This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘On the nose - How the nose shapes language’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about what the nose knows – how the nose is used in language. But first, next month is our 9th anniversary! We love making this show, and we love our anniversary as a moment to say thank you for sharing our enthusiasm for linguistics.

Lauren: To help celebrate, this year we’re asking you to take a moment to rate the show in your podcasting app of choice and to leave a review if you like.

Gretchen: Sometimes I wonder what rating actually does for a podcast.

Lauren: Look, I’m sure there’re some murky, algorithmic ways that it’s used, but it’s also a really useful way to help other people find the show and let them know it’s worth their time.

Gretchen: Podcasts don’t have public listener stats, so when I’m looking at a new show that I’m thinking about listening to or that I might do an interview on, I’ll have a look at the general number of ratings and reviews to get a vibe for the show. That’s where this can help us out.

Lauren: I use a small podcast player. And even there, it’s a big difference in whether a show has zero reviews or a few. Feel free to rate or review on any platform big or small.

Gretchen: We’ll be sharing some of our favourite reviews on social media and in the credits to episodes for the next year, so stay tuned, and you might see your review there.

Lauren: Speaking of things we’ve enjoyed seeing, we’ve enjoyed seeing your photos of the jazzed up Lingthusiasm logo sticker in your lives. If you missed out on one of the stickers or if you want to see the design on other objects, we’ve now also made it available on other merch including t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and more.

Gretchen: We’ve also made a new merch item, which are greeting cards that say, “/mɛɹi mɛɹi mɛɹi / holidays.”

Lauren: Do you mean “merry / marry / Mary holidays”?

Gretchen: That’s why the subtitle says, “Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful, festive season.”

Lauren: Also, Gretchen, shouldn’t it be “Merry Christmas” not “Merry Holidays”?

Gretchen: No, because this bonus extra linguistics – hearing or reading “Merry Holidays” produces a surprise effect on the brain, known officially as an “N400.” Other examples from linguistic experiments include, “I take coffee with cream and dog.”

Lauren: Okay, I’m glad you did not put that on a gift card.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I just don’t think it would sell as well. With this card, you are doing language variation, sound change, and psycholinguistics.

Lauren: And with nine years of the show, we also have a great back catalogue of linguistics merch from classy gifts for your favourite prof or linguistics graduate to deep cut references to some of our favourite episodes to designs that look great even if your friends don’t get the linguistics reference. You can get scarves and t-shirts and notebooks and mugs and all sorts of linguistics merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was about synonyms, homonyms, and many, many other less familiar types of -nyms. You can get access to this and nine-years-worth of bonus episodes by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: “Please do not turn your nose up at today’s topic.”

Gretchen: “Let’s just follow our nose and see where we end up.”

Lauren: “Okay, this is already getting on the nose.”

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

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 can be a resonating chamber that air can get shaped by, as well as a salient location for the hand to be in contact with.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the nose! We talk about why noses are so popular cross-linguistically (seriously, nasals are in 98% of the world’s languages), what the nose looks like inside (it’s bigger than you think!), and increasingly cursed methods that linguists have tried to use to see inside the nose (from giving yourself the worst headache to, yes, sticking earbuds up your nostrils). We also share our favourite obscure nose-related idioms, map the surprisingly large distribution of the “cock-a-snook” gesture, and try to pin down why the nose feels like an intrinsically funny part of the body.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We’re 9 years old! For our anniversary, we’re hope you could leave us a rating our review on your favourite podcast app to help people who encounter the show want to click “play” for the first time: we’ll read out a few of our favourite reviews at the end of the show over the next year so this could be your words!

People have responded super enthusiastically to the jazzed up version of our logo that we sent to patrons earlier this year! So we’ve now made this design available on some very cute merch. Wear your Lingthusiasm fandom on a shirt or a mug or a notebook to help spot fellow linguistics nerds!

We’ve also made a new greeting card design that says {Merry/marry/Mary} Holidays! Whether you say these words the same or differently, we hope this card leads to joyful discussions of linguistic variation.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about our favourite words ending in nym! We talk about We talk about how there are so many kinds of nym words that are weirder and wackier than classic synonyms and antonyms, how even synonyms and antonyms aren’t quite as straightforward as they seem, and why retronyms make people mad but are Gretchen’s absolute favourite. Plus: a tiny quiz segment on our favourite obscure and cool-sounding nyms!.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ 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:

• Wikipedia entry for ‘N400 (neuroscience)’
• The Free Dictionary entry for 'Idioms - Nose’
• 'Cross-Cultural Cognitive Motivation Of English And Romanian Nose Idioms. A Contrastive Approach’ by Ana-Maria Trantescu
• 'Cultures think alike and unlike: A cognitive study of Arabic and English body parts idioms’ by T.M. Bataineh, & K. A. Al-Shaikhli
• WALS entry Feature 18A: Absence of Common Consonants
• Wikipedia entry for 'Yele language’
• Wikipedia entry for 'Nasal vowel’
• WALS entry for Feature 10A: Vowel Nasalization
• Kevin B. McGowan
• Wikipeda entry for 'Nasal cycles’
• Etymonline entry for 'thrill’
• 'Sound–meaning association biases evidenced across thousands of languages’ by Blasi et al.
• Nez en LSF (langue des signes française) video ('Nose’ in LSF)
• Lingthusiasm episode ’When nothing means something’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity’
• For more on the nose and scent, check out our episode ’Smell words, both real and invented’

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, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).

Bonus 101: Why sci-fi gestures live long and prosper - Crossover with Imaginary Worlds

If you’re inventing a new world, why not invent a new gesture to go with it?

In this episode, Lauren gets enthusiastic about fictional gestures with Eric Molinsky, host of Imaginary Worlds, a podcast about sci-fi, fantasy and other genres of speculative fiction. We talk about the Vulcan salute from Star Trek, the Wakanda Forever salute from Black Panther, and the three-finger Hunger Games salute, and how all three have crossed over with additional symbolism into the real world. We also talk about gestures that have crossed over in the other direction, from the real-world origins of the Vulcan salute in a Jewish blessing, the two-finger blessing in the Foundation tv series from classical Latin and Greek oratory via Christian traditions, as well as religious gesture in the Penric and Desdemona series, smiles and shrugs in A Memory Called Empire, and more.

Listen to this episode about fictional gestures, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

Bonus 99: The linguistics of kissing 😘

Kissing, xoxo, quadrilabial clicks, blowing a kiss, chef’s kiss, bisous, kissy-face emoji, cataglottism, and more!

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about the linguistics of kissing! We talk about the technical phonetics terms for kissing (bilabial clicks…plus the classic ling student quadrilabial clicks joke) as well as how different cultures taxonomize types of kissing (the Roman osculum/basium/suavium distinction is still pretty useful!). We also talk about how toddlers acquire the “blow a kiss” gesture, how couples time their kisses around their sentences, and many ways of representing kissing in writing, such as xx, xoxo, and emoji.

Listen to this episode about the linguistics of kissing, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘A hand-y guide to gesture. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book about gesture, including why we gesture and how linguists do research on it. But first, I have a little story to tell.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: A little while ago, I was in a very cool café/restaurant/pub type place, and I went to the bathroom. The bathroom had a bunch of fun stickers and art and graffiti on the walls. There were some stickers for podcasts. I was like, “Oh, that’s so cool! I should add a Lingthusiasm sticker. Maybe people who come to this cool bar would like our cool podcast.” But then I realised, we don’t actually have a sticker or version of our logo that actually says that we’re a podcast.

Lauren: Oh, good point.

Gretchen: Like, our logo just says “Lingthusiasm,” which is great if you are like, “Ooo, ‘linguistics’ plus ‘enthusiasm.’ That sounds like it might be neat,” but not if you wanna stick it somewhere that indicates, “Here’s what you might want to get into this for.”

Lauren: Sure. It would be nice if it did say something like, “We’re a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics.”

Gretchen: We have a great tagline. It should actually go on a sticker. But with the way our logo is currently formatted, there’s not an obvious spot to put that.

Lauren: I also realised we maybe have a bit of a design issue when a family member put one of the show stickers up and very sensibly had the word “Lingthusiasm” along the bottom.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah. I’ve seen this happen to people, too. I give them stickers, and if they haven’t listened to the show before, they will very naturally put the text reading from left to right like text normally reads in English rather than up the side like we did maybe too cleverly.

Lauren: Yeah, I think we were too clever for our own good, especially if people are only passingly familiar with the show and/or the logo.

Gretchen: This inspired us – we’ve given out a lot of logo stickers at conferences; people like them. What if we came up with a slight variation on the existing design that was a little bit more clear about some of these factors?

Lauren: Our artist, Lucy, has been making all of these really nice doodle designs that are on own website and social media, but they aren’t reflected in the logo at all.

Gretchen: We asked Lucy if she could draw us some fun little objects, like we have elsewhere on the website, but in the shape of the classic Lingthusiasm squiggle-slash-glottal-stop-slash-question-mark-slash-ear logo. She could fill them in with some references from the past 100 episodes and other linguistics objects of assorted kinds.

Lauren: I am biased, but I love the little kiki and the little bouba in there.

Gretchen: I thought you were gonna comment on all the hand shapes.

Lauren: I also love those.

Gretchen: I personally love the leaping rabbit because rabbits have come up several times on Lingthusiasm with Gavagai and the Bill Labov rabbit story.

Lauren: I’m upset that you didn’t say you love the teeny tiny silhouettes of us having a little chat together.

Gretchen: Those are also very charming.

Lauren: We’ll have a link in the show notes to where you can see it and see what tiny objects you recognise from past episodes.

Gretchen: Plus, if you want to have the sticker in your own hands to put on your own water bottle or your laptop or maybe inside the bathrooms of your favourite spot that’s cool with having stickers in bathrooms, or assorted other locations, I dunno, telephone poles, we’re also gonna send a copy of the sticker with this new design on it to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-thusiast level or higher on our Patreon as of July 1, 2025.

Keep reading

103: A hand-y guide to gesture

Gestures: every known language has them, and there’s a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren’s new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press. Is it a general audience book? An academic book? A bit of both. (Please enjoy our highlights version in this episode, a slim guide to the Slim Guide, if you will.) We talk about the wacky hijinks gesture researchers have gotten up to with the aim of preventing people from gesturing without tipping them off that the study is about gesture, including a tricked-out “coloured garden relax chair” that makes people “um” more, as well as crosslinguistic gestural connections between signed and spoken languages, and how Gretchen’s gestures in English have been changing after a year of ASL classes. Plus, a few behind-the-scenes moments: Lauren putting a line drawing of her very first gesture study on the cover, and how the emoji connection from Because Internet made its way into Gesture (and also into the emoji on your phone right now).

There were also many other gesture stories that we couldn’t fit in this episode, so keep an eye out for Lauren doing guest interviews on other podcasts! We’ll add them to the crossovers page and the Lingthusiasm hosts elsewhere playlist as they come up. And if there are any other shows you’d like to hear a gesture episode on, feel free to tell them to chat to Lauren!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

We’ve made a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo to put on stickers, featuring fun little drawings from the past 8.5 years of enthusiasm about linguistics by our artist Lucy Maddox. There’s a leaping Gavagai rabbit, bouba and kiki shapes, and more…see how many items you can recognize!

This sticker (or possibly a subtle variation…stay tuned for an all-patron vote!) will go out to everyone who’s a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher as of July 1st, 2025.

We’re also hoping that this sticker special offer encourages people to join and stick around as we need to do an inflation-related price increase at the Lingthusiast level. As we mentioned on the last bonus episode, our coffee hasn’t cost us five bucks in a while now, and we need to keep paying the team who enables us to keep making the show amid our other linguistics prof-ing and writing jobs.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguist celebrities! We talk about start with the historically famous Brothers Grimm and quickly move onto modern people of varying levels of fame, including a curiously large number of linguistics figure skaters. We also talk about a few people who are famous within linguistics, including a recent memoir by Noam Chomsky’s assistant Bev Stohl about what it was like keeping him fueled with coffee. And finally, we reflect on running into authors of papers we’ve read at conferences, when people started recognizing us sometimes, and our tips and scripts for navigating celebrity encounters from both sides.

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:

• ‘Gesture: A Slim Guide’ by Lauren Gawne
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Emoji are Gesture Because Internet’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou’
• Lingthusiasm episode ’Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge’
• 'Gesture, Speech, and Lexical Access: The Role of Lexical Movements in Speech Production’ by Rauscher et al.
• 'Effects of Visual Accessibility and Hand Restraint on Fluency of Gesticulator and Effectiveness of Message’ by Karen P. Lickiss and A. Rodney Wellens
• 'Effects of relative immobilization on the speaker’s nonverbal behavior and on the dialogue imagery level’ by Rimé et al.
• 'The effects of elimination of hand gestures and of verbal codability on speech performance’ by J. A. Graham and S. Heywood

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, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).

Bonus 97: Rock, paper, scissors, Gesture book, and a secret project - Survey results and general updates

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about two sets of updates!

First, results from the 2024 listener survey. We learned which one of us you think is more kiki and more bouba, an utterly nonsensical question that you nonetheless had 80/20 agreement on! We also learned about heart gestures and variants on rock, paper, scissors (or paper, scissors, rock) in many different languages.

Plus, we used results from all three years of listener surveys to create a massive blog post of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics, if you’re looking for more linguistics options!

Second, our years in review and some upcoming things:

Lauren has finally finished writing her academic book about gesture and you can get Gesture: A Slim Guide from Oxford University Press later this month (that’s late March 2025 for people reading from the future). If academic books aren’t quite your jam (extremely reasonably), stay tuned for the fun highlights version on an upcoming Lingthusiasm episode!

Gretchen had a big trip in Europe last year including the launch of the Spanish edition of Because Internet, started learning American Sign Language (ASL), and has also been working a lot on a mysterious secret project which can’t be announced in public yet (ooooooh~~). It’s thanks to the support of patrons that we can do projects like this before they’re bringing in revenue on their own so stay tuned for further announcements once we’re allowed to talk about it :)

Together, we also co-authored two academic articles in 2024 about the meta aspects of doing linguistics communication with broader audiences (an important part of convincing Lauren’s job that it’s worth her spending time still making the podcast). They’re called: ‘Towards a theory of linguistic curiosity: applying linguistic frameworks to lingcomm and scicomm’  and 'Creating Inclusive Linguistics Communication: Crash Course Linguistics’ (with a big team from Crash Course Linguistics).

Listen to this episode about our 2024 survey results and general updates, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

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

Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you’re pointing at. Humans are really good at producing and understanding pointing, and it seems to be something that helps babies learn to talk, but only a few animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can’t. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of ways of pointing, and their relative prominence varies across cultures: you can point to something with a finger or two, with your whole hand, with your elbow, your head, your eyes and eyebrows, your lips, and even your words.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about pointing, aka deixis. We talk about how pointing varies across cultures and species: English speakers tend to have a taboo against pointing with the middle finger and to some extent at people, but don’t have the very common cross-cultural taboo against pointing at rainbows. We also talk about the technical term for pointing in a linguistic context, deixis, and how deictic meanings bring together a whole bunch of categories: pronouns in signed and spoken languages, words like here, this, go, and today, and the eternal confusion about which Tuesday is next Tuesday.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

This episode is brought to you by all of the fantastic people who have supported the podcast by becoming patrons or buying merch over the years! We say this a lot but it really is very much the case that we would have had to give up making the show a long time ago without your financial support. If you would like to help keep the show running ad-free into the future, listen to bonus episodes, and connect with other language nerds on our Discord, join us on Patreon.

In this month’s bonus episode, Lauren gets enthusiastic about the process of doing linguistic fieldwork with Dr. Martha Tsutsui Billins, an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at California State University Fresno and creator of the podcast Field Notes, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ 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:

• ‘Why don’t apes point?’ - Michael Tomasellso
• 'Dogs’ responsiveness to human pointing gestures’ - K. Soproni, A. Miklósi, J. Topál, V. Csányi
• 'A Comparative Study of the Use of Visual Communicative Signals in Interactions Between Dogs and Humans and Cats and Humans’ - Á. Miklósi, P. Pongrácz, G. Lakatos, J. Topál, V. Csányi.
• 'The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• Discussion of lip pointing in 'Encanto’ on Reddit, including video example
• 'Body-directed gestures: Pointing to the self and beyond’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• 'Even Rainbows Have a Dark Side’ - Kensy Cooperrider
• Etymonline entry for ’*deik-’
• Etymonline entry for 'deixis’
• Wikipedia entry for 'deixis’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Pronouns: Little words, big jobs’
• 'Pointing in gesture and sign’ - Kensy Cooperrider & Kate Mesh
• 'How Pointing is Integrated into Language: Evidence From Speakers and Signers’ - K. Cooperrider, J. Fenlon, J. Keane, D. Brentari, and S. Goldin-Meadow
• 'Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing’ - J. Fenlon, K. Cooperrider, J. Keane, D. Brentari, and S. Goldin-Meadow
• 'On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American sign language’ - Laura A. Petitto
• 'Demonstratives and deixis in Tamil and Sinhala’ blog post on Xavieremmanuel.org
• 'Spatial deixis in Iaai (Loyalty Islands)’ - Françoise Ozanne-Rivierre
• 'Deictic categories in three languages of Eastern Indonesia’ - Hein Steinhauer
• Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all’

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 Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter 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).

Lingthusiasm 2022 Survey Results

In late 2022, we ran our first Lingthusiasm audience survey! We tried out some linguistic experiments, and now we have the results. To learn more, and stay in the loop for potential future surveys (we have ethics approval for 3 years!), join us on Patreon.

In late 2022, we ran our first Lingthusiasm audience survey! We wanted to get to know you better and try out some linguistic experiments with you, so we got formal ethics approval from La Trobe University in case we want to use any of these findings in a research paper later. Thank you to the over 1000 people who filled it out! We have ethics approval for 3 years, so if you missed it this time around, keep an eye out in the future!

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get excited about the results of the 2022 Lingthusiasm Survey. First, some demographics: we had respondents from over 50 countries, in which Canada and Australia are tied (phew!), and a mix of genders, in which about 1 in 5 respondents are not a binary gender (including nonbinary, agender, and genderqueer; from responses to the “other” category it looks like we should add genderfluid for next year!). Also about 1 in 5 people answered some version of “all of them??” to the “what languages are you interested in?” question, which was honestly unfair of us to make you pick. We also talk about synesthesia fomo, whether people respond differently to kiki/bouba depending on whether they’re aware of them as a meme, complicating the “where is a frown?” map, the plural of emoji, and more!

Listen to this episode about the results of the 2022 Lingthusiasm Survey and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.