This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!. 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 SURPRISE! From how languages express the concept of surprise, to what surprised looks like in the brain. But first, if you’ve been intrigued by the idea of our many bonus episodes, but aren’t sure about committing to another monthly subscription, we’ve now made a few of the most popular bonus episodes into collections that you can buy as a single one-time thing.

Lauren: These collections are so fun. We have Lingthusiasm Book Club for all of our book-related episodes; Linguistics Gossip for all the behind-the-scenes episodes; fun word-nerd topics like onomatopoeia and pangrams; Linguistics Advice; and my personal favourite, Lingthusiasm After Dark for our episodes about swearing, language under the influence, and the linguistics of kissing, and the weirdly soothing Lingthusiasmr episode that we’ve recorded of us reading example sentences in a very calm voice.

Gretchen: If there are any other bonus episodes that you’d like us to put in a collection, let us know. This feature is still pretty new and experimental. We’re interested in hearing how it goes for people. Also, this is a reminder that we have gift memberships. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift idea for yourself or someone else, you can get a year’s subscription to our bonus episodes for a person in your life and help keep the show running. Combining the previous two features, you can also gift one of the collections to some else if you wanna give someone a one-time gift.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview about the mysterious Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern. Is it a centuries-old hoax? Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for collections, gifting, and all of the bonus episodes.

[Music]

Lauren: “Surprise! Gretchen, it’s a party for you! There’re balloons coming from the ceiling, and I’ve made you cake.”

Gretchen: Wow! Amazing! I’m so surprised! Not least because it’s not my birthday.

Lauren: And I’m in Australia, and you’re in Canada.

Gretchen: Yeah, well, there’s that, too.

Lauren: And because we scripted this whole thing to introduce our episode on surprise?

Gretchen: Look, let’s not quibble too much. Let’s talk about a few other things you could say if you were surprised.

Lauren: Okay, sure.

Gretchen: Like, “My, how sparkly these balloons are!”

Lauren: Bit of a throwback. It has “My, how sharp your teeth are, Grandma,” vibes from Little Red Riding Hood.

Gretchen: “Dang, these balloons are so sparkly!” Bit more modern.

Lauren: That works. What about if I didn’t realise it was your birthday, I could be like, “Oh, happy birthday!”

Gretchen: “I can’t believe it’s your birthday!”

Lauren: “Whoa, a whole cake – just for me!”

Gretchen: “Wow, you ate the whole thing!”

Lauren: “Wait, you have a birthday?”

Gretchen: Like we all do.

Lauren: There are so many different ways that we can indicate that we’re surprised, that something is contrary to our expectations, that we’re dealing with new information.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate. 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]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the ancient history of languages in Europe and its neighbours. I’m here with Dr. Danny Bate, who’s a public linguist, the host of the podcast A Language I Love Is…, and author of Why Q Needs U. But first, a brief announcement. Our most recent bonus episode was about World Linguistics Day, which is November 26th – coming up very soon – and other more and less obscure linguistics-related holidays, decades, anniversaries, and kinds of special days, and how those get created. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this and many other bonus episodes and help us keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Danny.

Danny: Hi, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Thank you for coming on Lingthusiasm.

Danny: Thank you so, so much for having me. This is surreal, safe to say, as a long-time listener to Lingthusiasm. To be on it myself is – I don’t really know how I’m feeling right now, but I’ll just be pinching myself while we’re recording if that’s okay.

Gretchen: Well, if you start zoning out because you think that you’re supposed to just be listening and not actively participating in the conversation, I’ll give you a little poke or something.

Danny: Thank you, thank you. I’ll be there listening like, “This guy is talking about – I like these topics.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Before we get into talking about your work and history of English and other languages, let’s start with a question that we start with all of our guests, “How did you get into linguistics?”

Danny: Right, okay, great question. It involves a little bit of personal history. The short answer is I don’t know. There must’ve been a time when I wasn’t into linguistics. There must’ve been. I have clear memories of thinking that foreign languages are silly and what’s the point of this and why do I have to go to school and other such childish impulses, but it is hard to pin down when I realised that linguistics was a thing and that it was the thing for me. Because I, like so many people of my generation, it wasn’t talked about at school. There wasn’t a great awareness of linguistics as a subject. I’m sure that’s still the case for a lot of people today, but it’s improving through things like Lingthusiasm. But that wasn’t there. Not to make myself sound extremely old, but it was definitely something that I came to by accident, organically, while searching for something to study at university that would combine my interests. I knew I liked modern languages, like French and German. I knew I liked philosophy. But it was really a haphazard, chance encounter until I turned up on the first day of my undergraduate degree at the University of York in the UK. Day 1, Lecture 1, yep, this is for me.

Gretchen: You took an intro linguistics class because the concept seemed like it could be kind of fascinating, and you’re like, “This is it.”

Danny: “This is it,” yeah. It was love at first lecture.

Keep reading

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

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu’. 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. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about documenting Grassfields languages in Cameroon. But first, Lingthusiasm has more than 20 interview episodes. You can find them all together on our topics page where we have a category for interviews specifically. Go to lingthusiasm.com/topics to find those. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons with a few interviews in there as well.

Our latest bonus episode is one of those interviews. We talk with one of the translators of Because Internet about the particular challenges of translating a book about internet linguistics, like how to translate the Lolcat bible into Spanish when this meme never existed in Spanish in the first place – a problem which Miguel solves brilliantly. You can listen to Gretchen’s chat with Dr. Miguel Sanchez Ibañez, who is a linguist and lecturer at Valladolid University, on Patreon, and you can read Because Internet in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Links in the show notes. Patrons get access to bonus episodes and help keep the show running ad-free. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Professor Pius Akumbu is a linguist from Babanki, Cameroon, and a Director of Research in African Linguistics at CNRS in the LLACAN Lab (the Languages and Cultures of Africa Lab) in Paris, France. Professor Akumbu has done documentation work on a wide variety of topics from lexical tone to traditional stories and also founded a school in his home village to ensure that children have access to primary education in their own language – Babanki, also known as Kejom. Welcome to Lingthusiasm, Professor Akumbu.

Pius: Thank you for having me, Lauren. It’s my pleasure to be invited to your programme.

Lauren: How did you get into linguistics?

Pius: I think the best answer is that I got into linguistics by chance. Like many people in many parts of the world, I had no idea what linguistics was when I completed high school. I went to the university. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Yeah, of course, the orientation before that wasn’t there, so I had to find my way through. Then, as I was wondering what to do, I had some friends who had already decided on one of them, whose name I can mention, Enow Cecilia, had already joined the linguistics department. We met on campus, and she was like, “Oh, come try and see!” I went to that class.

Lauren: What an excellent chance.

Pius: To date, I still really appreciate that I had this opportunity. Of course, when I went there, I had some very nice professors.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Urban Multilingualism’. 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 languages and cities, and how there’re often a lot more languages that live in a city than we might realise at first glance. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about all the different ways you can read the local linguistic landscapes in the signs and other writing in public spaces. You can think of it as a second part to this episode. Here we’re talking about the unwritten ways that languages are often hidden in cities. In the bonus episode, we’re talking about some of our favourite street signs that have interesting language things on them.

Lauren: I love this topic because there’re so many linguistically interesting street signs. You’ll never look at a street sign the same way again.

Gretchen: If you’re like me and Lauren, you probably have a bunch of photos on your phone of linguistically interesting street signs that you’ve come across.

Lauren: You can head to the Lingthusiasm Discord or tag us on social media to share your favourite examples of interesting language things on signs, and maybe we’ll do a second one of these episodes if we get enough.

Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to the linguistic landscapes episode and many other bonus episodes – and help keep the show running.

[Music]

Lauren: I live in a city. Gretchen, you live in a city. I think it’s fair to say we’re both big fans of urban living.

Gretchen: I live in Montreal. You live in Melbourne. One of the things that I remember about visiting you in Australia, which is, when I had been there for a few weeks, and I had gotten used to hearing Australian English all over the place, which is a variety that I’m pretty familiar with from talking with you a lot but is certainly not my local language, I remember being on a bus and overhearing some people talking to each other in Chinese and having this profound sense of feeling at home. Because when I’m on a bus in Montreal, I also overhear people speaking in Chinese, which I don’t speak, but that is an experience that I wasn’t having overhearing people speak Australian English because that doesn’t happen very often to me in Montreal, but it does happen that I overhear people speaking a language I don’t speak. That aspect of “Oh, yeah, of course there are people who have immigrated to both Melbourne and Montreal and a lot of other cities who speak Mandarian, Cantonese, a whole bunch of Chinese languages,” those are experiences that are part of living in this dense, urban, multilingual environment that sometimes get ignored when we represent countries as points on a map of country of origin without thinking about the history of people moving around as well.

Lauren: Cities are these magnets, and they keep attracting new waves of migration from new places and new languages and new experiences, and it’s part of what I love about the vibrancy of urban spaces. Again, just as countries aren’t points on a map, people come to cities with many different languages. It’s part of one of the many, many reasons I think cities are so compelling as spaces.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions’. 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]

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

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about “What even is a sandwich, and how does meaning even work anyway?”

Gretchen: This episode totally blew our minds when we were researching the classic internet debate.

Lauren: But first, this episode was originally posted as our 9th bonus episode in November 2017.

Gretchen: Oh my gosh, it was from our first year. We have been doing monthly bonus episodes since 2017 for people who support us at the Ling-thusiast level or above. The support of patrons is literally the way the show keeps running and helps us not have to think about running ads or exposing you to other things you don’t wanna listen to.

Lauren: We now have over 100 bonus episodes in the Patreon bonus feed for you to listen to right now and new ones that come out every month.

Gretchen: Our bonus episodes are often a little bit more playful and less likely to be used in a linguistics classroom, like our several swearing bonus episodes.

Lauren: Or the whole bonus episode on the linguistics of kissing.

Gretchen: But overall, we have as much fun with bonus episodes as our mains. We love them so much, we wanted to share one from the archive on the main feed.

Lauren: It also gives us a chance to catch a bit of a break between preparing new episodes.

Gretchen: This was something we did last year as well, and it really helps us during a busy period.

Lauren: Indeed, there’re multiple reasons to love this tradition that we’ve started. We’re gonna play the original episode. We are gonna skip the intro with updates from 2017.

Gretchen: Ooo, what was the hot news in 2017?

Lauren: We were heading towards full-length bonus episodes – a thing we have been doing for almost eight years now.

Gretchen: I had almost forgotten that these bonus episodes weren’t full length to start.

Lauren: We literally didn’t have the money to pay Claire to edit full-length bonuses for us a year into making the show.

Gretchen: That explains why this was only about 20 minutes of tape. We were also celebrating our first official anniversary month.

Lauren: Of course, because it was and is November, our anniversary. That’s so lovely.

Gretchen: We’re gonna revisit an episode from when we were a year into the show. We’ll listen along with you. And then I look forward to chatting with you at the end about other things that we’ve observed about this topic.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was all about linguistics landscapes and the way language is visible or not in the spaces around us.

Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to access this and many other bonus episodes including the original version of this episode with the announcements still intact.

[Music]

Lauren: We ran a poll with a very simple question: “Which of the following 20 items is a sandwich?”

Gretchen: If any!

Lauren: And people had opinions, I think it’s fair to say.

Gretchen: Yeah. This was, I think, maybe one of our more participated polls.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Definitely got the most comments because we didn’t manage to include a “none of the above” option because we ran up the max on the Patreon polls. We’re not gonna list all 20, because I assume you can see those, but I think of the most “sandwich” things, people were kind of most content to consider a hamburger a sandwich, maybe; bagel and cream cheese a sandwich; and an ice cream sandwich a sandwich. I mean. it’s got “sandwich” in the name! Like, it has to be a sandwich, right?

Lauren: Yeah. Things like burritos, pop-tarts, ravioli, apple pie didn’t really rate very highly.

Gretchen: Macarons, I don’t know – they seem very sandwich-y to me. They’ve got like, things on either side, and like a filling, and same with Oreos, like, they’re sandwich cookies. That’s their genre of cookie.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd’. 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]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Adam Aleksic, better known as “Etymology Nerd,” for his online videos and author of the book Algospeak. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about analysing how the structure of social media sites shapes how we communicate on them. But first, some announcements. Our most recent bonus episode is our 100th bonus episode! As a celebration, we are answering your linguistics advice questions. Need help navigating whether to correct someone’s grammar or copy their accent? Or “How can I support my peers as they age out of having the coolest slang?” We have the advice episode for you. Also, in celebration of our 100th bonus episode, we’ve decided to go back into the vault and revisit our very first bonus episode. This is a sweary episode about swearing that’s a bit too spicy for the main feed. Now, we’re releasing this very first bonus episode to anyone who follows us on Patreon. Whether you’re at the free or paid level, you can get this extra extra bonus bonus from the vault with a new intro featuring some extra sweary facts we’ve learned in the intervening years. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to these and many more bonus episodes. If you become a patron by July 1, 2025, you can get a special Lingthusiasm logo sticker with extra linguistics doodles on it sent to you in the mail.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Adam.

Adam: Hi, Gretchen, excited to be here.

Gretchen: Thank you for coming on the show. Before we get into talking a little bit more about linguistics on TikTok and other short-form videos, we’re gonna start with a question we ask all our guests which is “How did you get into linguistics?”

Adam: Well, my gateway was etymology, like a lot of other people I know. It started in 10th grade. I read Mark Forsyth’s excellent book The Etymologicon. Couldn’t get enough of it. Read a bunch of other books. Started a little blog for myself called “Etymology Nerd.com.” I’d do a little daily blogpost on etymology. I’d keep that up throughout college, where I studied linguistics, and then I asked myself the question that everybody graduating with a linguistics degree asks themselves which is “What do I do next?” That’s when I started making short form video.

Gretchen: Very relatable – “What do I do next?” You started a TikTok channel, and the rest is history. Did you have some growing steps along the way?

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski’. 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]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, who’s a professor of Sámi languages at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. She’s a native speaker of Northern Sámi and Finnish and fluent speaker of Swedish. She can read German and uses English mainly for academic publishing purposes. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about multilingual literacy.

But first, some announcements! We’ve commissioned a jazzed up version of the Lingthusiasm logo with fun little doodles in the classic shape of the Lingthusiasm squiggle adorning your podcast reader right now – now filled in with some linguistics and Lingthusiasm references in little, tiny doodles. See how many you can spot! We’re gonna be sending out a sticker with this new design to everyone who’s a patron at the Ling-thusiast level and higher as of July 1, 2025. If you wanna get this sticker that can adore your laptop, water bottle, and help maybe connect you to other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm. If you just wanna see a version of this sticker and see how many of the little doodles you can identify, you can go to lingthusiasm.com or @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. We’ll be posting about it a lot. Our artist, Lucy Maddox, did a really great job, and we’re so excited to share this design with you.

Our most recent bonus episode was about the linguistics of kissing from the physical articulation of kisses – which involves the mouth, much like many linguistic things – as well as the social significance of kissing in various ways, various times to various classes of people, to writing kisses as Xs and with emoji. All of that and 98 other bonus episodes at patreon.com/lingthusiasm help keep the show going.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Hanna-Máret, welcome to the show.

Hanna-Máret: Hi!

Gretchen: It’s so nice to have you here.

Hanna-Máret: It’s really good to be here.

Gretchen: We’re gonna get into more of your work later, but let’s start with the question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get interested in linguistics?”

Hanna-Máret: I grew up in a multilingual region in northern Finland that’s as far north in Europe as one can get. In my childhood, most people living there, they knew my Indigenous heritage language (that’s Northern Sámi), and they also spoke either Finnish or Norwegian or both. We also learned a lot of English in school and through TV. My home was also right at the border of Finland and Norway. There was only a river marking the state border. Some languages float quite freely in that region. For many people, knowing languages was quite natural. Most people didn’t think so much about the languages, but my father was always talking about some linguistic traits or challenges or other matters. He was a special teacher and had always had an interest in languages and for linguistics. His language enthusiasm spread into my life very early. He also read to me and encouraged me to read a lot in different languages, and then we used to talk about the literature afterwards. I was also really fascinated by the language knowledge and cultural knowledge that my Sámi relatives had, although most of them were not academics. The Sámi speakers in the generation before mine were actually the last ones to grow up speaking mainly Sámi. Their language was so beautiful and so effortless. I decided quite young that I would pursue a career working with my heritage language and do my best to support its survival.

Gretchen: That led you into linguistics.

Hanna-Máret: Yeah, but first I considered a career as a translator or interpreter. I actually got a basic training in that also. But I worked as an interpreter mostly just to make some money so that I could continue studying at the university. I studied Sámi, Finnish, linguistics, pedagogy, and I got a bachelor’s degree in Sámi language. Some of my professors then encouraged me to reach for the master’s degree and then continue with the PhD.

Gretchen: Did you go right into Sámi language revitalisation work, or were you doing more academic stuff?

Hanna-Máret: Well, my first attempt with the PhD was actually in formal linguistics. I was working on reflexivity and reciprocity in Sámi and this more specifically with Government and Binding Theory, which had, at that time, not yet lost its glory. I actually never finished the thesis. Instead, my teaching responsibilities grew every year, and I started noticing that I was more interested in the use of language than in some isolated syntactic structure. I don’t want anyone to get me wrong here. I’m really grateful for having acquired a base in formal linguistics since it has given me the tools not only to describe my language but also to problematise and solve some issues that our traditional, prescriptive grammars in some languages are not able to explain. It’s just that, at some point, I started thinking more about the work that was needed to keep the language in daily use and not just the structures.

Gretchen: But you have a doctorate now. You went back and did something else?

Hanna-Máret: My second attempt to finish the doctoral degree was, happily, a bit more successful, and I get the chance to gather texts written by multilingual Sámi children in three countries. Me and my colleagues, we used something that’s called “keystroke logging” to trace the ways our writers express their thoughts and ideas in three languages. I really found that project very inspiring, although it also showed me how challenging it can be to work with schools and pupils. After that PhD, I got a chance to do my postdoctoral studies within applied linguistics and educational sciences.

Gretchen: Three languages – that would be Sámi, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish? That’s four.

Hanna-Máret: I was in three countries. It was the majority language of all the countries. In Finland, Finnish; in Sweden, Swedish; and in Norway Norwegian. All the kids here in Nordic countries also study English, so that was the third language.

Gretchen: Okay. The third language depending on the country they did – yeah. Did you bring all of these different backgrounds together?

Keep reading

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.

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This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf’. 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]

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

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the complexity of the relationship between the language you speak, and the way that you perceive reality. But first, our most recent bonus episode was the results of our 2024 listener survey.

Gretchen: We learned which one of us was more “kiki” and which one of us was more “bouba.”

Lauren: Mm-hm. And we discussed the highly competitive hand gesture game of “Paper, Scissors, Rock.”

Gretchen: “You mean ‘Rock, Paper, Scissors’?” – and more things that people call it cross-linguistically.

Lauren: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and almost 100 other bonus episodes.

Gretchen: Ooo, 97! We’re almost at 100.

Lauren: Should we do something special for our hundredth?

Gretchen: Stay tuned to see if we do.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, I recently read the classic science fiction book Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany, which people have been asking me to read for a long time.

Lauren: It’s from, like, the mid-’60s, so, for basically much longer than you’ve been a linguist (or alive) it’s been a staple of linguistic sci-fi reading.

Gretchen: Yes, this book is older than I am. You have to come to classics when you come to them. There’s no wrong time to do something like that. It sure does have a lot of linguistic elements. There’s this very cute bit where – so the characters have a lot of these interesting body modifications. This character has fangs and so can’t make a P sound.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, because I guess if you have teeth sticking out over your lips, you can’t close your lips to make a P.

Gretchen: The thing that gets me is it is explicitly said that he can’t make the P but he can make a B – and those are done with the same movement of the lips. It’s just the vocals cords which are different, which has nothing to do with where your fangs are.

Lauren: I absolutely love the linguist brain with which you read these books.

Gretchen: This was my experience of reading a lot of Babel-17 is that there’s a lot of linguistic elements that are almost doing it for me. The biggest of those is “Babel-17” itself, which in the book refers to this mysterious alien language that our poet linguist character (like, more poet linguists, that’s great) is assigned to interpret/decipher/translate/figure out from recordings. Classic linguist sci-fi story line, but Samuel Delany is one of the first people doing it.

Lauren: I was very invested in this character when I read this book ages ago.

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