For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively ...
2024-02-16 02:45:10 +0000 UTC View PostIn this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about two kinds of fun linguistic questionnaires!
First: if you were a Lingthusiasm episode, which one would you be? We've ma...
2024-02-01 22:58:46 +0000 UTC View Post
It’s easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there’s an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how hum...
2024-01-18 23:35:08 +0000 UTC View Post
We've interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there's a story or two that we just don't have space for in the main episode, so here's a bonus episode with our favourite rece...
2024-01-04 22:44:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Language lets us talk about things that aren’t, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that’s an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it’s...
2023-12-22 00:24:36 +0000 UTC View Post
The words that a culture considers taboo or obscene can tell us things about what that culture considers important or profane. For example, many swear words in present-day English relate to sex and...
2023-12-07 23:40:35 +0000 UTC View Post
Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanis...
2023-11-17 00:20:22 +0000 UTC View Post
Are there linguistics things in your life that you would like advice about? In honour of our 7th anniversary making Lingthusiasm, this is an episode answering your advice questions, from the seriou...
2023-11-03 00:55:38 +0000 UTC View Post
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 d...
2023-10-20 00:11:14 +0000 UTC View Post
What if there was a summer camp for linguists? Like, imagine you could just go somewhere for a few weeks or a month and do linguistics classes and go to linguistics talks and eat your meals with li...
2023-10-06 00:16:57 +0000 UTC View Post
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 ...
2023-09-22 03:39:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Linguists often do research by interviewing people from a particular linguistic community. Sometimes these communities are nearby, sometimes very far away. Sometimes it's a community that the resea...
2023-09-08 01:59:23 +0000 UTC View Post
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...
2023-08-18 02:49:37 +0000 UTC View Post
A new round of Lingthusiasm merch is here!
"Etymology isn't destiny" on shirts, magnets, notebooks, ...
2023-08-10 01:04:15 +0000 UTC View Post
All of the Lingthusiasm main episodes and bonus episodes have transcripts, which involves some interesting technical challenges, including writing words in lots of languages, choosing between writi...
2023-08-03 23:48:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences real...
2023-07-21 03:45:52 +0000 UTC View Post
Sometimes linguistics example sentences are so charmingly bland that they could lull you to sleep, listed one after each other without any larger story for context. We thought, what if we took this...
2023-07-07 00:29:49 +0000 UTC View Post
In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the h...
2023-06-16 01:46:25 +0000 UTC View Post
Linguistics professors are some of the most visible career role models that you see if you're taking courses in linguistics (since they're teaching the courses), but most people who study linguisti...
2023-06-02 00:23:08 +0000 UTC View Post
The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells that set ...
2023-05-19 01:03:19 +0000 UTC View Post
In late 2022, we ran our first Lingthusiasm audience survey! We wanted to get to know you better and try out some linguistic experiments with you, so we got formal ethics approval from La Trobe Uni...
2023-05-05 00:41:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indi...
2023-04-20 23:07:44 +0000 UTC View Post
In this bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby C...
2023-04-07 00:24:07 +0000 UTC View PostLanguages change over time. So when you write a book set a few hundred years in the future, some aspects of how people talk are going to be different, and authors can invent potential future versio...
2023-03-03 00:40:50 +0000 UTC View PostThis is your reminder that the Lingthusiasm liveshow about language and gender with Kirby Conrod will be starting in exactly three (3) hours from the timestamp of this post/email, thanks to the mag...
2023-02-18 18:00:04 +0000 UTC View Post
Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from...
2023-02-17 01:44:24 +0000 UTC View Post
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about what we've been up to in 2022 (much travel for Gretchen, with linguistic impressions of Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand!) and...
2023-02-02 23:40:40 +0000 UTC View Post
Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “l...
2023-01-20 01:21:31 +0000 UTC View Post
We've interviewed lots of great people on Lingthusiasm, and sometimes there's a story or two that we just don't have space for in the main episode, so here's a bonus episode with our favourite rece...
2023-01-05 21:55:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses the one word “love” for several...
2022-12-15 21:40:53 +0000 UTC View Post