Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

By Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

What's Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics about?

A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. A weird and deep conversation about language delivered right to your ears the third Thursday of every month. "Joyously nerdy" –Buzzfeed.

Listened to all the episodes here and wish there were more? Want to talk with other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics? Get bonus episodes and access to our Discord community at www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm

Shownotes and transcripts: www.lingthusiasm.com

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Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics episodes:

04.18.2024
91: Scoping out the scope of scope
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...
03.21.2024
90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are
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...
02.16.2024
89: Connecting with oral culture
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...
01.18.2024
88: No such thing as the oldest language
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...
12.21.2023
87: If I were an irrealis episode
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...
11.16.2023
86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez
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...
10.19.2023
85: Ergativity delights us
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...
09.22.2023
84: Look, it's deixis, an episode about pointing!
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...
08.18.2023
83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro
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...
07.21.2023
82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences
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...
06.16.2023
81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries
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,...
05.19.2023
80: Word Magic
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...
04.20.2023
79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!
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....
03.17.2023
78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge
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...
02.17.2023
77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting
Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to create something unique to the...
01.20.2023
76: Where language names come from and why they change
Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “language” in the language itself; other times the name that outsiders call the...
12.15.2022
75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions
Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses the one word “love” for several distinct feelings: familial love, romantic love, platonic love, and loving things...
11.18.2022
74: Who questions the questions?
We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as...
10.20.2022
73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory
Maps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re also often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number of languages, like 7000, mapped to dots or coloured zones with suspiciously exact and un-overlapping locations. And yet, if...
09.16.2022
72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd
What’s the “it’s” in “it’s three pm and hot”? How do you write a cough in the International Phonetic Alphabet? Who is the person most likely to speak similarly to a randomly-selected North American English speaker? In this episode, your...
08.19.2022
71: Various vocal fold vibes
Partway down your throat are two flaps of muscle. When you breathe normally, you pull the flaps away to the sides, and air comes out silently. But if you stretch the flaps across the opening of your throat while pushing...
07.21.2022
70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko
Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the other things you do with your brain, we can put people in fancy...
06.16.2022
69: What we can, must, and should say about modals
Sometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk about how things could be. What can happen. What may occur. What might be the case. What will happen...
05.20.2022
68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s...
04.22.2022
67: What it means for a language to be official
The Rosetta Stone is famous as an inscription that let us read Egyptian hieroglyphs again, but it was created in the first place as part of a long history of signage as performative multilingualism in public places. Choosing between languages...
03.18.2022
66: Word order, we love
Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags...
02.17.2022
65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting in common: they’re all formed around...
01.20.2022
64: Making speech visible with spectrograms
If you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, it’s hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for understanding language, but it’s less convenient for analyzing it -- if you’re trying to...
12.16.2021
63: Where to get your English etymologies
When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if they might have originated with a common root word. Etymologists take these hunches and...
11.18.2021
62: Cool things about scales and implicature
We can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit, but we all generally agree on where these words sit in...
10.21.2021
61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta
If you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people have written about it. Which would be fine if your topic and people...
09.17.2021
60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics
Here’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in red and the affixes, that’s prefixes and suffixes, in blue. “Later today, I’ll...
08.19.2021
59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind
Let's say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room...
07.16.2021
58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip
What do the sounds fffff, vvvv, ssss, and zzzz all have in common? They're all produced by creating a sort of friction in your mouth when you constrict two parts against each other, whether that's your lips, your teeth, your...
06.18.2021
57: Making machines learn Fon and other African languages - Interview with Masakhane
When you see something on social media in a language you don’t read, it’s really handy to have a quick and good-enough “click to translate” option. But despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, machine translation...
05.20.2021
56: Not NOT a negation episode
“I don’t have a pet dinosaur.” This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isn’t, uh, tell us your ways?). And yet it has a different feel to it than a more ordinary sentence...
04.15.2021
55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity
The letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in...
03.18.2021
54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language
If you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty grammars of various languages. But grammars, like dictionaries, don’t just appear out of nowhere -- they’re made by people, and those...
02.18.2021
53: Listen to the imperatives episode!
When we tell you, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re using a grammatical feature known as the imperative. But although it might be amusing to imagine ancient Roman emperors getting enthusiastic about linguistics, unlike Caesar we don’t...
01.21.2021
52: Writing is a technology
There’s no known human society without language, whether spoken or signed or both, but writing is a different story. Writing is a technology that has only been invented from scratch a handful of times: in ancient Sumeria (where it may...
12.17.2020
51: Small talk, big deal
“Cold enough for ya?” “Nice weather for ducks.” Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions -- it can be a way of having a momentary exchange with someone you don’t know very well or a bridge into...
11.19.2020
50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P
“Blick” is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. “Bnick” contains English sounds, but somehow it doesn’t feel very likely as an English word. “Lbick” and “Nbick”...
10.15.2020
49: How translators approach a text
Before even starting to translate a work, a translator needs to make several important macro-level decisions, such as whether to more closely follow the literal structure of the text or to adapt more freely, especially if the original text does...
09.18.2020
48: Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates
High school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as how you dress or what vowels you’re using. Making choices from among these various factors is a big way that we assert our identities as we’re...
08.20.2020
47: The happy fun big adjective episode
Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re...maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’re words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as “bigger” or “most fun”. But when we start looking...
07.17.2020
46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics
How are you? Thanks, no problem. Stock, ritualistic social phrases like these, which are used more to indicate a particular social context rather than for the literal meaning of the words inside have a name in linguistics -- they’re called...
06.19.2020
45: Tracing languages back before recorded history
Language is much older than writing. But audio and visual cues from sounds and signs don’t leave physical traces the way writing does. So when linguists want to figure out how people talked before history started being recorded, we need...
05.22.2020
44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel
The words about, broken, council, potato, and support have something in common -- they all contain the same sound, even though they each spell it with a different letter. This sound is known as schwa, it's written as an upside-down...
04.17.2020
43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “There's not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I...
03.19.2020
42: What makes a language “easy”? It’s a hard question
Asking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is – it all depends on where you start. And for babies, who start out not knowing any of them, all natural languages are eminently...

What's Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics about?

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Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics episodes:

91: Scoping out the scope of scope

90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

89: Connecting with oral culture

88: No such thing as the oldest language

87: If I were an irrealis episode

86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

85: Ergativity delights us

84: Look, it's deixis, an episode about pointing!

83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro

82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

80: Word Magic

79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!

78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge

77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting

76: Where language names come from and why they change

75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

74: Who questions the questions?

73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory

72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd

71: Various vocal fold vibes

70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

69: What we can, must, and should say about modals

68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

67: What it means for a language to be official

66: Word order, we love

65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun

64: Making speech visible with spectrograms

63: Where to get your English etymologies

62: Cool things about scales and implicature

61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta

60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics

59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind

58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip

57: Making machines learn Fon and other African languages - Interview with Masakhane

56: Not NOT a negation episode

55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity

54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

53: Listen to the imperatives episode!

52: Writing is a technology

51: Small talk, big deal

50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P

49: How translators approach a text

48: Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates

47: The happy fun big adjective episode

46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics

45: Tracing languages back before recorded history

44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel

43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod

42: What makes a language “easy”? It’s a hard question