Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language.
A podcast about linguistics, the science of language.
Episodes
Commas, em dashes, apostrophes, and interrobangs. We use them for timing, for grammar, and even for social purposes. But these little marks didn't just arise overnight. Dr Florence Hazrat fills us in on the history and meaning of these symbols. Florence is the author of On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
01:48 Intros and hot punctuation takes
(5:21) On the Mar...
Michael Erard has been covering language in major publications for a good long while. What has he learned, and what can linguistic communication take from his work? Michael sits down for a chat with Daniel and Hedvig to talk about his new book The Language Beat: Essays and Reporting on Language and Life.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
01:21 Getting the book together: Save your contracts!
04:22 Getting into lingcomm
06:38 Popula...
How do children learn language, and why can't other animals? Why are false friends between languages always naughty? And how is public perception of language changing? Dr Karen Stollznow is taking us through a tour of psycholinguistics, taboo language, and linguistic skepticism with her new book Beyond Words: How We Learn, Use, and Lose Language. We're also taking a look at Bitch: The Journey of a Word.
Timestamps
- 00:00 Start
- ...
Emoji, once regarded as some kind of frivolous nonsense, have become an important way we communicate online. But how did these little pictures come to our devices? What is the Unicode Consortium, and how did they get involved? And who is the Levitating Suit Guy? Fear not; author Keith Houston is here to give us the whole story in front of a live audience. Keith is the author of Face With Tears of Joy: A Natural History of Emoji.
Ti...
Why don't we all sound the same? Are some accents easier to learn? And are there reasons for the differences in how people sound and sign, or is it just random?
We use sound and sign to encode information about our age, place, gender, sexuality, and so much more. Sometimes we're not even aware of how we do it. But we're fixing that on this episode with Jennifer Nycz and Lauren Hall-Lew, editors of Sociophonetics: Implications for P...
How does it feel to be isolated from a language and a culture that could have been yours? There are many paths to language loss, but there are also many ways back. Language revitalisation is now happening for communities and individuals. We're talking about it with journalist and lingToker Sophia Smith Galer, author of How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:34 Intros...
Translating Shakespeare takes a knowledge of language, culture, and poetry — both in English and in the target language. There are tradeoffs and pitfalls, but a skilled translator can bring Shakespeare closer to our age, not just to another language. We're talking with translator Daniel Hahn, author of If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation.
Also, we're answering listener questions. Send us yours!
Ti...
Each letter in our Latin alphabet tells a story. But what about spaces? Or writing direction? Should we get rid of some letters, or could we even do with more? Here to answer all these questions is Dr Danny Bate, author of Why Q Needs U: A History of Our Letters and How We Use Them.
Timestamps
- 00:00 Start
- 00:44 Intros: Special letters
- 05:46 News: Spanish okay at World Cup?
- 09:30 News: Forgetting is helpful in language acquisit...
We created software that could generate human-like text output quickly and easily. Now we're dealing with the societal upheaval it's caused. What are the risks and rewards, and what can we learn about language from these large language models? Daniel — joined by Caitlin Green — has a chat with Dr Christopher Summerfield, author of These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means.
Timestamps
00:00 ...
Australian magpies are even cleverer birds than we thought. New research from Dr Stephanie Mason shows that they do two language-like things we used to think only humans could do: learn their calls socially, and combine their calls in a way that looks a lot like syntax. So are we calling this language? If so, how are the linguists taking it? Stephanie joins us to talk about magpies, media, and the territoriality of linguists.
Times...
Wherever Irish speakers in the world get together, you can have a "pop-up Gaeltacht"! And we're having one on this episode. We've got author and TG4 presenter Laura Pakenham taking us through the history and orthography of this great and resilient language. Laura is the author of Irish: History and Culture Through Language.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:24 Introducing Laura Pakenham
10:12 About Laura: Getting the gig
15:01 ...
What goes on in our minds when we construct an utterance? Linguists often use syntax trees to represent the structure of sentences, but are they psychologically real? Yngwie Nielsen and Dr Morten Christiansen have found evidence for something else: we can recognise patterns in strings of words, even when they don't form coherent "treelets". They're giving us a walkthrough of their latest work.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:31 Intro...
What will happen to the languages of climate refugees? Dr Mary Walworth has been working with the small island community of Nusi in Papua New Guinea, which was recently featured in an episode of Pole to Pole with Will Smith. What's it like doing media for a large audience, and more importantly, how do we help speakers hold onto their language? Dr Walworth joins us for this episode.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:45 Intros
0...
"More people have listened to this episode than you have." Why does this sentence look so right, but feel so wrong? When your grammar says one thing, but your brain says another, you may have found a linguistic illusion. We're talking to Dr Dan Parker, author of Linguistic Illusions: A Case Study on Agreement Attraction.
Video for this episode: https://youtu.be/_9BcmMZrH7s
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 0:27
- News: 6:30
- Related...
How do you define what blue is? What even IS colour? Turns out, the quest to define colours was happening along with a standardisation crisis and a dictionary crisis at the venerable Merriam-Webster. Lexicographer and author Kory Stamper tells us all about it, and about her new book True Color.
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 1:17
- News: 12:40
- Related or Not: 33:34
- Chat with Kory Stamper, author of True Color: 50:43
- Words of the...
We all have an accent — or several! And we use them to communicate things about us, and highlight aspects of our identity. So what's going on with the accents we hear? Are we losing some accents, or are they just changing? Dr Valerie Fridland is the author of Why We Talk Funny, and she joins us for this episode.
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 0:30
- News: 6:25
- Related or Not: 17:59
- Interview with Valerie Fridland: 36:53
- Wo...
We're talking to Dr Kelly Wright, friend of the show and data czar for the American Dialect Society. They run the biggest and most prestigious Word of the Year event, and she was there when the 2025 WotY votes came in. She's talking us through all the words we missed. Plus we get to some listener feedback.
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 0:41
- The ADS WotYs for 2025: 7:12
- Related or Not: 1:00:51
- Listener comments: 1:09:53
- ...
Video for this episode: https://youtu.be/Mqf05kN-TaI
It's Word of the Year season, and we're counting down our Words of the Week of the Year! In the time-honoured tradition, we gathered them all up from our 2025 shows, and let everyone vote. And we're going to give a mention to everyone else's words as well. We're joined by our friends and patrons, so come see them in chat!
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 1:31
- Everyone else's w...
You know the story. The language you speak doesn't determine your savings. If your language has a future tense, there's no impact on the way you see or describe the future. Language and perception are separate.
Well, maybe it's time to revisit this. Séan Roberts and Cole Robertson are finding a cognitive connection, not with how our language makes us talk about the future, but with how our language lets us express uncertainty.
Also...
We've asked linguists about how language began, but what would an evolutionary biologist tell you? Prof Madeleine Beekman says it's part of a complex web of body, brain, and community, and at the heart of it is (perhaps surprisingly) childcare. Madeleine is the author of The Origin of Language: How We Learned to Speak and Why.
Timestamps
- Cold open: 0:00
- Intros: 0:42
- News: 9:07
- Related or Not: 30:02
- Interview with Madeleine Bee...
Popular Podcasts
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by Audiochuck Media Company.
DISGRACELAND is an award-winning music and true crime podcast about musicians getting away with murder and behaving very badly. Jerry Lee Lewis's 5th wife? Dead. Sid and Nancy? Both dead. Why? Because musicians are insane, and insane things happen to them. Why did we lose Amy Winehouse at 27? Was Debbie Harry really abducted by Ted Bundy as she claims? Is Patti Smith not just the "Godmother of Punk", but also the "Original True Crime Girl"? What really happened the night of the Jay Z nightclub stabbing? What do the Diddy indictments truly reveal? All these stories and more, on artists from every genre and their true crimes, in our massive 260-plus story archive. The Dead, the Stones, Johnny, Willie, Frank, Kurt, Courtney, Gaga, Lana, Taylor, and too many to name. DISGRACELAND is music history come to life through audio storytelling as you've never heard it before, with revealing facts: yes, assassins are the real reason the Beatles quit touring—reclaimed myths: no, Mama Cass didn't die from choking on a ham sandwich––and constant reckoning between art and artist––all told through the lens of true crime. This is the podcast for the self-proclaimed "Disgos", the musically obsessed and the true crime heads; the outsiders, the independent thinkers who know that the best history is the history that gets buried. DISGRACELAND is where host Jake Brennan tells the stories they didn't want told. The kind you'll end up telling someone else. Get ready to uncover hidden truths and buckle up for truly edge-of-your-seat storytelling. New, fully scripted, sound-designed episodes are released every Tuesday. Bonus chat-style episodes where Jake responds to voicemails, texts, and emails from Disgos hit on Thursdays, and "Rewind" episodes from our archive drop on Sundays. DISGRACELAND is not a journalistic podcast. It's an entertainment podcast inspired by true events. Certain dialogue and scenes are dramatized, as is common in scripted entertainment based on real stories. Sources and credits for each episode are available at www.disgracelandpod.com. To unlock ad-free listening, exclusive content, and connect with your fellow Disgos, go to www.disgracelandpod.com to become an All Access member. Rocka Rolla.