81: Mother Tongue (with Jenni Nuttall)
Women's bodies, women's occupations, women's experiences. So often in history, the discourse about women has been by men, about women. And that means that women's words have been lost. Dr Jenni Nuttall has charted the lost history of women's words in her new book Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women's Words, and she joins us for this episode.
2 Sep 20231h 49min
80: Mailbag of TLAs
Listeners have once again sent us some great questions, and we have answers! Why do we TALK SHIT and not SPEAK SHIT? Do we KEEP OUT, or STAY OUT? Why are so many acronyms three letters long? How do we break young people out of the prescriptivist mindset? Isn’t “folk etymology” just… etymology? Can you think of any anagrams that are also synonyms? Plus our favourite game, Related or Not!
13 Aug 20231h 30min
79: A.I. Hype Hosedown (with Emily Bender and Jack Hessel)
Daniel Midgley, Ben Ainslie, and Hedvig Skirgård
26 Jul 20233h 1min
78: Forensic Linguistics, Really (with Helen Fraser, Georgina Heydon, Diana Eades, Seán Roberts, and Steph Rennick)
For decades, forensic linguists have been pushing back on harmful language ideologies, and fighting for better representation for linguistic minorities in the legal domain. We're talking to three legendary linguists who have written the definitive record of how the discipline has developed in Australia. Also: why do male characters get more dialogue in video games? And how can this situation improve? The authors of a pioneering new study share their insights.
29 Jun 20232h 39min
77: Big Tent (live with Aris Clemons, Caitlin Green, Rikker Dockum, and friends)
How do we make the discipline of linguistics — and our world — a more just, diverse, and equitable place? Why does our personal history and personal perspective matter when doing science? How do we build community? And what happens if we do nothing? This episode is really kind of a mini-conference. We found some new work from linguists we admire, so we put out the word to our patrons and piled into a room! We're hearing work from Dr Aris Clemons, Dr Caitlin Green, and Dr Rikker Dockum on this episode.
15 Jun 20231h 50min
76: Ooo! Yum! Uh… (with Emily Hofstetter, Eleonora Beier, and Russell Gray)
Why does everyone say OOO! when they see someone fall down? Why do we say YUM when we feed a baby? And what's the deal with fillers like UM? For this episode we're talking about non-lexical vocalisations with Dr Eleonora Beier and Dr Emily Hofstetter. Also: linguists are diving into Grambank, a database with detailed information about grammatical features in over 2,500 languages. With its release, we're talking to project leaders Dr Russell Gray and our own Dr Hedvig Skirgård. Also, Hedvig gives us our yearly Eurovision language update. Ben's not here, so he won't complain.
27 Mai 20232h 26min
75: Fake News (with Jack Grieve)
How can you tell if a news story is intended to deceive? In one well-known case of journalistic deception, there were tells that required machine learning to trace. We’re talking to author and computational linguist Jack Grieve about his new book, The Language of Fake News.
15 Mai 20231h 44min
74: Mailbag of Go
We're going deep into our Mailbag, and we're going to answer all your questions. Why do we say "here you go" when we give something to someone? Why can we reduce something to /sʌmʔ/? The thing is is, there are two IS there. Why? Some contractions seem to've appeared, and they look strange in writing. What other ones're out there?
25 Apr 20231h 8min
