Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

115: The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked

17 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who spoke it? ...

114: Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper

20 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

begonia: a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see ‘coral’ 3B), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than swee...

113: Why "it's a diglossia!" explains so many social dynamics

20 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

In some communities, everyone regularly uses two languages or varieties according to the social situation, with one of them being more prestigious (an...

112: When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL)

15 Jan 2026

Contributed by Lukas

Language is all around us. This sentence right here, is language! But between the raw experience of someone saying something and a linguistic analysis...

111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

19 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some language...

110: The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate

20 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Before there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Linguist...

109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

17 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We often invoke the idea of language by showing the mouth or the hands. But the nose is important to both signed and spoken languages: it can be a res...

108: Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu

19 Sep 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Linguistic research has its highs and lows: from staging a traditional wedding to learn about ceremonial words to having your efforts to found a villa...

107: Urban Multilingualism

22 Aug 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we try to represent languages on a map, it's common to assign each language a zone or a point which represents some idea of where it's used or wh...

106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions

18 Jul 2025

Contributed by Lukas

We asked you if a burrito was a sandwich, and you said 'no'. We asked you if ravioli was a sandwich and you said 'heck no'. We asked you if an ice cre...

105: Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd

20 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are an evolving genre of media: short-form, vertical videos that take up your whole screen and are served ...

104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski

16 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have considerable wri...

103: A hand-y guide to gesture

18 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Gestures: every known language has them, and there's a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be har...

102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

21 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

It's a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you'd been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten ...

101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

21 Feb 2025

Contributed by Lukas

When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so o...

100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics

17 Jan 2025

Contributed by Lukas

This is our hundredth episode that's enthusiastic about linguistics! To celebrate, we've put together 100 of our favourite fun facts about linguistics...

99: A politeness episode, if you please

20 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

If it wouldn't be too much trouble, if you have a spare half hour, could we possibly suggest that you might enjoy listening to this episode on politen...

98: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender

22 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

97: OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻

17 Oct 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ~s...

96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!

20 Sep 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 La...

95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!

15 Aug 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 the...

94: The perfectly imperfect aspect episode

19 Jul 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones

21 Jun 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 a...

92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode

17 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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,...

91: Scoping out the scope of scope

18 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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, ch...

90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are

21 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

89: Connecting with oral culture

16 Feb 2024

Contributed by Lukas

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other peop...

88: No such thing as the oldest language

18 Jan 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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 unsat...

87: If I were an irrealis episode

21 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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?...

86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

16 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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, Bas...

85: Ergativity delights us

19 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

84: Look, it's deixis, an episode about pointing!

22 Sep 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro

18 Aug 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they d...

82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences

21 Jul 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar...

81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries

16 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 hor...

80: Word Magic

19 May 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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, bo...

79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!

20 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 w...

78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge

17 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting

17 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hyb...

76: Where language names come from and why they change

20 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

15 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses ...

74: Who questions the questions?

18 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confi...

73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory

20 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Maps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re also often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number of languages, like 7000,...

72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd

16 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What’s the “it’s” in “it’s three pm and hot”? How do you write a cough in the International Phonetic Alphabet? Who is the person most li...

71: Various vocal fold vibes

19 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Partway down your throat are two flaps of muscle. When you breathe normally, you pull the flaps away to the sides, and air comes out silently. But if ...

70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko

21 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the other things you...

69: What we can, must, and should say about modals

16 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Sometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk about how things could ...

68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages

20 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingua...

67: What it means for a language to be official

22 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

The Rosetta Stone is famous as an inscription that let us read Egyptian hieroglyphs again, but it was created in the first place as part of a long his...

66: Word order, we love

18 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine ...

65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun

17 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quo...

64: Making speech visible with spectrograms

20 Jan 2022

Contributed by Lukas

If you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, it’s hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for understanding...

63: Where to get your English etymologies

16 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if they might hav...

62: Cool things about scales and implicature

18 Nov 2021

Contributed by Lukas

We can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or F...

61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta

21 Oct 2021

Contributed by Lukas

If you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people have writt...

60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics

17 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Here’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in ...

59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind

19 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Let's say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured ...

58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip

16 Jul 2021

Contributed by Lukas

What do the sounds fffff, vvvv, ssss, and zzzz all have in common? They're all produced by creating a sort of friction in your mouth when you constric...

57: Making machines learn Fon and other African languages - Interview with Masakhane

18 Jun 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When you see something on social media in a language you don’t read, it’s really handy to have a quick and good-enough “click to translate” op...

56: Not NOT a negation episode

20 May 2021

Contributed by Lukas

“I don’t have a pet dinosaur.” This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isn’t, uh, tell us your ways?)....

55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity

15 Apr 2021

Contributed by Lukas

The letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of...

54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a language

18 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

If you go to the linguistics section of a big library, you may find some shelves containing thick, dusty grammars of various languages. But grammars, ...

53: Listen to the imperatives episode!

18 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

When we tell you, “stay lingthusiastic!” at the end of every episode, we’re using a grammatical feature known as the imperative. But although it...

52: Writing is a technology

21 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

There’s no known human society without language, whether spoken or signed or both, but writing is a different story. Writing is a technology that ha...

51: Small talk, big deal

17 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

“Cold enough for ya?” “Nice weather for ducks.” Small talk is a valuable piece of our social interactions -- it can be a way of having a mom...

50: Climbing the sonority mountain from A to P

19 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

“Blick” is not a word of English. But it sounds like it could be, if someone told you a meaning for it. “Bnick” contains English sounds, but s...

49: How translators approach a text

15 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Before even starting to translate a work, a translator needs to make several important macro-level decisions, such as whether to more closely follow t...

48: Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates

18 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

High school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as how you dress or what vowels you’re using. Making choices from among t...

47: The happy fun big adjective episode

20 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Adjectives: they’re big, they’re fun, they’re...maybe non-existent? In English, we have a fairly straightforward category of adjectives: they’...

46: Hey, no problem, bye! The social dance of phatics

17 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

How are you? Thanks, no problem. Stock, ritualistic social phrases like these, which are used more to indicate a particular social context rather than...

45: Tracing languages back before recorded history

19 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Language is much older than writing. But audio and visual cues from sounds and signs don’t leave physical traces the way writing does. So when lingu...

44: Schwa, the most versatile English vowel

22 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The words about, broken, council, potato, and support have something in common -- they all contain the same sound, even though they each spell it with...

43: The grammar of singular they - Interview with Kirby Conrod

17 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Using “they” to refer to a single person is about as old as using “you” to refer to a single person: for example, Shakespeare has a line “Th...

42: What makes a language “easy”? It’s a hard question

19 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Asking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is – it all depends on where you start. And for babies, who st...

41: This time it gets tense - The grammar of time

20 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

How do languages talk about the time when something happens? Of course, we can use words like “yesterday”, “on Tuesday”, “once upon a time”...

40: Making machines learn language - Interview with Janelle Shane

17 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

If you feed a computer enough ice cream flavours or pictures annotated with whether they contain giraffes, the hope is that the computer may eventuall...

39: How to rebalance a lopsided conversation

19 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Why do some conversations seems to flow really easily, while other times, it feels like you can’t get a word in edgewise, or that the other person i...

38: Many ways to talk about many things - Plurals, duals and more

21 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In English you have one book, and three books. In Arabic you have one kitaab, and three kutub. In Nepali it’s one kitab, and three kitabharu, but so...

37: Smell words, both real and invented

17 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

What’s your favourite smell? You might say something like the smell of fresh ripe strawberries, or the smell of freshly-cut grass. But if we asked w...

36: Villages, gifs, and children: Researching signed languages in real-world contexts with Lynn Hou

20 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Larger, national signed languages, like American Sign Language and British Sign Language, often have relatively well-established laboratory-based rese...

35: Putting sounds into syllables is like putting toppings on a burger

16 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Sometimes a syllable is jam-packed with sounds, like the single-syllable word “strengths”. Other times, a syllable is as simple as a single vowel ...

34: Emoji are Gesture Because Internet

18 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Emoji make a lot of headlines, but what happens when you actually drill down into the data for how people integrate emoji into our everyday messages? ...

33: Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change

20 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Why does “gh” make different sounds in “though” “through” “laugh” “light” and “ghost”? Why is there a silent “k” at the be...

32: You heard about it but I was there - Evidentiality

16 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Sometimes, you know something for sure. You were there. You witnessed it. And you want to make sure that anyone who hears about it from you knows that...

31: Pop culture in Cook Islands Māori - Interview with Ake Nicholas

19 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When a language is shifting from being spoken by a whole community to being spoken only by older people, it’s crucial to get the kids engaged with t...

30: Why do we gesture when we talk?

21 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

This episode is also available as a special video episode so you can see the gestures! Go to youtube.com/lingthusiasm or https://www.youtube.com/watch...

29: The verb is the coat rack that the rest of the sentence hangs on

22 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Some sentences have a lot of words all relating to each other, while other sentences only have a few. The verb is the thing that makes the biggest dif...

28: How languages influence each other - Hannah Gibson interview on Swahili, Rangi & Bantu languages

18 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The Rift Valley area of central and northern Tanzania is the only area where languages from all four African language families are found (Bantu, Cushi...

27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms

20 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

There are certain things that human societies, and therefore languages, have in common. We have the same basic inventory of body parts, which affect b...

26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization

16 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A letter stands for a sound. Or at least, it’s supposed to. Most of the time. Unless it’s C or G, which each stand for two different sounds in a w...

25: Every word is a real word

18 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

squishable, blobfish, aaarggghh, gubernatorial, apple lovers, ain’t, tronc, wug, toast, toast, toast, toast, toast. All of these are words that som...

24: Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz

20 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

As English speakers, we take for granted that we have lots of resources available in our language, from children’s books to dictionaries to automate...

23: When nothing means something

16 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

When we think about language, we generally think about things that are visible or audible: letters, sounds, signs, words, symbols, sentences. We don’...

22: This, that and the other thing - Determiners

19 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

When linguists think about complicated words, we don’t think about rare, two-dollar words like “defenestration”. Instead, we think about the kin...

21: What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles

22 Jun 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Most of the time, a word is an arbitrary label: there’s no particular reason why a cat has to be associated with the particular string of sounds in ...

20: Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binary

17 May 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Australian and Canadian English don’t sound much alike, but they have one big similarity: they’re both national varieties that tend to get oversha...

19: Sentences with baggage - Presuppositions

19 Apr 2018

Contributed by Lukas

What’s so weird if I say, “the present King of France is bald” or “I need to pick up my pet unicorn from the vet”? It seems like those sente...

18: Translating the untranslatable

15 Mar 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Lists of ‘untranslatable’ words always come with... translations. So what do people really mean when they say a word is untranslatable? In this e...

17: Vowel Gymnastics

15 Feb 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Say, “aaaaaahhhh…..” Now try going smoothly from one vowel to another, without pausing: “aaaaaaaeeeeeeeiiiiiii”. Feel how your tongue moves ...

16: Learning parts of words - Morphemes and the wug test

19 Jan 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Here’s a strange little blue animal you’ve never seen before. It’s called a wug. Now here’s another one. There are two of them. There are two ...