120: Gesture! ✨👐✨ (with Lauren Gawne)

Language titan Tiger Webb is helping us with our voluminous Mailbag. Hedvig is giving her annual Eurovision language roundup. And we’re sorting through the lexicon of the 2022 Australian election. Is MAYBE a compound word? What about ANOTHER, or GARBAGE? Are GONNA and WANNA portmanteaus? What does it take to be a linguist?

31 Maj 20221h 32min

How is language like a game of charades? According to a new book, quite a lot. Charades players and language users improvise and work together to create meaning in a situation, and they get better at it as they reuse elements and build up patterns. Drs Morten Christiansen and Nick Chater explain their vision of language to Daniel and Hedvig on this episode of Because Language.

11 Maj 20221h 31min

We had the pleasure of an interview with two up-and-coming linguists, wanting to find out more about the show and linguistic communication. It was such a fun chat that we wanted to share it with you. Here's Daniel and Hedvig with Kitty Liu and Romany Amber. Part of this chat also appears in magazine form (along with a lot of other really good articles) : https://issuu.com/u-lingua/docs/issue_8_forweb  Thanks to Kitty and Romany for thinking of us, and thanks to U-Lingua for letting us make this audio public.

1 Maj 202252min

Linguistics is what we all love, but how do we make it pay? Turns out there are more ways than you might have thought of, and a new book is here to help. Dr Anna Marie Trester joins Daniel for an uplifting and hopeful chat. And how do we make the online experience better for Blind people? Friend of the pod Ellen is here with some do’s and some do-not-do’s.

8 Apr 20221h 37min

Lingcomm legend Mignon Fogarty (Grammar Girl) joins us to answer all the questions in our Mailbag! And we have to ask her about National Grammar Day. How do we bring out descriptive grammar, and tone down the policing? Why do some people say “She text me”? Why are some people convinced it’s the Flinstones and not the Flintstones? Are some people saying “I finished mines”? Is technology making us forget how to spell and write? And why does “going to Kong Kong” have a naughty meaning in Korean?

23 Mars 20221h 11min

Anacostia is a rapidly gentrifying suburb in Washington DC, and as Anacostia changes, so does the language. How do the original Black residents use language to establish their cred? What about the language of the new Black gentrifiers? Dr Jessi Grieser has been listening. She’s the author of The Black Side of the River, and she joins Daniel for a chat.

4 Mars 20221h 32min

Every Linguistics 101 student knows about HP Grice and his famous Maxims. They state that dialogue is usually cooperative — and when it doesn't appear to be, they explain how we manage to work out meaning anyway. But linguists are questioning the applicability and universality of these rules. Is it time for a reappraisal of Grice? We're joined by Rikker Dockum on this episode of Because Language.

20 Feb 20221h 13min

Can dictionaries create a more fair world? One language observer sees that dictionaries, far from being a neutral chronicle of language, are capable of promoting social justice. Daniel speaks with Dr Rebecca Shapiro, author of Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied English Lexicography.

10 Feb 20221h 35min