10 most popular Lingthusiasm episodes
In honour of the 100th episode of the podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics, here is our most popular episode from each "decade" of Lingthusiasm!
Episode 01 - Speaking a single language won't bring about world peace
Wouldn’t it solve so many problems in the world if everyone just spoke the same language? Not so fast!
Episode 13 - What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday
If you grow up with multiple accents to choose from, what does the one you choose say about your identity? How can linguistics unpick our hidden assumptions about what “sounds angry” or “sounds articulate”? What can we learn from studying the melodies of speech, in addition to the words and sounds?
Episode 25 - Every word is a real word
We don’t point at a chair or a tree and assert that it’s not a word. Of course it’s not! So why, then, do people feel called to question the wordhood of actual words?
Episode 39 - How to rebalance a lopsided conversation
Why do some conversations seem to flow really easily, while other times, it feels like you can’t get a word in edgewise, or that the other person isn’t holding up their end of the conversation?
Episode 49 - How translators approach a text
How do translators decide whether to more closely follow the literal structure of the text or to adapt more freely?
Episode 59 - Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind
We talk about the highly important role of gossip in the development of language, reframing how we introduce people to something they haven’t heard of yet, and ways of synchronizing mental states across groups of people, from conferences to movie voiceovers.
Episode 68 - Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages
When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymology.
Episode 72 - What If Linguistics - Absurd Hypothetical Questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd
We answer absurd hypothetical linguistic questions from special guest Randall Munroe, creator of the webcomic xkcd
Episode 80 - Word magic
The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. Saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells and in terms of the real-world linguistics
Episode 90 - What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are
Vowels are a significant component of what we think of as someone's accent, so we commissioned custom vowel diagrams and explore how they're made and what factors might affect your vowels.
