Episodes
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Language is a lot like love. You can enjoyably lose yourself in both. They can both be dangerous. And they both entail a responsibility to keep each other safe. A new book Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love is both a language book and a memoir, connecting the strands of language learning, language love, and language loss. Daniel speaks with author Dr Julie Sedivy.
Also: Large language models have proven adept at duplicating patterns of language that humans find possible. But what about impossible language patterns? Can LLMs learn those? And what even is an impossible language? Dr Matt Spike explains.
Timestamps
Cold open: 0:00 Intros: 0:34 News: 5:49 Interview with Matt Spike: 32:01 Related or Not: 50:57 Interview with Julie Sedivy: 1:05:34 Words of the Week: 1:33:33 The Reads: 1:55:04 Outtakes: 2:01:21 -
For our 500th episode, we got together with our great listeners for their words, stories, and inspiration. It's a look back at the show, a look at language from our friends' point of view, and a celebration of our great community. Dr Kelly Wright joins us.
Big thanks to our friends who joined us, and to everyone who's listened over the years.
Watch the video here: https://youtu.be/Xc0S_O4KrhY
Timestamps
Cold open: 0:00
Intros: 1:17
News: 9:19
PharaohKatt tells us about Speech Pathology Week 2024: 27:00
Related or Not (with polls!): 40:23
Words of the Week: 56:52
Self-indulgent twaddle about the show and thank yous: 1:23:16
The Reads: 1:30:50
Outtake: 1:35:24 -
Episodes manquant?
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Can you hear them? Only if you're meant to. Political dogwhistles exploit lack of knowledge in one group to send a coded message to another group. But that's just the beginning. How are dogwhistles different from slurs? How do they licence behaviour? Do progressives dogwhistle? Dr Elin McCready is the author of Signaling Without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles.
We're also joined by Lizzy Hanks and Dr Jesse Egbert, who are working on the LANA-CASE corpus, a huge corpus of conversational English. It aims to bring representation to a diverse group of English speakers, and they're looking for contributors.
Dr Rikker Dockum is our special guest host.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:00 News: 3:01 Interview with Lizzy Hanks and Jesse Egbert: 16:47 Related or Not: 35:45 Interview with Elin McCready: 45:57 Words of the Week: 1:17:47 The Reads: 1:39:43 -
There are lots of Englishes out there, but the way we approach varieties of English sets learners up to fail. How do we combat language ideologies out there in the world — and in our own minds? Dr Ruanni Tupas is the editor of an important new book: Investigating Unequal Englishes: Understanding, Researching and Analysing Inequalities of the Englishes of the World.
We're joined by our special guest host Dr Nicole Holliday, and we are tackling a torrent of words — political and not — that the current news cycle has thrown at us.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:44 Words of the Week (coconut, weird, brat): 12:41 Related or Not: 55:25 Interview with Ruanni Tupas: 36:36 More Words of the Week (International Blue Screen Day / Crowdstrike, rawdogging, fedupedness, combining form -nomenon, fridgerton): 1:53:43 Comments: 2:11:15 The Reads: 2:13:47 -
What do signed languages have in common? How do oral languages influence signed languages? How do they influence each other? Here to answer these questions and many more, it's Dr Adam Schembri of the University of Birmingham.
You can watch our chat with Adam Schembri on video, with Christy Filipich doing Auslan interpretation.
That video is here:
https://youtu.be/GcV0218VJ2kAlso joining us as a special guest: Dr Mark Ellison.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:38 News: 3:33 Related or Not: 54:15 Interview with Adam Schembri: 1:05:31 Words of the Week: 2:08:27 Comments: 2:27:56 The Reads: 2:31:21 Listener comment: 2:39:33 -
Noam Chomsky is one of the world's foremost thinkers, and his impact on linguistics is incalculable. Yet many people are only familiar with his political activism. What are his linguistic ideas, and why have they been so tenacious?
To answer that question, Daniel had a delightful chat with generative syntactician and Chomsky fan Katie Martin.
We're honoured to have a chat with linguist and Uyghur language activist Abduweli Ayup, recipient of the 2024 Language Rights Defenders Award from the Global Coalition for Language Rights.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:41 News: 10:10 Interview with Abduweli Ayup: 37:36 Related or Not: 57:50 Interview with Katie Martin: 1:06:56 Words of the Week: 1:59:29 The Reads: 2:15:53 Outtakes: 2:22:21 -
What's going on in Germany? How are people talking about gender in the German language, and how is freedom of expression being handled? We have a couple of German experts — linguist Rob Tegethoff and Ciarán of the podcast Corner Späti — to tell us why other languages were banned at protests in Berlin, and what right-wing activists get from involving language in their plans.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:34
News: 5:16
Related or Not: 26:29
Interview with Rob and Ciarán: 44:37
Words of the Week: 1:46:42
The Reads: 2:02:50
Outtakes: 2:06:23 -
How much can we really know about the words we use? What are the facts behind some of the most tangled etymologies in English? And is our "Related or Not" game a good way of approaching word history?
We're talking to Dr Anatoly Liberman, perhaps the world's preëminent living etymologist and the author of Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology.
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What's the difference between a KINK and a FETISH? Does it matter if you ASSUME or PRESUME? English is full of these close groups of words, and author Eli Burnstein has untangled many of them in his delightful book The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Eli joins us for this episode.
Timestamps
Intros: 0:42
News: 9:54
Related or Not: 24:11
Interview with Eli Burnstein: 37:33
Words of the Week: 1:10:13
The Reads: 1:33:45 -
New York City is home to a lot of languages! Sometimes a sizeable language community can live on just a couple of floors of an apartment building. Dr Ross Perlin is working to find and promote minority languages in NYC. He's the co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, and author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. Ross joins us for this episode.
Intro: 0:36
News: 8:13
Related or Not: 32:52
Interview with Ross Perlin: 43:12
Words of the Week: 1:24:13
The Reads: 1:39:54Show notes: http://becauselanguage.com/96-language-city/
Support the show: http://patreon.com/join/becauselangpod/ -
Language authorities. Right-wing politicians. White supremacists and feminists. What do they have in common? They're all working together to fight gender-inclusive language. But why bring language into this fight? What extra does this give them?
Dr Caitlin Green and Maureen Kosse join us to explain on this big episode.
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In honour of Grammar Day (4 March), we are joined live by special guest Ellen Jovin, who regularly dispenses grammar advice and wisdom from the Grammar Table. Now she's testing our grammatical mettle and answering our questions.
YouTube video of this episode:
https://youtu.be/C1l8Alk3Ptc?si=7pnGnuKcy9YY-mhR -
What are your eyes doing when you describe a scene? It may depend on your language.
New research from Dr Rachel Nordlinger and team shows that we do a lot of planning and scanning very quickly, and it follows the requirements of our language. She's studied Murrinhpatha, an Australian Aboriginal language, to see what its speakers do.
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We’re talking words, and no one has a way with words like Grant Barrett. He’s here to tell us what it’s like at Dictionary.com, and what went down at the annual American Dialect Society Words of the Year 2023 vote. And perhaps he can help forestall Hedvig’s planned mass human extinction.
Also: World Endangered Writing Day is upon us! It’s a fantastic initiative, and author Tim Brookes of Endangered Alphabets is here to lay out the case for preserving writing systems.
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What is a woman? Or a man? Or a chair, or a sandwich? Or anything, really?
"Gender critical" people are making language into a vector to attack the rights of trans people. They treat categories like man and woman as binary and obvious.
But cognitive linguistics has a response, in the form of a new paper in Nature Human Behaviour. Are categories concrete, or are they mental, social, or something else? How do we categorise objects at all? Author Dr Andrew Perfors brings the science on this episode.
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We've got mail, and linguistic MVP Dr Nicole Holliday is here to help us sort some things out around here. And we chat about the state of lingcomm today.
Why is dog sushi made FOR dogs, but duck sushi is made FROM ducks? What do we call it generally when companies try to improve their image by -washing? Is the term "MVP" becoming uncoupled from sports? Will vaping kill your vocal fry? Are shibboleths made on purpose, as a way of creating an in-group and an out-group?Plus our favourite game: Related or Not!
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Who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary? Sure, James Murray had a very important role as editor, but a small army of volunteers submitted hundreds of thousands of words on slips of paper to get the project off the ground. What were their stories, and why did they have such a relentless sense of mission for the OED?
Dr Sarah Ogilvie is sharing her research into their lives and times, and it's startling and wondrous. She's a lexicographer and author of The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.
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