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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...
What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who sp...
begonia: a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see ‘coral’ 3B), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger tha...
In some communities, everyone regularly uses two languages or varieties according to the social situation, with one of them being more prest...
Language is all around us. This sentence right here, is language! But between the raw experience of someone saying something and a linguisti...
Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, som...
Before there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European...
We often invoke the idea of language by showing the mouth or the hands. But the nose is important to both signed and spoken languages: it ca...
Linguistic research has its highs and lows: from staging a traditional wedding to learn about ceremonial words to having your efforts to fou...
When we try to represent languages on a map, it's common to assign each language a zone or a point which represents some idea of where it's...
We asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said 'no'. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no'. We asked you if...
TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are an evolving genre of media: short-form, vertical videos that take up your whole screen and a...
When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have consid...
Gestures: every known language has them, and there's a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature...
It's a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you'd been zapped by a cosmic ray...
When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles...
This is our hundredth episode that's enthusiastic about linguistics! To celebrate, we've put together 100 of our favourite fun facts about l...
If it wouldn't be too much trouble, if you have a spare half hour, could we possibly suggest that you might enjoy listening to this episode...
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 wo...
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 enthusiast...
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...
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 a...
When we're talking about an activity -- say, throwing teacups in a lake -- we often want to know not just when the action takes place, but a...
There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysi...
Sometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making "brunch" from breakfast+lunch. Ot...
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 wi...
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...
For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing...
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 (th...
Language lets us talk about things that aren't, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that's an imaginative object (is a toy sword a r...
Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority lan...
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 "the...
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 und...
Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But th...
Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively s...
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...
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...
Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meanin...
Communicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say -- it’s also about the many subtle ingredients that g...
Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a...
Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re r...
Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, Eng...
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?),...
Maps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re also often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number of languages, li...
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...
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 silentl...
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...
Sometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk about how thi...
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 mul...
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...
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 thes...