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

Mar 21st, 2024 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

88: No such thing as the oldest language

Jan 18th, 2024 41m 36s

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 thoug

87: If I were an irrealis episode

Dec 21st, 2023 34m 59s

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'l

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

85: Ergativity delights us

Oct 19th, 2023 46m

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

84: Look, it's deixis, an episode about pointing!

Sep 22nd, 2023 38m 55s

Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you're pointing at. Humans are really good at producing and understanding pointing, and it seems to be something that helps babies learn to talk, but only a few animal

83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro

Aug 18th, 2023 41m 6s

Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major research universities that do most of the academic studies abou

82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

Jul 21st, 2023 43m 56s

Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or

81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

Jun 16th, 2023 37m 39s

In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping ou

80: Word Magic

May 19th, 2023 37m 19s

The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and in t

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

78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge

Mar 17th, 2023 1s

Communicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say -- it’s also about the many subtle ingredients that go into a message, from how you keep your audience in mind to how you portray the actions of the people y

77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting

Feb 17th, 2023 44m 28s

Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to create

76: Where language names come from and why they change

Jan 20th, 2023 37m 17s

Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “language” in the language itself; other times the name that outsiders

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

74: Who questions the questions?

Nov 18th, 2022 37m 36s

We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as ironic or rhetorica

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,

72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd

Sep 16th, 2022 49m 32s

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

71: Various vocal fold vibes

Aug 19th, 2022 40m 18s

Partway down your throat are two flaps of muscle. When you breathe normally, you pull the flaps away to the sides, and air comes out silently. But if you stretch the flaps across the opening of your throat while pushing air up through, you can

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

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

68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

May 20th, 2022 40m 48s

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember,

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