Subtitle
Episodes
How composer Leoš Janáček set his daughter’s last words to music
07 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
As 20-year-old Olga Janáčková lay dying from typhoid fever, her father wrote down everything she said. Later, he transformed those words—and gasp...
Will Icelandic survive the invasion of English?
26 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Some Icelanders are becoming unsettled by this existential question: Will their language still be spoken in the future? Comedian and former Reykjavik ...
The language that gave Missouri its name
12 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Many place names in the United States are borrowed from Native American words. It's often hard to trace the roots. Over time, the original names were ...
Presenting Home, Interrupted
29 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we're handing over the reins to the podcast series, Home, Interrupted, produced by Feet in 2 Worlds. The series explores how the clim...
Icelandic, the language that recycles everything
15 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Icelanders are protective of their language. When a new piece of tech or a new disease emerges, people debate what to call these things in Icelandic. ...
The bilingual edge: what the research says
01 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In recent decades, Americans' perception of bilingualism has been transformed. As recently as the 1990s, the prevailing belief was that if a child gre...
How Basque speakers saved their language
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How did Basque survive Spain's military dictatorship under Francisco Franco when speaking, writing and reading it were illegal? With more than six dia...
Chinese sci-fi has crossed the translation barrier
04 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Netflix's lavish new adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem is the latest 'translation' of one of this century's best, and best-selling, sci...
Why the French use the English word ‘black’
20 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The French language is replete with words borrowed from English, like 'weekend' and 'podcasting.' But French speakers' use of 'black' is in a category...
The Irish language renaissance
06 Mar 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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 whos...
From linguistic shame to pride
21 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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, ...
Easing into multilingualism
07 Feb 2024
Contributed by Lukas
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, O...
How the brain of an improv performer works
24 Jan 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Does the brain of an improv comedian or freestyle rapper function in a particular way? Is it processing language faster than a regular, lower-improvis...
Sugar Sammy’s multilingual comedy
13 Dec 2023
Contributed by Lukas
A conversation with comedian with Samir Khullar who grew up speaking Punjabi, Hindi, English and French. He does standup in all those languages, somet...
Is Mx here to stay?
29 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
Americans, Brits and the foreignness of English
15 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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 ...
A German-speaking outpost in the American Midwest
01 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Season 4 is coming
18 Oct 2023
Contributed by Lukas
In our upcoming season, we have stories about voice clones, tongue twisters and small languages fighting back. We'll hear from comedians, bilingual lo...
The precious secrets of Udi
16 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 langu...
The future sound of Black English
02 Nov 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 cod...
How music has shaped African American speech
19 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Guest host Ciku Theuri speaks with music writer Jordannah Elizabeth about the intimate relationship between music and Black American speech. That conn...
Where did African American English come from?
05 Oct 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Are the roots of African American English mainly African? Or English? Or something else? Linguists—and others—don't agree. Ciku Theuri guides us t...
A brief history of death threats
21 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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...
Latin, the undead language
07 Sep 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If Latin is dead, why is it easy to find meetups of people speaking it? Why is a group of scholars and lexicographers working on what has become a cen...
Learning to love apostrophes
06 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Ellen Jovin belongs to that rare breed of human with a passion for grammar. You will too if you spend a few minutes with her, your grammar anxiety mel...
Hello, Goodbye
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Steve Jobs' last words were: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." Oscar Wilde took his leave with: "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." (At least, that's how t...
How the Ojibwe language survived the pandemic
08 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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. ...
Ukraine’s linguistic patriotism
25 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, Russians have dismissed the Ukrainian language as "Little Russian," its speakers as simple-minded peasants. The Kremlin has sporadicall...
The rare joys of learning Finnish
11 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Kavita Pillay recently moved to Helsinki with her Finnish husband and half-Finnish daughter. While husband and daughter effortlessly embraced their ne...
Presenting More Than a Feeling
27 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
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 langua...
Will climate change wipe out French in Louisiana?
13 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For hundreds of years, people living in Louisiana's bayou country have spoken French. But rising sea levels are submerging entire communities, forcing...
When did comedians start saying ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’?
30 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
They're not in American dictionaries yet, but the terms, 'punching up' and 'punching down' are on the lips of many comedians. With the help of li...
The language of the outside people
16 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we tell the inspiring, heartbreaking story of Radio Haiti. For several decades, the station broadcast not just in French, spoken by H...
The speechways of the folk
02 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Does your grandmother call a chest of drawers a dresser? Or a bureau? Or perhaps a chiffonier? Over the years and across regions, Americans have favor...
‘Manifesting’ the language of self-help
16 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
If you’ve ever set boundaries, taken up a gratitude practice or manifested, you’re already well-versed in the language of self-help. Over its long...
Why some words are just funny
02 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Why do so many of us laugh at a word like 'poop' but not at, say, 'treadmill'? Is it all down to their meaning? Or are we also responding to the sound...
A mother tongue reclaimed
19 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When Julie Sedivy was four, her Czech family emigrated to Canada. In this episode we hear how Julie became estranged from her native Czech, only to re...
Teach me your song
05 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Is it easier to sing than speak in another language? Artist Wen-hao Tien is putting that idea to the test. She has invited friends from around the wor...
Once upon a hyphen…
15 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Some people have origin stories. Pardis Mahdavi has a hyphenation story. Her Iranian family was the target of a hate crime in Minnesota. She was strip...
Season 3 is coming
02 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In our upcoming season, we'll have stories on people who have "lost" their mother tongue, the language of self help, why certain sounds make us laugh,...
A language that survived the boarding schools
29 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Gwich’in is among Alaska’s most threatened languages. but Princess Daazhraii Johnson is determined to change that. Her mother, she says, was of "t...
A tale of edible intrigue
28 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Who writes the fortunes in fortune cookies? Why are so many of them not really fortunes at all? Why did some fortunes turn ominous for a while? (“Af...
The pleasure and pain of spelling
23 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With the Scripps National Spelling Bee back after a Covid-enforced year off, we conduct our very own spelling quiz. Also, Kavita Pillay offers her tak...
We are the people
09 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The German word "Volk" usually translates as "people," but it means a whole lot more than that. In 1989 as Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, they cha...
The little pronoun that could
26 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2012, a children’s book in Sweden sparked a nationwide debate— not about the book’s content but a three-letter word used ...
How the alphabet won our hearts
12 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If you're under the impression that encyclopedias and dictionaries in the West were always organized from A to Z, think again. We have chosen to class...
Japan’s mystery language
28 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Japan is an ethnically homogenous nation where everyone speaks Japanese, right? Not exactly. Other groups including the Ainu also have called Japan ho...
The dots and their future
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Will technology make Braille obsolete as the primary reading tool for blind people? Will talking apps and audiobooks win out over embossed dots? Brail...
The language closest to English
31 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
You may not have heard of Frisian, but it's spoken by about 500,000 people. Once upon a time, an older form of the language was barely distinct from O...
My notorious name
17 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Digital consultant Ivanka Majic was such an early user of Twitter that she was able to snag the handle @Ivanka. Which was great, until the rise of ano...
Season 2 is coming
11 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In our upcoming season, we have stories on notorious names, the future of Braille, a history of alphabetical order and much more. Look out the first ...
Subtitle presents A Better Life?
16 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Here's a guest episode from our friends at A Better Life?, a podcast from Feet in 2 Worlds about the immigrant experience in the time of COVID-19. The...
We Speak: Tina
19 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Tina Tobey was born and raised in Texas. She's used to non-Texans expecting her to know all about oil-drilling and ranching. And of course to speak "l...
We Speak: Ciku
05 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Why doesn't Ciku Theuri sound Black? Her friends wanted to know. Eventually, she wanted to know. Ciku tells the story of how she came to speak the way...
We Speak: Verónica
22 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Verónica Zaragovia lives in Miami but she was born in Colombia. Although she has a Colombian passport, her Spanish doesn't sound Colombian— at leas...
We Speak: Patrick and Kavita
08 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We are how we speak, right? Well, it's complicated— enough so to spend Subtitle's next four episodes on this question. We'll tell the stories o...
The birth of a language
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1986, Nicaraguan officials invited American linguist Judy Shepard-Kegl to observe a group of Deaf children. The kids were using an unrecognizable s...
‘Sisu’ gets an update
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Finland has been named the happiest country in the world. So why is sisu the word that best describes Finns? Associated with war and enduran...
A metaphor for our times
27 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In unsettled times, we reach for metaphors. They help us make sense of the nonsensical—or at least that's what we tell ourselves. In this episode, w...
In quarantine with Joe Wong
13 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Joe Wong is a brilliant bilingual comedian. In the US, he does standup. In his native China he hosts a popular TV game show. Recently his comedy has b...
In quarantine with Joanna Hausmann
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Bilingual comedian Joanna Hausmann (pictured with her mother Ana Julia Jatar-Hausmann) is sitting out the lockdown at her Venezuelan parents' New Engl...
At war, and not at war
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we talk with American medical student Esther Kim (pictured). She's trying to overcome her suspicion of people with a particular accen...
One virus, many languages
01 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We can't travel. We can't hug or visit loved ones. But we can talk our way through this pandemic — and we're doing just that, in most of the world's...
Going Dutch
18 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Hassnae Bouazza was born in Morocco. She didn't speak a word of Dutch when she immigrated to the Netherlands, though today it's effectively her mother...
How to communicate with aliens
04 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If there are extraterrestrials out there, what kind of messages might they be sending us? How might we decipher those messages? And should we hit re...
Did Katrina kill the New Orleans accent?
19 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina displaced tens of thousands of New Orleanians. Many never returned to the city. Others have since moved in, bringing with t...
The talk of the forest
05 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In folklore and fiction there's a rich tradition of trees that talk, from Greek mythology to The Wizard of Oz. But that's make-believe, right? Well, m...
Is a polyglot’s brain different?
22 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Susanna Zaraysky, speaker of nine languages, is one of those people who seem able to pick up French or Portuguese almost overnight. In reality, it's n...
Why Mormons are so good at languages
08 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Stereotypes about Mormon missionaries tend to overshadow their great success in foreign language learning. Why is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter...
Gullah Geechee enters the academy
18 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
There's a new language class on offer at Harvard. Gullah Geechee is a creole language developed by enslaved Africans and still spoken today. As far as...
The language of diamonds
04 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
'Real’ or ’synthetic’? 'Authentic' or ‘lab-grown’? 'Bloodstained' or ‘green’? The highly-regulated words that describe diamonds define t...
Words we love to hate
20 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Are you repelled by certain words? Do you get that fingernails-on-chalkboard feeling when someone says 'moist,' 'dollop' or 'fascia'? In this week's ...
Not so anonymous
06 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Want to say or write something anonymously? Or pretend you're someone else? Good luck. Linguists like Robert Leonard of Hofstra University are using e...
Your next favorite podcast
25 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Coming up in the first season of Subtitle with Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay: Words we love and hate. Words that solve crimes. Words we lose and find....
Coming soon: Subtitle
07 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Ever wondered why language simultaneously unites and divides us? Mystifies and delights us? Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay tell the stories of people...