146: Beyond Words (with Karen Stollznow)
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 ...
17 Sep 2h 1min
145: Face With Tears of Joy (live with Keith Houston and friends)
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 ...
3 Sep 1h 33min
144: Sociophonetics Deep Dive (with Jennifer Nycz, Lauren Hall-Lew, and Kelly Wright)
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 informa...
22 Aug 1h 8min
143: How to Kill a Language (with Sophia Smith Galer)
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 happe...
11 Aug 2h 16min
142: If This Be Magic (with Daniel Hahn)
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 Shakespear...
28 Jul 2h 2min
141: Why Q Needs U (with Danny Bate and Caitlin M. Green)
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...
17 Jul 2h 24min
140: These Strange New Minds (with Christopher Summerfield and Caitlin Green)
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...
30 Jun 2h 1min
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
