There are lots of extracurricular activities people do in high school, from sports to debating to math competitions. In the 1960s, a Russian linguistics undergraduate student named Alfred Zhurinsky had an idea: what if one of those things could be linguistics? Zhurinsky established the first linguistics olympiad in Moscow in 1965, and the idea gradually caught on -- the first International Linguistics Olympiad was held in 2003, and more countries have been joining on ever since.
I...
2021-12-02 22:25:27 +0000 UTC
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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 also do the same with other sets of words that don’t necessarily have an equivalent scientific scale, such as the relationship between “some", "a few" and “many“ or even words like "suppose”, “believe” and “know”.
In thi...
2021-11-18 23:53:13 +0000 UTC
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This 45 second track is for you to try out the speech to song illusion on yourself!
What's the speech to song illusion? We discuss it in our 57th bonus episode about linguistic illusions.
Content advisory: If you are prone to earworms please be aware that the speech to song illusion can work itself into your brain! That's why we've put it as its own opt-in portion. ...
2021-11-05 01:24:34 +0000 UTC
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Optical illusions are pretty well-known, like a rabbit that looks like a duck (or vice versa?) or figures that appear to move or change colour when you look at black and white patterns. But there are also many fun kinds of linguistics illusions!
In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of our favourite bits of language that can be two things at the same time. We talk about the where the Yanny/Laurel illusion that became popular on social media a while back came f...
2021-11-05 01:23:26 +0000 UTC
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This is a final reminder for any procrastinators that there's only approximately one day left to sign up for a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack by becoming a patron at the Ling-phabet tier or higher by Nov 3 ('approximately' because the website might show till Nov 4 for you depending on timezone, but don't count on it).
2021-11-02 06:01:00 +0000 UTC
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In case time has been rapidly slipping away from you and you can't believe there's only a week left of October (I know, I'm sorry), this is your reminder that you can get a sticker pack of all of the above Lingthusiasm stickers (including a signed Because Internet one!) by becoming a patron at the Ling-phabet tier or higher by Nov 3 (the website might show till Nov 4 for you depending on timezone, bu...
2021-10-25 18:48:17 +0000 UTC
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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’ve got, say, “everything published in English between 1800 and 2000″ and you’re trying to figure out how the use of a particular word (say, “the”) has been changing? In that case, you might want to turn to ...
2021-10-21 22:37:23 +0000 UTC
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Wikipedia is a treasure trove of late-night rabbit holes on all sorts of topics, including many related to linguistics! But there's more than just the articles themselves -- Wikipedia is also the process of how random people from around the internet work together to figure out what to put in them.
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about improving linguistics content on Wikipedia! We talk about gaps and biases that still exist for linguistics-related artic...
2021-10-08 00:25:58 +0000 UTC
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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 get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.”
Some of these are pretty straightforward. “Some”? Word. The -s on “prizes”? Affix. But some of them, “I’ll...
2021-09-17 01:51:46 +0000 UTC
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People have been telling us, I'm extremely bored of this pandemic still (still!) existing and is there a way that I could get more linguistics joy and whimsy in the mail?
People have also been asking, is there a way to get Gretchen to sign my copy of her book Because Internet, especially since irl conferences are, uh, not much of a thing these days?
We're excited to announce a special offer that we're running on Patreon that solves both of these problems!
Special Off...
2021-09-10 07:00:05 +0000 UTC
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There's a new museum entirely about language which opened up in Washington DC last year! It's called Planet Word, and we've been eagerly following its updates on social media ever since it was announced. Alas, we haven't managed to visit it yet (y'know, pandemic) but we're bringing you the next best thing.
In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about talking with Emily Gref, a linguist who's been working at Planet Word since 2018, first on creating content fo...
2021-09-02 22:48:05 +0000 UTC
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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 closed the box again, what are they going to think is in the box?
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about Theory of Mind -- our ability to keep track of what other people are thinking, even when it's...
2021-08-20 00:16:30 +0000 UTC
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One of the really nifty things about stories is how they can explore striking and unexpected ways that communication could be different from what we're used to, whether that's communicating with alien life forms or across space and cultures.
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of the linguistically interesting fiction we've been reading lately! We talk about the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant's perspective) in S...
2021-08-06 01:06:50 +0000 UTC
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Lingthusiasm Episode 58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip
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 your mouth, or in your throat. This whole class of sounds that are produced using friction are known as fricatives!
In this episode, your hosts...
2021-07-16 01:33:49 +0000 UTC
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A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here!
Kiki and bouba on scarves, mugs, notebooks, and more!
If I give you a rounded, lumpy shape and a sharp, spiky one, and tell you that one is called kiki and the other bouba, which name would you attach to which shape? It turns out that people's responses are surprisingly consistent! This classic experiment in cross-modal perception fea...
2021-07-09 02:26:06 +0000 UTC
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In fiction, we can often tell when a character is drunk or high by their way of speaking: when someone's slurring sounds together or jumping erratically from topic to topic, the audience is meant to assume that they're under the influence. But how accurate are these fictional portrayals?
In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two fun studies of how people talk differently when under the influence of alcohol or cannabis: the German Alcohol Language Corpus and t...
2021-07-01 23:27:13 +0000 UTC
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When you see something on social media in a language you don’t read, it’s really handy to have a quick and good-enough “click to translate” option. But despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, machine translation and other language tech tools don’t yet exist for most of them.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Jade Abbott and Bonaventure Dossou of Masakhane, a grassroots organisation whose mission is to strengthen and spur ...
2021-06-18 02:24:59 +0000 UTC
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Which sounds cuter, a Pikachu or a Charmander? Which sounds like it would be more likely to win in a fight, a Squirtle or a Blastoise? If you're familiar with the world of Pokémon, you might have opinions based on your experiences with the games or the anime series, but even if you're not familiar with these pocket monsters, or if you're encountering new Pokémon you haven't heard of before, you might still have a vague sense of which names sound big or small, cuddly or powerful. ...
2021-06-04 01:19:28 +0000 UTC
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“I don’t have a pet dinosaur.” This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isn’t, uh, tell us your ways?). And yet it has a different feel to it than a more ordinary sentence like “I don’t have a cat”, the type of negated sentence that’s true for some people and not others.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about negation! We talk about how languages make sentences negative, how nega...
2021-05-20 22:41:19 +0000 UTC
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When someone else is telling a story, you might encourage them to keep talking or to elaborate on a particular point by making various words, sounds, phrases, or gestures, such as "oh really?" and "mhm-hm" and nodding. In a digital context, you might also show that you're following along by liking a message or sending a carefully-chosen emoji. This linguistic behaviour is known as backchannelling.
In this episode, our first virtual liveshow, we get enthusiastic about the linguisti...
2021-05-06 22:01:00 +0000 UTC
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You can backchannel your way through the show on the Lingthusiasm Discord, or on social media using the #lingthusiasm hashtag.
You can also find the show and use the chat function at the following youtube link (with embedded captions):
https://youtu.be/7vBgVP5u5zM
If you're watching the stream live, press the LIVE button or drag the cursor all the way to the right.
If you've invited a f...
2021-04-24 21:47:06 +0000 UTC
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The Lingthusiasm liveshow starts in one hour! The show will last an hour, the first part a relatively normal Lingthusiasm show and the second part for your questions.
Just before the show we'll create a second livestream post so you can watch it embedded into Patreon if you prefer, but you can also find the show and use the chat function at the following youtube link (with embedded captions):
https://youtu...
2021-04-24 20:57:01 +0000 UTC
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We’re doing a virtual liveshow in exactly one week! We'll be getting enthusiastic about the linguistics of the words and sounds and gestures (and emoji!) that people make to show that they’re listening, such as “uh huh” and 👍 and nodding, all the while giving you the chance to backchannel to us and each other in the chat alongside (so meta).
The liveshow is on April 24, 2021 at UTC 22:00 (that's 6:00pm in EDT, 8:00am April 25th in AEST, or check the datestamp on this po...
2021-04-17 22:00:02 +0000 UTC
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The letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in various ways, from repeatedly trilling a small fleshy part against the rest of your mouth to an almost fully open mouth that’s practically a vowel.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about R and R-like sound...
2021-04-15 22:38:54 +0000 UTC
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When you talk to a baby, you might find yourself speaking a bit differently from the way you'd talk to someone your own age. You might notice that you're pronouncing words more distinctly, that you're producing them with exaggerated intonation and facial expression, or even that you're using cutesy "babytalk" forms of words. Even kids who are slightly older - a four year old talking to a two year old, for example - often replicate certain ways that older people talked to them when they're add...
2021-04-01 21:06:40 +0000 UTC
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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 people bring their own interests and priorities to the process.
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the process of figuring out the structure of a language and writing it down -- making a kind of b...
2021-03-18 22:14:45 +0000 UTC
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Have you eaten salad-salad, drunk milk-milk, or read a book-book lately? Or are you thinking something more along the lines of "salad, schmalad! milk, schmilk! books, schmooks!"? In either case, you're producing reduplication!
In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about how languages can repeat all or part of a word in order to convey a different meaning, a process known as reduplication. We look at different forms and meanings of reduplication across various lang...
2021-03-04 22:28:26 +0000 UTC
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When we tell you, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re using a grammatical feature known as the imperative. But although it might be amusing to imagine ancient Roman emperors getting enthusiastic about linguistics, unlike Caesar we don’t actually have the ability to enforce this command. So although “stay lingthusiastic!” has the form of the imperative, it really has more the effect of a wish or a hope.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCu...
2021-02-23 09:51:54 +0000 UTC
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What do you think is the best food to name a dog after? If you had to remove a phoneme from English, which do you think would have the most interesting results? How do you keep up with linguistics research outside academia?
In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about answering your questions! We also talk about our recent news and upcoming plans for 2021, "tell me you're a linguist without telling me you're a linguist", and lots more great questions from the patron...
2021-02-04 22:48:41 +0000 UTC
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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 spread to ancient Egypt or been invented separately there), in ancient China, and in ancient Mesoamerica. Far more often, the idea of writing spreads through contact between one culture and its neighbours, ev...
2021-01-21 19:48:34 +0000 UTC
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