2023 Listener Survey: Including new experiment questions!
We’re running our second official listener/reader survey!
This is your chance to tell us what you’re into on Lingthusiasm, what we could do more of, suggest topics and guests for future episodes, and also answer some fun linguistics experiment questions. This year’s experiment questions are new, so feel free to take it again if you did it last year and you’re curious!
The survey is online, and will take 5-30 minutes (depending on how much you want to tell us in the open text boxes).
The survey runs across our anniversary month, and closes December 15th 2023.
bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23
Results from our 2022 survey!
Here is a blog post of some of the most interesting results, or you can see a selection of audience reflections in our open access academic paper ‘Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study’.
If you’d like to hear us talk through the survey results, you can listen to our bonus episode ‘2022 Survey Results - kiki/bouba, synesthesia fomo, and pluralizing emoji’. Patrons already have access to this episode, so if you’d like to listen to it, plus our back catalogue of 80+ bonus episodes, you can join us on Patreon here. (And a massive thank you to everyone who’s already a patron, you really do help us keep running both the show itself as well as fun things like the survey.)
Here are two of the results from last year’s survey:

This survey is being conducted by Lingthusiasm in conjunction with La Trobe University (Ethics approval HEC22181). Thanks to La Trobe for the support to collect data that we can share with Lingthusiasm listeners and academic audiences. More information can be found in the Participant Informed Consent Form before the survey starts.

Another year of fun survey questions! Not to spoil anything, but I got TWO gesture related research questions into it this year!

New Research Article: From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: Emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture

In this new article I get to bring together three of my favourite things: gesture, science fiction and working with the best collaborators. I teamed up with genre author and creative writing expert Dr Peta Freestone and corpus whiz Jess Kruk to look at the different ways scifi gestures also have lives in the real world.

We used emoji evidence to look at the ways use of the Vulcan Salute (🖖) on Twitter references Star Trek, as well as nerd culture in general. There’s no emoji for the Three Finger Salute from the Hunger Games (…yet?), so we used a newspaper corpus to see what we could learn about this gesture. It has become a gesture of protest by younger people against a variety of regimes across South and South East Asia, and is becoming untethered from its narrative origins. For this gesture, newspapers provided a good, nuanced understanding of the meaning and function of this gesture.

This article partially started out of a blog post where I was pondering fictional gestures in scifi and fantasy. The article is part of a special issue of Linguistic Vanguard on the linguistics of scifi, with a special focus on corpus methods, which was edited bySofia Rüdiger and Claudia Lange. It’s fun that this article stands alongside lots of great articles including work on the sociolinguistics of Firefly, the lexical influence of Star Wars and changing gender dynamics on Star Trek.

Abstract

Research on emblems to date has not drawn on corpus methods that use public data. In this paper, we use corpus methods to explore the use of original fictional gestures in the real world. We look at two examples from popular science fiction, the Vulcan salute from Star Trek and the three-finger salute from The Hunger Games. Firstly, a Twitter corpus of the Vulcan salute emoji shows that it is used to represent Star Trek fandom and wider nerd culture, alongside its use as a greeting. Secondly, a global news corpus shows the three-finger salute has come to be used as a pro-democracy protest gesture across political and cultural boundaries in South East Asia. These corpus studies show different trajectories for the two gestures, with the three-finger salute escaping the confines of its fictional world, while the Vulcan salute has come to stand in as a reference to the media it originated from. We conclude with a reflection on the opportunities, challenges and limitations of bringing corpus methods to gesture studies.

Reference

Freestone, P., J. Kruk & L. Gawne. 2023. From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture. Linguistic Vanguard. doi: 10.1515/lingvan-2023-0006

See also

36 notes

November 13, 2023

lingthusiasm:

Lingthusiasm seventh anniversary: help share the show!
Lingthusiasm turns seven in 2023!
In celebration of our seventh year making a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics, we’re asking you to help introduce the show to people who would be totally into a linguistics podcast, if only they knew it existed! Lingthusiasm is a great fit for anyone in your life who is curious about language or who likes hearing ad-free conversational deep-dives into hidden patterns in the world around us from people who are extremely invested in articulating why it’s so cool.
Your recommendations really do work (we see it in the stats each year!), whether it’s sharing this very post, tagging us on social media, sending an episode you enjoy directly to a friend who’d like it, or rating us on podcast players. Or if you’ve been following us on social media for a while but have gotten behind or haven’t gotten around to actually listening at all, this is a great cue to dive into an episode or two!
We also love being recommended as guests on your (other) favourite podcasts! We love chatting about links between linguistics and your other favourite topics (we’ve done linguistics and science fiction/roleplaying games, linguistics and conlanging, linguistics in romance novels, linguistics and mythology, and more!).
Trying to figure out what to say about Lingthusiasm? Here are some ideas:
What’s Lingthusiasm like?
Ever find yourself distracted from what someone is saying by wondering about how they say it? Lingthusiasm is a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics as a way of understanding the world around us.
From languages around the world to our favourite linguistics memes, Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne bring you into a lively half hour conversation on the third Thursday of every month about the hidden linguistic patterns that you didn’t realize you were already making.
“Lauren and Gretchen know their stuff, have an easy rapport, and are skilled at pitching linguistic concepts to a general audience.” —Sentence First
“Joyously nerdy.” —BuzzFeed
“I checked out Lingthusiasm by playing a random episode and it was funny and fascinating and educational AND it had a shout out to Dinosaur Comics!” —Ryan North
Which episode should I start with?
You can start listening to Lingthusiasm anywhere! Here are some episodes that people often enjoy:
How to rebalance a lopsided conversation (Episode 39)
When nothing means something (Episode 23)
Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization (Episode 26)
Or if you like, you can start with an interview episode:
What If Linguistics - Absurd Hypothetical Questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd (Episode 72)
Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou (Episode 36)
The grammar of singular they with Kirby Conrod (Episode 43)
All episodes have human-made, edited transcripts.
Journey back through time to previous anniversary posts:
Sixth anniversary post
Fifth anniversary post
Fourth anniversary post
Third anniversary post
Second anniversary post
First anniversary post

I absolutely love the joy of picking the perfect podcast episode to share with someone! We’ve got some of our favourite recommendations in this post!

26 notes

November 6, 2023

hapax legomenon and automated email replies

While I’ve been on leave in 2023 I’ve had an automated email reply set up to direct people who email me to the most relevant alternative contact. Because I know that some people are stuck emailing me (sorry bosses, sorry mailing lists), I wanted to add a reminder about the magic of email filters, and couldn’t resist using it to share a little fact about corpus linguistics:

Sick of this automated reply?
 If you’d like to not get automated replies from me, you can filter them by creating a rule. The best rule will probably be to filter anything that has the phrase “a hapax legomenon is a word or an expression that occurs only once within a corpus of texts” in the body of the email. That’s rare enough that it currently doesn’t turn up anywhere on the internet when I search it as a string with DuckDuckGo.

Of course, by time I’m back from leave this post will be up and my autoreply won’t technically be correct anymore!

91 notes

October 23, 2023

lingthusiasm:

Episode 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.
Announcements:
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! 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 and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here.
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.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Take the Lingthusiasm 2023 survey here!
Lingthusiasm episode ‘Colour words around the world and inside your brain’
Lingthusiasm episode 'How to rebalance a lopsided conversation’
'Before we get to ergativity, unaccusitivity and other kinds of morphosyntactic funtimes…’ the 2014 blog post by Superlinguo that started Lauren and Gretchen’s collaboration
xkcd comic 'Tower of Babel’
Etymonline entry for 'ergative’
Grambank entry 'Feature GB409: Is there any ergative alignment of flagging?’
WALS entry 'Chapter Alignment of Case Marking of Pronouns’
WALS entry 'Chapter Alignment of Case Marking of Full Noun Phrases’
Wikipedia entry for 'ergative–absolutive alignment’
Wikiversity entry for 'A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman) Ergative case’
Wikipedia entry for 'tripartite alignment’
Wikipedia entry for 'antipassive voice’
Wikipedia entry for 'split ergativity’
Lingthusiasm episode 'Word order, we love’
Lingthusiasm episode 'The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on’
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Seven(!!!!) years in and we finally get to spend a whole episode talking about ergativity!

10,396 notes

October 23, 2023

Linguistics and Language Podcasts

superlinguo:

Looking for podcasts about language and linguistics? Here’s a comprehensive list with descriptions! I’ve also mentioned if shows have transcripts. If there are any I missed, let me know!
Linguistics
Lingthusiasm A podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne (that’s me!). Main episodes every third Thursday of every month, with a second bonus episode on Patreon. (Transcripts for all episodes)
Because Language Every week Daniel, Ben, and Hedvig cover the news in linguistics and tackle a particular topic. (previously Talk the Talk) (Transcripts for all episodes after release)
The Vocal Fries Every episode Carrie Gillon & Megan Figueroa tackle linguistic discrimination in relation to a particular group. (Transcripts for some episodes)
En Clair A podcast about forensic linguistics from Dr Claire Hardaker at Lancaster University. Episodes released monthly, with a range of topics from criminal cases to literary fraud. (Transcripts for all episodes)
Accentricity From Sadie Durkacz Ryan, a lecturer in sociolinguistics at Glasgow University. Season one has six episodes.
Field Notes Martha Tsutsui Billins interviews linguists about their linguistic fieldwork. (Transcripts for all episodes)
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences sub-30 minute episodes about the history of linguistics from James McElvenny, with the occasional interviews.
The Language Revolution Changing UK attitudes to languages.
Lexis A conversation about linguistics with a topical UK focus, from Matthew Butler, Lisa Casey, Dan Clayton and Jacky Glancey.
Kletshead A podcast about bilingual children for parents, teachers and speech language therapists from Dr. Sharon Unsworth. Also in Dutch.
Linguistics Lounge A podcast about language and discourse with Tony Fisher and Julia de Bres. Transcripts for all episodes.
CorpusCast from Dr Robbie Love, available alongside other shows in the Aston University podcast feed or in video format.
Life and Language Michaela Mahlberg chats with her guests about life and why language matters.
Toksave – Culture Talks A podcast from the PARADISEC Archive, where the archived records of the past have life breathed back into them once again.
Theory Neutral Covering typology and descriptive grammars with Logan R Kearsley.
PhonPod Podcast Interview-based podcast about phonetics and phonology.
Linguistics Careercast A podcast devoted to exploring careers for linguists outside academia.
Language
The Allusionist Stories about language and the people who use it, from Helen Zaltzman (Transcripts for all episodes) (my review).
Grammar Girl Episodes are rarely longer than 15 minutes, but they’re full of tips about English grammar and style for professional writing, and more! (Transcripts for all episodes).
A Language I Love Is… A show about language, linguistics and people who love both. An interview-based podcast hosted by Danny Bate.
Word of Mouth BBC Radio 4 show exploring the world of words with Michael Rosen.
America the Bilingual Dedicated to the pursuit of bilingualism in the USA.
Words & Actions A podcast about how language matters in business, politics and beyond.
Subtitle A podcast about languages and the people who speak them, from Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay. For those who miss Patrick’s old podcast, The World in Words.
The Parlé Podcast from Canadian Speech-Language Pathologist Chantal Mayer-Crittenden.
Slavstvuyte! A podcast for everyone who is fascinated by Slavic languages from Dina Stankovic.
Subtext A podcast about the linguistics of online dating.
Conlangs
Conlangery Particularly for those with an interest in constructed languages, they also have episodes that focus on specific natural languages, or linguistic phenomena. Newer episodes have transcripts.
Linguitect Matt, Rowan and Liam explain linguistic topics and talk about how to build them into your conlang.
Dictionaries
Word For Word From Macquarie dictionary, with a focus on Australian English.
Fiat Lex A podcast about making dictionaries from Kory Stamper & Steve Kleinedler. One season.
Word Matters From the editors at Merriam-Webster, hosted by Emily Brewster, Neil Serven, Ammon Shea, and Peter Sokolowski.
English
Unstandardized English Interview-based podcast. Disrupting the language of racism and white supremacy in English Language Teaching.
History of English Meticulously researched, professionally produced and engaging content on the history of English. (My reviews: episodes 1-4, episodes 5-79, bonus episodes).
Lexicon Valley Hosted by John McWhorter.
That’s What They Say Every week linguist Anne Curzan joins Rebecca Kruth on Michigan public radio for a five minute piece on a quirk of English language.
A Way With Words A talk-back format show on the history of English words, cryptic crosswords and slang.
Words/etymology
Something Rhymes With Purple Susie Dent and Gyles Brandreth uncover the hidden origins of language and share their love of words.
Telling our Twisted Histories Kaniehti:io Horn brings us together to decolonize our minds– one word, one concept, one story at a time.
Word Bomb Hosts Pippa Johnstone and Karina Palmitesta explore one word per week, using particular words for a deep dive into linguistic and social issues. (Transcripts for all episodes)
Words for Granted In each episode Ray Belli explores the history of a common English word in around fifteen minutes.
Lexitecture Ryan, a Canadian, and Amy, a Scot share their chosen word each episode.
Bunny Trails Shauna and Dan discuss idioms and other turns of phrase.
Translation
Troublesome Terps The podcast about the things that keep interpreters up at night. See also back episodes of Alexander Drechsel’s old podcast LangFM.
In Languages other than English
Parler Comme Jamais A French language podcast from Binge Audio.Monthly episodes from Laélia Véron.
Sozusagen A German language podcast of weekly 10 minute episodes.
Språket A Swedish language podcast from Sveriges Radio about language use and change.
Språktalk A Norwegian language podcast with Helene Uri and Kristin Storrusten from Aftenposten.
Klog på sprog A Danish language podcast that playfully explores the Danish language.
Kletshead A Dutch language podcast about bilingual children for parents, teachers and speech language therapists from Dr. Sharon Unsworth. Also in English.
BabelPodcast A Portuguese language podcast from Brazil, hosted by Cecilia Farias and Gruno.
War of Words A Spanish language podcast about linguistics from Juana de los Santos, Ángela Rodríguez, Néstor Bermúdez and Antonella Moschetti.
Con la lengua fuera A Spanish language podcast from Macarena Gil y Nerea Fernández de Gobeo.
Hablando mal y pronto A Spanish language conversational podcast from Santiago, Juan and Magui.
Back Catalogue
These are podcasts that had a good run of episodes and are no longer being produced.
Spectacular Vernacular A podcast that explores language … and plays with it Hosted by Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer for Slate. Transcripts available. 19 episodes from 2021 and 2022.
Science Diction a podcast about words—and the science stories behind them. Hosted by Johanna Mayer, this is a production from WNYC Science Friday. 42 episodes from 2020-2022.
The World in Words From PRI (2008-2019)
How Brands are Build (season 1 of this show focuses on brand naming)
Very Bad Words A podcast about swearing and our cultural relationship to it. 42 episodes from 2017 and 2018.
The Endless Knot is not strictly a language podcast, but they often include word histories, linguistics podcast fans episode may find their colour series particularly interesting.
Given Names (four part radio series from 2015, all about names. My review)
Odds & Ends
There are also a number of podcasts that have only a few episodes, are no longer being made, or are very academic in their focus:
The Black Language Podcast Anansa Benbow brings you a podcast dedicated to talking about Black people and their languages. Five episodes from 2020.
Speculative Grammarian Podcast (from the magazine of the same name, about 50 episodes from Dec 2009-Jan 2017)
Linguistics Podcast (on YouTube, around 20 episodes in 2013 introducing basic linguistic concepts)
Evolving English: Linguistics at the Library (8 episodes 2018), from the British Library.
Language Creation Society Podcast (8 episodes, 2009-2011)
LingLab (very occasionally updated podcast from graduate students in the Sociolinguistics program at NC State University)
Hooked on Phonetics five episodes from Maxwell Hope from 2019 and 2020.
Glossonomia Each episode is about a different vowel or consonant sound in English. 44 episodes from 2010-2014.
Distributed Morphs An interview-based podcast about morphology, from Jeffrey Punske. Eight episodes in 2020.
Word to the Whys a podcast where linguists talk about why they do linguistics. Created by TILCoP Canada (Teaching Intro Linguistics Community of Practice). 10 episodes in 2020 and 2021.
The Weekly Linguist An interview podcast about the languages of the world and the linguists who study them from Jarrette Allen and Lisa Sprowls. 21 episodes in 2021.
Silly Linguistics (ad hoc episode posting, but episode 7 is an interview with Kevin Stroud for History of English fans)
Linguistics After Dark Eli, Sarah and Jenny answer your linguistics questions in hour-ish long episodes.
WACC Podcast (guest lectures at Warwick Applied Linguistics)
Sage Language and Linguistics
Let’s Talk Talk
Queer Linguistics has a couple of episodes, with a bit of classroom vibe
GradLings An occasionally-updated podcast for linguistics students at any stage of study, to share their stories and experiences.
Canguro English A podcast about language for people learning languages. 103 episodes from 2018-2021.
Why is English? A podcast about how the English language got to be the way it is, from Laura Brandt. Seven episodes from 2020 and 2021.
Animology Vegan blogger Colleen Patrick Goudreau uses her love of animals as a starting point for exploring animal-related etymologies. 27 episodes from 2017-2020.
Wordy Wordpecker Short weekly episodes from Rachel Lopez, charting the stories of English words. 14 episodes from 2018.
Speaking of Translation A monthly podcast from Eve Bodeux & Corinne McKay. 10 episodes from 2020-2021.
Se Ve Se Escucha (Seen and Heard) Language justice and what it means to be an interpreter, an organizer and bilingual in the US South, from the Center for Participatory Change. Episodes from 2020.
This is an updated listing from October 2023. I’m always excited to be able to add more podcasts to the list, so if you know of any linguistics/language podcasts not here, please let me know! I wait until a show has at least 3 episodes before I add it to the list, and I like to let people know when transcripts are available.

I’ve done my annual update of the linguistics podcasts list.

As always, if something isn’t on the list, let me know, and if a show has transcripts that’s twice as good!

81 notes

October 12, 2023

lingthusiasm:

Episode 84: Look, it’s deixis, an episode about pointing!
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 animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can’t. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of ways of pointing, and their relative prominence varies across cultures: you can point to something with a finger or two, with your whole hand, with your elbow, your head, your eyes and eyebrows, your lips, and even your words.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about pointing, aka deixis. We talk about how pointing varies across cultures and species: English speakers tend to have a taboo against pointing with the middle finger and to some extent at people, but don’t have the very common cross-cultural taboo against pointing at rainbows. We also talk about the technical term for pointing in a linguistic context, deixis, and how deictic meanings bring together a whole bunch of categories: pronouns in signed and spoken languages, words like here, this, go, and today, and the eternal confusion about which Tuesday is next Tuesday.
Read the transcript here.
Announcements:
This episode is brought to you by all of the fantastic people who have supported the podcast by becoming patrons or buying merch over the years! We say this a lot but it really is very much the case that we would have had to give up making the show a long time ago without your financial support. If you would like to help keep the show running ad-free into the future, listen to bonus episodes, and connect with other language nerds on our Discord, join us on Patreon.
In this month’s bonus episode, Lauren gets enthusiastic about the process of doing linguistic fieldwork with Dr. Martha Tsutsui Billins, an Adjunct Teaching Fellow at California State University Fresno and creator of the podcast Field Notes, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
‘Why don’t apes point?’ - Michael Tomasellso
'Dogs’ responsiveness to human pointing gestures’ - K. Soproni, A. Miklósi, J. Topál, V. Csányi
'A Comparative Study of the Use of Visual Communicative Signals in Interactions Between Dogs and Humans and Cats and Humans’ - Á. Miklósi, P. Pongrácz, G. Lakatos, J. Topál, V. Csányi.
'The way humans point isn’t as universal as you might think’ - Kensy Cooperrider
Discussion of lip pointing in 'Encanto’ on Reddit, including video example
'Body-directed gestures: Pointing to the self and beyond’ - Kensy Cooperrider
'Even Rainbows Have a Dark Side’ - Kensy Cooperrider
Etymonline entry for ’*deik-’
Etymonline entry for 'deixis’
Wikipedia entry for 'deixis’
Lingthusiasm episode ‘Pronouns: Little words, big jobs’
'Pointing in gesture and sign’ - Kensy Cooperrider & Kate Mesh
'How Pointing is Integrated into Language: Evidence From Speakers and Signers’ - K. Cooperrider, J. Fenlon, J. Keane, D. Brentari, and S. Goldin-Meadow
'Comparing sign language and gesture: Insights from pointing’ - J. Fenlon, K. Cooperrider, J. Keane, D. Brentari, and S. Goldin-Meadow
'On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American sign language’ - Laura A. Petitto
'Demonstratives and deixis in Tamil and Sinhala’ blog post on Xavieremmanuel.org
'Spatial deixis in Iaai (Loyalty Islands)’ - Françoise Ozanne-Rivierre
'Deictic categories in three languages of Eastern Indonesia’ - Hein Steinhauer
Lingthusiasm bonus episode 'Is X a sandwich? Solving the word-meaning argument once and for all’
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, Bluesky, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

36 notes

September 25, 2023

Language Books for Kids: Highly Irregular, Arika Okrent & Sean O'Neill

English spelling, pronunciation and grammar have been fertile ground for Pop Ling books (up there with swearing), and it’s a delight to see this often-covered topic in the hands of one of the best lingcomm writers.

This book grew out of Okrent & O'Neill’s videos for Mental Floss that were made between 2015 and 2018, which featured Okrent’s voice over O'Neill illustrating onto a whiteboard. The book covers similar terrain to the video series, but with a tighter focus.

The book takes a tone of playful exasperation that never gets too heavy-handed. There are five sections, each focusing on a different place we can lay ‘blame’ for the state of English; The barbarians (English’s Germanic origins), the French, the printing press, the snobs, ourselves (a final catch-all section). As with the videos, each chapter is short and tightly focused. There are 40 chapters of around 5 pages each, with or or two of O'Neill’s illustrative examples in each chapter. Chapters can be read consecutively, allowing the reader to build a larger picture of these five different pressures on English, or you can dip in at any point that takes your fancy.

With this focus, there is a lot of focus on writing system and historical processes, but different chapters also cover topics in morphology, syntax, semantics and idioms.

The framing of whimsical affront at the state of English never gets too heavy-handed, and Okrent’s writing is a masterclass in the judicious deployment of both terminology and humour. I’ve used her videos in my undergraduate teaching, and plan to borrow some of her explanations (and jokes) in this book for future teaching.

I would use this as a gateway to Crystal’s A Little Book of Language (review here), you can safely leave it with a keen middle grader who is flummoxed by spelling bees or asks questions about linguistic oddities, or enjoy reading the short chapters with them.

Get the book: Bookshop, Amazon [buying through these links provides financial support to Superlinguo]

See also: Linguistics Books for Kids - the Superlinguo list

169 notes

September 11, 2023

lingthusiasm:

New Lingthusiasm Merch! “Etymology isn’t destiny” and aesthetic IPA chart on lots of items
A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here!
“Etymology isn’t destiny” on shirts, magnets, notebooks, and more!
Words change their meanings over time, and when we remind ourselves that etymology isn’t destiny, we can also remember we’re free to grow and change over the course of our lives too. We’ve talked about how the meanings of words are something that we’re constantly creating with each other in many Lingthusiasm episodes, so the idea that etymology isn’t destiny is a fun and liberating thing that you can now contemplate regularly by looking at these words in sparkly, witchy script by our linguist-artist Lucy Maddox in black, white, midnight blue, Lingthusiasm green, or (our personal favourite) rainbow gradient. Etymology isn’t Destiny is available on lots of items, including many different shapes and colours of shirts (for adults, kids, and babies!), stickers, laptop cases, mugs, tote bags, water bottles, zip pouches, notebooks, and excitingly, magnets!
Aesthetic IPA chart now on posters, shirts, and more!
The International Phonetic Alphabet chart is sometimes called the periodic table of linguistics – an important technical diagram that’s also visually interesting and which many linguists hang up on a wall, carry around inside a notebook, or simply know the exact keystrokes that’ll get them to a page to type or listen to it.
Like with the periodic table of the elements, the layout of the IPA chart is a key to what the symbols mean: from top to bottom, the chart goes roughly from sounds where the mouth is the most closed to the most open, and from left to right, it goes from sounds where the constriction is the front of the mouth to the back of the mouth. This means that many linguists only know well the parts of the IPA that they encounter regularly in languages they work with, and rely on their knowledge of the overall structure to retrieve other parts on occasion. Hence the need to have it handy to refer to.
But there’s also an important way in which the IPA chart and the periodic table differ: art. If you want a handy reference chart of the elements for your wall or your pocket, there are hundreds of possible designs, ranging from subtle, minimalist designs that look like cool nerdy art to intricate, maximalist designs with all the technical detail you might possibly want to refer to.
With the International Phonetic Alphabet, most people are still printing out (or occasionally stickering, or laminating) the same greyscale diagram from the International Phonetic Association. We, your Lingthusiasm cohosts, have a lot of affection for this classic design, which we’ve spent many hours poring over (especially the forbidden grey areas, ahem), but we also wondered, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a more subtle, minimal version that would look more like weird-yet-stylish nerd art and less like a diagram from an academic paper?
For these reasons, last year we commissioned an aesthetically redesigned version of the International Phonetic Alphabet from our linguist-artist Lucy Maddox and put it on a one-time order of microfibre lens cloths. We’ve since heard from several people who missed out on that order or wish they could have the design in another format, so we’ve now made that available in several versions: the original square design as a poster, a version with rectangular proportions as a poster (depending on the shape of that blank space on your wall which needs a cool IPA poster), and a transparent background version that plays well on a shirt! The notebooks and tote bags also look really good with the aesthetic IPA chart on them if you want a version to bring to classes or conferences. Also someone requested a mouse pad so we did that and then we put it on an apron because why not.
Lingthusiasm merch generally
If you’re looking for subtle-to-obvious ways to signal that you’re a linguist or linguistics fan in public, gift ideas for the linguistics enthusiast in your life (or handy links to forward to people who might be interested in getting you a gift sometime), we also have many previous items of Lingthusiasm merch! There are many subtly linguistics-patterened scarves, water bottles with linguistics-related jokes on them, NOT JUDGING YOUR GRAMMAR, JUST ANALYSING IT shirts, or just have a browse. All of the Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for the linguist or linguistics fan in your life, and as a patron you get to find out about new merch before anyone else! Check out the merch page at lingthusiasm.com/merch for the previous rounds of Lingthusiasm merch.
As ever, we love seeing photos of any Lingthusiasm merch or linguistics-themed crafts in your lives! Tag us in them @lingthusiasm on all of the social medias (or private message us photos of your babies in Lingthusiasm onesies if you’re not keen on posting baby photos publically, we still love to see them!)

I’m very excited for our new Etymology Isn’t Destiny merch!

✨Perfect for when you feel like the meaning of your name doesn’t vibe with who you are✨

(sorry to those Olivias who don’t like eating olives, and those atheist Theodores)

We have such a great catalogue of merch for every aesthetic and area of linguistic interest: https://lingthusiasm.com/merch

152 notes

August 21, 2023

lingthusiasm:

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 about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more about language learning in a broader variety of sociocultural settings.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro, who’s an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, a native speaker of Q'anjob'al and a learner of Kaq'chikel. We talk about Pedro’s background teaching school in Q’anjob’al and Spanish, which sounds kids acquire later in Q’anjob’al (hint: it’s the ejectives like q’ and b’), and gender differences in how kids speak Q’anjob’al. We also talk more broadly about why this work is important, both in terms of understanding how language acquisition works as a whole and in terms of using the knowledge of how children acquire Indigenous languages to create teaching materials specific to those languages. Finally, we talk about Pedro’s newer revitalization work with a community of Itzaj speakers and the process of building a relationship with a community that you’re not already part of.
Transcript available soon.
Announcements:
We love reading up on an interesting etymology, but the history of a word doesn’t have to define how it’s used now - and to celebrate that we have new merch with the motto ‘Etymology isn’t Destiny’. Our artist, Lucy Maddox has brought these words to life in a beautiful design in black, white, navy blue, Lingthusiasm green, and rainbow gradient. The etymology isn’t destiny design is available on lots of different colours and styles of shirts, hoodies, tank tops, t-shirts: classic fit, relaxed fit, curved fit. Plus mugs, notebooks, stickers, water bottles, zippered pouches, and more!
We also have tons of other Lingthusiastic merch available, it makes a great gift to give to a linguistics enthusiast in your life or to request as a gift from someone. Special shoutout to our aesthetic IPA chart redesign, which now comes in rectangle (looks great as a poster if you have an office or corridor that needs to be jazzed up), and with a transparent background for t-shirt purposes! Or get it on a tote bag or notebook so you can bring it to conferences!
In this month’s behind the scenes bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the linguistic process of transcribing podcast episodes with Sarah Dopierala, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show! We talk about how Sarah’s background in linguistics helps her with the technical words and phonetic transcriptions in Lingthusiasm episodes, her own research into converbs, and the linguistic tendencies that she’s noticed from years of transcribing Lauren and Gretchen (guess which of us uses more quotative speech!)
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, including our upcoming linguistics advice episode where we answer your questions! You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Pedro Mateo Pedro’s website
Guatemala Field Station website
Wikipedia article for Q’anjob’al
Wikipedia article for Mayan languages
The Acquisition of K'iche’ Status Suffixes - Clifton Pye
Lingthusiasm episode: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas
Lingthusiasm episode: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz
How diverse is child language acquisition research? Paper by Evan Kidd & Rowena Garcia (open access)
Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘103 ways for kids to learn languages’
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.
To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.
Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

84 notes

August 7, 2023

10 years of a PhD

August 2023 marks ten years since I was awarded a PhD in Linguistics. I submitted the thesis for examination in February 2013, it was examined by around May, and the final version with corrections done by some time in the middle of the year. August is when I dressed up and the degree was conferred, so that’s the date on the testamur that now hangs in my office.

The weirdest thing about this decade is that it means I’ve spent longer having a PhD than doing something that was such an important time in my life.

My work has continued to grow from, but still draw on, my thesis research. I have been working with speakers of Syuba as well as Lamjung Yolmo, to continue to document this language family. I’ve moved from a focus on evidentiality to look at reported speech, discourse and gesture. These all still require an approach that looks at both grammatical structures and how people use them, directly continuing the kind of approach I took in my PhD. I’m particularly proud of the gesture work, as this is a return to an older interest.

I didn’t publish my PhD as a single monograph, but turned it into a number of revised and refined papers. I publishing the descriptive grammar as a book, which was an expanded version of a slightly absurd 30k word appendix to the thesis. Below is a list of those publications, as you can see it took me quite a few years to find homes for all of this work.

I’ve also been lucky to take my research in other directions too; my gesture work has expanded into emoji and emblems, and I’ve also been writing about the data management and lingcomm work I’ve been doing. This work has increasingly been happening with collaborators, I love how much better work becomes when people talk each other into do their best thinking.

I know I’m very fortunate to still be researching and teaching a decade after graduating, and that I have an ongoing job that lets me plan for the next decade.

The thesis work informed a lot of my research, but these are the publications taken directly from the thesis:

Gawne, L. 2016. A sketch grammar of Lamjung Yolmo. Asia-Pacific Linguistics. [PDF] [blog summary]
Gawne, L. Looks like a duck, quacks like a hand: Tools for eliciting evidential and epistemic distinctions, with examples from Lamjung Yolmo (Tibetic, Nepal). 2020. Folia Linguistica, 54(2): 343-369. [Open access version][published version][blog summary]
Gawne, L. Questions and answers in Lamjung Yolmo Questions and answers in Lamjung Yolmo. 2016. Journal of Pragmatics 101: 31-53. [abstract] [blog summary]
Gawne, L. 2015. The reported speech evidential particle in Lamjung Yolmo. Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area, 38(2): 292-318. [abstract][pre-publication PDF]
Evidentiality in Lamjung Yolmo. 2014. Journal of the South East Asian Linguistics Society, 7: 76-96. [Open Access PDF]

A list of all publications is available on my website: https://laurengawne.com/publications/

109 notes

August 2, 2023

New Open Access Publication: Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study

Films have behind-the-scenes commentary tracks, Lingthusiasm now has a behind-the-scenes research article (a DOI rather than a DVD).

This new Open Access article in Language and Linguistics Compass is an introduction to a variety of evidence-based practice from linguistics, education, and psychology we have drawn upon and further developed in the first seven years of creating Lingthusiasm. We introduce you to a lot of the ways we think about framing, jargon, metaphor and putting feeling into our favourite linguistics topics. We argue that this is not just the basis of our work on the podcast, but a way of formalising the contribution that lingcomm (linguistics communication) can make to the larger field of scicomm (science communication). We also share some results from our 2022 listener survey that illustrate how our audience is receptive to the work we’re doing.

We hope that it provides a bit of an insight into how we do what we do, but also inspires other linguists to communication their research - whether that’s in a 3 minute thesis competition, a blog post for your institution, or “trying out [lingcomm] explanations during relevant, natural occasions in local communities” (i.e., chatting with friends and family, which is where we come up with some of our best episode ideas!).

Abstract

Communicating linguistics to broader audiences (lingcomm) can be achieved most effectively by drawing on insights from across the fields of linguistics, science communication (scicomm), pedagogy and psychology. In this article we provide an overview of work that examines lingcomm as a specific practice. We also give an overview of the Lingthusiasm podcast, and discuss four major ways that we incorporate effective communications methodologies from a range of literature in the production of episodes. First, we discuss how we frame topics and take a particular stance towards linguistic attitudes, second, we discuss how we introduce linguistic terminology and manage audience cognitive load, third, we discuss the role of metaphor in effective communication of abstract concepts, and fourth, we discuss the affective tools of humour and awe in connecting audiences with linguistic concepts. We also discuss a 2022 survey of Lingthusiasm listeners, which highlights how the audience responds to our design choices. In providing this summary, we also advocate for lingcomm as a theoretically-driven area of linguistic expertise, and a particularly effective forum for the application of linguistics.

Citation

Gawne, L., & McCulloch, G. (2023). ‘Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study’, Language and Linguistics Compass, 17/5: e12499. DOI: 10.1111/lnc3.12499 [OA publication]

Superlinguo

For those who like and use language

2023 Listener Survey: Including new experiment questions!

Results from our 2022 survey!

New Research Article: From Star Trek to The Hunger Games: Emblem gestures in science fiction and their uptake in popular culture

Lingthusiasm seventh anniversary: help share the show!

What’s Lingthusiasm like?

Which episode should I start with?

Journey back through time to previous anniversary posts:

hapax legomenon and automated email replies

Episode 85: Ergativity delights us

Linguistics and Language Podcasts

Linguistics

Language

Conlangs

Dictionaries

English

Words/etymology

Translation

In Languages other than English

Back Catalogue

Odds & Ends

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

Language Books for Kids: Highly Irregular, Arika Okrent & Sean O'Neill

New Lingthusiasm Merch! “Etymology isn’t destiny” and aesthetic IPA chart on lots of items

10 years of a PhD

New Open Access Publication: Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study

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

Lingthusiasm guide to pop linguistics books - available for newsletter subscribers

Episode 81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries