When a human learns a new word, we're learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer "learns" a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn't have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspective, just as plausible from the computer's. In this episode,...

Eye of newt and toe of frog, Wool of bat and tongue of dog... In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic and ~spooky~ about possession! We talk about how the haunting type of possession and the linguistic type of possession do share an etymological origin, but how the term "possession" itself is misleading, because possessive constructions are used to express all sorts of relationships between nouns, including part-whole (eye of newt), material (a...

We're taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don't forget to hold on! In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It's easy to think of literary comparisons like "my love is like a red, red rose" but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English speakers often talk about ideas as a journey (the metaphor train) or as if they're...

Imagine you're in a field with someone whose language you don't speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says "Gavagai!" You probably assumed they meant "rabbit" but they could have meant something else, like "scurrying" or even "lo! an undetached rabbit-part!" In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we manage to understand each other when we're learning new words, inspired by the famous "Gavagai" thought experiment from the...

When we're talking about an activity -- say, throwing teacups in a lake -- we often want to know not just when the action takes place, but also what shape that action looks like. Is this a one-time teacup throwing event (I threw the teacup in the lake) or a repeated or ongoing situation (I was throwing the teacup in the lake)? Both of these actions might have happened at the same time (they're both in the past tense), but this different in shape between them is known as aspect. In this...

There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone's voice, it's useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they're wearing and who they're talking with. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how nonbinary people talk with Jacq Jones, who's a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. We...

Sometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making "brunch" from breakfast+lunch. Other times, words are smooshed together gradually, over a long period of speakers or signers discovering more efficient ways to position their mouth or hands, such as pronouncing "handbag" being pronounced more like "hambag". In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about smooshing words together. We talk about the...

When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "everything". That's because words like "everything" and "all" really mean something more like "everything typical in this situation". Or in linguistic terms, we say that their scope is ambiguous without context. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne...

On Lingthusiasm, we've sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibility, one that can produce several sounds at the same time which combine into what we perceive as a vowel. Behold, our latest, greatest metaphor...

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 composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and Beowulf. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how writing things down changes how we feel about...

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 humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are shaped by contact with other languages. We don't even know whether the oldest language(s) was/were spoken or signed, or even whether there was a...

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 a hypothetical situation (such as "if it rains, we'll cancel the picnic" - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen. But also they might!). Languages have lots of different ways of talking about different kinds of speculative events, and together they're called...

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...

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 don't actually need those signals -- since there's only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read "Me laugh" or "Laugh me". And indeed, there are languages that do just this, where the single entity with an intransitive verb like "laugh" patterns with the...

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 helps babies learn to talk, but only a few animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can't. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of ways of pointing, and their relative prominence varies across cultures: you can point to something with a finger or two, with your whole hand,...

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 universities that do most of the academic studies about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more about language learning in a broader variety of sociocultural settings. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how...

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 really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or different varies depending on what we’re investigating. For example, to compare varieties of English, we might have everyone read the same passage that contains all of the sounds of English, whereas to compare the way people gesture when telling a...

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 horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical information, and the technical name for these helping verbs is auxiliary verbs. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get...

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 things on fire or make them invisible, and in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, place bets, establish names, and otherwise alter the fabric of our relationships. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne...

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 indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonation. When the pitch affects the meaning of an individual word, such as the difference between mother (high mā) and horse (low rising mǎ) in Mandarin, linguists call it tone. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic...

Communicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say -- it’s also about the many subtle ingredients that go into a message, from how you keep your audience in mind to how you portray the actions of the people you’re talking about. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Gabrielle Hodge, a deaf researcher and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in research relating to d/Deaf people, signed languages, and communication,...

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 this highly multilingual environment to create something unique to the island. An important part of growing up in Singapore is learning which of your language skills to use in which situation. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn language in...

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 “language” in the language itself; other times the name that outsiders call the language is completely different from the insider name. Sometimes they come from mistakes: a name that got mis-applied or even a pejorative description from a neighbouring group.  In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne...

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 distinct feelings: familial love, romantic love, platonic love, and loving things (I love this ice cream!), whereas Spanish distinguishes lexically between the less intense querer and the stronger amar. Conversely, many Austronesian languages use the same word for the concepts that English would split as “fear”...