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Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. · 105 episoder · Side 1 af 4
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 ma...
Translating Shakespeare takes a knowledge of language, culture, and poetry — both in English and in the target language. There are tradeoffs and pitfa...
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 w...
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 ...
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 t...
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 p...
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 psych...
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, ...
"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, ...
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 di...
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...
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...
Video for this episode: https://youtu.be/Mqf05kN-TaI It's Word of the Year season, and we're counting down our Words of the Week of the Year! In the...
You know the story. The language you speak doesn't determine your savings. If your language has a future tense, there's no impact on the way you see o...
We've asked linguists about how language began, but what would an evolutionary biologist tell you? Prof Madeleine Beekman says it's part of a complex ...
Among so many great word games, crosswords still reign supreme. How have they survived — and even expanded — in our digital age? What goes into a good...
The "Oh" show was an experimental linguistics performance lecture. It happened in June 2025 at Creative Time HQ in New York City. Actors, musicians, a...
Martha Barnette is one half of the linguistics podcast A Way With Words, and author of the new book Friends With Words: Adventures in Languageland. ...
Creators have to be mindful of what to say and what not to say in their content. This affects the language we're exposed to — and what we say IRL. But...
We've all seen style guides that tell us what to say and what not to say. Has a style guide ever asked you what you wanted to say? Or challenged you t...
How did language start? What do all languages have in common? How does language really work? Many answers have been posed to these questions, but one ...
How do large language models (LLMs) do their thing, and it is anything like how we do our thing? What can we learn about human language from this soft...
Gesture is everywhere. We wave our hands when we talk, even if we're alone. Signed languages are, of course, full languages that use gesture. And it c...
It's Eurovision season! We love to talk about what we can learn about language from this international song contest, but even we didn't realise that t...
Artificial intelligence (so-called) is typified by its boom and bust cycles, and we're in a boom now. But as more and more money pours in with decreas...
Video version of this episode: https://youtu.be/wxGeXMzlwng If you repeat something twice, how many times did you do it? Can more than one dinner be...
Spelling reform in English: a constant failure? Or a secret success? Waves upon waves of optimists have tried to make English spelling reflect its sou...
First words and last words get a lot of attention. But how did words get to have such a place of prominence? What would we see if we focused on intera...
Breaking news: The president of the United States intends to sign an executive order designating English the official language of the USA. Is this a b...
What really goes on behind the scenes at the biggest Word of the Year vote in linguistdom? Are we really going to stick with sanewashing for our word?...
