Episodes
Published 03/20/24
The French language is replete with words borrowed from English, like 'weekend' and 'podcasting.' But French speakers' use of 'black' is in a category of its own: this one short syllable tells the story of France's racial and colonial legacies and how they stack up against U.S. history, from slavery to Black Lives Matter. Both countries are idealistic, rooted in 18th-century revolutions and grand principles. But while many in the US value racial and ethnic difference, France sees itself as a...
Published 03/20/24
Irish is among Europe's oldest languages. It's a near miracle that anyone speaks it today. Patrick talks with online Irish teacher Mollie Guidera whose students include a Kentucky farmer who speaks Irish to his horses; also with Irish scholar Jim McCloskey who developed a love of the language when he spent a summer living with Irish speakers. Irish is changing fast, with far more of its speakers learning it as a second language, while the native-speaker population declines. Music by Elliot...
Published 03/06/24
Israel Jesus used to be ashamed of being from the Mexican state of Oaxaca and speaking the local indigenous tongue, Triqui. When he moved to Salinas, California, a kid in his high school told Jesus he was destined to work in the fields nearby. But it was his knowledge of Triqui that sent him on a different path. A hospital in Salinas recruited Jesus to interpret for the increasing number of Triqui-speaking patients. It's part of an effort in California and beyond to expand medical...
Published 02/21/24
Mastering six languages sounds like a slog, right? But in some corners of Europe, it happens—maybe not effortlessly, but more easily than in, say, Ohio. Gaston Dorren grew up speaking Limburgish at home, and Dutch at school. He fell in love in German and picked up Spanish in Latin America, all the while keeping English and French in his back pocket. He tells Patrick about his love of verbing nouns, and Dutch people's unconsciously sexist choice of pronouns. Also, Gaston is a fabulous...
Published 02/07/24
Does the brain of an improv comedian or freestyle rapper function in a particular way? Is it processing language faster than a regular, lower-improvising brain?  Or is something else also going on, something to do with how we judge ourselves?  We asked our pal Ari Daniel to look into this. He found a group of researchers and a group of professional improvisers working together on some of these questions.  Photo of Dutch-based comedy improv group Easy Laughs by Robin Straaijer. Music in...
Published 01/24/24
A conversation with comedian with Samir Khullar who grew up speaking Punjabi, Hindi, English and French. He does standup in all those languages, sometimes mixing them up. He has toured more than 40 countries, but audiences in his native Québec perhaps see the best of him. That's where he performs a bilingual French/English show called You're Gonna Rire (and now, You're Gonna Rire 2). As a Quebecer/Québécois, Sugar Sammy's comedy exposes the absurdity of language politics while also...
Published 12/13/23
When a word first enters the language, it sounds weird to some, radical to others and comforting to just a few. Only later does it seem 'natural.' So it was with the honorific Ms in the 20th century. So it may be with the non-binary Mx. Today, British banks and utilities routinely give customers the option to use Mx. Will American companies follow suit? And what might Shakespeare have thought? His gender-neutral 'master-mistress,' is arguably more poetic than Mx, but it might be a bit of a...
Published 11/29/23
American English and British English aren't different languages. But they're not the same either, even if they're getting closer. There are all those different words for things: diaper/nappy, faucet/tap and so on. More challenging are common words used in subtly different ways: sure, reckon, middle class. Who better to ask about these and other terms than UK-based American linguist Lynne Murphy and her British husband and daughter? Spoiler alert: They don't always agree. Lynne Murphy is...
Published 11/15/23
German used to be one of the most widely-spoken languages in the United States. A survey in 1900 listed 613 US-based German-language newspapers. Today, only a handful survive, and German is barely spoken at all. One exception is Cole Camp, Missouri. Our guide, Suzanne Hogan, hosts public radio station KCUR's podcast, A People's History of Kansas City. Thanks to Suzanne Hogan for the photo of German language activists Neil and Marilyn Heimsoth. More photos and info on Camp Cole's...
Published 11/01/23
In our upcoming season, we have stories about voice clones, tongue twisters and small languages fighting back. We'll hear from comedians, bilingual lovers and badly-behaved grandmothers. Look out for the first episode on November 1. Music by Harry Edvino and The Freeharmonic Orchestra. Photo by Patrick Cox. Subtitle is a production of Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America. Sign up for Subtitle’s newsletter here.
Published 10/18/23
Subtitle is delighted to share an episode of Exile, a podcast about Jewish lives under the shadow of fascism. In this episode, Florence Mendheim, a young Jewish librarian in New York, risks her life to spy on the growing Nazi movement in America. Adopting a fake German persona, she attends American Nazi rallies and works in their headquarters. Everything is on the line to try to halt hate in its tracks. More on Florence Mendheim here. Listen to more Exile episodes here. Exile is a production...
Published 01/11/23
Never heard of the Udi language? Get ready to be beguiled by this poster child for endangered languages. The history of the Udi people and their language includes an ancient kingdom, an exodus to escape persecution, and the creation of a bespoke alphabet. Udi also has a unique grammatical feature, a form of linguistic behavior that scholars previously thought was impossible. No wonder the small Udi-speaking community of Zinobiani in the Republic of Georgia attracts visitors from around the...
Published 11/16/22
If you want to know where African American English is headed, listen to Shondel Nero. Shondel was born in the Caribbean nation of Guyana where she code-switched between Guyana Creolese and colonial British English. As a young adult she moved to North America, eventually settling in New York City where she became a professor of language education at NYU. Shondel tells guest host Ciku Theuri that the various versions of English spoken by Black immigrants are rubbing off on Black American...
Published 11/02/22
Guest host Ciku Theuri speaks with music writer Jordannah Elizabeth about the intimate relationship between music and Black American speech. That connection was never closer than in the 1930s and 40s when Cab Calloway's Hepster Dictionary and Sister Rosetta Tharpe's groundbreaking rock 'n' roll established new artistic and linguistic pathways. This is the second of our three-part series on African American English. Jordannah Elizabeth is the founder of the Feminist Jazz Review and author...
Published 10/19/22
Are the roots of African American English mainly African? Or English? Or something else? Linguists—and others—don't agree. Ciku Theuri guides us through the theories. Opinions from Nicole Holliday, John McWhorter, John Rickford and Sunn m'Cheaux, who we also profiled in a previous Subtitle episode. Music in this episode by A P O L L O, Jobii, and Tilden Parc. Photo of Michelle Obama by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons. Read a transcript of the episode here. Subscribe to Subtitle's...
Published 10/05/22
Until recently, issuing a death threat required some effort. Today, anyone with a phone or computer can make a threat—or receive one. The result is a “golden age” for the dark realm of personal threats.   Forensic linguist Tanya Karoli Christensen and forensic psychologist Lisa Warren help us trace the history of death threats from eloquently penned letters to casually written social media posts. As the platforms for making threats are changing, so too are the methods for assessing their...
Published 09/21/22
If Latin is dead, why is it easy to find meetups of people speaking it? Why are a group of scholars and lexicographers working on what has become a century-spanning Latin dictionary project? Former Latin student Cristina Quinn challenges Patrick Cox to seek answers to these these and more questions about the supposedly dead language that it all around us. Photo by Patrick Cox. Music by Marc Torch, Arthur Benson, Frank Jonsson, Farrell Wooten, and Andreas Boldt. Read a transcript of this...
Published 09/07/22
Ellen Jovin belongs that rare breed of human with a passion for grammar. You will too if you spend a few minutes with her, your grammar anxiety melting away in minutes. That's what happens when apostrophe-challenged Patrick meets Ellen at her Grammar Table in New York's Central Park. There, Ellen fields questions from passers-by about commas, semicolons, ellipses and weird-sounding neologisms. Ellen tells Patrick about her word-obsessed childhood, her love of hyphens, and why a Jehovah's...
Published 07/06/22
Steve Jobs' last words were: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." Oscar Wilde went with: "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." (At least, that's how the story goes.) But the way most of us part company with language at the end of our lives is more halting and gradual. Even when a dying loved one is unable to speak clearly, other forms of communication often take over: noises, gestures, touch and eye contact. We have stories in this episode from a hospice nurse, from journalists covering mental...
Published 06/22/22
How do you keep your language alive while also protecting the health of elders? That's been the quandary facing Ojibwe educators during the pandemic. As native speakers, Ojibwe elders were the primary teachers of the language, but they were also the most vulnerable to COVID. Leah Lemm of Minnesota's Mille Lacs Ojibwe band tells us how she and others figured out how to continue learning while also ensuring the wellbeing of teaching elders like her own father. Music in this episode by...
Published 06/08/22
For centuries, Russians have dismissed the Ukrainian language as "Little Russian," its speakers as simple-minded peasants. The Kremlin has sporadically and unsuccessfully tried to suppress the language. Now Russia's invasion of Ukraine has driven even some Russian-speaking Ukrainians to switch to Ukrainian. We trace the defiant rise of this language with the University of Washington's Laada Bilaniuk, American-born daughter of Ukrainian parents. Photo of Andriy Khlyvnyuk via YouTube...
Published 05/25/22
Kavita Pillay recently moved to Helsinki with her Finnish husband and half-Finnish daughter. While husband and daughter effortlessly embraced their new linguistic surroundings, Kavita...didn't. In this episode, she seeks guidance from other immigrants with varying degrees of Finnish mastery. Among them, an opera singer who finds melody in verb conjugations, and an Iraqi-born linguistics major whose fluent Finnish is sometimes questioned by locals. Photo by Sauli Pillay. Music by...
Published 05/11/22
We can't always find words to describe our emotions—not in English, at least. In this episode, Saleem Reshamwala asks friends who speak other languages to share their favorite emotion words and phrases. He also seeks guidance from psychologist Ashley Ruba, and Tim Lomas, author of Happiness Found in Translation: A Glossary of Joy from Around the World. This is a guest episode from the new Ten Percent Happier podcast, More Than a Feeling: more info and show notes here. Photo by allyaubry...
Published 04/27/22
For hundreds of years, people living in Louisiana's bayou country have spoken French. But rising sea levels are submerging entire communities, forcing people to abandon their homes. As native French speakers move away, will the language survive in this most French of American states? We hitch a ride to the bayou with linguist Nathalie Dajko. Music in this episode by Alces Adams, View Points, Amos Noah, Earle Belo, Finn Danniell, Sture Zetterberg and Lindsey Abraham. Photo by Julia Kumari...
Published 04/13/22