Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. (Daniel Midgley, Ben Ainslie, and Hedvig Skirgård)

You probably communicate with your friends using media references all the time. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But why do we include media references, when we could just talk? Turns out it has a lot to do with identity, building social relationships, and communication — all the stuff that language normally does.

We’re having a media-heavy discussion with Dr Sylvia Sierra about her book Millennials Talking Media: Creating Intertextual Identities in Everyday Conversation.

How do we make the discipline of linguistics — and our world — a more just, diverse, and equitable place? Why does our personal history and personal perspective matter when doing science? How do we build community? And what happens if we do nothing?

This episode is really kind of a mini-conference. We found some new work from linguists we admire, so we put out the word to our patrons and piled into a room!

We're hearing work from Dr Aris Clemons, Dr Caitlin Green, and Dr Rikker Dockum on this episode.

This is the second of a two-parter on generativism, the linguistic school of thought originated by Noam Chomsky. This time, it's from the perspective of early-career researchers. How is generativism relevant to them, and how do they regard its claims?

We ask:

• What importance does linguistic theory have on day-to-day research?
• How does generativism relate to nativism, the idea that at least some language is innate?
• Is there a conflict between generativism and functionalism today?
• What's the next step in the generative enterprise?

Our friends, listeners, and patrons give us so many great stories, news, and words, so for this live episode, we’re having them tell these language stories in their own words.

Thanks to PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, Ariaflame, seejanecricket, Aristemo, O Tim, Ditte, Rodger, and Ben (not the host one).

What do signed languages have in common? How do oral languages influence signed languages? How do they influence each other? Here to answer these questions and many more, it's Dr Adam Schembri of the University of Birmingham.

You can watch our chat with Adam Schembri on video, with Christy Filipich doing Auslan interpretation.

That video is here:
https://youtu.be/GcV0218VJ2k

Also joining us as a special guest: Dr Mark Ellison.

Timestamps

• Intros: 0:38
• News: 3:33
• Related or Not: 54:15
• Interview with Adam Schembri: 1:05:31
• Words of the Week: 2:08:27
• Comments: 2:27:56
• The Reads: 2:31:21
• Listener comment: 2:39:33

Our ever-popular Mailbag is bursting with questions, so let’s get to them!

• How do you communicate expressively with a mask on?
• Which was the first language with a set spelling?
• Why is the word caterpillar so long? Did it come later?
• Why are some news outlets writing “since the pandemic begun“?
• As prescriptive linguists, can we reasonably disagree with someone’s definition of a word, if that definition is being used by people?

Schools are banning words and policing language. It may be a well-meaning attempt to encourage good language habits, but it also perpetuates troubling language ideologies that may be harming the very students that schools are committed to educate.

Linguist Ian Cushing tells us about his findings.

A chat with Dr Kelly Wright, who’s been working on… well, really a lot. Kelly is at the juncture of a lot of areas we’re keen on.

Oxford’s effort to document African-American English? She’s been there.

Doing lexicography with the American Dialect Society? She’s on it.

The LSA’s social media committee? She… was on it.

And she’s been looking into a new unexplored area: people’s ideas about their own language knowledge.

But it’s not all easy. And Kelly is here to tell us about her view of linguistics… from the struggle pile.

It’s crude. It’s rude. And it’s a lot of fun. Slang has been with us for as long as people didn’t want others to understand what they were about. But what exactly is it? And has the nature of slang changed in our internet age?

Daniel is talking to eminent slang lexicographer Jonathon Green on this episode of Because Language.

What's going on in Germany? How are people talking about gender in the German language, and how is freedom of expression being handled? We have a couple of German experts — linguist Rob Tegethoff and Ciarán of the podcast Corner Späti — to tell us why other languages were banned at protests in Berlin, and what right-wing activists get from involving language in their plans. 

Timestamps

Intros: 0:34
News: 5:16
Related or Not: 26:29
Interview with Rob and Ciarán: 44:37
Words of the Week: 1:46:42
The Reads: 2:02:50
Outtakes: 2:06:23

Can dictionaries create a more fair world? One language observer sees that dictionaries, far from being a neutral chronicle of language, are capable of promoting social justice.

Daniel speaks with Dr Rebecca Shapiro, author of Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography.

Language isn’t just for communication — it’s fun. For over a hundred years, crosswords have served as entertainment, and even been blamed for society’s ills. Turns out crosswords are serious business.

Author and illustrator of Letters to Margaret and crossword enthusiast Hayley Gold takes us into the history and the discussions happening in the world of crosswords — the Crossworld.

You can buy Hayley’s book Letters to Margaret at this link:
https://shop.lonesharkgames.com/collections/letters-to-margaret

Just two words, but they do so much. But what exactly? Here to answer that question is Dr Isabelle Burke, who has studied yeah-no in depth. She’s also going to help us with these Mailbag questions.

• Why is LIKE so resilient?
• Why can we say “I very much enjoy…” but not “I much enjoy…” or “I very enjoy…”?
• When is a loanword not a loanword?
• Do word processors have a problem with singular THEY?
• Why doesn’t English have diacritics?

Language authorities. Right-wing politicians. White supremacists and feminists. What do they have in common? They're all working together to fight gender-inclusive language. But why bring language into this fight? What extra does this give them?

Dr Caitlin Green and Maureen Kosse join us to explain on this big episode.

Many expressions we use come from the nautical domain. But are they nautical? Are they really? We’ve got Chase Dalton from the US Naval History Podcast to shine a light on some of these expressions, and in some cases reveal the secret nautical origins of words we use every day.

US Naval History Podcast on Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts 

Our listeners have voted, and here are all the words! Which were our top Words of the Week? Which were the worst? And what did all the dictionary people pick?

We’re joined by our very special guest (and lingopod pal) Dr Lauren Gawne for this very cheugy episode of Because Language.

What’s a corpsicle? How old is the word hyperspace? Who was the first writer to use the term warp drive?

These and many other terms can be found in the landmark work The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and with us is the editor, lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower.

Every Linguistics 101 student knows about HP Grice and his famous Maxims. They state that dialogue is usually cooperative — and when it doesn't appear to be, they explain how we manage to work out meaning anyway.

But linguists are questioning the applicability and universality of these rules. Is it time for a reappraisal of Grice? We're joined by Rikker Dockum on this episode of Because Language.

There's a new show on Netflix, and it's The History of Swearing, featuring Nicolas Cage. Backing him up is a team of researchers, comedians — and one of our favourite lexicographers, Kory Stamper.

Kory tells us all about the show on this episode of Because Language.

There are lots of Englishes out there, but the way we approach varieties of English sets learners up to fail. How do we combat language ideologies out there in the world — and in our own minds? Dr Ruanni Tupas is the editor of an important new book: Investigating Unequal Englishes: Understanding, Researching and Analysing Inequalities of the Englishes of the World.

We're joined by our special guest host Dr Nicole Holliday, and we are tackling a torrent of words — political and not — that the current news cycle has thrown at us.

Timestamps

• Intros: 0:44
• Words of the Week (coconut, weird, brat): 12:41
• Related or Not: 55:25
• Interview with Ruanni Tupas: 36:36
• More Words of the Week (International Blue Screen Day / Crowdstrike, rawdogging, fedupedness, combining form -nomenon, fridgerton): 1:53:43
• Comments: 2:11:15
• The Reads: 2:13:47

Blog post with show notes: http://becauselanguage.com/29-cultish/

Support the show on Patreon: http://patreon.com/join/becauselangpod/

Language helps us build and maintain social relationships. Cults — however we define them — exploit this function and subvert it for their own ends. Amanda Montell is the author of the new book Cultish, and she joins us for this show.

And researcher Jared Holt explains why QAnon conspiracy catch phrases seem to be dropping off in popularity from the mainstream web.

ChatGPT has just landed. It can generate text that seems fluid, plausible, and (surprisingly) not total nonsense. It's got a lot of people wondering what's left for humans — and for the field of Natural Language Processing. Here to help us is computational linguist Daan van Esch.

Here to help us answer our voluminous Mailbag is the tireless Dr Caitlin Green, Vice Cancellor of Caitlin University. Among our questions:

• NON-BINARY or NONBINARY?
• What’s behind coffee names?
• Why is there an L in WOULD?
• Could swearing get in the way of persuasion?
• When is it time to stop supporting a minority language?
• What’s with the D in TIDDIES?
• Fee fi fo… fun? Why doesn’t it rhyme with ENGLISHMAN?
• Where does TUCKER come from?

What's the difference between a KINK and a FETISH? Does it matter if you ASSUME or PRESUME? English is full of these close groups of words, and author Eli Burnstein has untangled many of them in his delightful book The Dictionary of Fine Distinctions. Eli joins us for this episode.

Timestamps
Intros: 0:42
News: 9:54
Related or Not: 24:11
Interview with Eli Burnstein: 37:33
Words of the Week: 1:10:13
The Reads: 1:33:45

The sciences are facing a replicability crisis. Some landmark studies were once considered settled, but then failed when they were retested. So have any linguistic experiments been toppled? And how do we fix this problem?

Dr Martine Grice and Dr Bodo Winter have contributed to a special issue of Linguistics, and they join us for this fun episode.

We're counting down our Words of the Year, as voted by you! We're joined by our friends and patrons, and they've brought us some words we missed. And we'll go through all the Words of the Year from dictionaries and language lovers, English and not.

Thanks to all our friends who joined us for this show, and to all our great patrons who have supported our work.

Video here: https://youtu.be/z1BmUixVNlY

How can you tell if a news story is intended to deceive? In one well-known case of journalistic deception, there were tells that required machine learning to trace. We’re talking to author and computational linguist Jack Grieve about his new book, The Language of Fake News.

Can you hear them? Only if you're meant to. Political dogwhistles exploit lack of knowledge in one group to send a coded message to another group. But that's just the beginning. How are dogwhistles different from slurs? How do they licence behaviour? Do progressives dogwhistle? Dr Elin McCready is the author of Signaling Without Saying: The Semantics and Pragmatics of Dogwhistles.

We're also joined by Lizzy Hanks and Dr Jesse Egbert, who are working on the LANA-CASE corpus, a huge corpus of conversational English. It aims to bring representation to a diverse group of English speakers, and they're looking for contributors.

Dr Rikker Dockum is our special guest host.

Timestamps

• Intros: 0:00
• News: 3:01
• Interview with Lizzy Hanks and Jesse Egbert: 16:47
• Related or Not: 35:45
• Interview with Elin McCready: 45:57
• Words of the Week: 1:17:47
• The Reads: 1:39:43

How is language like a game of charades? According to a new book, quite a lot. Charades players and language users improvise and work together to create meaning in a situation, and they get better at it as they reuse elements and build up patterns.

Drs Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater explain their vision of language to Daniel and Hedvig on this episode of Because Language.

OzCLO is the Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad, where Australian high school students compete with others around the world by solving language puzzles.

This week, we've invited some of Australia's best students to test their linguistic knowledge against us! Who will prevail?

New York City is home to a lot of languages! Sometimes a sizeable language community can live on just a couple of floors of an apartment building. Dr Ross Perlin is working to find and promote minority languages in NYC. He's the co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, and author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. Ross joins us for this episode.

Intro: 0:36
News: 8:13
Related or Not: 32:52
Interview with Ross Perlin: 43:12
Words of the Week: 1:24:13
The Reads: 1:39:54

Show notes: http://becauselanguage.com/96-language-city/
Support the show: http://patreon.com/join/becauselangpod/

The Words of the Year are out! And we’re talking about ’em.

We’re answering all the questions in our voluminous Mailbag.

• We have here, there, and where. We also have that and what. Was there ever a hat?
  Why are we friends with someone?
  Is the distribution of emoji Zipfian?
  If you study linguistics — the science of language — are you a STEM major?

And Hedvig springs a game on us.

Today, we communicate. But once, we didn’t. What had to happen in our brains to make communication possible? And why don’t other animals do it like we do? We talk to Dr Thom Scott-Phillips about his new work in the social and cognitive origins of communication.

And game creator Joshua Blackburn is going to test Daniel’s linguistic prowess with questions from the hottest game on Kickstarter, League of the Lexicon.

For many students, university opens up new frontiers of learning — and new ways to be marginalised for their language use. A new book explores the problem of linguistic discrimination in higher education, and how to work toward fixing it.

Also: Danish presents an unusual challenge for those who try to learn it — even babies. Why is Danish like this, and what does it tell us about language?

Dialect is a role-playing game about language and how it dies. Over the course of a game, players form an isolated community, create a private language, and watch it fade away as the community’s isolation is breached.

We’re very pleased and honoured to play a game of Dialect, with game creator Hakan Seyalıoğlu of Thorny Games leading us through it.

The definition of white supremacy: is it expanding, or are we just getting better at recognising it and its reach? How does white supremacy show itself in language and in linguistics? Kelly Wright talks about her work in sociolinguistics, and how we all can do better.

What we call sometimes Chinese is really a gigantic family of languages. They’re somewhat divided in mutual intelligibility, and somewhat united in their writing system. How are they different, and how are they maintaining themselves? Two Chinese researchers, Wu Mei-Shin and Ye Jingting, join us.

And what’s going on in the Cantonese lingopod world? We’re joined by Israel Lai of Rhapsody in Lingo.

In honour of Grammar Day (4 March), we are joined live by special guest Ellen Jovin, who regularly dispenses grammar advice and wisdom from the Grammar Table. Now she's testing our grammatical mettle and answering our questions. 

YouTube video of this episode:
https://youtu.be/C1l8Alk3Ptc?si=7pnGnuKcy9YY-mhR

Everyone’s favourite tabletop grammarian is back! It’s Ellen Jovin, proprietor of the Grammar Table. She dispenses grammar advice around New York City and the world, and now she’s written a book about her grammar adventures. Ellen is the author of Rebel With a Clause, and she joins us for this big episode.

Blog post with show notes and video episode:
http://becauselanguage.com/27-its-all-semantics/

Become a patron yourself: 
http://patreon.com/join/becauselangpod/

Are fish wet? What is bi-weekly? And which Monday is next Monday? We’re solving some of the thorniest problems in semantics by voting, because that’s how language works! 👍

Our great Patreon patrons join us for this episode, along with Christy Filipich on Auslan interpretation. Part of #LingFest.

Kamala Harris is the first woman — and woman of colour — to be Vice President of the United States. In the campaign, she had to pull off a tricky task: stay true to her voice and multiple aspects of her identity by employing features of African-American English that would resonate with Black voters, but that wouldn’t alienate white voters. How did she do it?

Dr Nicole Holliday joins Ben, Hedvig, and Daniel on this episode of Because Language.

There's so much news and research coming out, we can hardly address it all! But we're giving it a try on this episode of Little Words Newsblast Journal Club.

• Uzbek is romanising
• Honesty / certainty has a prosodic profile
• People with "gay-sounding" voices anticipate rejection and discrimination
• Language patterns emerge in protactile communities
• Gesture shows patterns

Linguistics as a discipline throws up challenges to Indigenous linguists. At the same time, they're the ones called upon to fix it. It can't stay like this. How do we make linguistics a safe place to work?

Daniel, Hedvig, and very special co-host Ayesha Marshall are having a yarn with Lesley Woods and Dr Alice Gaby about their work in changing linguistics for the better.

Our accents are great! They represent our origins, our languages, our community, and our identity. But too many of us feel like we can't speak with our authentic voice. Accent prejudice is real.

Linguist and author Dr Rob Drummond joins us to explain all about accent and accentism. He's the author of a new book You're All Talk.

And Dr Robbie Love is joining us with his research about how the word fuck is changing in the speech of British teens. Spicy!

Linguistics is what we all love, but how do we make it pay? Turns out there are more ways than you might have thought of, and a new book is here to help. Dr Anna Marie Trester joins Daniel for an uplifting and hopeful chat.

And how do we make the online experience better for Blind people? Friend of the pod Ellen is here with some do’s and some do-not-do’s.

Noam Chomsky is one of the world's foremost thinkers, and his impact on linguistics is incalculable. Yet many people are only familiar with his political activism. What are his linguistic ideas, and why have they been so tenacious? 

To answer that question, Daniel had a delightful chat with generative syntactician and Chomsky fan Katie Martin.

We're honoured to have a chat with linguist and Uyghur language activist Abduweli Ayup, recipient of the 2024 Language Rights Defenders Award from the Global Coalition for Language Rights.

Timestamps

• Intros: 0:41
• News: 10:10
• Interview with Abduweli Ayup: 37:36
• Related or Not: 57:50
• Interview with Katie Martin: 1:06:56
• Words of the Week: 1:59:29
• The Reads: 2:15:53
• Outtakes: 2:22:21

What are your eyes doing when you describe a scene? It may depend on your language. 

New research from Dr Rachel Nordlinger and team shows that we do a lot of planning and scanning very quickly, and it follows the requirements of our language. She's studied Murrinhpatha, an Australian Aboriginal language, to see what its speakers do.

Time to get to this Mailbag!

• Why are flip-flops called 'thongs'?
• When people write the date as '7 April' or 'April 7', do they also say it that way?
• Why do we add 'up' to verbs like 'cut up' or 'eat up'?
• Why do some words have opposite meanings?

We’re doing a deep dive into generativism, the linguistic school of thought championed by Noam Chomsky. It’s had an enormous impact on the direction of linguistics, and even those who disagree with the generative programme will be at least somewhat conversant with its claims and the debate around it. Here, we’ll try to answer questions such as:

• What is generativism, and what are its claims?
• What does generativism help you to do in linguistics?
• What is the relationship to nativism, the idea that some aspects language are inborn?
• How does generativism relate to functionalism?
• What should the next generation of generative linguists keep in mind?

If you love language, and you also love role-playing games with a sci-fi flair, then you're going to want to check out the new game Xenolanguage. It allows players to make first contact and decipher alien messages while working through their tangled personal relationships.

Kathryn Hymes of Thorny Games joins us for this episode.

Our listeners and patrons send in so many great ideas, stories, and words. For this episode, listener and prolific contributor Diego has put together an entire show for our edification.

• ASL may have changed to include copular BE
• What’s going on with French-only laws in Quebec?
• Why is an Indian airport broadcasting covid information in Sanskrit?
• And more.

Lingcomm legend Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl) joins us to answer all the questions in our Mailbag! And we have to ask her about National Grammar Day. How do we bring out descriptive grammar, and tone down the policing?

• Why do some people say “She text me”?
• Why are some people convinced it’s the Flinstones and not the Flintstones?
• Are some people saying “I finished mines”?
• Is technology making us forget how to spell and write?
• And why does “going to Kong Kong” have a naughty meaning in Korean?

Language and culture are intertwined, and a new research project discovers that the meanings of words diverge as culture does.

But this big-data experiment is attracting the ire of anthropologists. Why the friction? Researcher Gary Lupyan joins us for this episode.

We’re talking words, and no one has a way with words like Grant Barrett. He’s here to tell us what it’s like at Dictionary.com, and what went down at the annual American Dialect Society Words of the Year 2023 vote. And perhaps he can help forestall Hedvig’s planned mass human extinction.

Also: World Endangered Writing Day is upon us! It’s a fantastic initiative, and author Tim Brookes of Endangered Alphabets is here to lay out the case for preserving writing systems.

Why does everyone say OOO! when they see someone fall down? Why do we say YUM when we feed a baby? And what's the deal with fillers like UM?

For this episode we're talking about non-lexical vocalisations with Dr Eleonora Beier and Dr Emily Hofstetter. 

Also: linguists are diving into Grambank, a database with detailed information about grammatical features in over 2,500 languages. With its release, we're talking to project leaders Dr Russell Gray and our own Dr Hedvig Skirgård.

Also, Hedvig gives us our yearly Eurovision language update. Ben's not here, so he won't complain.

Our patrons are joining us live to give us their news, words, and stories. That's right, it's a Potluck episode! What's a "girl dinner"? What's the other name of India? And how is AI helping translate an ancient language?

Thanks to all our great patrons, and especially those who joined us for this episode.

Here’s an entire show, curated by one of our most prolific contributors — newly minted speechie PharaohKatt!

She’s got news. She’s got words. She tries to stump us on Related or Not.

She even teaches us how to roll our R’s. Wow.

But best of all, she answers all our questions about speech and language pathology.

The Because Language team are talking through some of the most interesting research around, and you get to listen!

• Valuable medical information gets lost when Indigenous languages are wiped out
• When it comes to learning languages, multilinguals have the edge over bilinguals
• A generativist argues that languages don't adapt to their environment. What's behind this?
• And it's iconicity turned up to 11: some experiments that explore how language began.

An open letter to the LSA has ignited a furious debate among linguists and the wider public about who represents public linguistics — and who gets to set the terms of acceptable public debate. The establishmentarians say it’s about free expression. We think it’s about power. If you’re wondering what’s going on, this bonus episode is for you.

It’s Ben, Hedvig, and Daniel all together in the same place for the first time. We’re talking about the state of the show, the state of linguistics communication, and where we are after all these years.

Who listens to the show more closely than anyone (except possibly Daniel)? It's Maya Klein, who transcribes every word we say in excruciating detail. What goes into the process of transcription, and is a word-for-word approach really the best? And what quirks and habits do we have on the show?

Maya roasts us on this episode of Because Language.

Language titan Tiger Webb is helping us with our voluminous Mailbag.
Hedvig is giving her annual Eurovision language roundup.
And we’re sorting through the lexicon of the 2022 Australian election.

• Is MAYBE a compound word? What about ANOTHER, or GARBAGE?
• Are GONNA and WANNA portmanteaus?
• What does it take to be a linguist?

Show notes: http://becauselanguage.com/3-lets-talk/
Subscribe: http://becauselanguage.com/listen/

How does conversation work? Why are videoconference calls so awkward and terrible? Why can we say goodbye multiple times in a conversation, but good morning only once? And how do we get good at being a conversationalist?

David Crystal tells us about his book Let’s Talk on this episode of Because Language.

We had the pleasure of an interview with two up-and-coming linguists, wanting to find out more about the show and linguistic communication. It was such a fun chat that we wanted to share it with you. Here's Daniel and Hedvig with Kitty Liu and Romany Amber.

Part of this chat also appears in magazine form (along with a lot of other really good articles) : https://issuu.com/u-lingua/docs/issue_8_forweb 

Thanks to Kitty and Romany for thinking of us, and thanks to U-Lingua for letting us make this audio public.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Linguistics as a discipline has some work to do when it comes to examining and eliminating the legacy of colonialism. How do we do it? And how do we feel about the overtly evangelical agenda of a lot of linguistic work? Dr Hannah Gibson joins us.

What’s happening with signed language in Argentina? How are terms for gender changing in the Spanish language? And are Zoomers making work language more casual?

Listener and friend of the pod Diego Diaz has put together a terrific bunch of language news and words for our edification and enjoyment.

We all have freedom of expression, but what are its limits — social and legal? And how have governments tried to curtail it? We’re talking through the implications of free speech with Dennis Baron. He’s the author of You Can’t Always Say What You Want: The Paradox of Free Speech.

We've got mail, and linguistic MVP Dr Nicole Holliday is here to help us sort some things out around here. And we chat about the state of lingcomm today.

• Why is dog sushi made FOR dogs, but duck sushi is made FROM ducks?
• What do we call it generally when companies try to improve their image by -washing?
• Is the term "MVP" becoming uncoupled from sports?
• Will vaping kill your vocal fry?
• Are shibboleths made on purpose, as a way of creating an in-group and an out-group?

Plus our favourite game: Related or Not!

Listeners have once again sent us some great questions, and we have answers!

• Why do we TALK SHIT and not SPEAK SHIT?
• Do we KEEP OUT, or STAY OUT?
• Why are so many acronyms three letters long?
• How do we break young people out of the prescriptivist mindset?
• Isn’t “folk etymology” just… etymology?
• Can you think of any anagrams that are also synonyms?

Plus our favourite game, Related or Not!

In which we get together for a chat, talk about stuff we like, and — oh, yeah — answers a few questions from our great listeners.

• Other languages have a word for late morning, before noon. Why doesn’t English have one?
• Why is EW the sound some English speakers make when disgusted?
• Why can you have potatoes, but not broccolis?
• Who started calling the YouTube description the DOOBLEYDOO?
• Is it WHOA or WOAH?
• Why do we use capital i for the pronoun I?

Our Mailbag is at capacity! Time to get to these questions.

• We have pronouns and proverbs. So why don’t we have proadjectives and proadverbs?
• Is it on accident, or by accident?
• What’s the past tense of speedrun?
• When has a loanword become just another word?
• Why do we say we’re going ham?
• Why do people pronounce dynasty differently?
• When we talk about accents, why is so much of the discussion about vowels?

When language was innovated, what happened next? How did it change our abilities — and our responsibilities — to each other? Dr Nick Enfield shares ideas from his new book, Consequences of Language.

Plus: Have large language models (like GPT) disproven a key tenet of the innateness of language? Dr Morten Christiansen takes us through the implications for nativism and language learning.

What is a woman? Or a man? Or a chair, or a sandwich? Or anything, really?

"Gender critical" people are making language into a vector to attack the rights of trans people. They treat categories like man and woman as binary and obvious.

But cognitive linguistics has a response, in the form of a new paper in Nature Human Behaviour. Are categories concrete, or are they mental, social, or something else? How do we categorise objects at all? Author Dr Andrew Perfors brings the science on this episode.

Aboriginal English has been around a long while, but linguists have not taken the opportunity to really listen to the voices of Aboriginal people.

Two researchers are changing that. They're gathering stories to find out what Aboriginal English is like, and how it's changing. Daniel sits down with them for a wicked long yarn on this episode of Because Language.

Our friends and listeners bring us lots of great stories, questions, and words. So for this episode, we've invited them to present them themselves! All patrons have been invited to join us for this live episode, and many have brought pets.

Also, Dr Hadas Kotek has examined the sentences used in linguistic textbooks and examples. How are people represented in our discipline?

On this momentous episode, we look back on all the words that made our year. Like, all of them. Including some from other languages.

Many words were discussed in the context of the annual vote of the American Dialect Society, but the greatest were voted on by you, the listeners. Ready? Let’s talk words!

The public has voted, and a winner has been decided! We're looking all the words chosen by the various dictionary bodies, and counting down our Words of the Week of the Year. 

And there's a very special interview with author, blogger, activist, and inventor of words Cory Doctorow.

These cute critters, once part of a pioneering study in child language acquisition, have become an unofficial mascot of linguistics. But now they’re part of a tussle over intellectual property. We do our best to talk through the Wug test and the surrounding struggle.

We're tackling these Mailbag questions with the help of our special guest and star of TikTok, the Layman's Linguist!

• Where do they say CHUBE instead of TUBE?
• When did contractions come into English, and why don't characters in period dramas use them?
• Did Hebrew displace Yiddish when it was revitalised?
• Do bilingual children have delays in syntax?
• When did the word APOLOGY move from a defence to an expression of contrition?
• Did linguistics affect your religious faith?

Words of the Week are coming out of the woodwork, and who better to work through them with us than Grant Barrett of A Way with Words? Wowee.

Who wrote the Oxford English Dictionary? Sure, James Murray had a very important role as editor, but a small army of volunteers submitted hundreds of thousands of words on slips of paper to get the project off the ground. What were their stories, and why did they have such a relentless sense of mission for the OED?

Dr Sarah Ogilvie is sharing her research into their lives and times, and it's startling and wondrous. She's a lexicographer and author of The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary.

We’ve heard a lot about the cognitive benefits of bilingualism. But then we’ve also seen a lot of the supposed benefits get walked back.

What are the facts? Does being bilingual provide any cognitive advantage? What factors does this depend on? What is bilingualism anyway?

We’re talking to researcher Iryna Khodos on this episode of Because Language.

Show notes: http://becauselanguage.com/28-the-cutting-edge/

Become a patron and support the show: http://patreon.com/join/becauselangpod/

We're taking over Pint of Science (or are they taking over us?) for this episode! Three researchers are presenting their work in language, and they'll also tell us what they're learning about public science communication.

OzCLO is the Australian Computational and Linguistic Olympiad. It gets students together to compete and solve linguistic problems. It’s also a gateway to further linguistic study.

We’ve brought some of the winning students to compete in a linguistic quiz with Ben and Hedvig. Will it go well for them?

In what was meant to be a casual chat, cognitive scientist Dr Mark Ellison answers galaxy-brain-level questions about how language works.

• Why aren't we more efficient with language?
• How do we know when something has gone wrong in a conversation?
• Why don't we just talk in a flat monotone all the time?
• Why do fairy tales start a certain way?
• Why is it so tiring to speak another language?

Fortunately, he helps us keep our eyes on the ball for this episode.

Our Mailbag is once again full of questions, and podcasting luminary Helen Zaltzman is here to help us answer them!

• Why is the raspberry sound (PBTPBBBBT) not a speech sound in any language? Or is it?
• How can sounds in a language change so much over time?
• Am I BURNED OUT? Or BURNT OUT?
• Why are they called metaphysicians and not metaphysicists?
• What can we call something besides LAME?
• Why is AMPHI- so infrequently used in English?

Daniel Midgley, Ben Ainslie, and Hedvig Skirgård

For decades, forensic linguists have been pushing back on harmful language ideologies, and fighting for better representation for linguistic minorities in the legal domain. We're talking to three legendary linguists who have written the definitive record of how the discipline has developed in Australia.

Also: why do male characters get more dialogue in video games? And how can this situation improve? The authors of a pioneering new study share their insights.

More great questions from our Mailbag!

• How did we get from SUSS (suspect) to SUSS OUT (find out)?
• Is the J in JORTS part of a portmanteau, or a real live prefix?
• Why do PEEP, PEEK, and PEER resemble each other?
• Which acronym etymologies aren't bunk?
• Why do we add a SCHM- to words to signify derision?
• Are Mormon missionaries supernaturally good at learning languages?

All it took was a tweet. Last week, linguists refocused their attention on a paper about humidity and tone. Was it bad linguistics? Environmental determinism? The reaction said a lot about linguistics and the nature of linguistic communication in the digital age.

Women's bodies, women's occupations, women's experiences. So often in history, the discourse about women has been by men, about women. And that means that women's words have been lost.

Dr Jenni Nuttall has charted the lost history of women's words in her new book Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words, and she joins us for this episode.

The American Dialect Society Word of the Year has been chosen — and it’s a wonderful and terrible pick! Depending on who you’re talking to. In this episode, we’re talking about -USSY and all the words.

And we’re getting to our Mailbag, with our most intriguing research project ever: can you spot the pattern in the way Ben pronounces EITHER and NEITHER? Is there one?

Yes, linguistics is all through the world of sci-fi, but science fiction has had a surprising impact on linguistic research as well. Dr Hannah Little is cataloguing the ways in a new book, and she joins us for this episode.

For this special live LingFest23 episode, we’ll again be voting on tricky language issues, and our votes will be binding on all English users for all time because that’s how language works.

• If you had to walk 10 kilometres “there and back”, how far away is the place?
• How many holes does a straw have?
• And if “Floyd and the chickens are outside”, is Floyd also a chicken?

And many more!

For our first episode, we asked some of our linguist and lingo-pod friends what their favourite thing is about language.

We are joined by:

• Ben Zimmer
• Carrie Gillon (The Vocal Fries)
• Ellen Jovin (Grammar Table)
• Grant Barrett (A Way with Words)
• Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne (Lingthusiasm)
• Jane Solomon (The Dictionary of Difficult Words)
• John McWhorter (Lexicon Valley)
• Nicole Holliday (University of Pennsylvania)
• Ryan Paulsen (Lexitecture)

Much gratitude to all our friends for their kind support.

It joins, it divides. It’s disappearing in some places, but it’s stronger than ever in others. For this episode, we’re talking to Professor Pardis Mahdavi, author of Hyphen, an exploration of identity and self as it concerns this confounding little mark.

We're going deep into our Mailbag, and we're going to answer all your questions.

• Why do we say "here you go" when we give something to someone?
• Why can we reduce something to /sʌmʔ/?
• The thing is is, there are two IS there. Why?
• Some contractions seem to've appeared, and they look strange in writing. What other ones're out there?

How much can we really know about the words we use? What are the facts behind some of the most tangled etymologies in English? And is our "Related or Not" game a good way of approaching word history?

We're talking to Dr Anatoly Liberman, perhaps the world's preëminent living etymologist and the author of Origin Uncertain: Unraveling the Mysteries of Etymology.

The questions keep coming! Let’s answer them.

• Why is “Live Laugh Love” in that order?
• Why do we talk about “getting out the vote”?
• Why is the L sound creeping into some words?
• What can computer languages tell us about human languages?
• Is there a word for turning a label into an insult, like Dumbocrats or Repuglicans?

Anacostia is a rapidly gentrifying suburb in Washington DC, and as Anacostia changes, so does the language. How do the original Black residents use language to establish their cred? What about the language of the new Black gentrifiers?

Dr Jessi Grieser has been listening. She’s the author of The Black Side of the River, and she joins Daniel for a chat.