This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 30: Why do we gesture when we talk? (Gestures are part of language). It’s been lightly edited for readability. For this special video episode, you can watch the video here. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 30 show notes page.

[Music]

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

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne. And in today’s episode, we’re getting enthusiastic about the gestures that we make when we speak. But first, welcome to our first video episode.

Gretchen: Video!

Lauren: Very exciting. Thanks to our patrons, we reached a funding goal where we were able to pay for the extra production costs to have a video. And, of course, as soon as we decided that, I couldn’t help but hope that we would do a gesture episode. And so that is our first video episode.

Gretchen: So you can see the gestures. This is also being released as an audio episode in the normal feed, so if you’re hearing this, you can listen to it audio-only, but you will miss some of the gestures. So you can go to YouTube.com/lingthusiasm to see the full gesture-y version.

[Music]

Gretchen: And now gestures. Lauren, they’re really cool. You’ve done proper research on these.

Lauren: I have, yes.

Gretchen: How did you get into gestures?

Keep reading