Tous les épisodes

It's not that Hawaiian has a completely different word for Christmas -- it's just that Kalikimaka is the closest that Hawaiian can possibly get to the word Christmas.

Why do we say "Ye Olde"? Why is "Menzies" pronounced "Mingis"? To find out, we have to go back into history.

The order of adjectives is one of those wonderful linguistic things that no-one really notices until it's pointed out to them.

Twitter was set up to support 140 characters. And in the English alphabet, that's easy to understand: a character is a letter, number, space or punctuation mark. People more or less agree with computers there. And if it was twenty years ago, that's exactly how the system would work. That far, no further.

There's an interesting thing about English that hardly anyone thinks about. There are two "th" sounds. And if you want to know why it took me twenty-one takes to record this intro, you try switching them round.

Machine translation's a useful tool, don't get me wrong. But if you actually try to use it for regular conversation, it'll fall down really quickly. Why? What makes it so difficult?

One comma can make a lot of difference. Language is ambiguous -- but in some very specific ways. Here's how.

Kids learn languages really easily, don't they? There's this thing in your brain that just works it out -- but it switches off when you're an adult. Right? Well, maybe. But it's not that simple.

Some languages have longer words than others -- but that's not just a simple choice. There's a lot of different ways to mix up morphemes, even if they all mean the same thing in the end.

"Word Count" is going to count plenty of things that aren’t words too -- and it doesn’t get to a more fundamental question: what actually is a word?

Language changes over time, and that's fine. Time for a dose of descriptivism, as the Language Files return.

"Hello!" "Thank you!" "You're welcome!" These are all phatic expressions, and people can argue about them.

The International Phonetic Alphabet: one sound for each symbol, and one symbol for each sound. Except for the sounds we can't make.

"Priming" is the idea that the words you read can change the way you act. And yes, there are papers that show an effect: but we also need to talk about the Replication Crisis.

Gestures are a really important part of language. But how do we use them, and why?

The Winograd schema is a language test for intelligent computers. So far, they're not doing well.

There are rules in the English language that you've probably never been taught, but you know anyway: how to split apart words with "infixes". But you've never been taught it because some of those infixes are words you probably shouldn't use in front of your high school English teachers...

Gricean Maxims are a vital part of how we understand each other: a set of... well, maybe "rules" is a bit strong. They're guidelines that we follow without realising it. And it's the reason that "asbestos-free cereal" sounds suspicious.

"Schwa" is the most common vowel in English. Every English speaker uses it, all the time, but most people have never heard of it.

Sooner or later, I was going to get around to this: it's one of the most famous experiments in linguistics.

Is there a "right" way to pronounce it? And why is it so complicated?

The answer is, of course, a bit more complicated than you might think.

Shakespeare sounds a certain way. Why? And why could it only work in English?

This is the only pirate reference you're getting from me.

This script was a nightmare to pronounce.

No. Mostly.