Lexis

Welcome to Episode 87 of Lexis in which Neil and Dan talk to Sam Hellmuth, Professor of Linguistics at University of York and Devyani Sharma, Professor of Language and Communication at University of Oxford about the 2026 York English Language Toolkit sessions at York. 

We talk about:

• What the York English Language Toolkit is and what it’s designed to do. 

• What’s on this year.

• The Generations of London English takeover that’s happening this year.

• What the GLE project is and where MLE fits into this story.

• The synchronic and diachronic aspects of London English. 

• The new work that’s being featured and where it fits in. 

• The importance of real-time data in this project.

• Where the work on MLE has been going in recent years. 

• Recent debates and arguments about MLE and Black British English.

York English Language Toolkit 2026: https://englishlanguagetoolkit.york.ac.uk/workshops 

Generations of London English project page: https://generationsoflondonenglish.org/ 

Devyani Sharma’s university page: https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-devyani-sharma 

Sam Hellmuth’s university page: https://www.york.ac.uk/language-linguistic-science/people/sam-hellmuth/ 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Neil Hutchinson

Amanda Cole

Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/dramandacole.bsky.social 

Matthew Butler 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Show notes for Episode 86

⚠️🤬⚠️Contains swearing (obvs) and quite a lot of it…handled seriously and with academic rigour (🧐)⚠️🤬⚠️

Welcome to episode 86 of Lexis in which we go in mob-handed with 5 (count ‘em!) interviewers and Dr Chris Montgomery, Senior Lecturer in Dialectology in the School of English at the University of Sheffield. Lisa, Jacky, Dan, Amanda and guest interviewer, Neil Hutchinson ask him about his work on dialect and how this relates to his new project on regional swearing. 

(We treat the subject with delicacy and restraint until about 46 minutes when it becomes something of a swearing free-for-all, in case you’re interested/want to turn it off.) 

We talk about:

• Why swearing is interesting from a dialectology point of view

• How swearing varies regionally in terms of the terms that are used and what they mean

• How he is going about this research and how it came to happen

• Different methodologies and their pros and cons

• Dialect levelling and swearing: what needs to be done to measure this

• Attitudes to academic research on swearing 

• The inventiveness of swearing

• How you can contribute to this research

• Advice to students about investigating swearing

Dr Chris Montgomery | English | The University of Sheffield 

Your contributions can be made here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSef-QCBddaJ9blKczAv_mrV3pWDHIKuPJHzDNHZ7U1IK0Rcdw/viewform (🔞only sorry)

Guardian article: From divvy to dinlo: index of insults aims to record Britain’s diverse dialects | British identity and society | The Guardian 

BBC feature: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78rr219457o 

Independent article: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/english-swearing-sheffield-university-midlands-merseyside-b2958087.html 

Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/15/language-linguists-preserve-britain-swear-words-phrases-map/  and http://archive.today/2026.04.15-173308/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/04/15/language-linguists-preserve-britain-swear-words-phrases-map/ 

https://moderntoss.com/ 

Modern Toss explain the project here too: https://moderntoss.com/2/ 

https://www.urbandictionary.com/ 

Internet Archive version of Roger’s Profanisaurus; https://archive.org/stream/RogersProfanisaurusPreviouslyKnownAsSwearyMarysDictionaryOfFilth/Roger%27s%20Profanisaurus%20previously%20known%20as%20Sweary%20Mary%27s%20Dictionary%20of%20Filth_djvu.txt 

Our previous interview with Dr Emma Byrne on swearing is here: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/K6x7JGgCR2b 

Our previous interview with Dr Robbie Love on changing swearing patterns in the UK is here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5Kq96LDO9jpz0LrcxcBNDr?si=EZVW_Zh0QKGi45XddCdCJw 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Show notes for Episode 85

⚠️⚠️⚠️We talk about some topics and forms of language - the language of incels and the manosphere, for example - that might be considered unpleasant and upsetting for some listeners⚠️⚠️⚠️

Welcome to episode 85 of Lexis in which Dan talks to Dr Rob Topinka, Reader in Digital Media and Rhetoric at Birkbeck, University of London.

We talk about: 

• Why language is important to politics

• What rhetoric is, its characteristics and what it’s designed to do

• How rhetoric works in online spaces

• The kind of rhetoric used to promote extremist views online

• Incels, red pills, maxxing and NPCs

• What happened to ‘woke’ 

• The pitfalls of ‘free speech’ and language policing 

• Avoiding reactionary narratives and promoting progressive alternatives

• Why being ‘unbiased’ is not really an option

Rob’s Birkbeck page: https://www.bbk.ac.uk/our-staff/9151496/robert-topinka 

Rob’s ResearchGate profile: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert-Topinka

The Guardian articles Rob has written: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/mar/22/racist-meme-nigel-farage-cameos-online-far-right

https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2025/oct/20/boriswave-fighting-age-men-cultural-marxism-how-the-far-right-is-changing-how-we-speak 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/jan/31/digital-politics-the-right-internet-digital-politics-extreme-political-ideas

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2026/feb/01/digital-politics-progressives-internet-the-left-online-world

More on NPCs: 

https://www.mentalfloss.com/language/slang/npc-meaning-and-history 

A report on Clavicular’s interview in Australia: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/clavicular-incel-60-minutes-andrew-tate-looksmaxxing-b2957021.html 

‘Are You Mogging Me Right Now?’ https://bsky.app/profile/theserfstv.bsky.social/post/3mjhr6v2lek2r  

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Welcome to episode 84 of Lexis in which we have both an interview and a Lang in the News segment. Amanda and Dan talk to Dr Daria Bahtina, Continuing Lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA about a lot of things, including:

• Generational slang and online vernacular

• Whether any slang is ever truly ‘meaningless’

• The rapid pace of slang generation, diffusion and disappearance in an online world

• What happens when slang leaves niche communities and gets picked up more widely

• Moral panics around slang and online vernacular

• The project work Daria does with her students and tips for A level English Language teachers and students about successful projects

Guardian articles Daria is quoted in: 

The Pentagon says it’s ‘lethalitymaxxing’. Why has ‘incel’ slang crossed into the mainstream? | Language | The Guardian

(https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/mar/01/incel-slang-mainstream-government-media)

Slang terms like ‘six-seven’ have no definition. But they’re loaded with meaning | Matthew Cantor | The Guardian

(https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/30/six-seven-meaning-slang) 

Daria’s UCLA pages:

https://linguistics.ucla.edu/person/daria-bahtina/

Daria’s Languaged Life blog:

https://languagedlife.ucla.edu/ 

The book Daria recommends: https://www.cambridge.org/highereducation/books/language-and-social-issues/5C1D0C2F61B4D0ADA69AE7024EF1E1E2#overview 

Our Lang in the News segment returns too! Lisa, Jacky and Dan talk about stories in the media about slang, appropriation and appreciation, discussing articles from the Mail Online, The Guardian, the Mississippi Clarion Ledger (yes, it is real) and a new paper by two of our previous guests, Christian Ilbury and Rianna Walcott. 

Articles: https://eu.clarionledger.com/story/news/2026/03/16/new-slang-67-what-does-lowkenuinely-mean-how-to-use-it/89180944007/ 

Christian Ilbury & Rianna Walcott - Gen Z Language? Y'all Mean AAVE’: The Appropriation of African American Vernacular English as ‘TikTok Language’

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/josl.70024 

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/30/six-seven-meaning-slang 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Revealed: The slang words and phrases experts are calling to be BANISHED in 2026 - with '6,7' topping the list 

Welcome to episode 83 of Lexis, another student-led episode, which this time features Oli, an A Level student at the Dubai British School interviewing Dr Sarah Hopkyns, with some help from Dan. Sarah is a Lecturer in TESOL and International Education at the University of St Andrews, Lecturer (Teaching) in Intercultural Communication at the Institute of Education, UCL and Visiting Research Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.

We talk about: 

• What we mean by ‘The Gulf’ and the Gulf nations

• What makes them interesting from a linguistic point of view

• The types of English spoken in the Gulf and whether we can talk about ‘Gulf English’

• The role of Arabic in the region

• Translanguaging, multilingualism and reconceptualising how we think about doing language in the world

• Translingual practice as a real world manifestation of how people use language resources to communicate

• Attitudes to English use and English as a threat to local language and identity

You can find Sarah’s university page here: https://research-portal.st-andrews.ac.uk/en/persons/sarah-hopkyns/ 

Her ResearchGate profile is here: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Sarah-Hopkyns 

We discuss some of the following:

Nizar Habash and David Palfreyman’s ZAEBUC corpus of Arabic-English: https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.9/ 

‘The Pact We Made’ by Layla AlAmmar https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-pact-we-made-layla-alammar/82be48b15ed150fc 

Blair Fussell’s 2011 work based on ‘Gulf English’: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231752461_The_local_flavour_of_English_in_the_Gulf 

Thanks to Oli and his teacher, Sumayya Kazi for making this episode happen and for all the work put into it. 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys

Welcome to episode 82 of Lexis, in which Raj, Dan and (guest interviewer and friend of the pod) Amanda Cole talk to Dr Rianna Walcott, Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Maryland, and Associate Director of the Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab. We discuss her 2023 PhD, A Tweet at the Table - Black British Identity Expression on Social Media. We talk about:

• Black community, identity and self-expression on social media

• Black Twitter

• Sociolinguistic work on Black British English and MLE

• Language online and offline

• Black feminist thought and its influences on this project and more

• Rianna’s current work

You can download the thesis here (and the most language-focused part is chapter 5): https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/en/studentTheses/a-tweet-at-the-table 

Rianna’s website is here and you can find some of the other papers and links mentioned: http://www.riannawalcott.com/ 

The Black Communication and Technology (BCaT) Lab is here: https://www.bcatlab.org/ 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Welcome to episode 81 of Lexis, a special student takeover edition which features Freya and Miles from Eltham Hill School in South London in conversation with Dr Jessica Aiston, postdoctoral research assistant in Linguistics at Queen Mary University of London (and who previously appeared on episode 50 talking about critical discourse studies). The episode is all about the language of, and around, neurodiversity, including:

• Why this episode exists and why Freya and Miles wanted to record it

• What we mean by ‘neurodiversity’ and other helpful definitions

• The neurodiversity paradigm

• Terms, labels and the history behind these

• The pros and cons of certain labels

• The importance of autistic people having agency in the terms being used 

• Semantic reclamation and euphemism cycles

• Person-first and identity-first terms

• The importance of autistic people centering themselves and being centered in linguistic research

• Using the lens of CCritical Discourse Analysis for exploring discourse around autism and neurodiversity

• Jess’s current work on the Autism in Affinity Spaces project

Jess has supplied the following references based on the topics raised in the show:

• Kenny, L., Hattersley, C., Molins, B., Buckley, C., Povey, C., & Pellicano, E. (2016). Which terms should be used to describe autism? Perspectives from the UK autism community. Autism, 20(4), 442-462. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361315588200 

• Botha, M., & Cage, E. (2022). "Autism research is in crisis": A mixed method study of researcher's constructions of autistic people and autism research. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1-22. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1050897 

• Botha, M., Hanlon, J., & Williams, G. L. (2023). Does language matter? Identity-first versus person-first language use in autism research: A response to Vivanti. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 53, 870-878. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04858-w 

• Cage, E., Crompton, C. J., Dantas, S., Strachan, K., Birch, R., Robinson, M., Morgan-Appel, S., MacKenzie-Nash, C., Gallagher, A., & Botha, M. (2024). What are the autism research priorities of autistic adults in Scotland? Autism, 28(9), 2179-2190. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613231222656  

• Botha, M., Chapman, R., Giwa Onaiwu, M., Kapp, S. K., Stannard Ashley, A., & Walker, N. (2024). The neurodiversity concept was developed collectively: An overdue correction on the origins of neurodiversity theory. Autism, 28(6), 1591-1594. https://doi.org/10.1177/13623613241237871  

Jess’s paper on the importance of inclusive linguistics research: Aiston, J., Koteyko, N., & van Driel, M. (2025). Discourse-based approaches to autistic focussed interests: Understanding shared focus, mutual accommodation, and multimodal expression, Applied Linguistics https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amaf006 

The project website for Autism in Affinity Spaces can be found here: https://autisminaffinityspaces.org/ 

Jess on ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jessica_Aiston 

Jess’s work on CDS featured on this episode of Lexis: https://spotifycreators-web.app.link/e/6XMKoRtp90b 

She has written two pieces for emagazine on CDS and the language of the manosphere: https://www.englishandmedia.co.uk/emc-magazines/#emagazine 

Also featured on BBC’s Word of Mouth show with Michael Rosen: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002js96 

Big thanks to Freya, Miles and their teacher El Power at Eltham Hill for instigating this episode and for all the work around it. 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ 

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys 

Welcome to episode 80 of Lexis in which Dan and guest interviewer Ben talk to Dr Matthew Hunt, Lecturer of Sociolinguistics, University of Southampton about voice pitch, including:

• What it is and how we measure it

• What it ‘means’, including its ‘social meaning potential’

• The judgements that we make about pitch and why these matter

• Gendered perceptions of pitch

• His work on domestic violence cases and the role of pitch in perceptions of ‘victimhood’

• Gender and football commentaries

• Advice to A Level students on exploring pitch and its role

⚠️Content warning⚠️

We discuss domestic violence and abuse in broad terms in part of this episode. 

Journal of Sociolinguistics paper on the effect of pitch variation on perceptions of domestic abuse victims: https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12723

The second paper, ‘Gender Penalty? Linguistic Discrimination and Perceptions of Female Football Commentators’ is with Gender & Language and currently in press. We will update the link once it is published. 

Matthew’s website: https://matthewhuntlinguistics.home.blog/ 

Matthew’s University of Southampton page: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/626sz2/doctor-matthew-hunt 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 
Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys

⚠️Content warning⚠️

We discuss mental health, self-harm and suicide as part of this episode. 

Welcome to episode 79 of Lexis in which Raj & Dan talk to Dr Charlotte Entwistle, Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow in Psychology, University of Liverpool. We discuss:

• Her path from A levels to research

• How language analysis can be used in psychology

• What language reveals about our minds and how they work

• The linguistic patterns associated with different personality traits

• Language and mental health

• Why we need to be cautious about making connections between language and personality

• The practical applications of this work

The article in The Conversation that we discuss is here: https://theconversation.com/people-with-personality-disorders-often-use-language-differently-our-research-reveals-how-271109

Charlotte’s university page is here: https://www.liverpool.ac.uk/people/charlotte-entwistle 

Welcome to episode 78 of Lexis in which Raj & Dan talk to John Kelly, former head of content at Dictionary.com, previous contributor to Merriam-Webster and Oxford Dictionaries, emoji lexicographer for Emojipedia, and school teacher. We discuss:

• How WOTY decisions were made at Dictionary.com

• Whether we should celebrate WOTY for getting us talking about words, or be cynical about it as a marketing exercise

• What makes a WOTY stick around

• What qualities a good WOTY should have

• The sketchier WOTYs that we've seen

• 2025’s crop of WOTY nominations - what we’ve seen so far and what might be to come

• WOTY as a barometer of the times

• ‘Fascism’ as John’s WOTY/etymology of the year and why an old word is pertinent again. 

John’s blog is here: https://mashedradish.com/ 

‘Fascism’ is here; https://mashedradish.com/2025/11/04/fascism-etymology-of-the-year-2025/ 

He is also on Bluesky here: https://bsky.app/profile/mashedradish.bsky.social 

Some of the WOTY choices we discuss are covered in the articles and posts below: 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/rage-bait-2025-oxford-word-internet-language-defense/685143/?gift=h5ssLVeyARshEXLqfVq5YwEAlKAoVnByCEZqdOsZdV8&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

https://theconversation.com/2025s-words-of-the-year-reflect-a-year-of-digital-disillusionment-270769

https://time.com/7334730/word-of-the-year-2025-cambridge-collins-dictionary-oxford-merriam/ 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/04/learning/what-teenagers-are-saying-about-6-7-and-the-era-of-brain-rot.html 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cewjxqvqzgyo

https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/z9xbh4j

https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/brain-rot-what-the-oxford-word-of 

https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/the-words-that-define-our-enshittifed 

https://bsky.app/profile/hooved-mammal.bsky.social/post/3m7ntojukdc2y 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys