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.

We’re running a Lingthusiasm listener survey for the third and final time! As part of our eighth anniversary celebrations, we’re running this survey as a way to learn more about our listeners, get your suggestions for topics, and to run some linguistic experiments! 

If you did the survey in a previous year, there are new questions, so you can participate again this year. There’s also a spot for asking us your linguistics advice questions, since our first linguistics advice bonus episode was so popular!

https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey24

The survey will be open for anyone who has listened to 1 or more episodes of Lingthusiasm until December 15th (anywhere on earth) 

You can hear about the results of the previous surveys in two bonus episodes:

• Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz
• 2022 Survey Results - kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji

Data from the 2022 survey also featured in this research article we published in 2023:

• Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study

We’ll have the results from this survey in an episode for you in 2025, as well as future research publications.

This project has ethics approval from La Trobe University (Ethics Reference Number HEC22181). The Participant Information Statement is available at the survey link.

Bonus 84: Are thumbs fingers and which episode of Lingthusiasm are you? Survey results and a new personality quiz

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires! 

First: if you were a Lingthusiasm episode, which one would be? We’ve made a tongue-in-cheek quiz that transforms your answers to questions like “You’re about to start a massive Lingthusiasm listening marathon. You need to stay fortified and hydrated. Pick a beverage to sustain you” into a Highly Accurate Window Into Your Personality.  Gretchen and Lauren take the quiz on air and share our own results – please let us know what you get and if this quiz helps you remember an older episode or figure out how to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm!

Second: we have results from the Lingthusiasm survey that many of you took last year! Find out whether Lingthusiasm listeners consider the show more kiki or more bouba, and highlights from your very extensive comments on whether your sister’s husband’s sister is still your sister-in-law, whether the thumb is a finger, and more gestures that are rude in some places. A few survey results also appear in an academic paper that we wrote: “Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study” which was published in Language and Linguistics Compass (open access).

Finally, a few updates: For 2024, Gretchen is heading to the Societas Linguistica Europea conference in Helsinki in August and Lauren is heading back to full-time prof work, teaching syntax and turning gestures and Lingthusiasm research into papers. Plus: the LingComm Grants are running again for 2024.

Listen to this episode about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

We’re running our second official listener/reader survey!

This is your chance to tell us what you’re into on Lingthusiasm, what we could do more of, suggest topics and guests for future episodes, and also answer some fun linguistics experiment questions. This year’s experiment questions are new, so feel free to take it again if you did it last year and you’re curious!

The survey is online, and will take 5-30 minutes (depending on how much you want to tell us in the open text boxes).

The survey runs across our anniversary month, and closes December 15th 2023.

bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23

Results from our 2022 survey!

Here is a blog post of some of the most interesting results, or you can see a selection of audience reflections in our open access academic paper ‘Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study’.

If you’d like to hear us talk through the survey results, you can listen to our bonus episode ‘2022 Survey Results - kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji’. Patrons already have access to this episode, so if you’d like to listen to it, plus our back catalogue of 80+ bonus episodes, you can join us on Patreon here. (And a massive thank you to everyone who’s already a patron, you really do help us keep running both the show itself as well as fun things like the survey.) 

Here are two of the results from last year’s survey:

This survey is being conducted by Lingthusiasm in conjunction with La Trobe University (Ethics approval HEC22181). Thanks to La Trobe for the support to collect data that we can share with Lingthusiasm listeners and academic audiences. More information can be found in the Participant Informed Consent Form before the survey starts.

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.