Podcast Review: Lingthusiasm

I am a longtime listener to the podcast Lingthusiasm recorded by linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. I had first learned about this podcast while watching “Tom’s Language Files”, a miniseries created by educational YouTuber Tom Scott. The title of the podcast is a portmanteau of “linguistics” and “enthusiasm”, and its tagline is “A podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics”. For me, it is nice to experience a show so focused in its purpose and habitual in releasing new episodes, as a new thirty-minute conversation comes out every third Thursday of the month. Gretchen and Lauren provide straightforward explanations of complex concepts in a way that makes the listener feel intelligent and never overwhelmed. Besides singing them praises, I will discuss several of their over one hundred episodes that I found most interesting.

In my mind, I separate Lingthusiasm episodes into two categories: the foundations of linguistics, and applications in the Real World. As someone who does not have a formal degree in linguistics but know a lot more about the field than the average person, I appreciate the casual discussion about the building blocks of language that would have been explained to undergraduates in their linguistics classes. I had previously cited “Episode 6: All the sounds in all the languages - the International Phonetic Alphabet” during an essay on writing and spelling in The Lord of the Rings, as this was the best resource for understanding IPA, even better than what was provided on the official website.

I especially enjoyed four other foundational episodes. “Episode 12: Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes” explained that babies can learn to speak any language because their brains have not yet begun to filter out sounds. While adults can learn to speak new languages, they may struggle with the correct accent because they are no longer able to process all sounds. “Episode 30: Why do we gesture when we talk?” had a companion video episode so viewers could see the gestures made by Gretchen and Lauren. Speakers use their arms, hands, and heads to emphasize or elaborate on spoken words. Sign language speakers also use gesture in addition to signed words, which can be confusing to new speakers. Other great episodes were “Episode 52: Writing is a technology”, which covered the history of writing systems from their inceptions to the present day, and “Episode 55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity”, which summarized the many ways to pronounce the consonant.

The four real-world application episodes that I found most interesting covered conlangs, dictionaries, and how gender presentation affects speech. In “Episode 1: Speaking a common language won’t lead to world peace”, Gretchen and Lauren described invented languages like Esperanto, Ido, and Blissymbols. While the original intention of these languages was to facilitate communication and achieve world peace, the founders often ended up to be terrible people. “Episode 8: People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper” was a book review in an audio format. Gretchen had met the author while moderating a panel of dictionary editors, also called lexicographers, while Lauren wrote a dictionary for the Lamjung Yolmo language spoken in Tibet as part of her PhD. I was interested in learning more about how dictionary writing worked and am glad someone else is doing that job instead of me.

“Episode 89: Connecting with oral culture” discussed the methods that stories were passed along before widespread literacy, and how written versions of stories are often treated as definitive versions in Western culture even if the original oral tradition was different. The episode reviewed national epics and folklore, including the compilations made by the Grimm Brothers and Homer. “Episode 93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones” covered the work of a high school dropout turned PhD researcher who realized that while some linguistic studies focused on the difference between how men and women talked, no studies existed on the differences for people who identified as neither. About half of this episode was actually about differences between dialects of English, since Jacq is a Canadian living in New Zealand. Additionally, the episode neatly linked to “Episode 90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are”, as modern, English-speaking, heterosexual men assigned male at birth tend to have least space between their vowels, meaning they pronounce the sounds more similarly to each other.

This past January, Lingthusiasm released “Episode 100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics”, which covered both foundational and applicational fun facts. My favorite set of fun facts focused on the use of the numerical term “score”, now usually called twenty. Americans might recognize the number from the Gettysburg Address given by Abraham Lincoln in 1863. The speech began “Four score and seven years ago”, meaning eighty-seven years. Score was a measurement of the Roman Empire that arrived in countries speaking Germanic languages, and five score was considered a hundred, also known as the long hundred. What we now consider a hundred was called tenty, while a hundred and ten was called eleventy. Of course, Tolkien brought the term back in his “translation” of The Lord of the Rings, as Bilbo turned eleventy-one years old during the Long-Expected Party.

Lingthusiasm has existed for almost nine years and is still going strong. All episodes come with transcripts, although the webpage does not allow for scrolling with keyboard arrows. Additionally, the episode “Villages, gifs, and children - Interview with Lynn Hou on signed languages in real-world contexts” was conducted in England and American Sign Language (ASL) with a translator, so a video allows viewers to watch the episode. If you are interested in linguistics and want an approachable podcast to assist your study, Lingthusiasm is a great place to start.

Abby Epplett’s Rating System

Experience: 9/10

Accessibility: 8/10