Linguistics After Dark

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Science
**Linguistics After Dark**

Linguistics After Dark is a podcast where three linguists (and sometimes other people) answer your burning questions about language, linguistics, and whatever else you need advice about. We have three rules: any question is fair game, there’s no research allowed, and if we can’t answer, we have to drink.

It’s a little like CarTalk for language: call us if your language is making a funny noise, and we’ll get to the bottom of it, with a lot of rowdy discussion and nerdy jokes along the way. At the beginning of the show, we introduce a new linguistics term, and there’s even a puzzler at the end!

Latest Episodes:

Episode 13: A-blade-ive Oct 06, 2024

Wherein we shove things away (with knives).

Jump right to:

0:37 Is there a word in some language for “responding to the literal words and not the subtext of a request?
4:22 Response question from Spotify: With babies absorbing sounds even without learning the language, when learning a language would it be good to listen to that language even if you weren’t actively trying to comprehend it?
7:30 Language Thing of the Day: Noun Cases
22:39 Question #1: Do other languages have adjective ordering like English?
27:08 Question #2: What would the phonetic description of a raspberry be? "Labio-lingual trill"? Also, it occurs to me that it would be cool if there were some kind of database of paralinguistic sounds, containing things like "ingressive labiodental fricative" (inhaling sharply through your teeth), and explanations of what they mean in various languages
35:55 Question #3: What part of speech is "End" in the phrase “End Construction” as seen on a highway road sign? I'd've thought it was a noun, shorthand for “the end of,” but I’ve noticed that in Virginia the road signs will read things like “Enter Fairfax County” and “Leave Arlington County,” which suggest that the first word is a verb, not a noun, and that raises more questions: why is it "leave" and "enter" (imperatives?) rather than "entering" or "leaving"?
44:14 The puzzler: If a 40-pound stone broke into four pieces which could be used to weigh any whole-number increment from 1 to 40, what must the weights of the individual pieces be?

Covered in this episode:

The hypothetical existence of a possibly-German word or sociological term meaning something in the vicinity of “oblivious literalism,” “de-phaticization,” “desubtextualization,” “supertextualization,” or “involuntary textual meaning-raising”
Don’t only listen to nursery rhymes
We do the genitive case weird in English
The thing that the thing was done to
Patients and agents again
Eli is shock-nə
“Tsk tsk, it looks like rain”?
“Standard” English is bad at present tense (and “Standard English” is a bad term)
As usual, translation is hard
Eli takes the most round-about route possible to figure out where he’s from

Links and other post-show thoughts:

The ablative in physics
Proto-Indo-European noun cases
Finnish cases & pronouns
Basque cases
Adjective ordering in English is (article, number, then) opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, and purpose
Apparently numbers, if not adjectives, are linguistically categorized as “numerals,” a subcategory of quantifiers, which are a subcategory of determiners
A raspberry without tongue is a voiced bilabial trill, written [ʙ] in IPA; a raspberry with tongue (when it’s not on the menu at a cocktail bar) is either (yes!) a voiceless linguolabial trill and written [r̼̊], or a a buccal interdental trill, written [ↀ͡ r̼] in the Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech
James Hoffman & Hames Joffman
The “tsk tsk” / “tut tut” sound is a dental click, written [ǀ] in IPA

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing for this episode was done by Luca, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 12: Dead Language Power Sep 03, 2024

Wherein we are not warful.

Jump right to:

3:36 A slight correction about the etymology of “magic”
5:55 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Verb voice, aka diathesis
23:01 Question 1: I [once] initially used "tiring" to describe someone, and then realized it didn't quite fit right, so I used "tiresome" instead. [T]hose should basically mean the same thing, and I can't [put the difference into words, but] they feel very different. How do words develop different connotations like that? / does the “-eous” suffix mean that something just has a flavor or hue of a thing but isn’t actually the thing? (Flavor/hue may not be the right words but I don’t remember what the correct term is) Like how “rightful” and “righteous” are not the same. I haven’t looked up the definition of “beauteous”, but I think it does mean something different from “beautiful”.
35:39 Question 2: I saw this screenshot of a tumblr post and it got me wondering. The grammar in the dialogue might be trying to suggest that the cavemen's language is "primitive", and we could imagine that the scene is set in a time when (spoken) language was still very much in development compared to what it is today. With that in mind, do you think they would have opted to use consonant clusters like gl, gr, and rg in their names? Are those (especially gl) common across languages spoken today (idk what to look for in WALS...)? When do you think they first appeared in a spoken language? What do we know about the sounds (phonemes?) our ancestors could produce; which likely came first and which ones are more recent?
51:30 Question 3: "Optimality Theory is bullshit." Discuss.
1:01:28 The puzzler: What is 3/7 chicken, 2/3 cat, and 2/4 goat?

Covered in this episode:

If you are a patient, you are experiencing a problem; if you are being patient, you are probably also experiencing a problem
“Collectivity” is not a word people know
Etymology is not destiny
English “caveman speak” relies heavily on phonesthemes
Human babies are scientifically proven to evolve into human adults
Sooner or later, M shows up
Eli is not an optimality theorist (because he thinks optimality theory is bullshit)
Eli apologizes to optimality theorists for calling their thing bullshit
Sarah fails to correctly divide a word into two-letter units

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Lexical gaps in English
Germanic / French / Latinate word triplets in English and it comes up here too
Collectivity is technically a word, and is a synonym of collectiveness
Per our belovèd Etymonline, “[Flour] also was spelled flower until flour became the accepted form c. 1830 to end confusion.” It doesn’t specify why it became the accepted form, but Webster’s “A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1806 and his “American Dictionary of the English Language” was published in 1828, so the timing would actually fit!
IPA pulmonic consonant charts
This was cut during editing, but we did discuss how there are many grayed out squares in the IPA for physically impossible sounds
Optimality Theory

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Audio editing is done by Luca, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 11: The Axiom of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Jul 30, 2024

Wherein we are not already in textbooks.

Jump right to:

2:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ergativity
25:50 Some people would say “historic moment” or “electric field”; others seem to say “historical moment” or “electrical field”. Is there any study of this difference[, and] how would you describe [it]? I usually call it whether people use nouns adjectivally, but that may not be accurate or precise. / "Magic" is a noun, its adjective form is "magical," and its adverb form is "magically." "Tragic," on the other hand, is an adjective, its noun form is "tragedy," and its adverb form is "tragically." Why aren't "tragic" and "magic" the same part of speech? should we make them the same part of speech? if so, do we drop "tragedy" and make "tragic" the noun and re-introduce "tragical" as an adjective? or do we invent the word "magedy" and get rid of "magical"?
39:47 How to learn a relatively obscure language without going to the country it is spoken in? How does it compare to learning a dead language?
52:56 If I'm trapped in the distant past with anatomically modern humans armed only with Ryan North's book "How To Invent Nearly Everything", then I plan to follow his recommendation to 'invent' writing (after spoken language, of course). What features should I keep in mind when devising an alphabet for my ancient new friends, and what might the result look like?
1:08:22 The puzzler: The name of what widely spoken language consists of four consecutive US state postal abbreviations?

Covered in this episode:

Agents, patients, doers, subjects, objects, and other words that don’t necessarily refer to the topic of a sentence
Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything
Sports commentators’ ongoing collective attempt to make nonce ergativity happen
Walkers and standees?
Agent-patient fluidity and hierarchies in languages like Chickasaw and Dyirbal
[Regina George voice] Stop trying to make “magedy” happen
If something ends in -al, it’s already in textbooks
Linguists don’t believe in adverbs, because they’re the same thing as adjectives (except when they’re not, but really they are)
Part-of-speech abbreviations that aren’t short for anything (again)
How to study a language depends on why you want to know it in the first place
Latin students can’t ask for help if their car breaks down
The Latin alphabet is really great for Latin! Because it’s the Latin alphabet, which was invented for Latin!
Sarah strongly encourages writing vowels and strong discourages writing boustrophedon

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Eli highly recommends “Describing Morphosyntax: A Guide for Field Linguists” by Thomas E. Payne
The Chickasaw people (and thus their language) are traditionally from northern Mississippi, northern Alabama, western Tennessee, and southwestern Kentucky. Dyirbal is spoken in northern Queensland in Australia.
Eli also mentioned “Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind” by George Lakoff
The etymology of “magic”
“Verbing weirds language”: Calvin & Hobbes, January 25, 1993
XKCD #356: Nerdsniping
Lang-8 no longer takes new users but they have an app called HiNative
Say Something In has courses in Welsh, Cornish, Manx, Dutch, and Spanish, for native English speakers
The Scots Wikipedia issue
Ryan North's book “How To Invent Nearly Everything”
Canadian Aboriginal syllabics
The origin of Hangul

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny wrangles questions, and show notes and transcriptions are a team effort. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 10: Voiceless Alvie Jun 27, 2024

Wherein we finally post this collection of tangents in a trenchcoat.

Jump right to:

15:09 Sneaky Question 0: As my high school-aged daughter starts to look towards college, she wants to learn more about the study of linguistics, both in terms of the fundamentals and in terms of cutting edge research. Are there resources beyond your podcast that you can recommend to us?
32:18 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Phoneme databases and inventories
46:59 Question 1: Where did the phrase “close but no cigar” come from? Where does the phrase "nursing a drink" come from?
57:30 Question 2: During the [2021] live show, you talked about how vowels are fake; with that in mind, would you say that phonemes (as opposed to phones or segments) are or are not fake? Along those lines, what would you say makes one linguistic theory as to how a particular part (say, syntax) of language works better than another, if anything?
01:17:40 The puzzler: The American rapper Watsky put out albums in 2019, 2020, and 2023, named Complaint, Placement, and Intention. The album cover art features the album name in all caps, as large as possible. Why did he choose those album names?

Covered in this episode:

Linguistics at the University of Campinas and the Brazilian Linguistics education system
Generative Linguistics and syntax
Should theories of language be good or just look pretty in LaTeX?
Resources for linguistics students
Phonetic databases and inventories and why they’re useful
#LingComm and linguistics memes for online teens (like @lingshits
Vowels are, as we have said before and will say again, fake, and also all the same
Consonants are real though, like ɬ (aka Voiceless Alvie)
The sounds coming out of your mouth are probably not the ones you think
Whether you should give cigars to students

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Severo mentions he is from Campinas. Coincidentally, the University of Campinas is where Daniel Everett did his Master's and PhD in linguistics.
Phoneme databases and other IPA resources Severo mentioned: PHOIBLE, UCLA, U of Glasgow’s Seeing Speech and Dynamic Dialects, and George Mason University’s Accent Archive
in re European Portuguese sounding Slavic
Q’s Greenland
That one XKCD, not for the first time and probably also not the last
Some papers about aspiration of stops in Korean, and one about Hindi
Tom Scott
Severo’s adorable felt wug

Our guest host:

Find Severo on Instagram at @severolinguista and @latinisteria, and check out his merch there as well at @glotalica!

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny transcribes, and Sarah does show notes. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod, and the drumroll sound is by ddohler.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 9: You Can't Live A Dangerous Banana Apr 27, 2024

Wherein we finish the podcast in under four hours!

Jump right to:

5:43 Language Thing Of The Day: Transitivity
34:55 Question 1: Are accents predictable? That is, there are specific accents people have based on the languages they have learned, and often these have specific-enough features to have stereotypes. But would a native speaker of Parisian French have the stereotypical “French accent” when speaking English even if they had grown up in a cultural vacuum or learned English from a book? Further, if this is predictable like this, is it sufficient to predict the accent a native speaker of Quenya or Lojban might have when they were learning English the first time?
51:37 Question 2: Have you noticed people using [ts] instead of [t] at the beginning of words, and why might that happen?
1:04:34 Question 3: How do songs in tonal languages work? How do the speakers distinguish between the melody and the tone?
1:13:01 The puzzler: Change one letter each in the names of two rival NFL teams to get synonyms for the name of a third NFL team

Covered in this episode:

Transitivity vs. intransitivity and ergative vs. accusative verbs
Why you can give a mouse a cookie but you cannot sleep a sandwich
Standard phonological mistakes
A rat whose name is not Cheese-teeth
Political allegiances of the Noldor
Too vs. tsoo and Tuesday vs. Tyuesday vs. Chewsday
English is a tonal language
“Trash” and “ashtray” are (we hope) not the names of beverages

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Pseudo-reflexive verbs in Romance languages (i.e. “i bathe myself” etc)?
In re hypothetical tri-transitive verbs: Wikipedia suggests “bet” and “trade”, citing a paper we couldn’t actually access, but you can try to dig it up if you want to read more. Not everyone agrees, though
“Complex transitive verb” can mean different things and not everyone agrees on that, either
Unaccusative vs. unergative intransitive verbs in English (depending on which argument is missing)
Valency), aka the real word for the marble slots we talked about
Mary Spender’s youtube channel
Chris Punsalan and his grandma of Chooseday fame (Grandma has passed away since we recorded this episode, but there is an extensive backlog of her being very sweet if that's your thing)
⟨Triangle⟩ spelled as ⟨chriego⟩ because kids are very good at phonetics actually
Okay, in retrospect, it should have been more obvious that Chinese media using hardcoded subtitles more often than English media relates as much or more to the HUGE number of topolects in their media market than difficulty hearing tones (even in music)
Old/Classical/Archaic Chinese is now suspected to be atonal, but Middle/Ancient Chinese aka Qieyun did have tones and overlaps the written record of Chinese music, including the establishment of Yayue and Chinese opera which does appear to make use of tones. (This is extremely complex and if you’re interested, you should do a lot more digging yourself! Our post-production research is still limited ^^;)

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on all the usual socials.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Edited by Luca, captioned by our new intern Harrison, and show notes by Sarah and Jenny. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 8: No Linguist Can Afford That House Mar 22, 2024

Wherein we KISS-FIST linguistics.

Jump right to:

3:15 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Garden path sentences
25:05 How do [in/formal] registers change over time; do they stairstep as we invent new informal registers and then everything bumps up a notch and the old formal registers fall off as “staid”, or is it nonuniform?
37:21 Audio question! Is linguistics a science? Is it a prestigious science? Why or why not?
58:03 What are your favorite words that don’t have an English equivalent or cannot be translated into English?
1:16:20 Listeners, what are your favorite words that haven't been fully un-italicized into English yet?
1:18:18 The puzzler: Think of an informal term for a beverage. Now say it in pig Latin, and you'll have an informal term for another beverage. What two beverages are these?

Covered this episode:

The beverage fandom
The euphemism treadmill
Real-time language processing
How Sarah likes syntactic ambiguity more than most people
Linguists are not (necessarily) translators
Linguistics is not physics
Yoinking words from language to language
Are toilets pieces of furniture?

Links and other post-show thoughts:

The headline “Violinist Linked to JAL Crash Blossoms” was actually spotted by American editor Mike O’Connell and shared to a linguistics forum, where another member, Dan Bloom, suggested “crash blossoms” as a term, as summarized on the Language Log and expanded on by the New York Times
XKCD #435: Purity about applied sciences
XKCD #2381: The True Name Of The Bear about the euphemism treadmill
That diagram Sarah mentioned about all the branches of linguistics
McGill professors Lisa deMena Travis and Jessica Coon’s offices were used as references for Arrival as described on the Language Log here, here, here, and here
SciComm people we named who you should look up: Vihart, Matt Parker, Numberphile for math. Brian Green, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox for physics. Language Log, John McWhorter, Gretchen McCulloch, Lauren Gawne for linguistics. English usage, Brian Garner and Grammar Girl.

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on all the usual socials.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Edits by Luca, transcript by Jenny, show notes by Sarah. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 7: The Fax Machine of Gondor Dec 10, 2023

Wherein we spin a shitpost question into linguistics gold.

Jump right to:

0:58 Mailbag; revisiting our treatment of linguistic typology
12:14 Language Thing of the Day: The Comparative Method
32:32 Question 1: Is English a creole?
40:34 Question 2: Are Old English and Modern English the same language?
51:07 Question 3: Is there any part of language that isn’t just slang and jargon that’s made it into the mainstream?
1:07:47 Last week’s puzzler answer
1:08:33 The puzzler: Take the name of an old communication technology, add a letter, and mix the letters around. You should get the name of a new communication technology — what is it?

Covered in this episode:

How a language's words and syntax can fall into different places on the typology spectrum
We're not Fractions After Dark, but we do like PIE
Why Grimm's Law should be called Rask's Rule
Star Wars spoilers via linguistic sound changes
A linguistics hot take with merit
The deterioration of the institution of marriage via etymology
Time is the cement mixer of language
A defense of business jargon

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Morphological Typology
Sir William Jones's speech, with a quote presaging the comparative method
Example of a Swadesh list
Examples of Grimm’s Law
Examples of English and German post-Grimm shifts
English Is Not Normal: A Case for English as a Semi-Creole Germanic, by John McWhorter (The article doesn’t appear to be accessible online, unfortunately.)
We tried to answer the question “how many Romance languages are there?” and the answer is both “a lot, more than you might think” and “the number varies depending on what counts as a language” which, honestly, we should have seen coming.
The History of English Podcast and the Saga Thing podcast
Lenition chart
Bill Labov's study about women being the agents of language change comes from Principles of Linguistic Change, Volume 2: Social Factors, in particular chapters 8-11. We couldn’t find a PDF available anywhere.
The beacons are lit! Marketing calls for aid!

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Edits: Luca; transcript: Luca/Jenny; notes: Jenny/Eli. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 6: Hamburger. Hamburger? Hamburger! Nov 11, 2023

Wherein we find an excuse to recommend a bunch of music to you.

Jump right to:

2:26 Language Thing of the Day: Filler words
14:17 Question 1: How did we get nicknames that don't seem to make sense? Like how did "Peggy" come out of "Margaret"?
25:26 Question 2: Why do singers' accents almost always become less intense in their singing voices as opposed to their speaking voices?
37:30 Question 3: How do we change the meaning of a sentence just by changing vocal pitch? Typed-out transcripts can lose the information conveyed by vocal pitch.
1:04:32 Answer to last week's puzzler
1:07:39 The puzzler: (Too long for Spotify! Check the post on our site!)

Covered in this episode:

Filler words in different languages (English, Japanese, ASL), and their discourse function
Names and their nickname equivalents: Margaret/Peggy, Theodore/Ted, Richard/Dick, John/Jack
Backformed names (e.g. if Nate is short for Nathan, then Kate is short for Kathan)
How nicknames are formed in different languages (Russian, Polish, Chinese)
What are children if not longitudinal linguistic studies?
The Beatles, Whitney Houston, Blink-182, the Ramones
Our future as an advice podcast
Gilbert & Sullivan
Effect of language exposure before birth on babies' linguistic behavior
Netspeak and netiquette in the 2000s
gr8, gr9, T9
Because Internet and its audiobook version
Court transcript style guides of the future
How to destroy a stuffed sheep with a lightbulb

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Number One brand Thai iced tea (available loose or bagged)
History of English podcast episode about first names
vlogbrothers video about the names John and Hank
Pop punk accent article blink 182: "I'm an American guy faking an English accent faking an American accent," Green Day lead singer Billie Joe Armstrong told Rolling Stone in 1994.
History of Punk docuseries
Gilbert & Sullivan Modern Major General has excellent patter and limited lyrical. It was tough to find a G&S clip that had both by the same singer in back to back moments.
Sondheim (Not) Getting Married Today has good patter vs lyrical.
We couldn't find the My Cousin Vinny clip or Chinese nickname thread. If you find some, send them our way!
The first five minutes: A sample of microscopic interview analysis by Pittenger, Hockett, and Danehy, which is a book from 1960 analyzing in minute detail the intonational meaning and paralinguistics of the first five minutes of a psychiatric interview.

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Jenny Sarah transcribed this one, and Sarah Eli did the show notes. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren't consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Bonus Episode: LxAD LIVE @ CrossingsCon 2022 (full video with audio description at the end) Sep 23, 2023

Wherein we #GiveLinguistsSwords. (Please note that this recording cut out a lot of background noise and claps/cheers, so if there is a weird volume jump up or down, that might be why.)

Jump right to:

00:04:42 Is syntax fake?
00:10:14 Favorite and least favorite words
00:23:48 How has profanity evolved with language?
00:34:40 What are the rules for onomatopoeia and how do they differ across languages?
00:41:13 What is lenition?
00:47:56 How do puns work in other languages?
01:02:15 What are fricatives?
01:02:33 The LxAD backstory
01:06:19 The first time we bring up L’Académie
01:08:12 Dead languages work poorly on the internet
01:12:44 Best stories of word mix-ups
01:18:12 How do colors work in different languages?
01:29:01 “It’s all Greek to me”
01:29:55 Where did the word orange come from?
01:31:36 Dialect-dependent homophones
01:34:56 What’s the most useless part of language?
01:40:29 Why is English spelling wonderful?
01:59:42 Sarah has to pronounce the hardest IPA sounds
02:07:30 The Thing At The End

Covered in this episode:

⁠Kewpie mayo⁠
That feeling you get when someone else is suffering and you’re just glad it’s not you
How to be rude and insulting but still G-rated
Translator love
SWORDS
On a scale of dead to Amish…
How to accidentally come on to someone in Spanish and ASL
Cappuccinos
Moose
⁠Dessus vs. dessous⁠

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Due to our link shortener going down, please click through for the ⁠full list of additional links⁠.

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, & Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Sarah does show notes, transcription is a team effort. Our music is ⁠“Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod⁠. Join us at ⁠linguisticsafterdark.com/volunteer⁠!

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Bonus Episode: LxAD LIVE @ CrossingsCon 2022 Sep 03, 2023

Wherein we #GiveLinguistsSwords. (Please note that this recording cut out a lot of background noise and claps/cheers, so if there is a weird volume jump up or down, that might be why.)

Jump right to:

00:04:42 Is syntax fake?
00:10:14 Favorite and least favorite words
00:23:48 How has profanity evolved with language?
00:34:40 What are the rules for onomatopoeia and how do they differ across languages?
00:41:13 What is lenition?
00:47:56 How do puns work in other languages?
01:02:15 What are fricatives?
01:02:33 The LxAD backstory
01:06:19 The first time we bring up L’Académie
01:08:12 Dead languages work poorly on the internet
01:12:44 Best stories of word mix-ups
01:18:12 How do colors work in different languages?
01:29:01 “It’s all Greek to me”
01:29:55 Where did the word orange come from?
01:31:36 Dialect-dependent homophones
01:34:56 What’s the most useless part of language?
01:40:29 Why is English spelling wonderful?
01:59:42 Sarah has to pronounce the hardest IPA sounds
02:07:30 The Thing At The End

Covered in this episode:

Kewpie mayo
That feeling you get when someone else is suffering and you’re just glad it’s not you
How to be rude and insulting but still G-rated
Translator love
SWORDS
On a scale of dead to Amish…
How to accidentally come on to someone in Spanish and ASL
Cappuccinos
Moose
Dessus vs. dessous

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Due to our link shortener going down, please click through for the full list of additional links.

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, & Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Luca edits, Sarah does show notes, transcription is a team effort. Our music is “Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod. Join us at linguisticsafterdark.com/volunteer!

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Bonus Episode: LxAD LIVE @ CrossingsCon 2021 Aug 07, 2023

We've gone live for #CrossingsCon! ...two years ago. And before we fell further into our unintended hiatus, we forgot to post this episode anywhere besides YouTube. Oops!! So here is this, and a promise that we are back! Full show notes will be added here and uploaded to https://linguisticsafterdark.com when we get them written, and we have a bonus episode from 2022 ready to post later this month, plus more regular episodes finally being edited!

So without further ado, call into our live show with your burning language questions and our two linguist hosts will answer them for you. Just one catch: we can’t do any research before answering. So if your language is making a funny noise, we’ll get to the bottom of it, with some rowdy discussion, bad nerdy jokes, and a lot of linguistics along the way.

If you enjoyed the show, send us a tip at https://ko-fi.com/emfozzing. And if you *really* liked the show, you can support us on Patreon at https://patreon.com/emfozzing.

For more information about CrossingsCon, visit https://crossingscon.org!

LxAD @ CrossingsCon Announcement Jul 28, 2021

Hello, and welcome to Linguistics After Dark! I'm Sarah, and this not really an episode—it's another teaser for next week's live show at CrossingsCon: Slipping Sideways. At 7pm New York time, Tuesday August 3rd, we'll be doing a live episode with real questions from real audience members! That's you!

The convention is free to attend, and throughout the rest of the week, your beloved podcast team (that's us!) will be participating in several other cool events as well!

On Wednesday August 4th, at 8pm New York time, Eli will be running a pub-quiz-style general knowledge trivia game for anyone who wants to attend.

On Friday August 6th, at 6pm New York time, Eli will also be joining writers CB Lee, Ursula Vernon, and Cat Valente to play Baron Munchausen, a wild and ridiculous semi-cooperative story-telling game.

Then I'll be hosting and Jenny will be appearing on a panel about the creation and use of conlangs, currently scheduled for 8pm New York time on Friday August 6th. That one might change, so keep an eye on the website.

And finally, as promised in our last live show, Eli and I will join our friend Dash to talk about the linguistics and archaelogy of the game Heaven's Vault. We'll be doing that on Saturday August 7th, at 7pm New York time.

We hope to see you at as many of these events as possible, and we welcome you to check out crossingscon.org/events to get a full run-down of the whole convention. Thanks!

And if you weren't consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth… now y'are :)

Bonus Episode: LxAD LIVE @ #LingFest Jul 02, 2021

Check out the events from #LingFest 2021 at https://lingcomm.org/lingfest/, and get hype for CrossingsCon 21: Slipping Sideways, running from August 1-8 on Gather, with more information at https://crossingscon.org/. Our show has not been assigned a time slot yet, but we'll make sure to announce it as soon as we have one!

⁌⁍ ⁌⁍ ⁌⁍

Wherein we are LIVE.

Jump right to:

coming soon!

Covered in this episode:

coming soon!

Links and other post-show thoughts:

coming soon!

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Sarah and Jenny transcribe and do show notes. Live captioning for this episode was done by Kelli Murphy from eCaptions. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Announcement: Linguistics After Dark LIVE! Apr 09, 2021

Hi everyone! We have two big Linguistics After Dark announcements for you.

The first announcement is: we're still here! We have two episodes that are in fact recorded and waiting to be edited, so look for those in the next little bit.

The second announcement is that we'll be doing a live show! We'll be taking questions from all of you while streaming on April 24th at 3pm Eastern. All of this is a part of LingFest, an online festival with some really cool linguistics events happening. Go to https://linguisticsafterdark.com/lingfest for more info and to get the link to the stream.

Thanks for sticking with us and we hope to see you in the stream on April 24!

Episode 5: Schwa de Vivre Aug 03, 2020

Wherein we talk a LOT.

Jump right to:

1:50 The International Phonetic Alphabet
30:59 Corrections
36:08 Question 1: Computer languages: Are they languages (in a linguistic sense)? They have rules, syntax, even dialects. They can express certain complex ideas better than English, but they cannot (easily) express arbitrary ideas.
44:50 Question 2: What causes a compound word like ‘bluebird’ (a bird that is blue) to become bahuvrihi like ‘Blackbeard’ (not a beard that is black, but someone who has a black beard)?
58:31 Question 3: If you could snap your fingers and know a new language, what would it be? (Like taking a point in D&D linguistics, you know the language as if you were a native speaker.) No rules, no restrictions (unless you want to pick one per category: real, commonly used; real, uncommonly used; real, dead; fake movie language; conlang).
1:10:55 Last week’s puzzler’s answer
1:12:50 The new puzzler: Three incandescent lightbulbs in a room, three lightswitches outside the room. You can look inside the room once and only once, after which you must decide which lightswitch controls which lightbulb.

Covered in this episode:

The IPA (developed by the IPA) ≠ an IPA, although Eli occasionally enjoys the latter too
ɹ, ə, æ, ʃ, Ʒ, ŋ, œ
Apple’s consistent failing of linguists
Cursive IPA, which apparently exists
How to learn IPA
“Bendy banana vowels”
Diphthong? Dip-thong? Dip-tong? It’s up to you, really
Computer languages have semantics but not pragmatics
A return of Gricean maxims having relevance (so to speak)
Compound words in Dutch versus in English
The gradual squishing-together of English compound words
“Website” is a single word, congrats to the AP style guide on finally joining the 21st century
Grilled cheese is not made on a barbeque
Agglutinative vs polysynthetic mostly means “where do you put the spaces”
Producer Jenny with the LOTR linguistic hot take
Producer Jenny with the (basic) elvish linguistic history
Zulu is neat and has interesting noun classes/gender-that-isn’t-gender
Sign languages are awesome and should have more research done on them!!
Also ASL is just a very useful second language in the US
This podcast exists because of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series on multiple levels and y’all should read it (or listen! The audiobooks are so good!)

Links and other post-show thoughts:

IPA chart
the Summer Institute of Linguistics
cursive IPA totally was a thing
typeit.org, and the Patreon
Agglutinative vs polysynthetic languages and more!
The Elvish languages mentioned: Quenya, Sindarin, and their shared ancestor, Common Eldarin (i.e., basically, “language of the elves”)
Native Listening
The Car Talk puzzle source

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Sarah and Jenny transcribe and do show notes. Our music is “Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 4: The HOA of Francophones May 16, 2020

Wherein we frequently get off topic and get angry at Les Immortels.

Jump right to:

1:08 Things Sarah Is Mad About Once She Did the Show Notes
3:39 Linguistic Thing of the Day: Borrowing!
8:00 L’Académie Française is annoying
22:27 Are there languages other than Irish that have the concept of helping vowels?
33:51 How do linguistic rules emerge?
51:36 Canadian raising! What actually is it?
1:09:00 The puzzler: Why are these birds flying in from different directions?

Covered in this episode:

A very hardcore church named All Souls Parish
Calques vs loanwords
Sarah mispronouncing the Spanish word for “avocado”
Epenthetic schwa and syllabic consonants
Should linguists get swords?
L’Académie Française does not know how language works
Anglish
Languages are not mathematical constructs
How phonetic inventories and stress patterns differ between languages
Lenition isn’t lazy, it’s economical!
Pidgins are not pigeons (though neither has syntax)
Linguistic redundancy
Adopting children and/or giving them piggyback rides
Vowels are like a shopping cart, or maybe a trombone
Whitney Houston
Emordnilaps

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Louisiana sort of has the Mary/marry/merry merger
⟨scooch⟩ predates ⟨skosh⟩ and is not related! Nor is either related to ⟨skoosh⟩.
All about Anglish! And all about physics in Anglish: Uncleftish Beholding
Epenthesis, and more about its presence in Ireland and the UK.
The “Castilian lisp” is indeed not out of deference to a king, nor is it actually a lisp, but that folk-explanation apparently dates back to the late 1300s.
⟨hƿæt⟩/⟨hwæt⟩ gives us ⟨what⟩ and also some Discourse
Native Listening (the book where Sarah read about that Spanish/English/Dutch word-stress study)
Some online things related to that
Lenition of consonants follows reliable patterns.
Eli said a quote wrong! It should have been "Eventually, you sell enough fish together, you decide to have a kid." -Tom Purnell, Eli’s sociolinguistics professor
Gretchen McC on the basic English vowel cart
Canadian raising diagrams and audio examples
We’re grateful that you could bear with us

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @LxADpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny transcribes, and Sarah does show notes. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 3: The Gospel of the Wug Apr 02, 2020

Wherein we make wugability happen and invoke rule three.

Jump right to:

3:40 The Part Where We Say The Title
20:22 Are clicks consonants?
30:22 Why do people like some words and hate others?
43:53 An uncharacteristically serious discussion about conversational styles and their relation or lack thereof to gender
65:18 The puzzler: What do the words ASSESS/BANANA/DRESSER/GRAMMAR/POTATO/REVIVE/UNEVEN/VOODOO have in common?

Covered in this episode:

The parts of linguistics we secretly don’t like
The ablaut of yeet
An inadvertent All The Stations shoutout
Jenny just says Walrus
Send us law questions!
The official LxAD Linguistics Hot Takes
Clicks, Ingressives, Ejectives, and... the other ones
Aaron/Erin is the new Mary/marry/merry
Phonesthemes
Bubu and Kiki
Our show notes have research!
Words are fake, but there’s a spectrum of reality
It’s like chai, but coffee
Meta language is important even for laypeople!
High school teachers know the dank memes of today—sometimes
If you say the food "herb" with an "h" you're wrong but valid
Optimality theory easter egg?

Links and other post-show thoughts:

The original Wug Test by Jean Berko Gleason
So far Sarah has not found the German study that she referenced, but has learned a lot about The Discourse around what constitutes irregularity in German. If you have information about this, let us know!
⟨snuck⟩ is indeed newer than ⟨sneaked⟩
Ohio 2
Choose your favorite wug plural
JBG’s Wug Store
Vowels are still a hot mess
The Other Consonants are called pulmonic consonants, which means that technically ejectives and ingressives are also not made using air from your lungs. We learned a thing.
Phonesthemes are super cool!
Bubu and kiki are also super cool!
Another optimality theory joke
There are new episode-specific highlights on our Instagram, with fancy highlight art!

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny transcribes, and Sarah does show notes. Our music is “Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod.

And until next time… if you weren’t consciously aware of your tongue in your mouth, now you are :)

Episode 2: Juno's Geese Feb 13, 2020

Wherein we discuss how linguistics is everywhere but linguists are nowhere, and introduce the concept of the unsolicited etymology swear jar.

Jump right to:

01:33 “Universal” word lists, bad puns, and university “field work” stories
07:25 What composes an accent? What counts as a dialect? What about “little kid speak”?
24:16 What are the most valuable ways linguistics can improve society?
45:45 Favorite ridiculous etymologies
54:31 The puzzler: What do the words JOB, POLISH, and HERB have in common?

Covered in this episode:

We love Car Talk
Dialects and accents often overlap but are not the same thing
Dialects and registers also often overlap but are not the same thing
Obligatory “A language is just a dialect with an army and a navy.”
Linguistics After Dark has no official positions on contentious geopolitical issues
Understanding the value of descriptivism and the reality of language evolution
Hot takes on regional identity in the UK vs North America vs California
Why don’t journalists know that linguists exist?
A story that has nothing to do with financial advising, and everything to do with geese
OK is the only acronym etymology that’s all correct

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Swadesh’s first name was Morris
Mutual intelligibility on the Deutsch/Dutch border
More mutual intelligibility, including Scandinavia, from an A++ YouTube channel
Victor Mair, coiner of the word topolect
All sorts of ways linguists and linguistics benefit society
BBC and Received Pronunciation
Here are some diagrams about the overlap between linguistics and other fields (this last one is the one Sarah had in mind)
The Unsolicited Etymology Trivia Jar
Etymologies of canary, easel, and lettuce
The full story of what the fuck, geese (spoiler alert: 356≠390)
And yes, ⟨mint⟩ (where money is printed) is also related to ⟨moneta⟩
Etymologies of island, isle, OK, and lox (which has a dialectical variation still spelled "lax"!)

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny transcribes, and Sarah does show notes. Our music is “Covert Affair” by Kevin MacLeod.

Thanks for listening!

Episode 1: Batman's Batsman Dec 24, 2019

Our very first episode, answering real language questions from real listeners! And boy do we live up to our no-research policy. (What is the truth about bubblers? TEACH THE CONTROVERSY!)

Jump right to:

00:43 Thing of the Day: Ambiguity (...or is it?)
04:28 In the English word ⟨scent⟩, is the ⟨s⟩ or the ⟨c⟩ silent?
11:50 Has our study of linguistics caused us to consciously change how we talk?
25:48 How should you pluralize superhero names?
34:37 Can "informal" mean "giving information to the reader" along with "not formal"?
39:30 The Puzzler: Can you find a word that has three double letters in a row?

Covered in this episode:

Fun with affixes!
English “soft c” spelling rules
Awkward teenage spelling reform phases
A hot take not taken
Obligatory (incorrect) citation of the Martha’s Vineyard accent study
How to tell if you should study linguistics
Obligatory mention of “bubbler”
Why is “bubbler” localised SO SPECIFICALLY?
Everyone needs to see Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse
Hot takes on Spider-Men, the Toronto Maple Leafs, and the Attorney General
In-laws and Sinlaws
Obligatory Latin-based explanations
⟨bassoon⟩ and ⟨balloon⟩ are basically the same word

Links and other post-show thoughts:

We have no link to back up Sarah’s assertion that ⟨sc⟩ makes an [ʃ] sound in Late Latin and modern Italian, despite a wide search. However, ⟨conscious⟩ is an English word where ⟨sc⟩ makes an [ʃ] sound, so that's almost as good.
The Nantucket study, which was actually done in Martha’s Vineyard (no research, y'all)
Confirmed: Kohler is a town named after the company named after the founding family
Bubbler is related to a Kohler trademark
Bubbler is not related to a Kohler trademark
I don't know what to think about bubbler anymore (They exist in Portland, OR, too!)
Fun fact: Sarah heard “Spider-Mans” in the wild the week after we recorded this podcast, explaining that "Into the Spider-Verse" has six total “Spider-Mans”. Native speaker intuition for the win!
Etymologies of inform versus informal
Turns out that ⟨informative⟩ ALSO used to be an inflammable-style contranym! (Well, sort of. It used to mean ⟨formative⟩. What even.)

Ask us questions:

Send your questions (text or voice memo) to questions@linguisticsafterdark.com, or find us as @lxadpodcast on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Credits:

Linguistics After Dark is produced by Emfozzing Enterprises. Eli edits, Jenny transcribes, and Sarah does show notes. Our music is "Covert Affair" by Kevin McLeod.

Thanks for listening!

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Ask us questions:

Credits:

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Ask us questions:

Credits:

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Ask us questions:

Credits:

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Ask us questions:

Credits:

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Ask us questions:

Credits:

Jump right to:

Covered in this episode:

Links and other post-show thoughts:

Ask us questions:

Credits:

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected