Linguistics Careercast

“Software makes me money, but linguistics makes me happy”

Logan Kearsley is an experienced software engineer with a history in the education, solar power, and entertainment industries. He earned a BS in Computer Science and an MA in Linguistics, both from Brigham Young University, and is currently employed as a software engineer at Idaho National Laboratory. He blogs about conlangs and xenolinguistics, and he has a YouTube channel where he reads Beowulf.

Logan Kearsley on LinkedIn

Logan Kearsley’s blog

Logan Kearsley on YouTube (Daily Beowulf)

A Hybrid Approach to Cross-Linguistic Tokenization: Morphology with Statistics

Topics include:

– computational morphology

The post Episode #75: Logan Kearsley first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

This episode is an audio version of a virtual panel held at the Linguistics Career Launch in the summer of 2024, titled “Content Creation – A Path to Alternative Careers”. The presenter is Erin Kuester, who has a Master’s degree in Applied Linguistics from Ohio University, and is a copywriter and content creator for women and queer-owned businesses.

This workshop presents content creation and social media usage as skills, and how these skills can be leveraged as an alternative career or to boost an alternative career. This is especially useful for anyone who is interested in starting their own business, freelancing (whether full-time or part-time), or becoming a content creator in general. In it, you’ll learn about finding and understanding an audience, types of content, carving out a niche, platform-specific strategies, using content to market a business, monetization, and alternative careers.

Erin Kuester on LinkedIn

Erin’s “Vent” on TikTok

Deck used in this presentation

TikToks in the video:

Topics discussed include

– alternative careers

This episode of the podcast is generously sponsored by Amazon Science.

The post Episode #74: Content Creation – A Path to Alternative Careers (LCL Audio) first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

“I’m happy for the winding path that took me to this work”

Kathryn Hymes is a technologist and computational linguist, currently serving as a director of product and innovation at Doctors Without Borders. Previously, she worked in leadership positions at multiple technology firms, most recently as the head of international product expansion at Slack and an advisor at Airtable. She holds an MS in computational and mathematical engineering and an MA in linguistics, both from Stanford. Her writing on language and technology has appeared in the Atlantic, Wired, and the New York Times. Kathryn is also a co-founder of Thorny Games, a design studio that explores the stories behind the language we speak.

Kathryn Hymes on LinkedIn

MSF Science Portal

Thorny Games

Topics include:

– computational linguistics

The post Episode #73: Kathryn Hymes first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

“If you understand why you’re making a career move, then don’t worry about explaining it”

Tim Durgin (杜腾飞) is an ATA-certified Chinese-to-English linguist, translator, and analyst based in the Washington DC area. His primary focus is on written translation in several key domains, including video games, politics, national security, and contracts. Beyond his freelance endeavors, Tim has contributed to teams at NetEase, Amazon, Google, and R2Games. He holds a Master’s in East Asian Studies, and he is passionate about video games.

Tim Durgin on LinkedIn

Topics include:

– LSPs

The post Episode #72: Tim Durgin first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

“The buzz in LLMs now is all about training data”

Andy Edmonds has an MS in Human Factors, Applied Psychology from Clemson University. He started his working career as a webmaster in 1995 and has since developed a huge breadth of expertise in UX, e-commerce, web analytics, online experimentation, data science, information retrieval, and software development methods at tech companies including Microsoft, eBay, RedBubble, Adobe, Facebook, and LinkedIn. He is now a product manager at Quora. He also holds nine patents.

Andy Edmonds on LinkedIn

Tabtopia on Github

Anthropic blog

Topics include:

– experimental design

The post Episode #71: Andy Edmonds first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

“I love the process of directing voice actors – and I never would have found out about it without the internet”

Colette Feehan is an audiobook director with a PhD in linguistics who specializes in multi-language books, books with technical jargon, and multi-book series that require maintaining a strong pronunciation database. Colette’s doctoral research focused on the intersection of articulatory and acoustic phonetics and vocal performance specific to character voiceover – using ultrasound to look at how actors move the parts of their vocal tract around to make different voices.

Colette Feehan on LinkedIn

Colette Feehan’s website

Colette Feehan on YouTube

Colette Feehan on TikTok

Natalie Naudus’s book Gay the Pray Away

Rosina Lippi-Green’s book English with an Accent

Topics include:

– acoustic phonetics

The post Episode #70: Colette Feehan first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

Linguists at Work!

This is a special mini-podcast of the Linguistics Careercast called Linguists at Work. It’s a series of 5-minute interviews with career linguists, conducted by grad students in the Georgetown Linguistics program, in which they ask the question: “What’s your job and how did you get it?” Every interview focuses on a job that a linguist not only can do, but adds value to based on the unique skillset we develop as language scientists.

Today’s pod features Lexi Slome, who is an associate trial consultant. She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Georgetown University in 2024, where she focused on discourse analysis of courtroom language, including research examining the role of identity construction in telling persuasive opening statement narratives. In her current role as a trial consultant, she uses both her linguistic knowledge and research skills to provide data-driven analysis of juror reactions to complex legal cases through research exercises such as mock trials and focus groups.

The interview is conducted by Joana Fehr, a graduate student from Germany in the MLC program at Georgetown University. She has lived and studied in seven countries across Europe, North America, and South America, and brings a global perspective to her work.

Lexi Slome on LinkedIn

Joana Fehr on LinkedIn

The post Mini-pod: Linguists At Work with Lexi Slome first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

“In tech, I feel like I’m giving a sociolinguistics 101 course once a month”

This episode is a recording of a special live episode of the Linguistics Careercast podcast.

Our panel of linguists discusses how artificial intelligence (especially Gen AI) is impacting linguistics as a field. We’ll cover topics like AI bias, challenges in training data curation, and implications of GenAI on online language data collection. These are conversations that linguists are having behind the scenes about the future of this changing technical landscape.

The panel was held on April 12, 2025, during LingFest, a part of LingComm 2025

Panelists:

Producer:

Topics include

The post Episode #69: Live at LingFest 2025 first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

“Conversation designer jobs are inherently collaborative”

Jyoti Iyer earned her PhD in linguistics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Since then she’s made the journey from theoretical linguistics to expertise in customer-facing language experiences.  She is currently employed as a conversation designer, working at the interface between customer-focused experience design and enterprise AI, and focused on LLM-powered chat: guardrails, analytics and metrics, and API integrations. She’s also an LCL alum!

Jyoti Iyer on LinkedIn

Jyoti Iyer’s website

Topics include:

– theoretical linguistics

The post Episode #68: Jyoti Iyer first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.

This episode is titled “Jobs in Tech for Qualitative Researchers and Social Scientists”. Our moderator, Alfonso Sánchez-Moya, guides a discussion with panelists Lex Konnelly and Jyoti Iyer on how backgrounds in linguistics and social sciences can shape innovation and drive meaningful change in tech companies. In this session, you’ll learn how to utilize skills and expertise in analysis, critical thinking, and understanding human behavior to impact tech and technology. And there’s practical advice on breaking into these fields and advancing your career in the rapidly evolving tech landscape.

The video of this presentation is available at the Linguistics Career Launch YouTube channel.

Alfonso Sánchez-Moya on LinkedIn

Lex Konnelly on LinkedIn

Jyoti Iyer on LinkedIn

This episode of the podcast is generously sponsored by Amazon Science.

Topics discussed include

– qualitative research

The post Episode #67: Jobs in Tech (LCL audio) first appeared on Linguistics Careercast.