Lingthusiasm Episode 110: The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate
Before there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have long been fascinated by the quest to get a glimpse into what Proto-Indo-European must have looked like through careful comparisons between languages we do have records for, and this very old topic is still undergoing new discoveries.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the process of figuring out Proto-Indo-European with Dr. Danny Bate, public linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is…, and author of the book Why Q Needs U. We talk about why figuring out the word order of a 5000-year-old language is harder than figuring out the sounds, and a great pop linguistics/history book we’ve both been reading that combines recent advances in linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence to reexamine where these ancient Proto-Indo-European folks lived: Proto by Laura Spinney. We also talk about Danny’s own recent book on the history of the alphabet, featuring fun facts about C, double letters, and izzard!
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about celebratory days, years, decades, and more with some relationship to linguistics! We recently learned that people in the UK have been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th and many lingcommers are excited about the idea of taking those celebrations international: World Linguistics Day, anyone? What we learned putting this episode together is that celebratory days take off when groups of people decide to make them happen so…let’s see how many different locations around the world we can wish each other Happy World Linguistics Day from this year!
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.
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).
Lingthusiasm Episode 105: Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd
TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are an evolving genre of media: short-form, vertical videos that take up your whole screen and are served to you from an algorithm rather than who you follow. This changes how people talk in them compared to earlier forms of video, and linguists are on it!
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the linguistics of tiktok with Adam Aleksic, better known on social media as etymologynerd. We talk about how Adam got his start into linguistics via etymology, the process that he goes through to make his current videos get the attention of people and algorithms, and how different forms of media (like podcasts vs shortform video) relate differently to their audiences. We also talk about the challenges of writing a book about language on the internet when it changes so fast, comparing the writing process for Adam’s upcoming book Algospeak with Gretchen’s book Because Internet.
In celebration of our 100th bonus episode we’ve decided to go back into the vault and revisit our very first bonus episode - with updated sweary commentary! We’ve made this extra bonus bonus version available to all patrons, free and paid, so feel free to send it to your friends!
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about your linguistics questions! In honour of our 100th bonus episode of Lingthusiasm, and because our first advice episode was so popular, here’s another episode answering your advice questions, from the serious to the silly!
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.
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).
Lingthusiasm Episode 104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski
When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have considerable written traditions, and engaging with writing as part of teaching these languages to children is important for all of the same reasons as we teach writing in majoritarian languages.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about multilingual literacy with Dr. Hanna-Máret Outakoski, who’s a professor of Sámi languages at the Sámi University of Applied Sciences in Kautokeino, Norway. We talk about growing up with a mix of Northern Sámi, Finnish, Norwegian, and English, as well as how Hanna-Máret got into linguistics and shifted her interests from more formal to more community-based work, such as “language showers” and the role of play in language learning. We also talk about the long history of literature in Sámi, from joiks written down as early as the 1500s to how people are still joiking today (including on Eurovision), and how teaching kids writing can strengthen oral traditions.
In this month’s bonus episode we 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.
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. If you join before July 1st you’ll get a sticker of a special jazzed-up version of the Lingthusiasm logo 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!
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. 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.
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).
Transcript Episode 104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski
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?
Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones
There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone’s voice, it’s useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they’re wearing and who they’re talking with.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how nonbinary people talk with Jacq Jones, who’s a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. We talk about their research on how nonbinary and binary people make choices about how to perform gender using their voices and other variables like clothing, and later collaborating with one of their research participants to reflect on how it feels to have your personal voice and gender expression plotted on a chart. We also talk about linguistic geography, Canadian and New Zealand Englishes, and the secret plurality of R sounds in English and how you can figure out which one you have by poking yourself (gently!) with a toothpick.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about three of our favourite kinds of linguistic mixups: spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns! We talk about William Spooner, the Oxford prof from the 1800s that many spoonerisms are (falsely) attributed to, Lauren’s very Australian 90s picture book of spoonerisms, the Scottish song “The Bonny Earl of Moray” which gave rise to the term mondegreen, why there are so many more mondegreens in older pop songs and folk songs than there are now, and how eggcorn is a double eggcorn (a mis-parsing of acorn, which itself is an eggcorn of oak-corn for akern).
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds about your favourite linguistic mixups.
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).
Episode 72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd
What’s the “it’s” in “it’s three pm and hot”? How do you write a
cough in the International Phonetic Alphabet? Who is the person most
likely to speak similarly to a randomly-selected North American English
speaker?
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and
Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about absurd hypothetical linguistic
questions with special guest Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic
xkcd and author of What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions.
We only wish that there was a little more linguistics in the book. So
Randall came on to fill the gap with all his most ridiculous linguistics
questions! One of our unresolved questions that we can merely speculate
about is our predictions for what the future of English might be like.
Are you listening to this episode from more than two decades in the
future? Please write in from 2042 or later and let us know how accurate
we’ve been!
We’ve teamed up with linguist/artist Lucy Maddox to create a fun, minimalist version of the classic International Phonetic Alphabet chart, which you can see here (plus more info about how we put together the design).
It looks really cool, and it’s also a practical reference tool that you
can carry around with you in a convenient multi-purpose format: lens
cloths!
We’re going to place ONE (1) massive order for aesthetic IPA chart lens cloths on October 6, 2022. If you want one, be a patron at the Lingthusiast tier or higher on October 5th, 2022,
timezone: anywhere in the world. If you’re already a patron at that
tier, then you’re set! (That’s the tier where you also get bonus episodes and the Discord access, we’ve never run a special offer at this tier before but we think this time it’ll be worth it!).
In this month’s bonus episode
we chat with Lucy about redesigning the IPA! We talk about how Lucy got
interested in linguistics, how she got into art, how we started working
with her, and the many design considerations that went into making a
redesigned IPA chart.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.
Episode 70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko
Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking -
happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the
other things you do with your brain, we can put people in fancy brain
scanning machines and then create very controlled setups where exactly
one thing is different. For example, comparing looking at words versus
nonwords (of the same length, on the same background) or listening to
audio clips of a language you do speak vs a language you don’t speak.
In
this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch talks with Dr Evelina
Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, USA about figuring out which
parts of the brain do language things! We talk about how we can use
brain scans to compare language with other things your brain can do,
such as solving visual puzzles, math problems, music, and inferring
things about other people’s mental states, as well as comparing how the
brains of multilingual people process their various languages. We also
talk about the results of the fMRI language experiments that Gretchen
got to be a participant in: which side is doing most of her language
processing and how active her brain is for French compared to English.
In this month’s bonus episode
we get enthusiastic about language inside an MRI machine! Gretchen
talks with Saima Malik-Moraleda, a graduate student in Speech and
Hearing Bioscience and Technology at Harvard University in Boston, USA,
about the details of what it was like inside the MRI machine doing the
studies we reported on here - it’s a Lingthusiasm language-in-the-brain
interview double feature!
Alice in the Language Localizer Wonderland - for more information about the study and
if you happen to be in the Boston area and want to participate! They’re
currently especially looking for people who are multilingual or speak a conlang including Esperanto,
Klingon, High Valyrian, or Dothraki (for which you can get travel
funding…), but other studies will also come along if you’re reading
this from the future.
If you wish you could see pictures of
your brain and aren’t in the Boston area, keep an eye out for any other
large research universities you might be near, as many are looking for
participants! (Googling “research subject pool” + name of a local
university may help find something.)
Here’s the image of Gretchen’s brain and a graph of her responses to listening to various languages:
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.
Episode 61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta
If you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks
about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people
have written about it. Which would be fine if your topic and people are
very specific, but what if you’ve got, say, “everything published in
English between 1800 and 2000″ and you’re trying to figure out how the
use of a particular word (say, “the”) has been changing? In that case,
you might want to turn to some of the text analysis tools of corpus
linguistics – the area of linguistics that makes and analyzes corpora,
aka collections of texts.
In this episode, your host Gretchen
McCulloch gets enthusiastic about corpus linguistics with Dr Kat Gupta, a
lecturer in English Language and Linguistics at the University of
Roehampton in London, UK. We talk about how Kat’s interests changed
along their path in linguistics, what to think about when pulling
together a bunch of texts to analyze, and two of Kat’s cool research
projects – one using a corpus of newspaper articles to analyze how
people perceived the various groups within the suffrage movement, and
one about what we can learn about consent from their 1.4 billion-word
corpus of online erotica.
Announcements:
There’s
just under two weeks left to sign up for the Lingthusiastic Sticker
Pack! Become a Ling-phabet patron or higher by November 3, 2021
(anywhere on earth) and we’ll send you a pack of four fun
Lingthusiasm-related stickers! Plus, if we hit our stretch goal, that’ll
also include the two bouba and kiki stickers below for all sticker
packs. Tea and scarf, sadly, not included, but the usual tier rewards of
IPA wall of fame tile and Lingthusiast sticker are. (That could be
seven stickers!)
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.
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.
We have been doing a few cross-over episodes visiting other podcasts. Here are three different chats, two with both Gretchen and I, and one where I pull apart some of my conlanging work.
We
are so proud to be able to come back from our break with this absolute
monster of an episode, and we are honored to have been joined by Lauren
and Gretchen of @lingthusiasm!
This
week we lean on their expertise in linguistics and worldbuilding, and
talk about how you too can construct your own languages and use them to
tell bigger and better stories! This was a listener requested episode
that we are really happy we were able to pull together, so thanks to
Skyler for the introduction and suggestion!
You might not know it yet, but you’re about to get very enthusiastic about linguistics.
Yes,
that’s right! The science of language and communication is fascinating
and we recently had the pleasure of chatting with Gretchen McCulloch and
Lauren Gawne, hosts of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic
about linguistics. We talk about what linguistics is, why it is so
interesting and relevant (especially to those who love learning other
languages!), whether we should all learn the International Phonetic
Alphabet (IPA), and more.
Through their podcast and a number of
other projects, Gretchen and Lauren make linguistics so accessible,
interesting and fun that you can’t help but wonder if you made a
terrible life decision if you didn’t study linguistics at university.
But never fear - if you haven’t studied linguistics before, you haven’t
missed the boat! See more in the links below about how they are helping
everyone to learn more and get as enthusiastic about linguistics as they
are.
George interviews Lauren Gawne of Superlinguo and Lingthusiasm about her
work on Aramteskan for the Shadowscent book series as well as her other
work with authors.
Conlangery is a monthly podcast focused on conlanging and the conlanging community.
I often talk about how Linguist Twitter is a great place to hang out. Twitter can be a big, confusing, noisy platform, but I’ve enjoyed building a little world full of linguists, and one of those excellent people is Rachael Tatman. It has been great to follow Rachael as she completed her PhD, got a job in data visualisation with Kaggle, and then moved on to chatbot maker Rasa. Rachael is not only a great linguist, but a thoughtful linguistics communicator. Her blog Making Noise and Hearing Things has a wonderful back catalogue covering data science, professionalism and emoji. You too can follow Rachael on Twitter (@rctatman).
What did you study at university?
My BA is in Linguistics and English Literature (I double majored) from William and Mary (in Virginia, USA) and then I went to the University of Washington for grad school. I got my PhD in linguistics in 2017, and my dissertation was “Modeling the Perceptual Learning of Novel Dialect Features”. Over the course of my PhD in particular I moved more and more into natural language processing, although I was still pretty much calling myself a computational linguist.
What is your job?
I’m a senior developer advocate for a company called Rasa. We make an open source framework for building chatbots/virtual assistants and free software for improving your assistant over time. (If you’re a business using the free software and want additional fancy features, we also have a paid enterprise version.) Developer advocates are basically peer-to-peer technical educators. Our job is to help make it as easy as possible for developers to use whatever product it is that we support. So my day to day involves a lot of developer education–things like writing blog posts, giving talks and making videos–as well as providing technical support and product feedback. Because I have a research background and Rasa has a research team I’ll sometimes help out with research projects as well.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
It helps me every day! One great example is that it’s given me a good idea of the typological diversity of languages in the world. Since Rasa is a language-agnostic platform (we want to be able to support as many languages as possible) knowing what sort of differences there are between languages is very helpful. My linguistics training also taught me how to communicate complex topics succinctly and accurately which is a huge part of developer relations and related fields, like technical writing.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
Be really kind to yourself, especially when you’re on the job market. There’s a large emotional regulation component to searching for jobs that I don’t think gets talked about enough. Find something that helps you disconnect from thinking about work or looking for work and commit to doing it often. That could be something as simple as following along with yoga videos in your room or setting up a weekly time to play video games with your friends or just taking a walk outside every day, maybe with your children if you have them. Building a brain break into my routine and keeping it stable really, really helped me both in graduate school and when I was on the job market.
Also: your goals and identity will change over time. You may think of yourself as an academic now but won’t in 5 years. That’s ok. It’s normal. And it’s also normal for those shifts to come with a grieving process, especially if you weren’t expecting them. Give yourself grace, and time, to feel your feelings. And know that you can have a rich, happy fulfilling life that looks nothing like what you’re planning for yourself right now.
Any other thoughts or comments?
The great thing about studying and having a fascination for language is that it’s everywhere. Your linguistic training will give you a set of lenses you can look through for the rest of your life, and that’s a thing to celebrate and cherish in its own right.
Lingthusiasm Episode 48: Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates
High school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as how you dress or what vowels you’re using. Making choices from among these various factors is a big way that we assert our identities as we’re growing up. For a particular group of students in the UK, they’re on the forefront of linguistic innovation using a variety known as Multicultural London English.
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Shivonne Gates, a linguist who wrote her dissertation on Multicultural London English and is currently a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research, Britain’s largest independent social research agency. We talk about her research on accents in the UK, doing collaborative research with young people, and linguistics research jobs outside of academia.
This month’s bonus episode is about pangrams! Pangrams are sentences that contain all of the letters of the alphabet, like the famous “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and the more obscure “Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!”. In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about pangrams and the further questions that they raise about the structure of various languages. How short can you get an English pangram without becoming incoherent? Which characters are hard to include in different languages? Do accented characters count as separate letters? What kinds of using-every-symbol writing can you make with non-alphabetic writing systems? Help Lingthusiasm stay ad-free and get access to over 40 bonus episodes by supporting us on Patreon.
If you want to get an email when each of the Crash Course Linguistics
videos comes out, along with exercises to practice the concepts and
links for further reading, you can sign up for Mutual Intelligibility email newsletters.
We also have exciting new merch colours! Our International Phonetic Alphabet scarves and masks, notebooks, mugs, and socks are now available in Raspberry, Mustard, and Lilac with white IPA symbols.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles
I met Shivonne at LingWiki events while I was living in the UK. It was so great to get to catch up and hear about her PhD research and what she’s up to now.
Lingthusiasm Episode 43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod
Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me. As if I were their well-acquainted friend”, and the Oxford English Dictionary has citations for both going back to the 14th century. More recently, people have also been using singular they to refer to a specific person, as in “Alex left their umbrella”.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Kirby Conrod, a linguist who wrote their dissertation about the syntax and sociolinguistics of singular they. We talk about Kirby’s research comparing how people use third person pronouns (like they, she, and he) in a way that conveys social attitudes, like how some languages use formal and informal “you”, specific versus generic singular they, and how people go about changing their mental grammars for social reasons.
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This month’s bonus episode is about synesthesia, and research on various kinds of synesthesia, including the much-studied grapheme-colour, sound-colour, and time-space synesthesia, as well as rarer varieties such as Gretchen’s attitude-texture synesthesia which she’s never heard of anyone else having. Also, our producer Claire realized she was actually a synesthete while editing this episode! Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the teaching linguistics episode and 37 previous bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord.
Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for yourself or other lingthusiasts! Check out IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at lingthusiasm.redbubble.com
Have a great idea for a linguistics communication project, but need a bit of money to get it off the ground? Looking to support emerging lingcomm projects? The LingComm Grant is four $500 grants for communicating linguistics to broader audiences in 2020. Applications close 1st of June 2020. Find out more and apply here.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
The Linguist Jobs Interview series has been running for 5 years. There are now 50
interviews to date, with people who studied
linguistics - be it a single undergraduate subject or a full PhD - and then gone on to careers outside of academia.
Although
I ask the same questions each time, I get very different answers. For
some people, linguistics is directly applicable to their daily work,
while others find that the general skills they learnt can transfer to
other careers.
I update this list at least once a year. For newer interviews, you can browse the Linguistics Jobs tag on the blog!
The full list of Linguistics Job Interviews (to April 2020):
Lingthusiasm Episode 36: Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou
Larger, national signed languages, like American Sign Language and British Sign Language, often have relatively well-established laboratory-based research traditions, whereas smaller signed languages, such as those found in villages with a high proportion of deaf residents, aren’t studied as much. When we look at signed languages in the context of these smaller communities, we can also think more about how to make research on larger sign languages more natural as well.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr Lynn Hou, an Assistant Professor of linguistics at the University of California Santa Barbara, in our first bilingual episode (ASL and English). Lina researches how signed languages are used in real-world environments, which takes her from analyzing American Sign Language in youtube videos to documenting how children learn San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language (in collaboration with Hilaria Cruz, one of our previous interviewees!).
We’re very excited to bring you our first bilingual episode in ASL and English! For the full experience, make sure to watch the video version of this episode at youtube.com/lingthusiasm (and check out our previous video episode on gesture in spoken language while you’re there).
This month’s bonus episode on Patreon is a behind the scenes look at the writing process of Gretchen’s recent book, Because Internet! Find out how Gretchen decided what to cover, what she had to leave out, how the book writing process differs from the academic article she and Lauren recently wrote together about emoji and gesture, and more. Plus, get access to over 30 bonus episodes of Lingthusiasm (that’s almost twice as much show!). patreon.com/lingthusiasm
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.
Special thanks for this episode to Mala Poe, for interpreting, to Daniel Midgley, for recording the video, and to the Linguistic Society of America, for providing a room to record this interview in at the annual meeting.
Lingthusiasm
is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our audio producer
is Claire Gawne, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is
‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
I’m so excited that we are now at the point where we can pull off a production like this on Lingthusiasm. Dr. Lynn Hou’s work is so interesting! It was great to be a member of the Lingthusiasm audience for this one!
When I was chatting with Elisa about being part of this interview series, she wanted to make it clear that she didn’t study linguistics specifically, but it came up in subjects that were part of her double major in Classical Studies and Creative Writing. I’ve talked to lots of people, and interviewed many for this series, who have PhDs and MAs in linguistics, but I also love hearing from people who took a handful of linguistics subjects and still find them useful in their careers. Elisa still draws on her linguistics education as a writer and editor, and runs her own agency, Craft Your Content. You can follow Elisa on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
What did you study at university?
I started school at the University of Maine as a music major, in education and vocal performance. When I realized in my first-year I would never be the next famous stadium-filler, I switched my major to philosophy — but quickly grew tired of listening to old men tell me what to think and do. But I love history and philosophy and reading, so I decided to pursue a Classics major, with a minor in Latin. Not sure what one does with that degree, I also decided to add a second major, Creative Writing.
My linguistics classes were often deep dives into the histories and changes in language, furthering my teen love of definitions and etymologies. I came to understanding how the very vocabulary choice of various periods in writing and politics shaped the culture and mindset of the masses.
What is your job?
My title is Owner and Executive Editor — I own and operate an editorial agency that provides proofreading, editing, and writing services to entrepreneurial writers and brands. I like to say that we work with people to make their own words even better, because my years of studies (in school and personally) have taught me that the way so many of us write barely scrapes the surface of what is possible; of what we are capable of.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
After years working as a writer, I found that one of the things that I struggled with the most working with editors is that they often stripped down my voice and writing, creating something generic and primed for “collecting clicks” or hitting deadlines. The few good ones I worked with me to improve my writing, understand (even more) the power of words, and craft great pieces that still read as I’d wanted. I decided to build something that would provide that for others.
Though I work with a team of editors and coaches who are also rocking some serious linguistic geekdom, I’m probably the most dedicated to the actual academia of it. Jumping into conversations frequently about the historical significance of a particular word or phrase, writing about my own etymology journal (and constantly telling others to create their own), and explaining to clients why I make the edits I’m making — so they understand the perspective I’m coming from and can better decide whether the feedback has merit.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
To focus more on the linguistics and language study, and less on the Creative Writing and English major. To quote the brilliant Will Hunting, “You wasted $150,000 on an education you coulda got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library.”
I didn’t end up finishing my degree program, for a number of personal reasons, and had to leave after my third year. As I was wrestling with the decision, this quote popped into my head more than a few times. That being said, if someone wanted to fund the rest of my undergrad Classics degree at St. Andrews or Oxford, I wouldn’t be opposed!
Any other thoughts or comments?
Having studied the way that language has impacted history and politics and philosophy for centuries, I feel we are at an important point as a global society. The words we use matter, as they are shaping rhetoric on a daily basis. Beyond sensationalism and gamesmanship, we communicate almost exclusively with each other using shared vocabularies and understandings. The influence that media, writers, speakers, cultural leaders, and so many others choose have need to be carefully considered, and uttered with the reverence that generations before us knew linguistics should be afforded.
