Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language.

Commas, em dashes, apostrophes, and interrobangs. We use them for timing, for grammar, and even for social purposes. But these little marks didn't just arise overnight. Dr Florence Hazrat fills us in on the history and meaning of these symbols. Florence is the author of On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World.

Timestamps

00:00 Start 01:48 Intros and hot punctuation takes (5:21) On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World 06:13 Patreon plug: It's OnlyFans for your brain 11:37 News: Irish citizenship test 17:35 News: Bonobo compositionality maybe not a thing 22:36 Side note: How does disconfirmation feel? 26:26 News: Analogies increase fidelity in language transmission 36:34 News: The Internet Archive is saving news footage 39:30 Related or Not: Theme from Camden 40:14 Related or Not 1: stick 44:32 Related or Not 2: vacation, vaccine, vacuum 46:10 Related or Not 3: Spot the pair 52:57 Interview with Florence Hazrat, author of On the Mark 55:09 Getting into punctuation 56:44 Punctuation is about prosody and…? 01:02:26 Misconceptions and playfulness in punctuation 01:04:45 Who were the heavy hitters in punctuation? 01:08:36 Punctuation as a democratising force 01:11:38 Hyphens and identity 01:14:59 English puts hyphens and spaces everywhere 01:20:14 How is digital communication changing punctuation? 01:23:57 Of dashes both em and en 01:30:33 Which punctuation marks have disappeared? 01:35:48 What punctuation should we be using, but don't? 01:38:15 Does punctuation help reading comprehension? 01:46:11 Conscious punctuation 01:49:19 Word of the Week: parachute 01:54:34 Word of the Week: Lake America 01:56:09 Word of the Week: doom trolling 02:05:44 Word of the Week: Naoero 02:06:46 Comment from Scott: Soo-ey! and Shakespeare 02:08:42 The Reads

Show notes

Why does French have circumflex letters? https://thelanguagecloset.com/2022/05/21/french-circumflex-circonflexe/

Citizenship rules to be tightened with longer residency and language test https://www.thejournal.ie/irish-citizenship-residency-changes-7154915-Sep2026/

White Australia policy | National Museum Australia https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/white-australia-policy

Dictation test passages used in 1925 | National Archives of Australia https://www.naa.gov.au/students-and-teachers/learning-resources/learning-resource-themes/society-and-culture/migration-and-multiculturalism/dictation-test-passages-used-1925

[PDF] Aspects of Racism in the Australian Context: Issues of Definition and Action

Minister for External Affairs Atlee Hunt, in a 1903 memo to his staff: "It is not desirable that [coloured] persons should be allowed to pass the test . . . and before putting it to anyone the Officer should be satisfied that he will fail. If he is considered likely to pass the test if put in English, it should be applied in some other language of which he is ignorant." https://www7.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/AUJlHRights/1994/9.pdf

Structure without semantics: no evidence for bonobo compositionality in Berthet et al. (2025) https://peerj.com/articles/21651/

Holding, Thomas, Paul E. Smaldino, and Charlotte O. Brand. "Analogies Evolve by Increasing Transmission Fidelity in the Communication of Complex Information." Evolutionary Human Sciences 8 (2026): e32. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2026.10063.

TV News Search & Borrow | Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/tv

Jethro Tull - Aqualung (Instrumental) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVcsLJ3mixQ

Catherine the Great was inoculated against smallpox in a risky experiment. It changed Russia's history https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-09-22/catherine-the-great-russian-empress-inoculation-thomas-dinsdale/101405692

On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, by Florence Hazrat https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/florence-hazrat/on-the-mark/9781541606494/?lens=basic-books

(01:39:46) All over me

On the Mark: Apple Books link https://books.apple.com/us/book/on-the-mark/id6755950089

Richard Artschwager, Exclamation Point (Yellow), 2001 http://www.dreamideamachine.com/?p=81116

Broken Swedish words (split by accidental spaces) breaking translations https://forum.readlang.com/t/broken-swedish-words-split-by-accidental-spaces-breaking-translations/5256

Tear Drops and Roses: Persian Punctuation by Florence Hazrat https://mindthegap1.substack.com/p/tear-drops-and-roses-persian-punctuation

Irony punctuation | Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irony_punctuation

Mind the Gap | Florence Hazrat on Sunstack https://mindthegap1.substack.com

Florence Hazrat on Instagram (@thepunctuationlady) https://www.instagram.com/thepunctuationlady/

Labor's Secret Harbour by-election loss is ominous https://redflag.org.au/article/labors-secret-harbour-by-election-loss-is-ominous/

Political Parties, book by Duverger | Brittanica https://www.britannica.com/topic/Political-Parties

Political parties : their organization and activity in the modern state, by Duverger, Maurice, 1917- | Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/politicalparties0000duve/page/n9/mode/2up?q=parachuting

History of a concept: 'Parachute' candidates, an old electoral practice of politics taking precedence over roots https://www.lemonde.fr/en/history/article/2022/06/17/history-of-a-concept-parachute-candidates-an-old-electoral-practice-of-politics-priming-over-roots_5987200_157.html

Parachute candidate | Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parachute_candidate

Trump signs order to rename Lake Ontario 'Lake America' amid Canada trade war https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/27/trump-canada-lake-america-ontario.html

Coxon tweet https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843

Google engineer claims AI technology LaMDA is sentient https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-06-13/google-ai-lamda-sentient-engineer-blake-lemoine-says/101147222

OpenAI IPO will not happen in 2026 amid AI safety fears, Sam Altman says https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/12/openai-delays-ipo-sam-altman-ai-safety-concerns

Timnit Gebru tweet https://x.com/timnitGebru/status/2098289939217846660

Dear AI Companies: Stop the "Doom Trolling" https://calnewport.com/dear-ai-companies-stop-the-doom-trolling/

Cal Newport: Dear AI Companies: Stop the "Doom Trolling" https://youtu.be/aHxwZEXHwps?si=7K5dLhu34NIRPRqm

The Thrill of Wanting AI to Destroy the World https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/ai-destroy-world-apocalypse/688575/

Nauru officially changes its name to Naoero https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/03/nauru-officially-changes-its-name-to-naoero

Shakespeare in the Bush Bohannon, Laura (1971), from Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology, eds. James P. Spradley and David W. McCurdy Boston: Little Brown and Company. https://web.archive.org/web/20060613143803/http://www-static.cc.gatech.edu/~idris/Essays/Shakes_in_Bush.htm

List of typographical symbols and punctuation marks | Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_typographical_symbols_and_punctuation_marks

Michael Erard has been covering language in major publications for a good long while. What has he learned, and what can linguistic communication take from his work? Michael sits down for a chat with Daniel and Hedvig to talk about his new book The Language Beat: Essays and Reporting on Language and Life.

Timestamps

00:00 Start 01:21 Getting the book together: Save your contracts! 04:22 Getting into lingcomm 06:38 Popular things v things you're interested in 10:48 Getting the Spidey sense 19:30 Public reactions and book tour insights 23:22 Lingcomm involves a little bit of pastoral care 26:55 How has the lingcomm landscape changed? 34:05 Persistent misunderstandings 39:48 Are we seeing a lingcomm explosion? 47:37 Are we doing any good? 57:07 Thanks and closing

How do children learn language, and why can't other animals? Why are false friends between languages always naughty? And how is public perception of language changing? Dr Karen Stollznow is taking us through a tour of psycholinguistics, taboo language, and linguistic skepticism with her new book Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language. We're also taking a look at Bitch: The Journey of a Word.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Start
• 00:32 Intros: Do you use Y'ALL?
• 06:46 New patron shoutout
• 08:07 News: Strathfield Council trying to control shop signage
• 17:37 News: Claude introduces watermarking
• 25:43 News: Welsh joins the Star Wars club
• 29:30 Related or Not: Theme from Hugh
• 30:25 Related or Not 1: cute and acute
• 34:48 Related or Not 2: skip
• 42:22 Related or Not 3: tribe, tribute, & tributary
• 46:51 Karen Stollznow on psycholinguistics
• 50:36 Language and animal communication
• 53:37 Skepticism in linguistics
• 59:48 Getting a book done
• 01:02:09 The attraction of taboo words
• 01:08:18 Daddy diaries and child language acquisition
• 01:15:00 False friends
• 01:19:09 Best way to learn a language?
• 01:22:05 Public awareness of linguistics
• 01:26:58 Word of the Week: forever war
• 01:29:56 Word of the Week: aegyo
• 01:31:20 Word of the Week: meat proxy
• 01:33:46 Word of the Week: Cyberno de Bergerac
• 01:37:31 Comment: vague v ambiguous
• 01:39:24 Comment: Okay if languages die?
• 01:41:59 Comment: Sudoku pronunciation in Japanese
• 01:43:20 The Reads
• 01:56:02 Outtake: Hedvig watches an eclipse
• 02:00:18 Outtake: Glottle

Emoji, once regarded as some kind of frivolous nonsense, have become an important way we communicate online. But how did these little pictures come to our devices? What is the Unicode Consortium, and how did they get involved? And who is the Levitating Suit Guy? Fear not; author Keith Houston is here to give us the whole story in front of a live audience. Keith is the author of Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji.

Timestamps

00:00 Start 02:21 Introducing Keith Houston, author of Face With Tears of Joy 03:28 Put your top five emoji in chat 08:03 What's the state of emoji now? 10:11 How did the Unicode Consortium get involved? 22:30 The strange history of Levitating Suit Guy 27:37 The latest emoji in v17.0 30:12 Changes to some emoji 38:22 What gives an emoji staying power? 47:12 Related or Not: Theme by David 48:10 Related or Not 1: orchard and hoard 52:46 Related or Not 2: belle, bell, ball, & ball 59:01 Related or Not 3: Italian aceto (vinegar) & Spanish aceite (oil) 01:03:45 Why don't they use emoji on Reddit? 01:05:26 Are emoji now more acceptable in serious contexts? 01:08:34 Do speakers of some languages use emoji more? 01:13:00 Any languages where they just don't use emoji? 01:13:59 Does everyone call them "emoji"? 01:16:13 Sociolinguistic trends in emoji? 01:22:12 The reads: Which emoji is closest to your name? 01:33:06 Afterparty

Why don't we all sound the same? Are some accents easier to learn? And are there reasons for the differences in how people sound and sign, or is it just random?

We use sound and sign to encode information about our age, place, gender, sexuality, and so much more. Sometimes we're not even aware of how we do it. But we're fixing that on this episode with Jennifer Nycz and Lauren Hall-Lew, editors of Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory.

Timestamps

00:00 Start: Introducing Jennifer Nycz and Lauren-Hall Lew 01:57 What is sociophonetics? 03:01 What's in our own sociophonetic background? 10:10 Why is it always vowels, vowels, vowels? 13:03 Why don't we all just sound the same? 15:09 You can hallucinate accents by seeing a photo 16:00 Sound encodes gender and sexuality 20:57 Chronolects, Boomerlects, and GenX-lects 22:04 Tweens to teens: What to expect sociophonetically? 27:33 Are there reasons for sound variation and change? 34:16 Why does a community change faster than an individual? 38:37 Does media have an influence on accent? 42:17 How much are we consciously aware of? 44:52 Are some accents easier? 48:39 What are the sociophonetic hot spots? 50:54 Are American women more nasal? 52:09 Persistent misconceptions 54:49 Fight linguistic discrimination, or teach marginalised people to "pass"? 01:03:03 The sociophonetics of signed languages

How does it feel to be isolated from a language and a culture that could have been yours? There are many paths to language loss, but there are also many ways back. Language revitalisation is now happening for communities and individuals. We're talking about it with journalist and lingToker Sophia Smith Galer, author of How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.

Timestamps

00:00 Start 00:34 Intros: How are you "going"? 05:54 News: A font that can poison data for GenAI 13:51 News: A lost Golden Age of language in the Holocene 27:33 News: New language support for Netflix, Disney+ 33:59 Related or Not: Theme from Gordon 34:37 Related or Not: ramshackle 41:39 Related or Not: nap 48:57 Related or Not: adder, deer, natter, otter, hydra 54:12 Chat with Sophia Smith Galer: Her language background 01:00:31 The pain of separation from one's own language 01:05:01 Attacks on multicuturalism 01:07:34 Is all language death language murder? 01:09:41 The role of parents in language transmission 01:16:52 Factors influencing language survival 01:26:50 Will GenAI help or harm minority languages? 01:35:33 Challenging monoglossic language ideology 01:40:36 Sophia encourages linguistic curiosity 01:43:11 Responding to a review: Is it okay if languages die? 01:53:21 Word of the Week: slop zombie 01:55:29 Word of the Week: eternity leave 01:56:24 Word of the Week: spherical bastard 01:58:10 Word of the Week: the butter's penthouse 02:01:47 Word of the Week: Jimothy 02:04:42 Comments: Ingressive speech 02:08:33 The Reads 02:15:40 Outtakes: Hedvig's plant

Translating Shakespeare takes a knowledge of language, culture, and poetry — both in English and in the target language. There are tradeoffs and pitfalls, but a skilled translator can bring Shakespeare closer to our age, not just to another language. We're talking with translator Daniel Hahn, author of If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation.

Also, we're answering listener questions. Send us yours!

Timestamps

00:00 Start 00:21 Intros: Shakespearean insults 07:33 Pronouncing SUDOKU: Why so variable? 15:58 Ingressive speech 20:46 Nonplussed 26:59 Related or Not: Theme from Hugh 28:13 Related or Not: pooch, pouch, pocket, and poach 38:14 Related or Not: caddy and caddie 42:47 Related or Not: hemi-, demi-, and semi- 49:30 Chat with Daniel Hahn: Keeping everything but the words 52:51 Spanish as a language of translation 58:59 Translation closes the distance: Shakespeare in contemporary English 01:07:02 Poetic meter and when to break it 01:11:07 Punctuating the translation 01:16:08 Archaic words and the feel of Shakespeare 01:18:23 Hardest language to translate Skakespeare into? 01:20:43 Staying true to time and culture 01:26:05 Having fun 01:31:12 Monosyllables 01:34:32 The impact of GenAI on translation 01:37:38 Getting people to care about translation 01:40:37 Should multi-line highway word markings start near to us or start far? 01:47:48 Gender and the -ster suffix 01:56:12 Comment from Allyson: Soo-ee! 01:58:03 The Reads 02:02:01 Outtake

Each letter in our Latin alphabet tells a story. But what about spaces? Or writing direction? Should we get rid of some letters, or could we even do with more? Here to answer all these questions is Dr Danny Bate, author of Why Q Needs U: A History of Our Letters and How We Use Them.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Start
• 00:44 Intros: Special letters
• 05:46 News: Spanish okay at World Cup?
• 09:30 News: Forgetting is helpful in language acquisition
• 21:18 News: Bluey in Yolŋu
• 25:41 Related or Not theme by Jo
• 27:21 Related or Not: prodigy, prodigal, and prodigious
• 34:19 Related or Not: vice, device, divide
• 43:09 Related or Not: gauntlet and gaunt
• 49:48 Interview with Danny Bate, author of Why Q Needs U
• 50:16 About Danny's podcast: A Language I Love Is…
• 52:24 The Alphabet: greatest innovation since sexual reproduction
• 56:08 The case against boustrophedon
• 58:51 Letters flipped over time
• 01:02:40 Why are some letters more common than others?
• 01:06:14 Why does H get used in so many digraphs?
• 01:10:52 Thoughts on spelling reform
• 01:18:07 Why are L and R so squirrelly?
• 01:28:53 The evolution of spaces in written language
• 01:31:46 What letters can we get rid of?
• 01:35:15 Actually, no, we need a new letter
• 01:36:53 Communicating linguistic ideas to the public
• 01:44:02 Word of the Week: monoculture
• 01:53:43 Word of the Week: algae-TBQ agenda
• 02:00:15 Word of the Week: hobbylos
• 02:03:14 Word of the Week: tokenmaxxing
• 02:06:27 Word of the Week: Claudeonomics
• 02:11:21 The Reads
• 02:18:18 Outtakes: Back on our Bluey nonsense + On being a Dan

We created software that could generate human-like text output quickly and easily. Now we're dealing with the societal upheaval it's caused. What are the risks and rewards, and what can we learn about language from these large language models? Daniel — joined by Caitlin Green — has a chat with Dr Christopher Summerfield, author of These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means.

Timestamps

00:00 Start 00:46 Intros: Generative A.I. concerns 04:15 Shout out to our patrons! 05:03 News: AP Style Guide defines COUPLE 10:35 News: Men do vocal fry more 14:59 News: Uptalk from 1890 16:01 News: Is Singlish up? 22:22 Related or Not: Bonkers Mélange editon, theme from Ste 23:41 Related or Not: population, discombobulate, bobbin 29:09 Related or Not: goggle, goo-goo, agog 36:09 Related or Not: once, ounce, pounce, lynx 41:55 Interview with Christopher Summerfield: Do you like A.I.? 44:21 Consequences of AI: Will we know nothing, or know everything? 47:03 Are LLMs just spicy autocorrect? 48:44 Are LLMs simply regurgitating their training data? 49:51 LLMs are getting better fast 52:33 On consciousness and intentionality 55:58 Do LLMs (or humans) understand? 58:58 The Chinese Room 01:01:00 Should we avoid anthropomorphising language around LLM behaviour? 01:04:02 Why we dismiss LLMs 01:07:26 Accelerationists, anti-hypers, and X-risk: Which are you? 01:09:49 Safety, privacy, and security 01:14:29 The magic wand of policy 01:20:18 Fixing the hallucination problem 01:27:36 Goals of the book 01:31:18 Word of the Week: liminal 01:39:59 Word of the Week: pink slime journalism 01:44:44 Word of the Week: waste colonialism 01:48:13 Quick words: hot-washing, eppy, shoulder surgfing, news-jacking, bio-break 01:51:37 Word of the Week: wario 01:55:02 The Reads 02:01:06 Outtake: That time when a siren went off in Hedvig's Parisian hotel, mid-recording

Video for this episode: https://youtu.be/94SbeM0KpWw

Australian magpies are even cleverer birds than we thought. New research from Dr Stephanie Mason shows that they do two language-like things we used to think only humans could do: learn their calls socially, and combine their calls in a way that looks a lot like syntax. So are we calling this language? If so, how are the linguists taking it? Stephanie joins us to talk about magpies, media, and the territoriality of linguists.

Timestamps

00:00 Start 00:54 Intros: Your favourite bird 07:10 What's coming up: Magpies 09:34 Join us! Patreon spruikery 11:32 News: Jamaican MP shut down for speaking Jamaican in Parliament 19:35 News: Whale phonology 31:46 News: Unicode to include new genderless pronoun for Mandarin 36:37 News: China and the Rubio Workaround 38:16 Related or Not: New theme from Hugh! 40:05 Related or Not 1: SLAP, SMACK, and SWAT 45:45 Related or Not 2: SOUND 56:13 Related or Not 3: SPECK, SPECKLE, SPECTRE, and SPECTRUM 01:00:36 Talking about magpies with Stephanie Mason 01:03:38 About Australian magpies 01:06:17 The problem of anthropomorphism 01:15:21 What's the semantic content? 01:22:52 Linguists can be territorial about language 01:34:48 Social complexity drives new behaviours 01:45:19 Magpies learn their calls socially 01:49:42 Magpies combine their calls 01:58:44 Magpies learn calls across the lifespan 02:05:36 Finding those birds 02:08:10 Doing public engagement: Are metaphors actually helping? 02:17:26 Words of the Week: mog 02:24:54 Word of the Week: pied-à-terre 02:27:48 Word of the Week: dummymander 02:33:03 Word of the Week: Sooooo-ee! 02:39:22 Etymology of Guacamole 02:39:35 Comment: guacamole = testicle sauce? 02:41:28 The reads 02:46:28 Outtake