Superlinguo

Linguistics and Language Podcasts

laurengawne — Wed, 18 Dec 2024 13:18:29 +1100

Looking for podcasts about language and linguistics? Here’s a comprehensive list with descriptions! I’ve also mentioned if shows have transcripts. If there are any I missed, let me know!
Linguistics
Lingthusiasm A podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne (that’s me!). Main episodes every third Thursday of every month, with a second bonus episode on Patreon. (Transcripts for all episodes)
Because Language Every week Daniel, Ben, and Hedvig cover the news in linguistics and tackle a particular topic. (previously Talk the Talk) (Transcripts for all episodes after release)
The Vocal Fries Every episode Carrie Gillon & Megan Figueroa tackle linguistic discrimination in relation to a particular group. (Transcripts for some episodes)
En Clair A podcast about forensic linguistics from Dr Claire Hardaker at Lancaster University. Episodes released monthly, with a range of topics from criminal cases to literary fraud. (Transcripts for all episodes)
Language on the Move Conversations about linguistic diversity in social life. (Transcripts for some episodes)
Said & Done A podcast about languages and the people who speak them, from the Columbia LRC
Accentricity From Sadie Durkacz Ryan, a lecturer in sociolinguistics at Glasgow University. Season one has six episodes.
All About Accents A podcast all about accents with linguist and accent coach Dani Morse-Kopp in conversation with her partner Lucas Morse.
Tomayto Tomahto Led by Talia Sherman, a Brown University undergrad, this interview-based podcast explores language.
Field Notes Martha Tsutsui Billins interviews linguists about their linguistic fieldwork. (Transcripts for all episodes)
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences sub-30 minute episodes about the history of linguistics from James McElvenny, with the occasional interviews.
Lingua Brutalica Jess Kruk and Wes Robertson take on the world of extreme metal.
Say It Like You Play It A podcast about games, language and culture.
The Language Revolution Changing UK attitudes to languages.
The Secret Life of Language An interview podcast from the University of Melbourne’s School of Languages and Linguistics.
JSLX Conversations Podcast A podcast produced by the Journal of Sociolinguistics. (Transcripts for all episodes)
Lexis A conversation about linguistics with a topical UK focus, from Matthew Butler, Lisa Casey, Dan Clayton and Jacky Glancey.
Kletshead A podcast about bilingual children for parents, teachers and speech language therapists from Dr. Sharon Unsworth. Also in Dutch.
Linguistics Lounge A podcast about language and discourse with Tony Fisher and Julia de Bres. Transcripts for all episodes.
CorpusCast from Dr Robbie Love, available alongside other shows in the Aston University podcast feed or in video format.
Life and Language Michaela Mahlberg chats with her guests about life and why language matters.
Toksave – Culture Talks A podcast from the PARADISEC Archive, where the archived records of the past have life breathed back into them once again.
Theory Neutral Covering typology and descriptive grammars with Logan R Kearsley.
PhonPod Podcast Interview-based podcast about phonetics and phonology.
Linguistics Careercast A podcast devoted to exploring careers for linguists outside academia.
Language
The Allusionist Stories about language and the people who use it, from Helen Zaltzman (Transcripts for all episodes) (my review).
Grammar Girl Episodes are rarely longer than 15 minutes, but they’re full of tips about English grammar and style for professional writing, and more! (Transcripts for all episodes).
A Language I Love Is… A show about language, linguistics and people who love both. An interview-based podcast hosted by Danny Bate.
Word of Mouth BBC Radio 4 show exploring the world of words with Michael Rosen.
America the Bilingual Dedicated to the pursuit of bilingualism in the USA.
Words & Actions A podcast about how language matters in business, politics and beyond.
Subtitle A podcast about languages and the people who speak them, from Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay. For those who miss Patrick’s old podcast, The World in Words.
The Parlé Podcast from Canadian Speech-Language Pathologist Chantal Mayer-Crittenden.
Slavstvuyte! A podcast for everyone who is fascinated by Slavic languages from Dina Stankovic.
Subtext A podcast about the linguistics of online dating.
Conlangs
Conlangery Particularly for those with an interest in constructed languages, they also have episodes that focus on specific natural languages, or linguistic phenomena. Newer episodes have transcripts.
Linguitect Matt, Rowan and Liam explain linguistic topics and talk about how to build them into your conlang.
Dictionaries
Word For Word From Macquarie dictionary, with a focus on Australian English.
Fiat Lex A podcast about making dictionaries from Kory Stamper & Steve Kleinedler. One season.
Word Matters From the editors at Merriam-Webster, hosted by Emily Brewster, Neil Serven, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski.
English
Unstandardized English Interview-based podcast. Disrupting the language of racism and white supremacy in English Language Teaching.
History of English Meticulously researched, professionally produced and engaging content on the history of English. (My reviews: episodes 1-4, episodes 5-79, bonus episodes).
Lexicon Valley Hosted by John McWhorter.
That’s What They Say Every week linguist Anne Curzan joins Rebecca Kruth on Michigan public radio for a five minute piece on a quirk of English language.
A Way With Words A talk-back format show on the history of English words, cryptic crosswords and slang.
Words/etymology
Something Rhymes With Purple Susie Dent and Gyles Brandreth uncover the hidden origins of language and share their love of words.
Telling our Twisted Histories Kaniehti:io Horn brings us together to decolonize our minds– one word, one concept, one story at a time.
Word Bomb Hosts Pippa Johnstone and Karina Palmitesta explore one word per week, using particular words for a deep dive into linguistic and social issues. (Transcripts for all episodes)
Words for Granted In each episode Ray Belli explores the history of a common English word in around fifteen minutes.
Lexitecture Ryan, a Canadian, and Amy, a Scot share their chosen word each episode.
Bunny Trails Shauna and Dan discuss idioms and other turns of phrase.
Translation & Interpreting
Brand the Interpreter Interviews about the profession, from Mireya Pérez.
The Translation Chat Podcast a podcast on Japanese to English media with Jennifer O’Donnell, and translators and editors in the Japanese to English localization.
In Languages other than English
Parler Comme Jamais A French language podcast from Binge Audio.Monthly episodes from Laélia Véron.
Sozusagen A German language podcast of weekly 10 minute episodes.
Talking Bodies A German language podcast about speech, gesture and communication.
Registergeknister A German language linguistics podcast of the Collaborative Research Center 1412 at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Språket A Swedish language podcast from Sveriges Radio about language use and change.
Språktalk A Norwegian language podcast with Helene Uri and Kristin Storrusten from Aftenposten.
Klog på sprog A Danish language podcast that playfully explores the Danish language.
Kletshead A Dutch language podcast about bilingual children for parents, teachers and speech language therapists from Dr. Sharon Unsworth. Also in English.
Over taal gesproken A Dutch language podcast from the Institute for the Dutch language and the Dutch Language Society.
BabelPodcast A Portuguese language podcast from Brazil, hosted by Cecilia Farias and Gruno.
El Racionalista Omnívoro a Portuguese language podcast about linguistics, history, cinema, literature and more, hosted by Antonio Fábregas.
War of Words A Spanish language podcast about linguistics from Juana de los Santos, Ángela Rodríguez, Néstor Bermúdez and Antonella Moschetti.
Con la lengua fuera A Spanish language podcast from Macarena Gil y Nerea Fernández de Gobeo.
Hablando mal y pronto A Spanish language conversational podcast from Santiago, Juan and Magui.
Rhapsody in Lingo Cantonese podcast on language and linguistics.
Back Catalogue
These are podcasts that had a good run of episodes and are no longer being produced.
Spectacular Vernacular A podcast that explores language … and plays with it Hosted by Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer for Slate. Transcripts available. 19 episodes from 2021 and 2022.
Science Diction a podcast about words—and the science stories behind them. Hosted by Johanna Mayer, this is a production from WNYC Science Friday. 42 episodes from 2020-2022.
Troublesome Terps The podcast about the things that keep interpreters up at night. 70 episodes from 2016-2022.
The World in Words From PRI, episodes from 2008-2019.
How Brands are Build (season 1 of this show focuses on brand naming)
Very Bad Words A podcast about swearing and our cultural relationship to it. 42 episodes from 2017 and 2018.
The Endless Knot is not strictly a language podcast, but they often include word histories, linguistics podcast fans episode may find their colour series particularly interesting.
Given Names (four part radio series from 2015, all about names. My review)
Odds & Ends
There are also a number of podcasts that have only a few episodes, are no longer being made, or are very academic in their focus:
The Black Language Podcast Anansa Benbow brings you a podcast dedicated to talking about Black people and their languages. Five episodes from 2020.
Speculative Grammarian Podcast (from the magazine of the same name, about 50 episodes from Dec 2009-Jan 2017)
Linguistics Podcast (on YouTube, around 20 episodes in 2013 introducing basic linguistic concepts)
Evolving English: Linguistics at the Library (8 episodes 2018), from the British Library.
Language Creation Society Podcast (8 episodes, 2009-2011)
LingLab (very occasionally updated podcast from graduate students in the Sociolinguistics program at NC State University)
Hooked on Phonetics five episodes from Maxwell Hope from 2019 and 2020.
Glossonomia Each episode is about a different vowel or consonant sound in English. 44 episodes from 2010-2014.
Distributed Morphs An interview-based podcast about morphology, from Jeffrey Punske. Eight episodes in 2020.
Word to the Whys a podcast where linguists talk about why they do linguistics. Created by TILCoP Canada (Teaching Intro Linguistics Community of Practice). 10 episodes in 2020 and 2021.
The Weekly Linguist An interview podcast about the languages of the world and the linguists who study them from Jarrette Allen and Lisa Sprowls. 21 episodes in 2021.
Silly Linguistics (ad hoc episode posting, but episode 7 is an interview with Kevin Stroud for History of English fans)
Linguistics After Dark Eli, Sarah and Jenny answer your linguistics questions in hour-ish long episodes.
WACC Podcast (guest lectures at Warwick Applied Linguistics)
Sage Language and Linguistics
Let’s Talk Talk
Queer Linguistics has a couple of episodes, with a bit of classroom vibe
GradLings An occasionally-updated podcast for linguistics students at any stage of study, to share their stories and experiences.
Canguro English A podcast about language for people learning languages. 103 episodes from 2018-2021.
Why is English? A podcast about how the English language got to be the way it is, from Laura Brandt. Seven episodes from 2020 and 2021.
Animology Vegan blogger Colleen Patrick Goudreau uses her love of animals as a starting point for exploring animal-related etymologies. 27 episodes from 2017-2020.
Wordy Wordpecker Short weekly episodes from Rachel Lopez, charting the stories of English words. 14 episodes from 2018.
Speaking of Translation A monthly podcast from Eve Bodeux & Corinne McKay. 10 episodes from 2020-2021.
Se Ve Se Escucha (Seen and Heard) Language justice and what it means to be an interpreter, an organizer and bilingual in the US South, from the Center for Participatory Change. Episodes from 2020.
This is an updated listing from December 2024. I’m always excited to be able to add more podcasts to the list, so if you know of any linguistics/language podcasts not here, please let me know! I wait until a show has at least 5 episodes before I add it to the list, and I like to let people know when transcripts are available.

The 2024 update to the Linguistics and Languages podcast list!

Click through to the original post to see the latest version.

Chatting to Emily M. Bender was an absolute delight, it was great to hear about her own research as…

laurengawne — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 08:02:00 +1100

lingthusiasm:

Lingthusiasm Episode 98: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender
When a human learns a new word, we’re learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer “learns” a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn’t have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspective, just as plausible from the computer’s.
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about how computers process language with Dr. Emily M. Bender, who is a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, USA, and cohost of the podcast Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000. We talk about Emily’s work trying to formulate a list of rules that a computer can use to generate grammatical sentences in a language, the differences between that and training a computer to generate sentences using the statistical likelihood of what comes next based on all the other sentences, and the further differences between both those things and how humans map language onto the real world. We also talk about paying attention to communities not just data, the labour practices behind large language models, and how Emily’s persistent questions led to the creation of the Bender Rule (always state the language you’re working on, even if it’s English).
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
The 2024 Lingthusiasm Listener Survey is here! It’s a mix of questions about who you are as our listener, as well as some fun linguistics experiments for you to participate in. If you have taken the survey in previous years, there are new questions, so you can participate again this year.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about three places where we can learn things about linguistics!! We talk about two linguistically interesting museums that Gretchen recently visited: the Estonian National Museum, as well as Mundolingua, a general linguistics museum in Paris. We also talk about Lauren’s dream linguistics travel destination: Martha’s Vineyard.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Also, Patreon now has gift memberships! If you’d like to get a gift subscription to Lingthusiasm bonus episodes for someone you know, or if you want to suggest them as a gift for yourself, here’s how to gift a membership.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Emily Bender
Emily Bender on Bluesky and Twitter
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000
Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: The Newsletter
The AI Con by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna
‘Data Sovereignty and the Kaitiakitanga License’ on Te Hiku
wordfreq by Robyn Speer on GitHub
Lingthusiasm Episode ‘Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane’
Bonus with Janelle Shane: we do a dramatic reading of the funniest auto-generated Lingthusiasm episodes
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Chatting to Emily M. Bender was an absolute delight, it was great to hear about her own research as well as the differences between different models of computational linguistics.

Towards a theory of linguistic curiosity: applying linguistic frameworks to lingcomm and scicomm - New Open Access research article in Linguistics Vanguard

laurengawne — Mon, 11 Nov 2024 08:01:03 +1100

The latest Special Issue of Linguistics Vanguard is all about Public Outreach in Linguistics, and includes articles from some of my favourite lingcommers and about some of my favourite projects. There are articles from Planet Word and the Linguistics Roadshow team, as well as podcasting, courtrooms and high school clubs.

As the editors of this special issue, Laura Wagner and Georgia Zellou, note in their introduction to the collection:

[P]ublic engagement in the domain of language does not (currently!) have a well-established presence in society; compare it, for example, to the range of high-profile engagement activities to be found in Astronomy. Some of the reasons for this lack are institutional – most academic researchers don’t get credit for engagement work the way they do for writing traditional research papers. But the field also lacks an engagement infrastructure: we have few ways of learning about who is doing it, what’s been found to be effective, and connections for building engagement collaborations.

It’s exciting to see lingcomm practitioners begin to articulate the work that goes into what they produce, and to build a shared understanding of the value of lingcomm.

As part of this collection of articles, I’m delighted that I am coauthor on a paper with Gretchen McCulloch on the value of ‘curiosity’ as a linguistic value that can be observed and analysed. This is a theory Gretchen has been working on for a while, and I’m delighted that she invited me along to turn this into an article we can share. It captures the expansive approach to the value of linguistic theory to the production of lingcomm content, and the ways that lingcomm can benefit from studying excellent scicomm in other domains.

Abstract

Linguistics communication (lingcomm) is uniquely placed as a branch of science communication (scicomm), as lingcomm practitioners can reflexively draw on our own discipline of linguistics to further our understanding of effective communication practices with broader audiences. In this article we cut across various sub-disciplines of linguistics to look at syntactic, semantic, and discourse practices that make for compelling communication. We refer to this as the way a text incites curiosity, or the value of “curiosity”, by analogy with “grammaticality” and “felicity” as linguistic concepts. We look at an example text with high curiosity in scicomm, before highlighting key linguistic features of curiosity. We also show how we implement these in our own lingcomm work, and discuss the implications for effective lingcomm. We conclude with potential avenues for exploring curiosity in scicomm and lingcomm, and the importance of linguists contributing to public understanding of language.

Reference

McCulloch, G. & L. Gawne. 2024. Towards a theory of linguistic curiosity: applying linguistic frameworks to lingcomm and scicomm. Linguistics Vanguard 10(s3): 181-189. DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2024-0073

Very happy with this episode being a lowkey mashup of spooky season and morphosyntax.

laurengawne — Mon, 21 Oct 2024 08:00:50 +1100

lingthusiasm:

Lingthusiasm Episode 97: OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻
Eye of newt and toe of frog,
Wool of bat and tongue of dog…
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic and ~spooky~ about possession! We talk about how the haunting type of possession and the linguistic type of possession do share an etymological origin, but how the term “possession” itself is misleading, because possessive constructions are used to express all sorts of relationships between nouns, including part-whole (eye of newt), material (a cauldron of silver), interpersonal (the wizard’s apprentice), and general association (the school of magic). We also talk about the three big ways possession is expressed in English (of, ’s, and have) and how languages can require some concepts to be possessed (like kinship terms and body parts) or consider others too significant or too trivial for possession (like the moon or a pen).
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
The 2024 Lingthusiasm Listener Survey is here! It’s a mix of questions about who you are as our listener, as well as some fun linguistics experiments for you to participate in. If you have taken the survey in previous years, there are new questions, so you can participate again this year. There’s also a spot for asking us your linguistics advice questions, since our first linguistics advice bonus episode was so popular!
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about how linguists might go about communicating with aliens! Drawing on highlights of the academic book “Xenolinguistics: Towards a Science of Extraterrestrial Language”, we talk about how we’d actually go about trying to communicate with aliens.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes, including the episodes where we discuss the results of our past two surveys - ‘2022 Survey Results - kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji’, and ’Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz’.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Take the 2024 Lingthusiasm Listener Survey here!
The Witches, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I
WALS entry for ‘Obligatory Possessive Inflection’
Wikipedia entry for 'Inalienable Possession’
'My dug is actually my uncle’ tweet by @ChrisMcQueer, reposted to tumblr
Etymonline entry for 'of’
Etymonline entry for 'off’
Etymonline entry for 'have’
WALS entry for 'Predicative Possession’
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Very happy with this episode being a lowkey mashup of spooky season and morphosyntax.

It’s our third and final survey!

laurengawne — Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:38:45 +1100

lingthusiasm:

Lingthusiasm listener survey 2024
We’re running a Lingthusiasm listener survey for the third and final time! As part of our eighth anniversary celebrations, we’re running this survey as a way to learn more about our listeners, get your suggestions for topics, and to run some linguistic experiments!
If you did the survey in a previous year, there are new questions, so you can participate again this year. There’s also a spot for asking us your linguistics advice questions, since our first linguistics advice bonus episode was so popular!
https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey24
The survey will be open for anyone who has listened to 1 or more episodes of Lingthusiasm until December 15th (anywhere on earth)
You can hear about the results of the previous surveys in two bonus episodes:
Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz
2022 Survey Results - kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji
Data from the 2022 survey also featured in this research article we published in 2023:
Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study
We’ll have the results from this survey in an episode for you in 2025, as well as future research publications.
This project has ethics approval from La Trobe University (Ethics Reference Number HEC22181). The Participant Information Statement is available at the survey link.

It’s our third and final survey!

I personally think this years experiments include some of our silliest and some of our most interesting.

Lingthusiasm Episode 96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!

laurengawne — Mon, 23 Sep 2024 09:55:40 +1000

lingthusiasm:

We’re taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don’t forget to hold on!
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It’s easy to think of literary comparisons like “my love is like a red, red rose” but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English speakers often talk about ideas as a journey (the metaphor train) or as if they’re visual - clear or murky or heavy or maybe fuzzy, but not as fluffy or feathery or metallic or polka-dotted, but other languages can use different metaphors. We also talk about the process of metaphor design, and how metaphors can help us understand - or misunderstand - abstract concepts like electricity or language learning.
Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 30: Welcome aboard the metaphor train! We’ve added a few new things about metaphors and an updated announcements section to the top. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get Tom Scott’s Language Files team together on one call for the first and last time! We talk with host/writer Tom Scott, as well as researcher/writer Molly Ruhl and animator Will Marler, about their roles putting the videos togehter, Gretchen’s role in the brainstorming and fact-checking process, and what it’s like working on a big, multi-faceted project like the Language Files videos.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 90+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Original ‘Welcome aboard the metaphor train!’ episode on Patreon
Because Internet
Metaphor - etymology (Wikipedia)
Conceptual metaphors
Gentner, D. (1983). Flowing waters or teeming crowds: Mental models of electricity. In D. Gentner, & A. L. Stevens (Eds.), Mental Models (pp. 99-129). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Erlbaum. (Gentner and Gentner 1983, 2014 reprint)
German 'wichtig’
Michael Erard’s metaphor for language learning
FrameWorks Institute
Malaphors
Cakewalk
After recording this episode we researched more about cakewalks, which turned out to have their origin in 19th Century dance events held by African Americans. This article by Nicole Emmanuel goes into more on the history of cakewalk.
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

A cute classic Gavagai illustration has been on my Lingthusiasm merch wish list for years now. So…

laurengawne — Mon, 02 Sep 2024 08:08:43 +1000

lingthusiasm:

New Lingthusiasm merch! Gavagai, Ask Me About Linguistics, and More people have read the text on this item than I have!
A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here! We have three new designs available across a range of items.
Gavagai: lo, un-detatched rabbit parts!
Imagine you’re in a field with someone whose language you don’t speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says “Gavagai!” You probably assumed they meant “rabbit” but they could have meant something else, like “scurrying” or even “lo! an undetatched rabbit-part!” We undergo this experience pratically every time we learn a word, and yet we still manage to do it.
Inspired by the famous Gavagai thought experiment, these items feature a running rabbit and the caption “lo, an undetached rabbit-part!” in a woodblock-engraving-crossed-with-vaporwave style in magenta, indigo, teal, cream, and black/white on shirts, scarves, and more!
More people have read the text on this item than I have
“More people have been to Russia than I have” is a sentence that at first seems fine, but then gets weirder and weirder the more you read it. Inspired by these Escher sentences, we’ve made self-referential shirts saying “More people have read the text on this shirt than I have” (also available on tote bags, mugs, and hats, with the appropriate tweaks in wording), so you can wear them in old-time typewriter font and see who does a double take.
See our bonus episode Linguistic 〰️✨ i l l u s i o n s ✨〰️ (#57) for more about this classic sentence.
Ask Me About Linguistics
We’ve made a design that simply says “Ask me about linguistics” in a style that looks like a classic “Hello, my name is…” sticker, and you can put it on stickers and buttons and shirts and assorted other portable items for when you want to skip the small talk and go right to a topic you’re excited about.
ALT
Lingthusiasm merch generally
If you’re looking for subtle-to-obvious ways to signal that you’re a linguist or linguistics fan in public, gift ideas for the linguistics enthusiast in your life (or handy links to forward to people who might be interested in getting you a gift sometime), we also have many previous items of Lingthusiasm merch!
There are subtly linguistics-patterened scarves, mugs and water bottles with linguistics-related jokes on them, NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT shirts, nerdy linguistics baby clothes, and more items to browse.
We love to see your photos of Lingthusiasm merch or any diy linguistics crafts projects you might make! Feel free to tag us @lingthusiasm on social media or share in the #merch-crafts-objects channel in the Lingthusiasm Discord.
Stay lingthusiastic!

A cute classic Gavagai illustration has been on my Lingthusiasm merch wish list for years now. So excited that 2024 is the year we made this one happen.

And yes, I also have an “ask me about linguistics” button badge for my lanyard at work.

Himalayan Linguistics turns 20: Celebrating two decades of Diamond Open Access publish

laurengawne — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 08:00:30 +1000

The publication of Himalayan Linguistics issue 23(1) marks 20 years of the journal. To celebrate this milestone, the current team of editors, including myself, teamed up with two key former editors to write a special editorial about the history of the journal. Below are some excerpts from this history, as well as the article list for HL23(1) and a newly published Archives piece.

In early 2004, the first issue of Himalayan Linguistics was published. This first issue contained a single article: “An Analysis of Syntax and Prosody Interactions in a Dolakhā Newar: Rendition of The Mahābhārata”, by Carol Genetti and Keith Slater. In 2024, with the publication of Issue 23.1, Himalayan Linguistics celebrates twenty years of publishing fee-free Open Access research scholarship on the languages of the Himalayas. In these twenty years, Himalayan Linguistics has published almost 200 pieces of scholarship, all freely available online. In this special introductory article, we chart the history of the journal and look to its future.

In its twenty years of publication, Himalayan Linguistics has published 144 original research articles, 18 review articles, and 14 Archive and Field Reports. The Archive publications include grammars, dictionaries, text collections and extended descriptive works.

Himalayan Linguistics is well-placed to continue into the next twenty years. Indeed, the need for accessible online journals, which do not gatekeep with article processing charges, is even greater. The rise of digital-first research publication has seen an even contraction and concentration in the publishing market, which is now predominantly an oligopoly of a few giant commercial publishers (Larivière et al. 2015). This landscape creates a barrier, particularly for scholars who cannot afford processing fees.

Himalayan Linguistics, Volume 23, Issue 1, 2024

Editorial: Twenty years of Himalayan Linguistics
Lauren Gawne, Gregory Anderson, You-Jing Lin, Kristine A. Hildebrandt, Carol Genetti,
Spoken and sung vowels produced by bilingual Nepali speakers: A brief comparison
Arnav Darnal,
A corpus-based study of cassifiers and measure words in Khortha
Netra P. Paudyal
The grammar and meaning of atemporal complement clauses in Assamese: A cognitive linguistics approach
Bisalakshi Sawarni, Gautam K. Borah
Possessive prefixes in Proto-Kusunda
Augie Spendley
Expressing inner sensations in Denjongke: A contrast with the general Tibetic pattern
Juha Sakari Yliniemi

New in Archives and Field Reports

Facts and attitudes: on the so-called ‘factual’ markers of the modern Tibetic languages [HL ARCHIVE 14]
Bettina Zeisler

You can read all of Himalayan Linguistics, always Open Access at: https://escholarship.org/uc/himalayanlinguistics

New Research Article: Emblems: Meaning at the interface of language and gesture

laurengawne — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 08:00:57 +1000

Over the last couple of years I’ve had a bit of a running thing with emblem gestures - those gestures that have a fixed meaning and a fixed form for a particular group. I’ve done posts about air quote gestures, worked on emoji proposals for head nods and shakes, and written a journal article about the emblem gestures from The Hunger Games and Star Trek.

All of this work is been happening because I’ve been working with Kensy Cooperrider on a major review of the emblem literature, which is now published in Glossa. I started working on this article in the first year after returning to work when my first child was born, so it’s fitting that it’s finishing up pretty much four years later when my second child is a similar age. Kensy also became a parent while we were writing this paper. It’s been a slow and steady approach with this project!

This paper aims to summarise what make emblems, especially what makes them so interesting, and how they relate to spoken language, signed language, other gesture categories and other phenomena. We also surveyed the known literature of emblems across the world’s languages, noting that we need to do a lot better at documenting the world’s diversity of emblems. We also lay out the kinds of questions we should be asking about emblems, and the exciting cross-disciplinary potential for work in this area.

I really enjoyed starting a new topic deep dive. I especially appreciated that Kensy agreed to join me on this adventure. I’ve long admired his writing, both academic publications and his excellent work for general audiences across a variety of publications. His podcast Many Minds is also great.

Definitely more from me on the topic of emblems in the future.

Abstract

Emblems—the thumbs up, the head shake, the peace sign, the shhh—are communicative gestures that have a conventional form and conventional meaning within a particular community. This makes them more “word-like” than other gestures and gives them a distinctive position at the interface between language and gesture. Here we provide an overview of emblems as a recurring feature of the human communicative toolkit. We first discuss the major defining features of these gestures, and their points of commonality and difference with neighbouring communicative phenomena. Next, we review efforts to document emblems around the world. Our survey highlights the patchiness of global coverage, as well as strengths and limitations of approaches used to date. Finally, we consider a handful of open questions about emblems, including how they mean, how they are learned, and why they exist in the first place. Addressing these questions will require collaboration among linguists, lexicographers, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others. It will also deepen our understanding of human semiotic systems and how they interface with each other.

Reference:

Gawne, Lauren & Cooperrider, Kensy. 2024. Emblems: Meaning at the interface of language and gesture. Glossa, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.9705 [Open Access]

See also:

New gesture Emoji in Unicode 15.1: Head Shaking Horizontally and Head Shaking Vertically (aka shake and nod!), and (finally) right facing emoji
Gesture emoji: contributing to the Unicode Standard
New Research Article: From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: Emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture
Notes and observations about air quote gestures
Gawne, L., & Cooperrider, K. (2022). Emblems: Gestures at the interface. Preprint version of this paper on PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/my5an

Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones

laurengawne — Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:01:13 +1000

lingthusiasm:

There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone’s voice, it’s useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they’re wearing and who they’re talking with.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how nonbinary people talk with Jacq Jones, who’s a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. We talk about their research on how nonbinary and binary people make choices about how to perform gender using their voices and other variables like clothing, and later collaborating with one of their research participants to reflect on how it feels to have your personal voice and gender expression plotted on a chart. We also talk about linguistic geography, Canadian and New Zealand Englishes, and the secret plurality of R sounds in English and how you can figure out which one you have by poking yourself (gently!) with a toothpick.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about three of our favourite kinds of linguistic mixups: spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns! We talk about William Spooner, the Oxford prof from the 1800s that many spoonerisms are (falsely) attributed to, Lauren’s very Australian 90s picture book of spoonerisms, the Scottish song “The Bonny Earl of Moray” which gave rise to the term mondegreen, why there are so many more mondegreens in older pop songs and folk songs than there are now, and how eggcorn is a double eggcorn (a mis-parsing of acorn, which itself is an eggcorn of oak-corn for akern).
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds about your favourite linguistic mixups.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Jacq Jones’ website
‘Beyond a dot on a graph: A participant’s perspective on being quantified in variationist sociolinguistic research’ presentation slides by Kaspar Middendorf and Jacq Jones
Lingthusiasm episode 'What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are’
Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'How we made vowel plots with Bethany Gardner’
Lingthusiasm episode 'The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory’ (linguistics and geography)
Lal Zimman’s website
'The Female-to-Male Transsexual Voice: Physiology vs. Performance in Production’ by Viktória Papp
'Voice and Communication Change for Gender Nonconforming Individuals: Giving Voice to the Person Inside’ by Shelagh Davies, Viktória Papp, and Christella Antoni
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Review: How to Talk Language Science with Everybody, Laura Wagner & Cecile McKee

laurengawne — Mon, 17 Jun 2024 15:03:34 +1000

I was delighted to get the chance to review a new book from Laura Wagner & Cecile McKee all about doing lingcomm through hands-on demos and conversations at museums, science fairs and other public events. There’s a lot in the book for anyone who wants to start or refine the way they share linguistics with different audiences, particularly those that do face-to-face interactive work.

I have written a full review that is in Language. Below you can read a couple of excerpts from the longer review.

Communicating about linguistics to non-specialist audiences (lingcomm) is a specialist skill set in its own right. Equipping more linguists with these skills is vital if linguistics is going to stake a claim for its relevance to people’s lives as more than a passing curiosity. Until now, this skill set had to be learned mostly through emulation of existing practitioners, online resources and informal networks. Thankfully, Laura Wagner (Ohio State University) and Cecile McKee (University of Arizona) have distilled their extensive experience running lingcomm activities and events into a clear and practical book. How to Talk Language Science with Everyone (Cambridge University Press) illustrates the best of lingcomm practice; it is informed by linguistic research as well as insights from related fields, including psychology, education and anthropology. It also illustrates the best of the lingcomm community more broadly; it is accessible to those new to the practice, encouraging in tone, and passionate about introducing more people to how great linguistics is (a fact taken as given in this book).

The closing worksheets of each chapter are a sequence of activities that allow the reader to work towards what the authors call a ‘doable demo’, a well-planned hands-on demo that engages an intended audience in your topic of interest. While the activities in the early chapters are not particularly linked to the chapter topic, as the book builds the activities allow the reader to put the lessons of the chapter to work designing and refining a hands-on demo. The book can make a good classroom resource for anyone lucky enough to be able to run a lingcomm/scicomm subject, but the clear structure of the book means that it can be put to great use in the hands of an individual with time to work through the activities. It would be great to see more people working on short, engaging hands-on demos that capture people’s linguistic imagination (and, as the authors say in the book, sharing them!). Alongside initiatives like 3 Minute Thesis and 5 Minute Linguist, a hands-on demo can be an important part of a linguist’s toolkit for communicating with a range of audiences outside of academia. This book is perfect for you to share with your engaged graduate students or highly-enthusiastic undergraduates.

Thanks to Language for arranging for the review copy!

Wagner, Laura & Cecile McKee. 2023. How to Talk Language Science with Everybody. Cambridge University Press. [Review in Language]

Feeling inspired? For more lingcomm resources visit: https://lingcomm.org/resources/

2024 LingComm Grantees: New linguistics projects for you to follow

laurengawne — Thu, 30 May 2024 11:37:46 +1000

The 2024 LingComm Grants awarded six $500 (USD) grants, thanks to the support of Lingthusiasm, Rob Monarch, Wordnik, Claire Bowern, and Kirby Conrod and friends. Some of these projects are already producing content for you to enjoy right now!

LingComm Grants.

Emily Remirez, Linguistics Coloring Book
Adam Aleksic, Etymology Nerd videos
Sarah Wood, Pina Hare, Marcus Wilker, Get the Reference Podcast
Onyedikachi Augustine Okodo, English Parliament radio show
Irene Lami, Saussure e Grida podcast

Kirby Conrod LGBTQ+ LingComm Grant:

Montreal Benesch, trans*languaging art show

Commendations:

Talia Sherman, Tomayto Tomahto podcast
Franca Umasoye Igwe, Say No to Language Shaming Campaign
Marvin Nauendorff, Anthony Burger, Anna Sulaiman, Rebecca Hall, Alice Pol, Perla Camacho-Cedillo, Aline Vitaly, Yuka Kawasaki, Linguaphile Language Magazine

Grants were judged by Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch and also included a group mentoring meeting for advice and support. The 2024 LingComm Grants received 40 applications.

For more on the 2024 grants, the winners from previous years, and other lingcomm resources, check out the LingComm website.

Lingthusiasm Episode 92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode

laurengawne — Mon, 20 May 2024 08:00:48 +1000

lingthusiasm:

Sometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making “brunch” from breakfast+lunch. Other times, words are smooshed together gradually, over a long period of speakers or signers discovering more efficient ways to position their mouth or hands, such as pronouncing “handbag” being pronounced more like “hambag”.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about smooshing words together. We talk about the history of portmanteau words like motel and chortle, the poem Jabberwocky, and why some portmanteaus, like Kenergy from Ken + energy, sound really satisfying, while others (wonut??) just don’t catch on at all. We also talk about words becoming more efficient to produce over time, like how a path can be gradually created through many people choosing the same route through a field, such as “going to” becoming “gonna” or the historical forms of ASL “remember” and French “aujourd'hui”.
Read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about secret codes and the word games we create based on them!! We talk about using alternate symbols to encode messages like in semaphore, Morse code, as well as repurposing existing symbols like the Caesar cipher, ROT13, and cryptoquote puzzles. We also talk about cryptic crosswords, which aren’t technically a kind of cryptography but were used to recruit codebreakers for Bletchley Park in World War II, as well as Navajo, Choctaw, and other Native American code talkers who used their language skills to transmit messages in both world wars that were much harder to crack than a mere cipher.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Lingthusiasm episode ‘When Nothing means Something’
Wikipedia list of portmanteaus
OED entry for 'frenemy’
Examples of Spanish portmanteaus - post by Reddit post by user ExtraSquats4dathots
More examples of Spanish portmanteaus
Wikipedia entry for 'Blend Words’
'BroT3’ - post by All Things Linguistic
'Quantifying cronuts: Predicting the quality of blends’, by Constantine Lignos and Hilary Prichard
'Frankenwords: they’re alive! But for how long?’ by Andy Bodle
’#portmantfail’ - post by Superlinguo
'The Fandom Pairing Name: Blends and the Phonology-Orthography Interface’ post by All Things Linguistic
'The Fandom Pairing Name: Blends and the Phonology-Orthography Interface’ paper by Cara M. DiGirolamo
Wikipedia entry for 'Jabberwocky’
'An Open Letter To The Red Squiggles Under “Imput”’ post by All Things Linguistic
'Homorganic Nasal Assimilation in Arsi-Bale Afan Oromo: A Non-Linear Phonology’ by Tilahun Negash
'Nasal assimilation in Jakarta Indonesian’ by Ferdinan Okki Kurniawan
'Nasalisation and nasal assimilation in Akan’ by John Odoom and Kwasi Adomako
Lingthusiasm episode 'What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are’
Assimilation processes in sign language
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Thinking With Your Hands, Susan Goldin-Meadow (Review)

laurengawne — Mon, 06 May 2024 08:00:55 +1000

In Thinking With Your Hands, Susan Goldin-Meadow meets the challenge of summarising a lifetime of research for a non-specialist audience. Since the early 1970s Goldin-Meadow has been researching the role of gesture in thinking, communicating and learning. This book captures her passion for this work, and the enthusiasm for collaboration that has resulted in the Goldin-Meadow lab being a powerhouse of Gesture Studies scholarship over the last three decades. There are some black line images throughout the book that illustrate some key gestural moments. I was delighted to read a physical review copy from the publisher.

Goldin-Meadow’s work spans a range of topics in child language acquisition, the emergence of homesign and signed languages, and the use of gesture in educational contexts. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, “Thinking with our hands”, introduces the ways that gesture provides a more expansive understanding of language and what we communicate. In this book, as in her research, Goldin-Meadow focuses on the gestures we use alongside speech. These gestures can provide visual information alongside the structured linguistic content of spoken or signed languages. Sometimes that information is not found in the linguistic content and instead offers a different perspective on the thought processes of the person using gesture, other times, gesturing appears to not only show, but help, the thinking process.

The second section, “Speaking with our hands”, is built around Goldin-Meadow’s expertise in children’s communication, particularly in contexts without spoken language. This includes discussion of homesign, where a deaf child is raised in a hearing household without signed language and develops a way of communicating with their family. These homesign systems are more than gesture, but less structured than a language, although as Goldin-Meadow’s work has shown, it’s the child driving the structure, not their caregivers. Goldin-Meadow is exceedingly diplomatic about the choices made by parents in these contexts, but at least makes it clear how the oralism approach does not benefit children. We also get to read about the birth of signed languages in contexts like Nicuagua, where the first school for deaf children was set up in the 1980s. In a context of support and input, children are able to collaboratively build a full language, often drawing on local gestures as one of their resources.

The third section, “Why you should care about hands”, draws on insights from the research introduced in earlier chapters to make a case for gesture being relevant to parents, clinicians and teachers. The final chapter “what if gesture were considered as important as language?” is an opportunity that Goldin-Meadow uses for a vision for the use of the many remarkable insight from her work and that of collaborators and colleagues.

Although this book draws mostly on research conducted by her own lab, or by people from her lab who have gone on to become leaders in the field in their own right, the book still draws on research from others across the field as well. It’s clear that Goldin-Meadow is demonstrating the ways she’s honed the message about her work, and its wider relevance, for a general audience. For someone with a passing familiarity with work from the Goldin-Meadow lab, there’s a great deal of charm in learning the stories behind some iconic pieces of research. Goldin-Meadow is very happy to let us know that had shown students some classic gesture mismatch footage in her classes for years before Brecky Church coded the data and noted that the mismatches preceded a developmental advance. Goldin-Meadow is exceedingly charming in her enthusiasm for name-checking her junior collaborators and students, as well as their students (who she gleefully points out are her academic grandchildren).

In Thinking with your Hands Goldin-Meadow’s expertise and depths of enthusiasm are exceedingly evident, but so is her commitment to finding ways to share her work with people beyond psychology and Gesture Studies. This has become one of my go-to recommendations for Gesture Studies scicomm.

Susan Goldin-Meadow, Thinking With Your Hands (Basic Books, 2023)

This episode has everything in it.

laurengawne — Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:00:31 +1000

lingthusiasm:

Lingthusiasm Episode 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 technically part of “everything”. That’s because words like “everything” and “all” really mean something more like “everything typical in this situation”. Or in linguistic terms, we say that their scope is ambiguous without context.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we can think about ambiguity of meaning in terms of scope. We talk about how humour often relies on scope ambiguity, such as a cake with “Happy Birthday in red text” written on it (quotation scope ambiguity) and the viral bench plaque “In Memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile” (negation scope ambiguity). We also talk about how linguists collect fun examples of ambiguity going about their everyday lives, how gesture and intonation allow us to disambiguate most of the time, and using several scopes in one sentence for double plus ambiguity fun.
Read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the forms that our thoughts take inside our heads! We talk about an academic paper from 2008 called “The phenomena of inner experience”, and how their results differ from the 2023 Lingthusiasm listener survey questions on your mental pictures and inner voices. We also talk about more unnerving methodologies, like temporarily paralyzing people and then scanning their brains to see if the inner voice sections still light up (they do!).
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Also: Join at the Ling-phabet tier and you’ll get an exclusive “Lingthusiast – a person who’s enthusiastic about linguistics,” sticker! You can stick it on your laptop or your water bottle to encourage people to talk about linguistics with you. Members at the Ling-phabet tier also get their very own, hand-selected character of the International Phonetic Alphabet – or if you love another symbol from somewhere in Unicode, you can request that instead – and we put that with your name or username on our supporter Wall of Fame! Check out our Supporter Wall of Fame here, and become a Ling-phabet patron here!
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Wikipedia entry for Everything Bagel
‘Shel Silverstein’s hot dog and the domain of “everything”’ post on Language Log
Wikipedia entry for 'Scop’ (an oral poet)
'New publication: Reported evidentiality in Tibeto-Burman languages’ post on Superlinguo
Wikipedia entry for Tom Swifty
'Bench in honour of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn’t smile’ post on All Things Linguistic
WALS entry for Feature 144B: Position of negative words relative to beginning and end of clause and with respect to adjacency to verb
'A few notes on negative clauses, polarity items, and scope’
'I didn’t ask you to kill him’ Learning English post on sentence stress and meaning
'I didn’t ask you to kill him’ sentence stress example in action by @dheanasaur on TikTok (⚠︎warning, loud sound)
Non-manual Markers in ASL / NMM’s
'The Impulse to Gesture: Where Language, Minds, and Bodies Intersect’ by Simon Harrison
'Quantifier Scope Jokes’ post on All Things Linguistic
'Caring for your baby since 1890’ ambiguity post on All Things Linguistic
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

This episode has everything in it.

I would love if “getting your vowels done” became the same kind of thing as “getting your colours…

laurengawne — Fri, 12 Apr 2024 10:28:11 +1000

lingthusiasm:

Lingthusiasm Episode 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 various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibility, one that can produce several sounds at the same time which combine into what we perceive as a vowel. Behold, our latest, greatest metaphor (we’re so sorry)… the meat bagpipe!
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are. We commissioned Dr. Bethany Gardner to make custom vowel plots for us (which you can see below!) based on how we say certain words during Lingthusiasm episodes, and we talk about how our personal vowel plots let us easily see differences between our Canadian and Australian accents and between when we’re carefully reading a wordlist versus more casually talking on the show. We also talk about where the two numbers per vowel that we graph come from (hint: that’s where the bagpipe comes in), the delightfully wacky keywords used to compare vowels across English varieties (leading us to silly names for real phenomena, like “goose fronting”), and how vowel spaces are linked to other aspects of our identities including regional variation as well as gender and sexuality.
Read the transcript here.
Announcements:
We’ve created a new and Highly Scientific™ ’Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you’re not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here!
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the process of making visual maps of our own vowel spaces with Dr. Bethany Gardner. We talk about Bethany’s PhD research on how people learn how to produce and comprehend singular “they”, how putting pronouns in bios or nametags makes it easier for people to use them consistently, and how the massive amounts of data they were wrangling as a result of this led them to make nifty vowel plots for us! If you think you might want to map your own vowels or you just like deep dives into the making-of process, this is the bonus episode for you.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
The Lingthusiasm Vowel Plots:
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
See larger versions of our vowel plots on Bethany’s Github, which also contains a tutorial on making your own if you’re excited about an intermediate-level coding project
Previously on vowels: Lingthusiasm episode ‘Vowel Gymnastics’
Previously on visualizing sounds: Lingthusiasm episode 'Making speech visible with spectrograms’
Previously on “meat clarinet”: Lingthusiasm episode 'Various vocal fold vibes’
'How do bagpipes work?!’ from Ally The Piper on YouTube
Make your own bagpipe! - 'The World’s Greatest Latex Glove Bagpipes || DIY’ from World By Charlie on YouTube
Wikipedia entry for 'Voder’
A Voder in action - 'VODER (1939) - Early Speech Synthesizer’ from VintageCG on YouTube
99% Invisible episode 'Vox Ex Machina’
Identifying sounds in spectrograms
Formants
Wikipedia entry for Wells Lexical Set
'lexical set’ entry on John Wells’s phonetic blog
'The Standard Lexical Sets for English as emoji’ on Superlinguo
'The Advance of ‘Goose’’ on Dialect Blog
'GOOSE-fronting in Received Pronunciation across time: A trend study’ by Sandra Jansen and Jose A. Mompean
Australian kit/fleece vowel (Wikipedia entry on Australian English phonology)
'Australian English Monophthongs’ by Robert Mannell and Felicity Cox
'Vowel Acoustic Space Development in Children: A Synthesis of Acoustic and Anatomic Data’ by Houri K. Vorperian and Ray D. Kent
'There is no female vocal tract: Abandoning essentialist ideology in
phonetics’ by Santiago Barreda and Michael Stuart
'The influence of sexual orientation on vowel production (L)’ by Janet B. Pierrehumbert et al.
'Hegemonic masculinity and the variability of gay-sounding speech: The perceived sexuality of transgender men’ by Lal Zimman
'Revisiting the acoustics of speaker gender perception: A gender expansive perspective’ by Brandon Merritt and Tessa Bent
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Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

I would love if “getting your vowels done” became the same kind of thing as “getting your colours done” (I’m a deep jewel tones and very fronted front vowels 💅)

This was super fun, we’re so grateful to Dr. Bethany Gardner for working with our team on this, and sharing their workflow.

New gesture Emoji in Unicode 15.1: Head Shaking Horizontally and Head Shaking Vertically (aka shake and nod!), and (finally) right facing emoji

laurengawne — Mon, 08 Apr 2024 08:01:04 +1000

Unicode 15.1 will be rolling out to phones and computers across this year. It will include lots of new CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) ideographs, some new line-breaking rules for syllabic scripts, and a handfull of new emoji! There’s a phoenix, a breaking chain, a lime and a brown mushroom, as well as new family silhouettes and a handful of existing emoji, but now facing rightward!

Below are illustrations of the set from a recent Emojipedia summary of the 15.1 update.

The two emoji I’m most excited about are Head Shaking Horizontally and Head Shaking Vertically. That’s head shaking and head nodding to you! I wrote these proposals with Jennifer Daniel and the Unicode emoji subcomittee team.

Why the more elaborate names? Well, Unicode tend to describe emoji by form, not function. That’s for very good reason, because a head nod might be agreement for you, but in other cultures a vertical movement of the head can mean disagreement. This has provided a double challenge for emoji designers, who have to both show movement and also facial features that aren’t too positive or negative. Below are the Emojipedia pair. They’ve done a great job.

These two emoji are actually made by combining a classic emoji face wtih the horizontal (🙂‍↔️) or vertical arrows (🙂‍↕️ ) using a special Unicode character called a Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ, ‘zwidge’ to it’s friends), which means that even though they’re two characters they smoosh together to create one emoji. It’s the same process that makes all the different flags, as well as the gender and skin tones.

In fact, all of the emoji in 15.1 are combinations using the ZWJ mechanism; including the phoenix (🐦‍🔥), lime (🍋‍🟩) and brown mushroom (🍄‍🟫 ). Those new right-facing emoji are a combination of the usual left-facing emoji and a rightward arrow🚶‍➡️ .

It’s exciting that Unicode have decided to try this set of right-facing characters. Many emoji are left-facing, which is a legacy of their Japanese origins (the word order in Japan means that right-facing makes sense). I’ve been complaining about emoji directionality since 2015, and I’m glad that this update will mean that lil emoji dude can finally escape a burning building for those of us with a left-to-right writing system and Subject Verb Object word order. They’ve started with a bunch of people in motion. It will be interesting to see if this set is where it stops or not.

(no no buddy!! To the exit!!)

The use of the ZWJ is an elegant solution because it means that you don’t have to make a whole new codepoint for the emoji, it just uses the old one. If someone doesn’t have their phone or computer update to 15.1 then it should fall back to just showing 🚶‍➡️, which somewhat conveys the intent. That’s the magic of a good ZWJ combination.

Earlier posts on emoji gesture

Earlier posts on emoji directionality

It’s time to give the secondary Cardinal Vowels the attention they deserve ✨

laurengawne — Sun, 07 Apr 2024 09:50:30 +1000

lingthusiasm:

Which of Daniel Jones’s 10 secondary Cardinal Vowels is your favourite?
/y/ high front rounded vowel, as in German “über” or French “tu”
/ø/ mid-high front rounded vowel, as in SAE “bird”, French peu", German “schön”
/œ/ mid-low front rounded vowel as in French “coeur” (Cockney/NZ “bird”)
/ɶ/ low front rounded vowel, as in how some Danish speakers say grøn “green”
/ɒ/ low back rounded vowel, as in “not” in Received Pronunciation
/ʌ/ low-mid back unrounded vowel - historically u in “but” but not common no
/ɤ/ mid-high back unrounded vowel as in “foot” in South African English
/ɯ/ high back unrounded vowel, not in English, but u in Japanese “sushi”
/ɨ/ high central unrounded, as in the 2nd syl of roses when distinct from Rosa’s
/ʉ/ high central rounded, as in the surfer pronunciation of “dude”
See Results
In honour of Vowel Month please take this highly serious poll about your favourite vowels!!!
tumblr polls only have 10 options so we’re going with the weird bois, sorry schwa, it’s not my fault danny j didn’t love you
(don’t know what these symbols mean? vote on vibes or listen to our friend danny jones saying all the vowels on an old school record here)

It’s time to give the secondary Cardinal Vowels the attention they deserve ✨

New Research Article: Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics

laurengawne — Fri, 22 Mar 2024 08:40:13 +1100

This handbook chapter is a behind-the-scenes of how the Crash Course Linguistics video series came together. I’m really proud that this article includes contributions from the linguistics writing team, including my co-writer Gretchen McCulloch, and our fact checker Jessi Grieser, but also from members of the Complexly team, who produced the show, including Nicole Sweeney, Rachel Alatalo, Hannah Bodenhausen and Ceri Riley. As with the actual videos themselves, this was a dream team. Lingcomm that is inclusive doesn’t just happen as an accident - in this article we discuss some of the ways we set things up to make the best series we could.

This chapter is also a dream project, because it’s part of the excellent double feature: Inclusion in Linguistics and Decolonizing Linguistics, both edited by Anne Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, & Mary Bucholz for Oxford University Press. These books are both be available through digital open access. They include some of your new favouite classics about the state of linguistics in research, education and outreach, even if you don’t know that just yet.

Abstract

This case study vignette provides an insight into the choices made in the writing of Crash Course Linguistics (Complexly/PBS 2020). This series of sixteen 10-minute videos cover core introductory level topics for English speakers who consume online content. We discuss how the topics were selected and arranged into a series order. We also discuss the ways we actively built inclusion into the series workflow and content, including in the team that worked on the content, the language examples selected and topics covered. Throughout we discuss the challenges and benefits of working in a collaborative team that includes a media production company and linguists with a commitment to public engagement and communication linguistics to new audiences. Sharing these observations about putting Crash Course Linguistics together is part of our commitment to using public communication to advance the standard of public engagement with the field, and the field’s approach to inclusive practice.

Reference

Gawne, Lauren, Gretchen McCulloch, Nicole Sweeney, Rachel Alatalo, Hannah Bodenhausen, Ceri Riley & Jessi Grieser. 2024. Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics. In Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz (Eds), Inclusion in Linguistics, 383-396. Oxford University Press. [Open Access]

See Also:

Research Data Management. Or, How I made multiple backups and still almost lost my honours thesis.

laurengawne — Mon, 04 Mar 2024 07:00:11 +1100

This is a story I used to tell while teaching fieldworkers and other researchers about how to manage their data. It’s a moderately improbable story, but it happened to me and others have benefited from my misadventures. I haven’t had reason to tell it much lately, and I thought it might be useful to put into writing. This is a story from before cloud storage was common - back when you could, and often would, run out of online email storage space.

Content note: this story includes some unpleasant things that happened to me, including multiple stories of theft (cf. moderately improbable). Also, because it’s stressful for most of the story, I want to reassure you that it does have a happy conclusion. It explains a lot of my enthusiasm for good research data management.

In Australia, ‘honours’ is an optional fourth year for a three year degree. It’s a chance to do some more advanced coursework and try your hand at research, with a small thesis project. Of course, it doesn’t feel small when it’s the first time you’ve done a project that takes a whole year and is five times bigger than anything you’ve ever written.

I’ve written briefly about my honours story (here, and here in a longer post about my late honours supervisor Barb Kelly) . While I did finish my project, it all ended a bit weirdly when my supervisor Barb got ill and left during the analysis/writing crunch. The year after finishing honours I got an office job. I hoped to maybe do something more with my honours work, but I wasn’t sure what, and figured I would wait until Barb was better.

During that year, my sharehouse flat was broken into and the thief walked out with the laptop I’d used to do my honours project. The computer had all my university files on it, including my data and the Word version of my thesis. I lost interview video files, transcriptions, drafts, notes and everything except the PDF version I had uploaded to the University’s online portal. Uploading was optional at the time, if I didn’t do that I probably would have just been left with a single printed copy. I also lost all my jewellery and my brother’s base guitar, but I was most sad about the data (sorry bro).

Thankfully, I made a backup of my data and files on a USB drive that I kept in my handbag. This was back when a 4GB thumb drive was an investment.

That Friday, feeling sorry for myself after losing so many things I couldn’t replace, I decided to go dancing to cheer myself up. While out with a group of friends, my bag was stolen. It was the first time I had a nice handbag, and I still miss it.

Thankfully, I knew to make more than one back up. I had an older USB that I’d tucked down the back of the books on my shelf (a vintage 256MB drive my dad kindly got for me in undergrad after a very bad week when I lost an essay to a corrupted floppy disk).

When I went to retrieve the files, the drive was (also) corrupted. This happens with hard drives sometimes. My three different copies in three different locations were now lost to me.

Thankfully, my computer had a CD/DVD burner. This was a very cool feature in the mid-tens, and I used to make a lot of mixed CDs for my friends. During my honours project I had burned backed up files on some discs and left them at my parents house.

It was this third backup, kept off site, which became the only copy of my project. I very quickly made more copies.

When Barb was back at work, and I rejoined her as a PhD student, it meant we could return to the data and all my notes. The thesis went through a complete rewrite and many years later was published as a journal article (Gawne & Kelly 2014). It would have probably never happened if I didn’t have those project files. I continued with the same cautious approach to my research data ever since, including sending home SD cards while on field trips, making use of online storage, and archiving data with institutional repositories while a project is ongoing.

I’m glad that I made enough copies that I learnt a good lesson from a terrible series of events. Hopefully this will prompt you, too, to think about how many copies you have, where they’re located, and what would happen if you lost access to your online storage.