139: Magpie Syntax (with Stephanie Mason)
Australian magpies are even cleverer birds than we thought. New research from Dr Stephanie Mason shows that they do two language-like things...
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Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language.
A podcast about linguistics, the science of language.
Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. Podcast Guide
Listen to Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language., a Science & Medicine podcast by Daniel Midgley. Stream 102 episodes in English, follow new audio stories, and play episodes online on Radio and Podcast.
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Episodes
20 of 102 episodes138: Pop-Up Gaeltacht (live with Laura Pakenham and friends)
Wherever Irish speakers in the world get together, you can have a "pop-up Gaeltacht"! And we're having one on this episode. We've got author...
137: Are Trees Real? (with Yngwie Nielsen and Morten Christiansen)
What goes on in our minds when we construct an utterance? Linguists often use syntax trees to represent the structure of sentences, but are...
136: These Languages Are Anchors (with Mary Walworth)
What will happen to the languages of climate refugees? Dr Mary Walworth has been working with the small island community of Nusi in Papua Ne...
135: Linguistic Illusions (with Dan Parker)
"More people have listened to this episode than you have." Why does this sentence look so right, but feel so wrong? When your grammar says o...
134: True Colour (with Kory Stamper)
How do you define what blue is? What even IS colour? Turns out, the quest to define colours was happening along with a standardisation crisi...
133: Why We Talk Funny (with Valerie Fridland)
We all have an accent — or several! And we use them to communicate things about us, and highlight aspects of our identity. So what's going o...
132: WotY 2025, the Final Word (with Kelly Wright)
We're talking to Dr Kelly Wright , friend of the show and data czar for the American Dialect Society. They run the biggest and most prestigi...
131: Words of the Week of the Year 2025 (live with friends)
Video for this episode: https://youtu.be/Mqf05kN-TaI It's Word of the Year season, and we're counting down our Words of the Week of the Year...
130: Back to the FTR (with Séan Roberts, Cole Robertson, and Annemarie Verkerk)
You know the story. The language you speak doesn't determine your savings. If your language has a future tense, there's no impact on the way...
129: They Started It: Children and Language Evolution (with Madeleine Beekman)
We've asked linguists about how language began, but what would an evolutionary biologist tell you? Prof Madeleine Beekman says it's part of...
128: Across the Universe (with Natan Last)
Among so many great word games, crosswords still reign supreme. How have they survived — and even expanded — in our digital age? What goes i...
127: Oh (with Maia Chao, Kelly Wright, and Caitlin Green)
The "Oh" show was an experimental linguistics performance lecture. It happened in June 2025 at Creative Time HQ in New York City. Actors, mu...
125: Friends With Words (live with Martha Barnette and friends)
Martha Barnette is one half of the linguistics podcast A Way With Words , and author of the new book Friends With Words: Adventures in Langu...
124: Algospeak (with Adam Aleksic)
Creators have to be mindful of what to say and what not to say in their content. This affects the language we're exposed to — and what we sa...
123: Conscious Language (with Karen Yin)
We've all seen style guides that tell us what to say and what not to say. Has a style guide ever asked you what you wanted to say? Or challe...
122: The Interaction Engine (with Stephen Levinson)
How did language start? What do all languages have in common? How does language really work? Many answers have been posed to these questions...
121: Learning from LLMs (with Adele Goldberg)
How do large language models (LLMs) do their thing, and it is anything like how we do our thing? What can we learn about human language from...
120: Gesture! ✨👐✨ (with Lauren Gawne)
Gesture is everywhere. We wave our hands when we talk, even if we're alone. Signed languages are, of course, full languages that use gesture...
119: Eurovision Goes to Uni (with Paulette van der Voet and Solveig Bollig)
It's Eurovision season! We love to talk about what we can learn about language from this international song contest, but even we didn't real...