages, have in common. We have the same basic inventory of body parts, which affect both the kinds of movements we can make to produce words and the names we have for our meat-selves. We’re all living on a watery ball of rock and fire, orbiting a large ball of gas. And we all arrived on this planet by means of other humans, and form societies to help each other stick around. Sometimes, we even bring into existence further tiny humans. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the special vocabulary that exists across languages for people you’re related to. Kinship terms are a fascinating area of commonality and variation: on the one hand, all languages seem to have ways of distinguishing family (both chosen and biological) from non-family. But on the other hand, there’s a wide degree of variation in the exact relationships that languages have words for, and this provides an interesting window into w

A letter stands for a sound. Or at least, it’s supposed to. Most of the time. Unless it’s C or G, which each stand for two different sounds in a whole bunch of languages. C can be soft, as in circus or acacia, or hard, as in the other C in circus or acacia. G can be hard, as in gif, or soft, as in gif. Why can C and G be hard or soft? And why don’t other letters come in hard and soft versions? In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the group of sounds that are pronounced with the back part of the roof of your mouth, aka the palate. When one sound in a word is produced at the palate, it tends to pull neighbouring sounds towards the palate as well, and this palatal attraction explains so many weird mismatches of sound and spelling. Why can C and G be hard and soft? Why do T and D sometimes get different pronunciations as well, as in nation and didja? Why are Irish and Scottish Gaelic names spelled that way?

squishable, blobfish, aaarggghh, gubernatorial, apple lovers, ain’t, tronc, wug, toast, toast, toast, toast, toast. All of these are words that someone, somewhere has asserted aren’t real words – or maybe aren’t even words at all. But we don’t point at a chair or a tree and assert that it’s not a word. Of course it’s not! That would be absurd. So why, then, do people feel called to question the wordhood of actual words? In this episode of the funnest* podcast about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take you on a tour through what’s really going on when people say that a word isn’t a word. (*Funnest is definitely a real word, and so are all the others.) We’re heading into our second anniversary! That’s two whole years of linguistics enthusiasm delivered right to your ears every month (twice a month for patrons). To celebrate, we want to share the show with more people! Most people find podcasts through word of mouth, and there are people out there who would be totally into a live

As English speakers, we take for granted that we have lots of resources available in our language, from children’s books to dictionaries to automated tools like Siri and Google Translate. But for the majority of the world’s languages, this is not the case. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Hilaria Cruz, a linguist and native speaker of Chatino, an Indigenous language of Mexico which is spoken by over 40,000 people. Hilaria combines her work as an Assistant Professor of linguistics at the University of Louisville, Kentucky with creating resources for her fellow speakers of Chatino, everything from paperback or cloth children’s books to high-tech speech recognition tools which will make it easier to create more resources like this in the future. And she’s also making these resources available for other underrepresented languages! -- There were two big announcements at the top of the episode: The first is that we have a date for our liveshow in Melbourne! We will be at the Stat

When we think about language, we generally think about things that are visible or audible: letters, sounds, signs, words, symbols, sentences. We don’t often think about the lack of anything. But little bits of silence or invisibility are found surprisingly often throughout our linguistic system, from the micro level of an individual sound or bit of meaning to the macro level of sentences and conversations. In this episode of the podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about four different kinds of linguistic nothings: silence in between turns, silence in between sounds, invisible units of meaning, and invisible words. (Officially known as turntaking, glottal stops, zero morphemes, and traces.) We also announced some details about our upcoming liveshow! Our last liveshow was in Montreal where Gretchen lives, so it’s only fair that our next official show is in Lauren’s hometown of Melbourne! It’ll be sometime in November. Stay tuned for

When linguists think about complicated words, we don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kinds of words that you use all the time without even thinking about it, like “the”. You might not already know that defenestration refers to throwing something out of a window, but once you find out, it’s easy to explain. But what does “the” mean? And, for that matter, what kind of a word even is “the”? If you think back to when you learned about nouns and verbs, you might have been told that “the” was an article. But this brings us to a circular question, which is, what exactly is an article, other than “that thing that ‘the’ is”? In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about a bigger-picture answer to the question of how “the” works, one that joins together a bunch of words that might not seem related at first glance, including the, that, each, my, and five. Welcome to one of our favourite word classes: the

Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of sounds in the word “cat”, and indeed other languages have different words for the same animal. But sometimes it may not be so arbitrary. Take these two shapes: a sharp, spiky

Australian and Canadian English don’t sound much alike, but they have one big similarity: they’re both national varieties that tend to get overshadowed by their more famous siblings. In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch use Lynne Murphy’s new book The Prodigal Tongue as a guide to the sometimes prickly relationship between the globally dominant British and American varieties of English, give a mini history of English in our own countries, and discuss our national quests to find space between and around US and UK nationlects. On the way, we ask the big, country-dividing questions like, is soup more likely to be brothy or puréed? Does “please” make a request ruder or more polite? What’s a prototypical bacon? Where on your face is a frown? This month’s bonus episode on Patreon is about what you should know if you’re considering linguistics grad school: whether to apply, tips on applying and choosing a school, and some of the differences between the North American a

What’s so weird if I say, “the present King of France is bald” or “I need to pick up my pet unicorn from the vet”? It seems like those sentences should be false: at least, they certainly can’t be true. But if you reply, “No, he isn’t” or “No, you don’t” it still feels unsatisfying: aren’t we still both assuming that France has a king and that I have a pet unicorn? In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore different kinds of meanings: sometimes sentences wear their meaning on their sleeves, but sometimes they instead smuggle it in as baggage. These assumptions are known as presuppositions. Presuppositions are incredibly useful (we couldn’t manage conversations at a normal pace without them), but in the wrong hands (such as when you’re trying to influence an eyewitness) they can also be very dangerous. This month’s bonus episode on Patreon is about memes, poetry, and mock-old English: Roses are red / Violets are dreams / In this episode / We talk poems and memes

Lists of ‘untranslatable’ words always come with... translations. So what do people really mean when they say a word is untranslatable? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore how how we translate different kinds of meaning. What makes words like schadenfreude, tsundoku, and hygge so compelling? Which parts of language are actually the most difficult to translate? What does it say about English speakers that we have a word for “tricking someone into watching a video of Rick Astley singing Never Gonna Give You Up?” This month’s Patreon bonus episode is about the grammar of swearing. When we launched our Patreon this time last year (wow!) with a bonus episode about the sounds of swearing, we promised that we’d come back with even more about swearing that we didn’t have space to talk about. Now you can listen to a sweary double feature: put on bonus #1 and bonus #13 back to back! As always, episodes that aren’t specifically about swearing are swear-free. To listen to bonus episo

Say, “aaaaaahhhh…..” Now try going smoothly from one vowel to another, without pausing: “aaaaaaaeeeeeeeiiiiiii”. Feel how your tongue moves in relation to the back of the roof of your mouth as you move from one vowel to the next. When you say “ahhhh” like at the dentist, your tongue is low and far back and your mouth is all the way open. If you say “cheeeeese” like in a photo, your tongue is higher up and further forward, and your mouth is more closed: it’s a lot harder for the dentist to see your molars. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explain how the position of our tongue when we make vowels can be described in the shape of a trapezoid: it can go up and down, forward towards the teeth and backwards towards the throat, and there’s a bit more space for movement higher up towards the roof of your mouth. Vowels don’t just exist in a trapezoid, they move around inside it: sometimes they squish up against their neighbours, sometimes they expand into less-occupied corners of th

Here’s a strange little blue animal you’ve never seen before. It’s called a wug. Now here’s another one. There are two of them. There are two ___? You probably thought “wugs” – and even kids as young as 3 years old would agree with you. But how did you know this, if you’ve never heard the word “wug” before? What is it that you know, exactly, when you know how to add that -s? Now try saying two cat__

When we talk about things that languages have in common, we often talk about the physical side, the fact that languages are produced by human bodies, using the same brain and hands and vocal tract. But they’re also all produced (so far) by people from the same planet and going through the same fourth dimension: time. As the earth revolves around the sun again, each of your Lingthusiasm cohosts is going through another longest (Lauren) or shortest (Gretchen) day, and we’re reflecting on how languages measure the passing of time. This episode of Lingthusiasm is a chance to reflect on the cyclical nature of years and days, the metaphors we use to talk about time in space, from time-space synesthesia to whether the past is behind us or in front of us, and why we measure time in seconds, but not thirds. (We definitely know that tense is also a time-related concept, but it's such a cool topic that we're going to give it its very own episode -- something to look forward to!) Thanks to everyone who has made this

Are you up for some prepositions? You might think you’re over prepositions, but have you ever really looked into them, or have you just gone by them? Other parts of speech notwithstanding, prepositions are something we’re really down with. In Episode 14 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne introduce you to our favourite English grammar book, the mammoth, 1800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (affectionately known as CGEL), and take a deep dive into its 60+ pages all about prepositions. We also explore how it is that a grammar can even have sixty pages of things to say about prepositions in a single language and how the tricky edge cases are what makes grammar so interesting. Plus, we look at cousins of the preposition in other languages, like case markers, postpositions, and even circumpositions, why prepositions are complicated to translate, and pied-piping, the prepositional structure named after a fairy tale. This month’s bonus episode is about how linguists so

If you grow up with multiple accents to choose from, what does the one you choose say about your identity? How can linguistics unpick our hidden assumptions about what “sounds angry” or “sounds articulate”? What can we learn from studying the melodies of speech, in addition to the words and sounds? In Episode 13 of Lingthusiasm, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Nicole Holliday, an Associate Professor of linguistics at Pomona Collegem about her work on the speech of American black/biracial young men, prosody and intonation, and what it means to sound black. We also talk about how Obama inadvertently provided her research topic, the linguistics of the Wu Tang Clan, and how linguistics can make the world a better place. This month’s bonus episode is a recording of our liveshow about discourse markers in Montreal in September. What do “um” and “like” have in common with “behold” and “nevertheless”? They’re all discourse markers! These little words and phrases get a bad rap for being “meaningless”, b

Why does it always sound slightly off when someone tries to imitate your accent? Why do tiny children learning your second language already sound better than you, even though you’ve been learning it longer than they’ve been alive? What does it mean for there to be sounds you can’t hear? In Episode 12 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch explore the fundamental linguistic insight at the heart of all these questions: the phoneme. We also talk about how to bore babies (for science!), how sounds appear and disappear in a language, and how to retain our sense of wonder when the /t/ you hear doesn’t match up with the /t/ I hear. LIVESHOW: Exciting news! We held our first liveshow on Saturday, September 23rd in Montreal, at Argo Bookshop. It was great to meet so many lingthusiasts at this sold out show. We’re looking forward to bringing the liveshow experience to more people, once we hit our Patreon goal. This month’s Patreon bonus was about linguistic research, and how to become the g

– Would you like some coffee? – Coffee would keep me awake. Does that mean yes coffee, or no coffee? It depends! Is it the morning or the evening? Is the person trying to pull an all-nighter or take an afternoon nap? A computer looking strictly at the meanings of the words would be confused, but we humans do this kind of thing all the time without even noticing it. In episode 11 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about the hidden assumptions of cooperation that we bring to every conversation. They were formulated by the linguist Paul Grice, and are known as the Cooperative Principle or Grice’s Maxims. Not only does stating these assumptions explicitly help us understand conversations where we exchange messages beyond the literal meaning of our words, but it also explains a lot of humour – many jokes rely on creative flouting of Gricean Maxims! This month’s Patreon bonus was about language play: games like Pig Latin, rhyming slang, and Verlan, as nominated and voted on

Some linguists work with multiple languages, while others focus on just one. But for many people, learning a language after early childhood is the thing that first gets them curious about how language works in general and all the things in their native language(s) that they take for granted. In episode 10 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about how learning languages can feed into linguistics and vice versa. We also explore the power dynamics that affect learning languages, and the importance of learning about the rules of interaction as well as the rules of grammar. This month’s Patreon bonus was about hypercorrection, where you try so hard to follow a linguistic rule that you end up overshooting. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about the doggo meme, swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. http://patreon.com/lingthusiasm Gretchen’s new recorder in this episode is thanks to the

How do we get from knowing words to making brand-new sentences out of them? In episode 9 of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne talk about how words form groups with other words: constituency. Once you start looking for it, constituency is everywhere: in ambiguous sentences like “time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana”, in remixed films like “Of Oz The Wizard”, and even internet dog memes. This month’s Patreon bonus was the backstory about the linguistics of the doggo meme and its connection to Australian slang, which grew out of this NPR article about doggo. You can get access to it and previous bonuses about swearing, teaching yourself linguistics, and explaining linguistics to employers by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. For more information, and links to things mentioned in this episode, visit the show page: http://lingthusiasm.com/post/161859273886/lingthusiasm-episode-9-the-bridge-between-words