It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting in common: they’re all formed around a parti

63: Where to get your English etymologies

Dec 16th, 2021 34m 56s

When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if they might have originated with a common root word. Etymologists take these hunches and painstakingly track th

46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics

Jul 17th, 2020 37m 43s

How are you? Thanks, no problem. Stock, ritualistic social phrases like these, which are used more to indicate a particular social context rather than for the literal meaning of the words inside have a name in linguistics -- they’re called phat

79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!

Apr 20th, 2023 40m 43s

Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonation. W

75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

Dec 15th, 2022 27m 2s

Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses the one word “love” for several distinct feelings: familial love, romantic love, platonic love

73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory

Oct 20th, 2022 39m 18s

Maps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re also often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number of languages, like 7000, mapped to dots or coloured zones with suspiciously exact and un-overlapping locations. And yet,

70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

Jul 21st, 2022 38m 15s

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 c

67: What it means for a language to be official

Apr 22nd, 2022 37m 33s

The Rosetta Stone is famous as an inscription that let us read Egyptian hieroglyphs again, but it was created in the first place as part of a long history of signage as performative multilingualism in public places. Choosing between languages i

61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta

Oct 21st, 2021 44m 26s

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’v

60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics

Sep 17th, 2021 41m 37s

Here’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in red and the affixes, that’s prefixes and suffixes, in blue. “Later today, I’ll know if I hafta

59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind

Aug 19th, 2021 38m 59s

Let's say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room a minute later, and we've close

58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip

Jul 16th, 2021 39m 39s

What do the sounds fffff, vvvv, ssss, and zzzz all have in common? They're all produced by creating a sort of friction in your mouth when you constrict two parts against each other, whether that's your lips, your teeth, your tongue, the roof of

54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

Mar 18th, 2021 41m 16s

If you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty grammars of various languages. But grammars, like dictionaries, don’t just appear out of nowhere -- they’re made by people, and those peopl

52: Writing is a technology

1 Jan 21st, 2021 37m 48s

There’s no known human society without language, whether spoken or signed or both, but writing is a different story. Writing is a technology that has only been invented from scratch a handful of times: in ancient Sumeria (where it may have spre

47: The happy fun big adjective episode

Aug 20th, 2020 38m 26s

Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re...maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’re words that can get described with a comparative or a superlative, such as “bigger” or “most fun”. B

39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

Dec 19th, 2019 33m 25s

Why do some conversations seems to flow really easily, while other times, it feels like you can’t get a word in edgewise, or that the other person isn’t holding up their end of the conversation? In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gre

28: How languages influence each other - Hannah Gibson interview on Swahili, Rangi & Bantu languages

Jan 18th, 2019 35m 5s

The Rift Valley area of central and northern Tanzania is the only area where languages from all four African language families are found (Bantu, Cushitic, Nilotic, and Khoisan). Languages in this area have been in contact with each other for a

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

Nov 16th, 2023 47m 25s

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 revi

69: What we can, must, and should say about modals

Jun 16th, 2022 42m 23s

Sometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk about how things could be. What can happen. What may occur. What might be the case. What will happen (or would, if on

66: Word order, we love

Mar 18th, 2022 33m 23s

Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags and who’s sitting at home with the ket

62: Cool things about scales and implicature

Nov 18th, 2021 37m 20s

We can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit, but we all generally agree on where these words sit in relation to each other. We can

41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

Feb 20th, 2020 35m 25s

How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”, “now”, or “in a few minutes”. But some languages also require their speakers to use an additional small

91: Scoping out the scope of scope

7 hours ago 30m 9s

When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "eve

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

28 days ago 47m 48s

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

89: Connecting with oral culture

Feb 16th, 2024 55m 19s

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