Click here to listen to ‘Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper’

begonia: a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see ‘coral’ 3B), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet William, called also ‘gaiety’.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about trying to pin down definitions for colour terms with Kory Stamper, author of the new book TRUE COLOR! Kory is a lexicographer and was Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster for almost two decades. Her first book was Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, which we also loved, and now Kory is back with the fruits of her dive into the mid-20th century quest to standardize colour terms, taking us from dying fabrics to painting cars to assessing grades of maple syrup.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about childlore! We talk about our favourite bits of childlore from our own childhoods, such as skipping/clapping rhymes, counting-off rhymes, and fortune-telling. We also talk about tracking down the sources for “All Right, Vegemite!”, a compilation of Australian children’s chants and rhymes from Lauren’s childhood, selectively choosing to pass on less racist and sexist versions of the rhymes, the relationship between childlore and memes, as well as research from folklorists and anthropologists on childlore around the world.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink’ by Kory Stamper

• Kory Stamper’s website

• Kory Stamper on Bluesky

• Lingthusiasm episode ‘People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper‘

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr.

Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Here’s the link again to ‘Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper’

Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!

Lauren & Gretchen

Not a fan of substack? You can also get these same monthly update emails by becoming a Free member on Patreon.

Click here to listen to ‘Why “it’s a diglossia!” explains so many social dynamics’

In some communities, everyone regularly uses two languages or varieties according to the social situation, with one of them being more prestigious (and more likely to be written down) than the other. This particular kind of multilingualism is known as a diglossia.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about diglossia! We talk about why diglossia is the answer to so many questions Gretchen gets asked at parties, what “high” and “low” versions of a language have to do with mountains, where the four “classic” cases of diglossia come from (Arabic, Greek, Haitian, and Swiss), and how at least some of them might not be diglossias anymore. We also talk about whether there are new diglossias emerging (French? English???) and how to tell if you might be in a diglossia.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

The LingComm grants are running in 2026! If you’re working on sharing linguistics concepts with broader audiences or know someone who is, whether in person, online, with kids, through art, video, audio, writing, in person events (or some other idea we haven’t thought of!), we have $300USD grants to support your cool project. The grants also include a mentoring meeting with Gretchen, Lauren, and/or an experienced lingcommer who we have personally selected to be relevant to your project.

Applications close on 30th of April 2026, that’s the end of April anywhere on earth. Thanks to the generosity of several people we have more grants to give out than we expected, so please apply! Application form and further details can be found here.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about what we’ve been up to in 2025 and what’s coming up in 2026! Plus, we go behind the scenes on the Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame: we finally take our Which IPA character are you? personality quiz ourselves and use the results to give you a look into our artisanal process of assigning phonetic symbols to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes (and get a symbol for yourself). You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Diglossia’ by Charles A. Ferguson

• Wikipedia entry for ‘Mozambican Portuguese’

• Wikipedia entry for ‘Brazlian Portugese’

• Wikipedia entry for ‘European Portugese’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr.

Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Here’s the link again to ‘Why “it’s a diglossia!” explains so many social dynamics’

Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!

Lauren & Gretchen

Not a fan of substack? You can also get these same monthly update emails by becoming a Free member on Patreon.

Click here to listen to ‘When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL)’

Language is all around us. This sentence right here, is language! But between the raw experience of someone saying something and a linguistic analysis of what they’ve said, there are certain steps that make it easier for that analysis to happen, or to be understood or reproduced by others later.

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how language becomes linguistic data. We talk about making recordings of language, transcribing real-life or recorded language, annotating recordings or transcriptions, archiving all those materials for future generations, restoring archival materials from decaying formats, and presenting this information in useful ways when writing up an analysis. Along the way, we touch on playing 100+ year old songs from cracked wax cylinders, the multi-line glossing format used so readers can understand examples in a language they’re not already fluent in, analyzing spontaneous conversation using tapes from the Watergate Scandal, recognizing everyone who’s contributed (including your own intuitions!), and Lauren’s role on a big committee of linguists and archivists formalizing principles for data citation in linguistics.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

If you wish there were more Lingthusiasm episodes to listen to or you just want to help us keep making this show, we have over a hundred bonus episodes available for you to listen to on Patreon.

Not sure about committing to a monthly subscription? You can now sign up for a free trial and start listening to bonus episodes for free right away.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about about some of our favourite deleted bits from recent interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you! First, an excerpt from our interview with Adam Aleksic about tiktok and how different online platforms give rise to different kinds of communication styles. Second, a return to our interview with Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez for a bit about Spanish internet slang, -och, and why “McCulloch” looks like a perfect name for an author of a book about internet linguistics. Finally, deleted scenes from our advice episode, in which we reveal some Lingthusiasm lore about pronouncing “Melbourne” and imitating each other’s accents and answer questions about linguistics degrees and switching languages with people..

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Leipzig Glossing Rules from Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology Department of Linguistics

• Kittens & Linguistic Diversity Facebook page

• Codes for the Human Analysis of Transcripts (CHAT)

• Child Language Data Exchange System (CHILDES)

• CABank English Jefferson Watergate Corpus

• Jefferson Transcription System – A guide to the symbols

• Wikipedia entry for ‘List of -gate scandals and controversies’

• The Austin Principles

• T-Recs - ‘Tromsø recommendations for citation of research data in linguistics’ by H. Andreassen, A. Berez-Kroeker, L. Collister, P. Conzett, C. Cox, K. De Smedt, and B. McDonnell

• ‘Berkeley Cylinders’ post on Old Phono

• ‘Media Stability Ratings’ post on Museum of Obsolete Media blog

• ‘The Tape Restorator’ post on Endangered Languages and Cultures

• DELAMAN Award

• Pāṇini Award from the Association for Linguistic Typology

• ‘New publication: Situating Linguistics in the Social Science Data Movement. Chapter in the Open Handbook of Linguistic Data Management’ post on Superlinguo

• ‘Linguistic Data Interest Group: Five years of improving data citation practices in linguistics’ post on Superlinguo

• ‘New Commentary Paper: Open research requires open mindedness: commentary on “Replication and methodological robustness in quantitative typology” by Becker and Guzmán Naranjo [open access]’ post on Superlinguo

• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences‘

• Lingthusiasm episode ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are’

• ‘Tiny Turtle Follows Cat On a Skateboard | Cuddle Buddies’ on Cuddle Buddies YouTube page

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr.

Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Here’s the link again to ‘When language become-s(3SG) linguistic example-s(PL)’

Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!

Lauren & Gretchen

Not a fan of substack? You can also get these same monthly update emails by becoming a Free member on Patreon.

Click here to listen to ‘Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!’

Wait, surprise is associated with a particular intonation!? Oh, you can see surprise by measuring electricity from your brain!? Hang on, some languages have grammatical marking for surprise!?

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about surprise. We talk about surprise voice and context, writing surprise with punctuation marks and emoji, anti-surprise and sarcasm, and measuring the special little surprise blip (technically known as the n400) in your brain using an EEG machine. We also talk about grammatically indicating surprise, aka mirativity, and whether that’s its own thing or part of a broader system related to doubt and certainty (spoiler: linguists are still debating this).

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

New on Patreon: you can now buy a set of bonus episodes as a collection if you’re not keen on signing up for a monthly membership. Collections so far include Lingthusiasm book club, Lingthusiasm After Dark, Linguistics Gossip, Linguistic Advice, Word Nerdery, and Interviews.

Patreon bonus episodes also make a great last-minute gift for a linguistics enthusiast in your life.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript with Dr. Claire Bowern! We talk about We talk about what we can actually know about the manuscript for certain: no, it wasn’t created by aliens; yes, it does carbon-date from the early 1400s; and no, it doesn’t look like other early attempts at codes, conlangs, or ciphers. We also talk about what gibberish actually looks like, what deciphering medieval manuscripts has in common with textspeak, why the analytical strategies that we used to figure out Egyptian hieroglyphs from the Rosetta Stone and Linear B from Minoan inscriptions haven’t succeeded with the Voynich Manuscript, and finally, how we could know whether we’ve actually succeeded in cracking it one day.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘Intonation and Expectation: English Mirative Contours and Particles’ by Kelsey Kraus

• Kelsey Kraus’ intonationally contoured princess cake

• Etymonline entry for ‘surprise’

• ‘Tomorrow’s Emoji, Today: Unicode 17.0 Has Arrived’ by Jennifer Daniel

• ‘Brainwaves of people with coarse, curly hair are now less hard to read’ by Laura Sanders for Science News Explores

• ‘Novel Electrodes for Reliable EEG Recordings on Coarse and Curly Hair’ by A. Etienne, T. Laroia, H. Weigle, A. Afelin, S. K. Kelly, A. Krishnan, and P. Grover

• ‘Reading Senseless Sentences: Brain Potentials Reflect Semantic Incongruity’ by Marta Kutas and Steven A. Hillyard

• ‘Event-Related Potentials (ERP) explained! | Neuroscience Methods 101’ by Psyched! on YouTube

• Wikipedia entry for ‘N400 (neuroscience)’

• Lingthusiasm bonus episode ‘Language inside an MRI machine - Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda’

• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko’

• Wikipedia entry for ‘Mirativity’

• ‘New Research Article: Looks like a duck, quacks like a hand: Tools for eliciting evidential and epistemic distinctions, with examples from Lamjung Yolmo (Tibetic, Nepal)’ post on Superlinguo

• Wikipedia entry for ‘Topic and comment’

• ASL: Topic / Comment

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr.

Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Here’s the link again to ‘Whoa!! A surprise episode??? For me??!!’

Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!

Lauren & Gretchen

Not a fan of substack? You can also get these same monthly update emails by becoming a Free member on Patreon.

Click here to listen to ‘The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate’

Before there was English, or Latin, or Czech, or Hindi, there was a language that they all have in common, which we call Proto-Indo-European. Linguists have long been fascinated by the quest to get a glimpse into what Proto-Indo-European must have looked like through careful comparisons between languages we do have records for, and this very old topic is still undergoing new discoveries.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about the process of figuring out Proto-Indo-European with Dr. Danny Bate, public linguist, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is..., and author of the book Why Q Needs U. We talk about why figuring out the word order of a 5000-year-old language is harder than figuring out the sounds, and a great pop linguistics/history book we’ve both been reading that combines recent advances in linguistic, archaeological, and genetic evidence to reexamine where these ancient Proto-Indo-European folks lived: Proto by Laura Spinney. We also talk about Danny’s own recent book on the history of the alphabet, featuring fun facts about C, double letters, and izzard!

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about celebratory days, years, decades, and more with some relationship to linguistics! We recently learned that people in the UK have been celebrating National Linguistics Day on November 26th and many lingcommers are excited about the idea of taking those celebrations international: World Linguistics Day, anyone? What we learned putting this episode together is that celebratory days take off when groups of people decide to make them happen so…let’s see how many different locations around the world we can wish each other Happy World Linguistics Day from this year!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Danny Bate on Bluesky and Twitter

• ‘Why Q Needs U’ by Danny Bate

• Danny Bate’s ‘A Language I Love Is…’ podcast (Gretchen’s episode about Montreal French and Lauren’s episode about Yolmo)

• ‘Proto; How One Ancient Language Went Global’ by Laura Spinney on Bookshop.org and Amazon

• ‘Proto-Indo-European and Laura Spinney’ on Danny Bate’s ‘A Language I Love Is...’ Podcast

• Simon Roper on YouTube

• Jackson Crawford on YouTube

• Wikipedia entry for ‘Czech language’

• Wikipedia entry for ‘Old Church Slavonic’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content, our Discord server, and other perks.

Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr.

Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

Here’s the link again to ‘The history of the history of Indo-European - Interview with Danny Bate’

Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!

Lauren & Gretchen

Not a fan of substack? You can also get these same monthly update emails by becoming a Free member on Patreon.