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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.  

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?

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.