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.

Do you have an idea for a linguistics communication project that could use a bit of money and support to help get off the ground? Are you working on a linguistics communication project that could use a bit of a boost to reach the next level?

Apply for a LingComm Grant!

The 2022 LingComm Grants consist of ten $100 (USD) LingComm Startup Grants and four $500 (USD) LingComm Project Grants to support linguistics communication projects that bring linguistics to new audiences in engaging ways. The grants also include a group mentoring meeting with Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne to refine your idea, and promotion of your project to our lingthusiastic audience.

Applications close: 31 March 2022, midnight (anywhere on Earth)

The grants are funded by Lingthusiasm, thanks to the kind support of our patrons, and other generous contributors, and judged by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. (Want to contribute to additional LingComm Grants existing? See our FAQ.)

For more details and to apply to the LingComm Grants, check out its website.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode! 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 53 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 imperatives. But first, we’re going to do a Lingthusiasm liveshow – a virtual liveshow in late April brought to you on an internet near you for everybody who’s a patron of Lingthusiasm, which there is still time to become. Keep an eye out in late April 2021. We’ll be announcing the dates on social media and the website a little bit closer to the time.

Lauren: This liveshow is our current Patreon goal. All tickets will be for patrons. That is available at lingthusiasm.com/patreon. If you’re listening to this in the future from beyond April 2021, patrons will also be able to listen to the recording of that liveshow event as a bonus episode – along with over 50 other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: The Lingthusiasm liveshow is also part of LingFest, which is a bunch of other fun linguistics events that are happening in late April. Stay tuned to our website for more information about that. Also, in late April, we’re doing a virtual conference for linguistics communicators called “LingComm.” That’s people who make linguistics communication materials online – modelled after SciComm for science communicators. This is gonna be happening online. You can find more details about LingComm on the website lingcomm.org. That’s “comm” with two Ms.

Lauren: Our most recent Patreon bonus episode was an Ask Us Anything episode in celebration of our 100th overall episode. It is our 48th bonus and, along with our over 50 main episodes, it means there is twice as much Lingthusiasm. If you’ve worked your way through all the main episodes, they are all available at lingthusiasm.com/patreon.

Gretchen: Thanks for asking us such great questions on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord. Go hang out in the Discord if you haven’t yet. It’s fun!

[Music]

Gretchen: Start the episode!

Lauren: Go on!

Gretchen: Be interesting!

Lauren: Do linguistics!

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

Lauren: All of these sentences are giving some kind of command.

Gretchen: These are all what’s known grammatically as “imperatives.” They have the function of giving commands, but they also have the imperative, which is this particular grammatical thing where, in English, an imperative may begin with the bare form of the verb – like “start” and “go” and “be” and “do” and “stay.” That’s a particular grammatical concept that we wanna talk about today.

Lauren: The function of giving a command means that now, Gretchen, I expect you for the next half hour to be very interesting and very linguistic – if you’re going to obey the command that’s been given.

Gretchen: No, I was telling you to be interesting, Lauren.

Lauren: Oh, okay. Well, now we’re in trouble. It is possible to do things that have the function of giving some kind of command that’s not an imperative – that doesn’t have the grammar of an imperative structure. So, “I order you to be interesting,” is not actually an imperative.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 53: Listen to the imperatives episode!

When we tell you, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re using a grammatical feature known as the imperative. But although it might be amusing to imagine ancient Roman emperors getting enthusiastic about linguistics, unlike Caesar we don’t actually have the ability to enforce this command. So although “stay lingthusiastic!” has the form of the imperative, it really has more the effect of a wish or a hope. 

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the range of things that imperatives do in various languages. We also get excited about why imperatives are often one of the first verb forms that children learn, how imperatives make up the general “vibe” (aka mood) of a verb, and imperatives in the fairy-tale retelling Ella Enchanted. 

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

Announcements: 

We’re doing a virtual live show! It’s on April 24, 2021 and you can get access to it by becoming a patron of Lingthusiasm at any level. The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like programme of independently organized online linguistics events for the week of April 24 to May 2. See the LingFest website for details as more events trickle in. 

The week before LingFest is LingComm21, the International Conference on Linguistics Communication. LingComm21 is a small, highly interactive, virtual conference that brings together lingcommers from a variety of levels and backgrounds, including linguists communicating with public audiences and communicators with a “beat” related to language. Find out more about LingComm21. 

This month’s bonus episode is a Q&A with us, your hosts! We get enthusiastic about answering your questions!, like: What do you think is the best food to name a dog after? If you had to remove a phoneme from English, which do you think would have the most interesting results? How do you keep up with linguistics research outside academia? We also talk about our recent news and upcoming plans for 2021, “tell me you’re a linguist without telling me you’re a linguist”, and lots more great questions from the patron Discord. Become a Patreon now to get access to this and 47 other bonus episodes, as well us our upcoming live show!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

• Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
• Sara Ciesielski ‘Learning to be Sherpa: Children, language and culture on the roof of the world’
  
• Sara Ciesielski ‘Language development and socialisation in Sherpa’
• The Morphological Imperative
  
• The Morphological Prohibitive
  
• Lingthusiasm Episode 47: The happy fun big adjective episode
• Embassytown by China Mieville
  
• Etymonline entry for ‘mode’
• Lingthusiasm Episode 32: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality
• Biological class

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, 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 manager is Liz McCullough, and 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).

In 2020 we gave out 4 LingComm Grants. The 2020 LingComm Grants were $500 (USD) to support a linguistics communication project that brings linguistics to new audiences in engaging ways. The grant also included a one-on-one mentoring meeting with Gretchen and Lauren. The grants were funded by Lingthusiasm, thanks to the kind support of our patrons.

We had over 75 applications from around the world and we’d like to thank all applicants for making the job of deciding extremely difficult! We plan to keep tweaking the structure of the LingComm Grants in future years based on what we’ve learned. If you’re thinking of starting a lingcomm project, or any scicomm project, check out the resources page on the LingComm Grants website.

Now that all four grantees have started posting (ahead of schedule, despite this incredibly stressful year), we’d like to encourage you to check them out! Here are the summaries of each project from the 4 grantees, including links to their projects and social media, so you can get a little more linguistics in your life.  

The Black Language Podcast

Anansa Benbow

I am creating a podcast to engage members of the African diaspora in dialogue surrounding our linguistic practices. The focus of my project is on the English language variations of Black people, specifically in the Americas and the Caribbean. The podcast will be a space to discuss topics in linguistics (politeness, pronouns, discourse markers, etc) as it relates to English language variations of Black people, as well as language discrimination faced by Black people. It is my goal to make issues in linguistics more accessible to my community. To my knowledge, there aren’t projects that expose Black people outside of academia to topics in linguistics. Additionally, while there are a handful of linguistics podcasts, many designate a few episodes to talking about Black English and other minoritized language variations, whereas, I plan to focus solely on English language varieties of Black people. See my 2019 TEDx talk Grammar Skool. Twitter: @AnansaBenbow

Follow The Black Language Podcast on various podcast platforms and @blacklangpod on Twitter and on Instagram.   

Nonbinary Linguistics youtube channel 

Nina Lorence-Ganong

I am interested in the intersection between linguistics and nonbinary gender identity. Nonbinary people are generally an understudied population, and we are underrepresented in linguistic research. I want to highlight the research done by, about, and for nonbinary people. This project helps people understand what it means to be nonbinary, and to develop an interest in linguistics. I want to make a series of videos that explore different topics in this area. So far, I made a video about nonbinary gender construction through voice. I use the study as an example to introduce and illustrate concepts, such as the framework of sociolinguistics. 

Follow Trundling Wombat on youtube. 

Jazicharnica (Јазичарница) blog

Nina Tunteva and Viktorija Blazheska

Our idea is to start a blog in Macedonian that will serve as an accessible introduction to linguistics. As young linguists from Macedonia, we are well aware that there are very few resources on linguistics in our native language, and even less on pop linguistics. We will attract readers by presenting engaging content related to language in general and the Macedonian language in particular. The Macedonian language community has never had a pop linguistics project that mediates between linguists and the general public. Language minorities and multilingualism in the country are frequently misrepresented. Our blog will inform speakers of all languages in the country that there’s no right or wrong when they’re speaking their mother tongue and empower them to think about language outside of the deeply entrenched standardist and prescriptivist limits. 

Check out the blog at Jazicharnica.com and follow them on social media Tumblr: @jazicharnica Twitter: @jazicharnica Facebook: jazicharnica Instagram: jazicharnica

War of Words podcast

Juana de los Santos, Angela Makeviciuz, Antonella Moschetti & Néstor Bermúdez

We propose the production and publication of the second season of War of Words, a Spanish linguistics podcast whose content will be about linguistic topics and related sciences which are connected with their construction for scientific knowledge. In the first season we have shown a general outlook of the discipline through interviews to students and professors of this career. But in this second season we feel the necessity of bringing the theoretical concepts back down to earth and show their applications, not only for a specialized audience but also for linguistic students and other professionals. 

Follow War of Words on various podcast platforms and on Facebook and Instagram.

Commendation

We had so many great applications that we’d also like to commend the following two projects and their proposers for their innovation and commitment to reaching new audiences:

Code-switching, language freedom realized (Photobook by Sarah F. Phillips)
All Talk with Accentricity (Workshop by Sadie Ryan)

We had many great applicants for the LingComm Grants and alas, were not able to fund them all. But we would love to see more linguistics communication projects exist! So we decided make this episode about how to start a lingcomm project on a budget. It may also be useful for other kinds of public engagement projects or if you just want to hear the Lingthusiasm origin story!

In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about how we got started doing linguistics communication when we were both broke grad students. We talk about the various stages we went through with launching our blogs, Superlinguo and All Things Linguistic, and of course this podcast a few years later! We give tips on how to come up with a topic, set a schedule, and promote your project, as well as the nitty-gritty details on free or low-cost ways to do  things like registering a website and starting a blog, podcast, or youtube channel. 

Announcements:

By popular demand, our IPA, Tree and Esoteric Symbol designs are now available on these new non-medical reusable fabric masks from Redbubble. On our store you’ll find the white IPA characters on black, red or navy, and the esoteric symbols in white on black or green on black. If you fancy another colour, or the tree design, we’ve made masks available on all of the scarf pages.

Also check out our Schwa (Never Stressed) pins, IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at RedBubble.

Listen to the lingcomm on a budget bonus episode and get access to 41 more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. 

We’re excited to be part of the broader linguistics podcast community and bring you behind the scenes on other shows!  

In this interview, Lauren sat down with Daniel Midgley of the Talk the Talk radio show/podcast to talk about how Daniel got into linguistics, what linguists and radio producers have in common, his favourite linguistics resources, and how linguists can be better at engaging with the media and the public.

Lauren and Daniel got to hang out as part of the workshop ‘Talking the Talkley’ that Lauren organized for the Australian Linguistics Society annual conference in December (the Talkley is the ALS award for communicating linguistics, a pun on the Walkley awards for Australian journalism).

Talking the Talkley workshop summary:

The rise of ‘on demand’ media like podcasts and content platforms like The Conversation means that linguists are able to share their expert knowledge with a wider audience than ever before. This workshop brings together people who have worked to bring linguistics into the popular consciousness in different media.

To listen to this interview with Daniel, and get access to 10 previous bonus episodes, support Lingthusiasm on Patreon.