Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Jacq Jones, a lecturer at Massey University, discusses how nonbinary and binary individuals express gender through voice, clothing choices, and makeup. They share insights on linguistic geography, Canadian and New Zealand Englishes, and the complexities of the 'R' sound in English pronunciation.

Delve into the world of smooshed words like 'brunch' and 'gonna', exploring the history and evolution of creative linguistic blends. From portmanteau words like 'motel' to the efficiency of pronunciations in ASL and French, discover the fascinating process of word 'smooshing' and the evolution of language over time. Uncover the secrets of secret codes and ciphers in the bonus episode, showcasing the playful and creative side of linguistics

Explore linguistic ambiguity through the concept of scope in this engaging podcast. Delve into humor, quote demarcation, bench plaque misinterpretation, and language intricacies. Discover exclusive bonus content and support options available for listeners.

Discover the intricacies of vowel sounds and accents through a unique meat bagpipe analogy. Explore personalized vowel plots and see the differences between Canadian and Australian accents. Unravel the social significance of vowels in relation to identity, gender, and regional variation.

The podcast explores the impact of writing on social fabric and cultural traditions. It discusses the preservation of oral culture and the transmission of knowledge through storytelling. The challenges of creating nuclear warning messages for the future are also explored. The episode delves into the tradition of bedtime stories and the epic poem Beowulf. Listeners can also find additional linguistic content and support the show through various platforms.

The podcast explores the concept of language age and how it is often based on political or cultural decisions. It discusses the influence of writing systems on language preservation and the challenges of understanding the history of older languages. The podcast also delves into Latin cursed tablets, the limitations in understanding the history of human language, and the comparison between conservative and innovative languages. It concludes with an exploration of the written format for signed languages and the importance of valuing all languages.

Language allows us to talk about unreal things, like imaginary objects and hypothetical situations. The podcast explores the different ways languages express speculative events, including fictional concepts, hypothetical statements, and various types of irrealis categories. It also discusses the evolution of the English subjunctive, the complexity of irrealis forms in different languages, and the tools people use to make sense of reality and uncertainty.

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 Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, who's an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. We talk about how Itxaso grew up learning Basque at school and from her parents, who'd learned it as adults as part of the Basque language revitalization movement, and how studying linguistics gave her names for her linguistic experiences and made her realize she wasn't alone. We also talk about a paper Itxaso wrote with several other multilingual linguists about how academia needs to stop searching for "unicorn language users", aka users of minoritized languages who perfectly match a monolingual majority control group. Plus: Basque language revitalization through punk rock, reggaeton, and more music recs! (Links to songs in shownotes.) Read the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/734191628928106496/transcript-episode-86-itxaso-interview Announcements: Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! We appreciate your support so much, and it was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. If you'd like to share more of your thoughts on Lingthusiasm, take our 2023 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 (https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-75-2022-82426500) and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here until December 15th 2023: https://bit.ly/lingthusiasmsurvey23 In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about giving advice by answering your linguistics questions! 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. Listen to our latest bonus here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/bonus-81-advice-92128507 For links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/734191359532122112/episode-86-revival-reggaeton-and-rejecting

The hosts of the podcast discuss ergativity and its significance in linguistics. They explore how different roles in a sentence can be distinguished, introduce a mnemonic gesture for ergativity, and highlight examples from languages like Basque and Maya. They also touch on the concept of anti-passive and ergativity in English, including exceptions and split ergative systems.

This podcast episode delves into the fascinating topic of pointing. It explores how different cultures and species use pointing gestures, and the linguistic concept of deixis. The hosts discuss the challenges of understanding contextual meaning and the complexities of time references. They also share anecdotes about animals' ability to understand pointing and conclude with jokes and information on how to support the show.