54: How linguists figure out the grammar of a...

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 ...  Show more

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 ...  Show more

Ingrid Piller speaks with Aneta Pavlenko about her new book Multilingualism and History (Cambridge UP, 2023). We often hear that our world 'is more multilingual than ever before', but is it true? This book shatters that cliché. It is the first volume to shine light on the millenn ...  Show more

Nick Enfield’s book, Language vs. Reality: Why Language is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists (MIT Press, 2022), argues that language is primarily for social coordination, not precisely transferring thoughts from one person to another. Drawing on empirical research, Enfield ...  Show more

In an enormously prolific writing and editing career, David Crystal has excelled in supplying volumes hitherto missing from the field: here a balanced and accessible introduction to general linguistics, there a lucid specialised textbook in an emerging field. With this memoir, Ju ...  Show more

Have you ever wondered what’s up with double negation, the history of gender neutral pronouns, or why swearing is taboo? Then get ready for this week’s guest, linguist Anne Curzan! Anne and Jonathan talk about how the English language has evolved since the 1300s and how our words ...  Show more