Chinwag

As technologies advance, it's a critical time to think about how we can help keep linguistic diversity rather than level every advancement to an anglocentric system. Let's discuss the languages that risk being left behind and what we can do about it.

How can we use computers to understand language as data? Can we combine statistics and language to answer our questions about linguistics? Listen to this episode about the methodology called corpus linguistics to learn more!

Ever wonder about Siri and Alexa and whether they really understand us? Do you dictate your texts to your friends, get the weather from Google Assistant, and tell your smart speaker to turn up your music? How do they know what you're saying? We'll start to answer these questions and more in this episode on Natural Language Processing (NLP).

What do minions, lasagna, and girl-boss energy have to do with linguistics? Today's episode is on 'cheugy' and how 'made up words' spread into our vernacular. We discuss neologisms, nonce words, wug tests, and more to learn about how new coinages gain traction.

Ever assumed everyone is American when you hear them sing, then only later realize that they have a very different accent when speaking? Let's talk about the phonological and sociolinguistic reasons for this in today's episode!

Wonder why and how we shorten forms to gonna, finna, wanna, and more? Are you gonna wanna know more about this, too? This week we're discussing verbal contractions and delve into a bit of formal syntax!

Let's chit-chat willy-nilly and have no flip-flopping while we're at it. We're talking about reduplication and whether we can know or KNOW know what it's doing in our language.

Do languages shape how we think about the world? What does it mean to be an ergative language compared to a nominative-accusative language? This week I am diving into the nitty gritty of theoretical syntax to help explain!la

We're talking about our "language muscle" and whether we're all born with an innate ability to understand language. Let's dive into the science side of linguistics and use our brains to learn about them!

Let's talk about code switching! Is it for dialects, registers, or full bilingualism? When do we use it and why? What's happening psychologically when we switch how we speak to different people? Listen to the final episode of season 1 part 1 to learn more about this cool phenomenon!

Did you have deja vu at the rendezvous while watching the matinee ballet? Who knew we could speak French! Learn how and why these words got "loaned" to us from our friendly language friends around the world in this week's episode

It's raining cats and dogs! I just got the boot because I let the cat out of the bag... Idioms are the hardest thing to master in learning a new language, but what really creates a phrase as an idiom? Why do different languages have different idioms? Let's talk about it.

What do your favorite meal, political scandal, and celebrity couple all have in common? We use portmanteaux to describe them! This week's episode discusses the difference between compound words and portmanteaux and delves into the history of the term. Plus, learn about how different people use the same term to describe wildly different linguistic phenomenon!

What does it mean when two words act as one? Why are some compounds hyphenated and others are not? How do new compounds form in a language? I'll answer a listener question and discuss what it means to be a compound.

Ever have a complete conversation without any words? Do you read "!!!!" as a statement? Can you comprehend the question "????"? Let's explore how we got to this point, what we really say when we don't say anything at all, and what even is happening with all this punctuation.