What’s the shape of a word? How do you save a dying language? How is studying languages a science anyway?

All excellent questions for our guest Prof. David Adger a linguist at Queen Mary University of London. He is interested in what underlies the patterns found in the grammar of human languages.

Why would anyone study this? As David states, just to better understand the world. But there are also more practical applications like saving dying, often Indigenous languages which hold within them stories and knowledge that can help everyone’s understanding of the world.