139: Magpie Syntax (with Stephanie Mason)
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 so...
9 Jun 2h 47min
138: Pop-Up Gaeltacht (live with Laura Pakenham and friends)
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 hist...
12 Mai 1h 32min
137: Are Trees Real? (with Yngwie Nielsen and Morten Christiansen)
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 Chri...
1 Mai 1h 1min
136: These Languages Are Anchors (with Mary Walworth)
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 ...
25 Apr 2h 10min
135: Linguistic Illusions (with Dan Parker)
"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 ...
3 Apr 2h 8min
134: True Colour (with Kory Stamper)
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. ...
13 Mar 2h 21min
133: Why We Talk Funny (with Valerie Fridland)
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 a...
26 Feb 2h 27min
132: WotY 2025, the Final Word (with Kelly Wright)
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 W...
17 Feb 1h 29min
