90 episodes

A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. A weird and deep conversation about language delivered right to your ears the third Thursday of every month. "Joyously nerdy" –Buzzfeed.

Listened to all the episodes here and wish there were more? Want to talk with other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics? Get bonus episodes and access to our Discord community at www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm
Shownotes and transcripts: www.lingthusiasm.com

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

    • Science
    • 4.8 • 586 Ratings

A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. A weird and deep conversation about language delivered right to your ears the third Thursday of every month. "Joyously nerdy" –Buzzfeed.

Listened to all the episodes here and wish there were more? Want to talk with other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics? Get bonus episodes and access to our Discord community at www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm
Shownotes and transcripts: www.lingthusiasm.com

    90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

    90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

    On Lingthusiasm, we've sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibility, one that can produce several sounds at the same time which combine into what we perceive as a vowel. Behold, our latest, greatest metaphor (we're so sorry)... the meat bagpipe!

    In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are. We commissioned Dr. Bethany Gardner to make custom vowel plots for us (which you can see below!) based on how we say certain words during Lingthusiasm episodes, and we talk about how our personal vowel plots let us easily see differences between our Canadian and Australian accents and between when we're carefully reading a wordlist versus more casually talking on the show. We also talk about where the two numbers per vowel that we graph come from (hint: that's where the bagpipe comes in), the delightfully wacky keywords used to compare vowels across English varieties (leading us to silly names for real phenomena, like "goose fronting"), and how vowel spaces are linked to other aspects of our identities including regional variation as well as gender and sexuality.

    Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/745605876867629056/transcript-episode-90-vowel-plots

    Announcements:

    We’ve created a new and Highly Scientific™ ’Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?’ quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you’re not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here: bit.ly/lingthusiasmquiz

    In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the process of making visual maps of our own vowel spaces with Dr. Bethany Gardner. We talk about Bethany’s PhD research on how people learn how to produce and comprehend singular “they”, how putting pronouns in bios or nametags makes it easier for people to use them consistently, and how the massive amounts of data they were wrangling as a result of this led them to make nifty vowel plots for us! If you think you might want to map your own vowels or you just like deep dives into the making-of process, this is the bonus episode for you.

    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. Find us here: patreon.com/lingthusiasm

    For links to things mentioned in this episode:https://lingthusiasm.com/post/745605428371701760/lingthusiasm-episode-90-what-visualizing-our

    • 47 min
    89: Connecting with oral culture

    89: Connecting with oral culture

    For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf.

    In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about them. We talk about a Ted Chiang short story comparing the spread of literacy to the spread of video recording, how oral cultures around the world have preserved astronomical information about the Seven Sisters constellation for over 10,000 years, and how the field of nuclear semiotics looks to the past to try and communicate with the far future. We also talk about how "oral" vs " written" culture should perhaps be referred to as "embodied" vs "recorded" culture because signed languages are very much part of this conversation, where areas of residual orality have remained in our own lives, from proverbs to gossip to guided tours, and why memes are an extreme example of literate culture rather than extreme oral culture.

    Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/742445104511500288/transcript-episode-89-connecting-with-oral

    Announcements:

    We've created a new and Highly Scientific™ 'Which Lingthusiasm episode are you?' quiz! Answer some very fun and fanciful questions and find out which Lingthusiasm episode most closely corresponds with your personality. If you're not sure where to start with our back catalogue, or you want to get a friend started on Lingthusiasm, this is the perfect place to start. Take the quiz here: https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmquiz

    For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/742444321413939200/lingthusiasm-episode-89-connecting-with-oral

    • 55 min
    88: No such thing as the oldest language

    88: No such thing as the oldest language

    It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don't even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a singular common ancestor language or several.

    In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what people mean when we talk about a language as being old. We talk about how classifying languages as old or classical is often a political or cultural decision, how the materials that are used to write a language influence whether it gets preserved (from clay to bark), and how people talk about creoles and signed languages in terms of oldness and newness. And finally, how a language doesn't need to be justified in terms of its age for whether it's interesting or worthy of respect.

    Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/739896819002277888/transcript-episode-88-every-language-is-an-old

    For links to things mentioned in this episode:https://lingthusiasm.com/post/739896689822990336/lingthusiasm-episode-88-no-such-thing-as-the

    • 41 min
    87: If I were an irrealis episode

    87: If I were an irrealis episode

    Language lets us talk about things that aren't, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that's an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it's a hypothetical situation (such as "if it rains, we'll cancel the picnic" - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen. But also they might!). Languages have lots of different ways of talking about different kinds of speculative events, and together they're called the irrealis.

    In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about some of our favourite examples under the irrealis umbrella. We talk about various things that we can mean by "reality", such as how existing fictional concepts, like goblins playing Macbeth, differ from newly-constructed fictions, like our new creature the Frenumblinger. We also talk about hypothetical statements using "if" (including the delightfully-named "biscuit conditionals), and using the "if I were a rich man" (Fiddler on the Roof) to "if I was a rich girl" (Gwen Stefani) continuum to track the evolution of the English subjunctive. Finally, a few of our favourite additional types of irrealis categories: the hortative, used to urge or exhort (let's go!), the optative, to express wishes and hopes (if only...), the dubitative, for when you doubt something, and the desiderative (I wish...).

    Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/737362573359464448/transcript-episode-87-irrealis

    Announcements:
    Thank you to everyone who shared Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! It was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. We hope you enjoyed the warm fuzzies!

    In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about swearing (including rude gestures) in fiction with science fiction and fantasy authors Jo Walton and Ada Palmer, authors of the Thessaly books and Terra Ignota series, both super interesting series we've ling-nerded out about before on the show. We talk about invented swear words like "frak" and "frell", sweary lexical gaps (why don't we swear with "toe jam!"), and interpreting the nuances of regional swear words like "bloody" in fiction.

    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. Find us here: https://patreon.com/lingthusiasm

    For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/737362321491591169/lingthusiasm-episode-87-if-i-were-an-irrealis

    • 34 min
    86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

    86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

    Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions.

    In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, who's an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. We talk about how Itxaso grew up learning Basque at school and from her parents, who'd learned it as adults as part of the Basque language revitalization movement, and how studying linguistics gave her names for her linguistic experiences and made her realize she wasn't alone. We also talk about a paper Itxaso wrote with several other multilingual linguists about how academia needs to stop searching for "unicorn language users", aka users of minoritized languages who perfectly match a monolingual majority control group. Plus: Basque language revitalization through punk rock, reggaeton, and more music recs! (Links to songs in shownotes.)

    Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/734191628928106496/transcript-episode-86-itxaso-interview

    Announcements:
    Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! We appreciate your support so much, and it was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share.

    If you'd like to share more of your thoughts on Lingthusiasm, take our 2023 Listener Survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode (https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-75-2022-82426500) and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here until December 15th 2023: https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23

    In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about giving advice by answering your linguistics questions! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey. Listen to our latest bonus here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-81-advice-92128507

    For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/734191359532122112/episode-86-revival-reggaeton-and-rejecting

    • 47 min
    85: Ergativity delights us

    85: Ergativity delights us

    When you have a sentence like "I visit them", the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from "they visit me". However, in a sentence like "I laugh", you don't actually need those signals -- since there's only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read "Me laugh" or "Laugh me". And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like "laugh" patterns with the object (me) rather than the subject (I) of a transitive verb like "visit". This pattern is known as ergativity.

    In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about ergativity! We talk about how ergativity first brought us together as collaborators (true facts: Lingthusiasm might never have existed without it), some classic examples of ergatives from Basque and Arrente, and cool downstream effects that ergativity makes possible, including languages that have ergatives sometimes but not other times (aka split ergativity) and the gloriously-named antipassive (the opposite of the passive). We also introduce a handy mnemonic gesture for remembering what ergativity looks like, as part of our ongoing quest to encourage you to make fun gestures in public!

    Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/731654643533447168/transcript-episode-85

    November is Lingthusiasm's anniversary month and it's been 7 years! To help us celebrate we’re asking you to help connect us with people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast, if only they knew it existed. Most people still find podcasts through word of mouth, so we're asking you to share a link to your favourite episode, or just share Lingthusiasm in general. Tag us on on social media so we can thank you, or if you share in private enjoy the warm fuzzies of our gratitude.

    We’re doing our second listener survey! Right here: https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23 This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year's survey in a bonus episode (https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-75-2022-82426500) and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here: https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23

    In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about linguistic summer camps for grownups aka linguistics institutes! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey. Listen here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-80-from-87062497

    For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/731654340611293184/episode-85-ergativity-delights-us

    • 46 min

Customer Reviews

4.8 out of 5
586 Ratings

586 Ratings

Audreymarie97 ,

Great show!

Recently caught up and now I'm in withdrawal between episodes! I don’t study linguistics but both of my sisters do and it's great to have an entry-level way for me to learn enough to ask them about stuff that they're learning in school!

Suzannekmoses ,

Enthusiastic!

I love this podcast. While I may not share the deep geekery on this subject, I’m happy to learn more.

Maestra Erin ,

Incredible!

As a linguistic nerd, lover of languages, and kindergarten teacher at a dual immersion school, this podcast fascinates me. You do an amazing job. I’ve recommended to various co workers. Thank you! (Am also wondering if potentially I could get a couple of months of bonus material for free…I’m so curious about the episodes and….educator bonus?🥰)

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