The Wide World of Language Diversity

Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer discuss a regional grammatical construction that is most common in the Philadelphia area, though it’s also found in Canada and Vermont. Then they talk with journalist Allyson Waller about Black American Sign Language. Waller won the Linguistics Journalism award from the Linguistic Society of America for her New York Times piece “Black, Deaf, and Extremely Online.” Finally, we invite listener Ben Snitkoff to take part in some wordplay with an improv-comedy theme.

Do you have any language questions or fun facts to share? Email us at spectacular@slate.com.

Produced by Jasmine Ellis and June Thomas.

Here are some notes and references from this episode:

The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project page for the “done my homework” construction

A Facebook Live video of a conversation between Britney Trumpy and Patsy Kelly

“Black, Deaf, and Extremely Online,” by Allyson Waller for the New York Times

The Linguistics Society of America’s announcement of the 2021 Linguistics Journalism Award

Nakia Smith’s TikTok page

The documentary Signing Black in America

Science Ink: Tattoos of the Science Obsessed, by Carl Zimmer

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