This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking - Interview with Julie Sedivy’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the science of beautiful writing with Dr. Julie Sedivy, who’s a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, and the author of Memory Speaks and Linguaphile.

Lauren: But first, this episode originally aired on Patreon a year and a half ago. We heard from so many listeners who wanted to share it with their writing groups or with academics trying to make the transition from scientific writing to literary writing. We thought we’d make it available to everyone as part of our annual unlocking of a bonus episode in the main feed.

Gretchen: Which also gives us and everyone on the production team a mini break that keeps making the show sustainable for us.

Lauren: If you’d like to listen to over 100 other more Lingthusiasm episodes that are bonuses like this one, and maybe you’d like to suggest which one we should unlock next year, join us on Patreon.

Gretchen: We’ve also been posting more and more titbits for everyone who follows us on Patreon – both free and paid – including unlocking our very first bonus episode about swearing with added swear-y commentary.

Lauren: We’ve recently unlocked a bonus chat with Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist about linguistics podcasting.

Gretchen: Or if you’re someone who’s always got a lot of podcasts on the back burner and doesn’t really need more listening material, but you’d just like to help us keep existing long into the future, there’s a new option on Patreon where you can purchase a community gift membership for us to give out to one of your fellow lingthusiasts who’d like to listen to the bonus episodes and can’t afford it right now.

Lauren: We’ve already given out seven of these community-gifted memberships thanks to the generosity of few people who found this feature before we had even figured out what we were doing with it.

Gretchen: If anyone else is inclined to join them, I think that was really a post that resonated in this economy. It helps us keep going at the same time.

Lauren: Stay subscribed to emails from Lingthusiasm on Patreon to hear about any future community gift memberships that become available.

Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for memberships for yourself, for a specific person you know, or for these new community gift memberships.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Julie.

Julie: Hi, Gretchen. I am fulfilling a longtime fantasy of appearing on Lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: It’s so fun to have you since you’re already a listener.

Julie: Indeed.

Gretchen: Before we get into stuff about your book, Linguaphile, and your other book, Memory Speaks, let’s start with a question that we ask all of our guests, which is, “How did you get into linguistics?”

Julie: I stumbled into it. I had started university as an English major. I had always thought that I would be a writer from the time I was very small. I was reading through course descriptions, came across this thing called “linguistics,” and it made reference to “grammar” and other stuff that didn’t sound overly interesting to me, but I thought, “If I’m gonna be a writer, I probably need to know some of this stuff.” I took the class, and from the get-go, I was utterly mesmerised. I think my experience was a little bit like – imagine you’re a kid, and you love bugs. You’ve spent your life watching bugs and being fascinated by them, but you don’t realise you can be a scientist of bugs and that there is a science of bugs. Then suddenly you encounter this, you know, at the age of 18. That’s a little bit what it was like for me just to realise that you can study this scientifically, systematically. Of course, one of the things that comes out when you start looking at linguistics is the realisation that there’s so much about language that’s going on below the surface of conscious awareness that is not really easy to just introspect about unless you have the right tools.

Gretchen: You’d had a lot of language experiences before discovering linguistics as a named phenomenon.

Julie: I did. And I think that’s what gave me an orientation and an attunement to language and a desire to use it as a medium as a writer. I was lucky enough to have been dragged from one linguistic environment to another. I think my parents would probably not frame it that way. It was quite a difficult time for them to be bouncing around from one country to another. I was born in what was then Czechoslovakia, and then we lived in Austria for a while, and Italy, and back and forth a bit, and then finally landed in Montreal where I learned French as my fourth language. Finally, English as a fifth language in kindergarten for the first time.

Gretchen: Wow. I really enjoyed the Montreal aspects of your writing because I also live in Montreal. Hearing some of the things that were, like, before I lived here, before I was around in here, and the way that English and French interplay in that – and in your childhood brain.

Julie: Yeah, no, it was a real lesson to me in observing some of the sociolinguistic aspects of language because it was very clear at the time – so this would’ve been the early-to-mid ’70s when we first arrived – that French – I mean, it was the language spoken by the majority, but it was not the language of official business, and it was not the respected language.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the complicated legacy of linguistic data collected by problematic people with This Guy Sucked. But first, This Guy Sucked is a history podcast who reached out to us about doing a shared episode.

Gretchen: We had a look, and we were like, well, we clearly share an approach to accessible podcasting that nonetheless has scholarly rigour in it. We were like, “Wait, This Guy Sucked is for professional haters, and we are just really enthusiastic about things.”

Lauren: Claire Aubin, who hosts the show, was like, “Look, I am also very enthusiastic about hating things.”

Gretchen: This is how we learned that there are sort of two meanings for “enthusiastic.” One is high energy, and another is high positivity. Normally on Lingthusiasm, we’re both.

Lauren: This was a chance for me to revisit a topic where maybe I don’t feel both.

Gretchen: How was life as a temporary hater?

Lauren: It was very cathartic, actually. This episode is a bit more fast-and-loose than I usually am. I discovered that I used the extended form of “BS” more when I’m really fired up. This Guy Sucked is a fun and unique way to approach history.

Gretchen: What did this person do that you hated so much?

Lauren: Daisy Bates left one of the most important and extensive archives we now have of Australian Indigenous languages from the early 20th Century. But it only exists because of her particularly bad attitudes towards Indigenous people even by the standards of that colonial era, which were also pretty bad, so just a heads up going into this one.

Gretchen: There’s your content advisory. Or most recent bonus episode was about a less problematic woman from the 20th Century, Margaret Godlove (who secretly wrote a whole bunch of definitions for colour words), with our very un-problematic guest, lexicographer Kory Stamper. It’s the second half of the interview that we did with Kory Stamper as a main episode last month. If you listened to that first half, and you want to know the answer to the spoiler, this is your chance.

Lauren: For access to this and over 100 other bonus episodes, head to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Claire: Welcome to This Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it’s never too late to have haters, and you can’t label the dead. I’m your host, Dr. Claire Aubin. I’m a historian, writer and, most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it’s because of their politics, their behaviour, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. We bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. Today, we are here to do a super special mash up, collaborative episode thing, with who?

Lauren: Yay.

Claire: Who are you? What are we doing?

Lauren: Hi Claire, my name is Lauren. I am co-host of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics. This is really fun for me because normally we just do “Yay, enthusiasm!” and hating is a new vibe for me. Let’s see how it goes.

Claire: I mean, I think we try to be enthusiastic about the hating a little bit in the sense that we’re doing it for justice. The goal is we’re not just being mean; we’re doing it to try to rewrite someone’s history back into the historical narrative or to try to be clear about harms that are caused by people that we in some way or another hold up as “good” or “useful” or “important.” We just like to make sure that the record is balanced.

Lauren: As long as it’s pedagogically informed and academically rigorous hating – sounds great.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about colour and how we describe it with Kory Stamper. But first, our most recent bonus episode was all about idioms. We “go the extra mile” to “get to the bottom” of why we should “cut idioms some slack.”

Lauren: “It’s easier said than done.” Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get this and many other bonus episodes.

[Music]

Gretchen: Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and was Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster for almost two decades. Her first book was Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Her second book is out 31st of March 2026 and is titled, “True Color – The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color – From Azure to Zinc Pink.” Welcome, Kory!

Kory: Thank you. It’s good to be here with both of you.

Lauren: It’s so lovely to have you here. We’re already off to a start where I’m like, “You don’t say /azjuə/?” [Laughter] We’re doing so great. Kory, how did you get into lexicography?

Kory: It was pretty much an accident. Back in my undergraduate, I was a Medieval Studies major, so I studied languages and literature primarily. After I got out of college, I thought, “Well, now what am I gonna do?” I answered – this is how long ago it was – I answered a want ad in the newspaper (in a print newspaper) to be an editorial assistant at Merriam-Webster. I got the job and within a few months of being there just realised “This is what I wanna do. This is what I love doing.” And that’s how I got into lexicography. I’ve been a lexicographer now since 1998.

Gretchen: Whoa. And you also wrote a previous book about lexicography, Word By Word, which we also loved and reviewed in one of the very early episodes of Lingthusiasm. We will link to that from the archives. How did you get into writing about lexicography?

Kory: You know, it was an occupational hazard of working at a dictionary company. Merriam-Webster, way back in the dark ages, used to respond to every single piece of consumer mail or email that came in. Most of them were asking – yeah, I don’t think they do that anymore. Please, folks, don’t email Merriam-Webster to ask them questions. I was one of the people that was in charge of answering a lot of that email. There was that coupled with the fact that whenever I would go out or meet new people, they would say, “What do you do?” I’d say, “I write dictionaries.” People would say, “What? How? Why? Who? When?”

Gretchen: “You mean there are people behind those dictionaries? I thought it just appeared from the sea foam like Aphrodite.”

Kory: Exactly. Or “Why do we need to write dictionaries? They’ve already been written.” After a little bit of having these conversations with people over and over, I started a blog where I started talking a little bit about what it’s like to write dictionaries. Why do people write them? What are some of the weird parts of writing dictionaries? The blog took off. People loved it. That’s what led to my first book. That’s led to this book, too.

Lauren: If you can cast your mind all the way back, Kory, how did you get into the research topic for this book?

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Why “it’s a diglossia!” explains so many social dynamics’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about when there are two different social roles for two languages or varieties in a society (a.k.a. “diglossia”). But first, the LingComm grants are coming back for 2026. If you’re working on sharing linguistics concepts with broader audiences or you know someone who is (whether in person, online, with kids, through art, video, audio, writing, in-person events, in other languages, or some other idea we haven’t thought of) we have 300 US dollar small grants to support your cool project, which also come with a mentorship meeting with us or a LingCommer who we know who has experience working on something similar that we can connect you with.

Lauren: LingComm grant applications close on the 30th of April 2026. That’s the end of April anywhere on Earth. Thanks to the generosity of several people, we have more grants to give out than we expected. Now, we need people to apply for them. Tell people to apply for a LingComm grant. For more information about applying, go to LingComm.org/grants.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was an update on what we’re up to in 2026 and a discussion of some great linguistics books, including Talking Hands by Margalit Fox and Hellspark by Janet Kagan.

Lauren: I loved Hellspark so much. We also took our own patented questionnaire for “What Character of the IPA are You?” and assigned each other characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is an activity available to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier.

Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to bonus episodes, to sponsor your very own character of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and for more ways of supporting us.

[Music]

Gretchen: I sent you a text from a party that I was at recently, saying, “Lauren, we have to do an episode about diglossia.” People keep asking about linguistics things at parties, which to be clear, I love. Several times recently, the answer has been “diglossia,” but because people don’t know what diglossia is – and at a party, they wanna hear a 3-minute explanation of something (they don’t quite wanna sit there for my full 30-minute explanation of something) – saying, “Oh, that’s a great question. The answer is diglossia,” does not help as much as I want it to help.

Lauren: Look, to be honest, it’s not the first time you’ve sent me the text message, “I was at a party, and the answer was diglossia.” I thought we’d have a chat about this question in a bit more detail because I’ve refilled my drink. I’ve got my canapés. I have nowhere else to be for the next 30 minutes.

Gretchen: You’re gonna be my party-guest-slash-victim. I’m gonna put the question into your mouth because you’re my party guest. Part of the reason why this question keeps coming up for me at parties is partially because I live in Montreal. This is a question that is particularly relevant to French.

Lauren: I feel like it’s also a question that is also particularly relevant to French learners, which is “I keep being told that the way I’m doing something is wrong, but everybody does it. If everybody does it, how is it wrong?” This is the French-learning paradox.

Gretchen: Diglossia itself explains a whole lot of things. One of the questions that you, my party victim, can keep in your mind towards the end of this is “Is everything secretly a diglossia? Are there way more hidden diglossias than we thought there were now that we have this diglossic lens to look on the world with?” We’re talking about French, but you can keep this in mind for any other language or linguistics situation how many of these are diglossias.

Lauren: The answer is diglossia. What is a “diglossia,” Gretchen? My dinner party conversationalist.

Gretchen: Your audition for Jeopardy guest is going great.

Lauren: [Laughs]

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL). It’s been made and edited by humans thanks to the support of our patrons. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the data people use to do linguistics. But first, if you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes to listen to, or you just wanna help us keep making the show, we have over 100 bonus episodes available for you to listen to on Patreon. If you’re not sure about committing to a monthly subscription, you can now sign up for a free trial and start listening to bonus episodes for free right away.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was a whole collection of extra, great material from interviews we’ve done over the past year that was too good not to share. You can hear more from Adam Aleksic about how the differences between platforms shape how slang evolves on them, and from Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez about Spanish internet memes.

Lauren: We have some bonus linguistics advice questions that we answer in this episode as well. For this and over 100 other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Lauren, what is linguistic data? I’m speaking a language right now. Does that mean I’m linguistic data right now?

Lauren: Absolutely. In fact, we have used recordings of this show with Bethany Gardner to make vowel plots of the two of us. Extremely yes.

Gretchen: That is true. Maybe this episode someday will be part of another analysis. This is one of the things that I find so exciting about linguistics. There’s always language to analyse. There’s language going on right inside my head that I could analyse at any time.

Lauren: Indeed. Even with a recording of a conversation, there’re so many different things that you could do with the same single recording. You could look at (as we’ve done) the way both of us pronounce different words. You could also look at the choices of words that we make, or the way our sentences are structured, or the way we do back and forth. Language is so many different things, and linguistic data can be so many different things as well.

Gretchen: One of the reasons I love linguistics is because of this wide-ranging approach to data. Linguistics really is a science. You can do linguistic experiments and get that kind of experimental scientific data. Linguistics is also a humanity in that you can do this kind of detailed textural analysis or very detailed analysis on one particular piece of a story or a conversation and analyse that one thing in its own terms. All of these fall within linguistics. They’re all different ways of relating to language and to linguistic data.

Lauren: It could be signed language or spoken language. You could look at written language. You could look at those things across time for a single person or a single group. You could look across different people right now. You can do experiments or you can observe naturalistic data.

Gretchen: One of the things that we want out of linguistics as an academic discipline, as a scientific discipline, is the idea that its data is replicable. Sometimes, that can be replicable in the scientific sense. If you’ve got a hundred Australian English speakers, and you have them read a list of words, and then you extract their vowels, and you analyse the vowels, the idea is that you could get a different group of another hundred Australian English speakers to read the same word list, and you should get the same results. Or if you get a different set of results, there should be some sort of reason why this group is different from that group. Maybe 50 years later the vowels have shifted because you’re doing these at different times.

Lauren: Maybe you’re looking at Melbourne and Sydney English speakers. Nothing like a bit of intercity variation to get people excited about comparing data. Sometimes, you can learn a lot about language by just studying a story or a conversation in a lot of detail. The real challenge with this data is that, even if you ask the same person to tell the same story again – or even if you have those two people have another conversation on the same topic – it’s always going to be different because you’re really trying to capture something about that particular moment.

Gretchen: In some ways, it makes them feel weirder if you say, “Now, can you just have the same conversation that you were having before I turned the tape recorder on? Make sure you laugh in all the same places that you were laughing before because you’re gonna find it just as funny the second time around, right?”

Lauren: This is maybe a good point to confess that once or twice we have lost a recording of this show. Doing it again – like, I fully sympathise why you can’t just replicate that exact moment.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about SURPRISE! From how languages express the concept of surprise, to what surprised looks like in the brain. But first, if you’ve been intrigued by the idea of our many bonus episodes, but aren’t sure about committing to another monthly subscription, we’ve now made a few of the most popular bonus episodes into collections that you can buy as a single one-time thing.

Lauren: These collections are so fun. We have Lingthusiasm Book Club for all of our book-related episodes; Linguistics Gossip for all the behind-the-scenes episodes; fun word-nerd topics like onomatopoeia and pangrams; Linguistics Advice; and my personal favourite, Lingthusiasm After Dark for our episodes about swearing, language under the influence, and the linguistics of kissing, and the weirdly soothing Lingthusiasmr episode that we’ve recorded of us reading example sentences in a very calm voice.

Gretchen: If there are any other bonus episodes that you’d like us to put in a collection, let us know. This feature is still pretty new and experimental. We’re interested in hearing how it goes for people. Also, this is a reminder that we have gift memberships. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift idea for yourself or someone else, you can get a year’s subscription to our bonus episodes for a person in your life and help keep the show running. Combining the previous two features, you can also gift one of the collections to some else if you wanna give someone a one-time gift.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was an interview about the mysterious Voynich manuscript with Claire Bowern. Is it a centuries-old hoax? Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for collections, gifting, and all of the bonus episodes.

[Music]

Lauren: “Surprise! Gretchen, it’s a party for you! There’re balloons coming from the ceiling, and I’ve made you cake.”

Gretchen: Wow! Amazing! I’m so surprised! Not least because it’s not my birthday.

Lauren: And I’m in Australia, and you’re in Canada.

Gretchen: Yeah, well, there’s that, too.

Lauren: And because we scripted this whole thing to introduce our episode on surprise?

Gretchen: Look, let’s not quibble too much. Let’s talk about a few other things you could say if you were surprised.

Lauren: Okay, sure.

Gretchen: Like, “My, how sparkly these balloons are!”

Lauren: Bit of a throwback. It has “My, how sharp your teeth are, Grandma,” vibes from Little Red Riding Hood.

Gretchen: “Dang, these balloons are so sparkly!” Bit more modern.

Lauren: That works. What about if I didn’t realise it was your birthday, I could be like, “Oh, happy birthday!”

Gretchen: “I can’t believe it’s your birthday!”

Lauren: “Whoa, a whole cake – just for me!”

Gretchen: “Wow, you ate the whole thing!”

Lauren: “Wait, you have a birthday?”

Gretchen: Like we all do.

Lauren: There are so many different ways that we can indicate that we’re surprised, that something is contrary to our expectations, that we’re dealing with new information.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the ancient history of languages in Europe and its neighbours. I’m here with Dr. Danny Bate, who’s a public linguist, the host of the podcast A Language I Love Is…, and author of Why Q Needs U. But first, a brief announcement. Our most recent bonus episode was about World Linguistics Day, which is November 26th – coming up very soon – and other more and less obscure linguistics-related holidays, decades, anniversaries, and kinds of special days, and how those get created. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this and many other bonus episodes and help us keep the show running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Danny.

Danny: Hi, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Thank you for coming on Lingthusiasm.

Danny: Thank you so, so much for having me. This is surreal, safe to say, as a long-time listener to Lingthusiasm. To be on it myself is – I don’t really know how I’m feeling right now, but I’ll just be pinching myself while we’re recording if that’s okay.

Gretchen: Well, if you start zoning out because you think that you’re supposed to just be listening and not actively participating in the conversation, I’ll give you a little poke or something.

Danny: Thank you, thank you. I’ll be there listening like, “This guy is talking about – I like these topics.” [Laughter]

Gretchen: Before we get into talking about your work and history of English and other languages, let’s start with a question that we start with all of our guests, “How did you get into linguistics?”

Danny: Right, okay, great question. It involves a little bit of personal history. The short answer is I don’t know. There must’ve been a time when I wasn’t into linguistics. There must’ve been. I have clear memories of thinking that foreign languages are silly and what’s the point of this and why do I have to go to school and other such childish impulses, but it is hard to pin down when I realised that linguistics was a thing and that it was the thing for me. Because I, like so many people of my generation, it wasn’t talked about at school. There wasn’t a great awareness of linguistics as a subject. I’m sure that’s still the case for a lot of people today, but it’s improving through things like Lingthusiasm. But that wasn’t there. Not to make myself sound extremely old, but it was definitely something that I came to by accident, organically, while searching for something to study at university that would combine my interests. I knew I liked modern languages, like French and German. I knew I liked philosophy. But it was really a haphazard, chance encounter until I turned up on the first day of my undergraduate degree at the University of York in the UK. Day 1, Lecture 1, yep, this is for me.

Gretchen: You took an intro linguistics class because the concept seemed like it could be kind of fascinating, and you’re like, “This is it.”

Danny: “This is it,” yeah. It was love at first lecture.

Keep reading

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘On the nose - How the nose shapes language’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about what the nose knows – how the nose is used in language. But first, next month is our 9th anniversary! We love making this show, and we love our anniversary as a moment to say thank you for sharing our enthusiasm for linguistics.

Lauren: To help celebrate, this year we’re asking you to take a moment to rate the show in your podcasting app of choice and to leave a review if you like.

Gretchen: Sometimes I wonder what rating actually does for a podcast.

Lauren: Look, I’m sure there’re some murky, algorithmic ways that it’s used, but it’s also a really useful way to help other people find the show and let them know it’s worth their time.

Gretchen: Podcasts don’t have public listener stats, so when I’m looking at a new show that I’m thinking about listening to or that I might do an interview on, I’ll have a look at the general number of ratings and reviews to get a vibe for the show. That’s where this can help us out.

Lauren: I use a small podcast player. And even there, it’s a big difference in whether a show has zero reviews or a few. Feel free to rate or review on any platform big or small.

Gretchen: We’ll be sharing some of our favourite reviews on social media and in the credits to episodes for the next year, so stay tuned, and you might see your review there.

Lauren: Speaking of things we’ve enjoyed seeing, we’ve enjoyed seeing your photos of the jazzed up Lingthusiasm logo sticker in your lives. If you missed out on one of the stickers or if you want to see the design on other objects, we’ve now also made it available on other merch including t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, and more.

Gretchen: We’ve also made a new merch item, which are greeting cards that say, “/mɛɹi mɛɹi mɛɹi / holidays.”

Lauren: Do you mean “merry / marry / Mary holidays”?

Gretchen: That’s why the subtitle says, “Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful, festive season.”

Lauren: Also, Gretchen, shouldn’t it be “Merry Christmas” not “Merry Holidays”?

Gretchen: No, because this bonus extra linguistics – hearing or reading “Merry Holidays” produces a surprise effect on the brain, known officially as an “N400.” Other examples from linguistic experiments include, “I take coffee with cream and dog.”

Lauren: Okay, I’m glad you did not put that on a gift card.

Gretchen: [Laughs] I just don’t think it would sell as well. With this card, you are doing language variation, sound change, and psycholinguistics.

Lauren: And with nine years of the show, we also have a great back catalogue of linguistics merch from classy gifts for your favourite prof or linguistics graduate to deep cut references to some of our favourite episodes to designs that look great even if your friends don’t get the linguistics reference. You can get scarves and t-shirts and notebooks and mugs and all sorts of linguistics merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was about synonyms, homonyms, and many, many other less familiar types of -nyms. You can get access to this and nine-years-worth of bonus episodes by going to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: “Please do not turn your nose up at today’s topic.”

Gretchen: “Let’s just follow our nose and see where we end up.”

Lauren: “Okay, this is already getting on the nose.”

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This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about documenting Grassfields languages in Cameroon. But first, Lingthusiasm has more than 20 interview episodes. You can find them all together on our topics page where we have a category for interviews specifically. Go to lingthusiasm.com/topics to find those. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons with a few interviews in there as well.

Our latest bonus episode is one of those interviews. We talk with one of the translators of Because Internet about the particular challenges of translating a book about internet linguistics, like how to translate the Lolcat bible into Spanish when this meme never existed in Spanish in the first place – a problem which Miguel solves brilliantly. You can listen to Gretchen’s chat with Dr. Miguel Sanchez Ibañez, who is a linguist and lecturer at Valladolid University, on Patreon, and you can read Because Internet in Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean. Links in the show notes. Patrons get access to bonus episodes and help keep the show running ad-free. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Professor Pius Akumbu is a linguist from Babanki, Cameroon, and a Director of Research in African Linguistics at CNRS in the LLACAN Lab (the Languages and Cultures of Africa Lab) in Paris, France. Professor Akumbu has done documentation work on a wide variety of topics from lexical tone to traditional stories and also founded a school in his home village to ensure that children have access to primary education in their own language – Babanki, also known as Kejom. Welcome to Lingthusiasm, Professor Akumbu.

Pius: Thank you for having me, Lauren. It’s my pleasure to be invited to your programme.

Lauren: How did you get into linguistics?

Pius: I think the best answer is that I got into linguistics by chance. Like many people in many parts of the world, I had no idea what linguistics was when I completed high school. I went to the university. I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. Yeah, of course, the orientation before that wasn’t there, so I had to find my way through. Then, as I was wondering what to do, I had some friends who had already decided on one of them, whose name I can mention, Enow Cecilia, had already joined the linguistics department. We met on campus, and she was like, “Oh, come try and see!” I went to that class.

Lauren: What an excellent chance.

Pius: To date, I still really appreciate that I had this opportunity. Of course, when I went there, I had some very nice professors.

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This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Urban Multilingualism’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page..

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about languages and cities, and how there’re often a lot more languages that live in a city than we might realise at first glance. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about all the different ways you can read the local linguistic landscapes in the signs and other writing in public spaces. You can think of it as a second part to this episode. Here we’re talking about the unwritten ways that languages are often hidden in cities. In the bonus episode, we’re talking about some of our favourite street signs that have interesting language things on them.

Lauren: I love this topic because there’re so many linguistically interesting street signs. You’ll never look at a street sign the same way again.

Gretchen: If you’re like me and Lauren, you probably have a bunch of photos on your phone of linguistically interesting street signs that you’ve come across.

Lauren: You can head to the Lingthusiasm Discord or tag us on social media to share your favourite examples of interesting language things on signs, and maybe we’ll do a second one of these episodes if we get enough.

Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to the linguistic landscapes episode and many other bonus episodes – and help keep the show running.

[Music]

Lauren: I live in a city. Gretchen, you live in a city. I think it’s fair to say we’re both big fans of urban living.

Gretchen: I live in Montreal. You live in Melbourne. One of the things that I remember about visiting you in Australia, which is, when I had been there for a few weeks, and I had gotten used to hearing Australian English all over the place, which is a variety that I’m pretty familiar with from talking with you a lot but is certainly not my local language, I remember being on a bus and overhearing some people talking to each other in Chinese and having this profound sense of feeling at home. Because when I’m on a bus in Montreal, I also overhear people speaking in Chinese, which I don’t speak, but that is an experience that I wasn’t having overhearing people speak Australian English because that doesn’t happen very often to me in Montreal, but it does happen that I overhear people speaking a language I don’t speak. That aspect of “Oh, yeah, of course there are people who have immigrated to both Melbourne and Montreal and a lot of other cities who speak Mandarian, Cantonese, a whole bunch of Chinese languages,” those are experiences that are part of living in this dense, urban, multilingual environment that sometimes get ignored when we represent countries as points on a map of country of origin without thinking about the history of people moving around as well.

Lauren: Cities are these magnets, and they keep attracting new waves of migration from new places and new languages and new experiences, and it’s part of what I love about the vibrancy of urban spaces. Again, just as countries aren’t points on a map, people come to cities with many different languages. It’s part of one of the many, many reasons I think cities are so compelling as spaces.

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