Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. "A fascinating listen that will change the way you see everyday communications." –New York Times. "Joyously nerdy" –Buzzfeed. Weird and deep half-hour conversations about language on the third Thursday of the month. Listened to all the episodes here and wish there were more? Want to talk with other people who are enthusiastic about linguistics? Get bonus episodes and access to our Discord community at www.patreon.com/lingthusiasm Shownotes and transcripts: www.lingthusiasm.com

Episodes

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

March 19, 2026 • 54 mins
begonia: a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see ‘coral’ 3B), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet William, called also ‘gaiety’. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about trying to pin down definitions for colour terms with Kory Stamper, author of the new book TRUE COLOR! Kory is a lexicographer and was Associate Editor at Merriam-Webste...
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113: Why "it's a diglossia!" explains so many social dynamics

February 19, 2026 • 48 mins
In some communities, everyone regularly uses two languages or varieties according to the social situation, with one of them being more prestigious (and more likely to be written down) than the other. This particular kind of multilingualism is known as a diglossia. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about diglossia! We talk about why diglossia is the answer to so many questions Gretche...
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112: When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL)

January 15, 2026 • 49 mins
Language is all around us. This sentence right here, is language! But between the raw experience of someone saying something and a linguistic analysis of what they've said, there are certain steps that make it easier for that analysis to happen, or to be understood or reproduced by others later. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how language becomes linguistic data. We talk a...
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111: Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!

December 18, 2025 • 50 mins
Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about surprise. We talk about surprise voice and context, writing surprise with punctuation marks and emoji, anti-surprise and sarcasm, and measuring the specia...
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110: The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate

November 20, 2025 • 60 mins
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. Linguists have long been fascinated by the quest to get a glimpse into what Proto-Indo-European must have looked like through careful comparisons between languages we do have records for, and this very old topic is still undergoing new discoveries. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCull...
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109: On the nose - How the nose shapes language

October 16, 2025 • 46 mins
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 resonating chamber that air can get shaped by, as well as a salient location for the hand to be in contact with. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the nose! We talk about why noses are so popular cross-linguistically (seriously, nasa...
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108: Highs and lows of tone in Babanki - Interview with Pius Akumbu

September 18, 2025 • 51 mins
Linguistic research has its highs and lows: from staging a traditional wedding to learn about ceremonial words to having your efforts to found a village school disrupted by civil war. Linguistic research can also be about highs and lows: in this case, looking at how high and low tones in Babanki words affect their meaning. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about the highs and lows of fieldwork in Babanki w...
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107: Urban Multilingualism

August 21, 2025 • 39 mins
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 where it comes from. But in reality, people move around, and many cities are host to hundreds of languages that don't show up on official records. In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about urban multilingualism! We talk about a recent book ...
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106: Is a hotdog a sandwich? The problem with definitions

July 17, 2025 • 33 mins
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 cream sandwich was a sandwich and things...started to get a little murky. This isn't just a sandwich problem: you can also have similar arguments about what counts as a cup, a bird, a fish, furniture, art, and more! So wait...does any word mean anything anymore? Have we just broken lan...
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105: Linguistics of TikTok - Interview with Adam Aleksic aka EtymologyNerd

June 19, 2025 • 43 mins
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 to you from an algorithm rather than who you follow. This changes how people talk in them compared to earlier forms of video, and linguists are on it! In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the linguistics of tiktok with Adam Aleksic, better known on s...
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104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski

May 15, 2025 • 47 mins
When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have considerable written traditions, and engaging with writing as part of teaching these languages to children is important for all of the same reasons as we teach writing in majoritarian languages. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about multilingual literacy with Dr. Han...
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103: A hand-y guide to gesture

April 17, 2025 • 48 mins
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 hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about Lauren's new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide from Ox...
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102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

March 20, 2025 • 51 mins
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 by a radioactive spider. But what's the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the science and fiction of linguistic relativity, popularly kn...
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101: Micro to macro - The levels of language

February 20, 2025 • 48 mins
When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which th...
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100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics

January 16, 2025 • 41 mins
This is our hundredth episode that's enthusiastic about linguistics! To celebrate, we've put together 100 of our favourite fun facts about linguistics, featuring contributions from previous guests and Lingthusiasm team members, fan favourites that resonated with you from the previous 99 episodes, and new facts that haven't been on the show before but might star in one of the next 100 episodes in greater detail. In this episode, y...
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99: A politeness episode, if you please

December 19, 2024 • 56 mins
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 politeness? Or, if you'd prefer a less polite version, "Listen! Now!" In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what politeness and rudeness are made up of at a linguistic level. We talk about existing cultural notions of "saving face" and "losi...
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98: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender

November 21, 2024 • 56 mins
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 creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn't have that real-world grounding, which can sometimes lead to spectacular failures: hilariously implausible from a human perspecti...
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97: OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻

October 17, 2024 • 44 mins
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 ~spooky~ about possession! We talk about how the haunting type of possession and the linguistic type of possession do share an etymological origin, but how the term "possession" itself is misleading, because possessive constructions are used to express all sorts of relationships between...
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96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!

September 19, 2024 • 35 mins
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 Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It's easy to think of literary comparisons like "my love is like a red, red rose" but metaphors are also far more common and almost unnoticed in regular conversation as well. For example, English speakers often talk a...
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95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts!

August 15, 2024 • 43 mins
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 they meant "rabbit" but they could have meant something else, like "scurrying" or even "lo! an undetached rabbit-part!" In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we manage to understand each other when we're learning new words, inspired ...
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