Language Rules

A podcast about the languages of the world and their speakers

Episodes

LR006 Arabic

December 16, 2015 • 116 mins

Elie from Aïn Ikrine, Lebanon, is a native speaker of Lebanese, considers himself near-native in French, but does not feel as comfortable speaking Arabic. Yes, Lebanese is a dialect of Arabic - and yet it's quite a different language. We talk about French, Christians in Lebanon, diverse dialects, aggressive sounds, how to chat and write poetry in Arabic, roots and patterns, words and numbers, Lebanese christmas traditions, and g...

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LR005 Turkish

September 20, 2015 • 94 mins

Özlem from Samsun, Turkey, is not only a native speaker of Turkish, but also deals with Turkish in her work as a researcher in the field of natural language processing. We talk about Istanbul, Turkish–German code-switching, agglutination, gatherings of ü and other vowels, non-existing houses, and the challenges of processing Turkish and other languages with computers. Sorry for the slightly shaky audio quality and background noi...

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LR004b Icelandic (Part II)

July 25, 2015 • 87 mins

In this second episode about Icelandic, Björn demonstrates the various ways to inflect different types of Icelandic words, including names. We talk about certain gender issues, dogs biting men (or the other way around?), the evolution of case, the recycling and invention of words, Icelandic names, a bit of Icelandic politics, and Björn's connection to Björk. Music: Árstíðir – Himinhvel (CC BY-SA 3.0) Erratum: Whenever I use t...

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LR004a Icelandic (Part I)

June 28, 2015 • 70 mins

Björn from Reykjavík, Iceland, has moved around in the Nordic countries quite a bit in his life. As a result, he speaks several languages fluently and is used to constantly switching back and forth between them. In contrast, his native language Icelandic managed to stay and evolve mainly in one place and without much contact to other languages for hundreds of years. In this episode, we talk about what it's like to be a Scandinavian...

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LR003 Swedish

May 2, 2015 • 140 mins

This episode's guest Anders comes from the very south of the very north of Europe, namely from Lund in Sweden. We talk about inter-Scandinavian communication, a (not so) Swedish Chef, what makes the Swedes "sing", the definite way to mark definiteness, the assimilation of loan words, the rise of a new pronoun, somewhat bizarre traditions, and why many Swedes don't pronounce Anders' first name correctly.

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LR002b Esperanto (Part II)

March 21, 2015 • 104 mins

Welcome back to the second part of my interview with Johannes (a.k.a. "two Germans talking to each other in English about Esperanto"). We speak about fifteen of the sixteen rules of Esperanto, what makes Esperanto (more or less) easy to learn, (more or less) qualified criticism of Esperanto, dancing female communists, and which language to learn if Esperanto is just not nerdy enough for you.

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LR002a Esperanto (Part I)

March 8, 2015 • 83 mins

How does a new language come into existence? Usually, it's a long and slow process in which one language is evolved from another collectively and overall unintentionally by a community of speakers. However, in the case of Esperanto, its grounds were laid by a single person named L. L. Zamenhof more than 125 years ago. Since then, Esperanto has turned into a living language thanks to its engaged speaker community. The native lang...

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LR001 Mandarin Chinese

February 3, 2015 • 170 mins

And so it begins ... In the first episode, Anett and her fearless guest Yi from Shanghai (China) go on an epic journey through the linguistic wilderness of (Mandarin) Chinese, always trying to stay away from the sun. Along the way, they encounter a special relative of Mandarin, meaningful stress, ten dead lions, missing spaces, Chinese face palms, certain aspects of aspect, entities of cute pandas, stacks of verbs, surprising Chine...

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LR000 Hello World

January 25, 2015 • 15 mins

In this very first episode, Anett gives a brief introduction of herself and this podcast project and delivers some first fun facts about the diversity of the world's languages.

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