Wherein we play language games. Jump right to: 12:47 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Language games 37:07 Question 1: Could y’all talk about how your understanding of how to pronounce the word can affect what you think the spelling, etymology, or meaning is? Examples that comes to mind is “su-burban” vs “sub-urban,” “a napron” vs “an apron,” “a stigmatism” vs “an astigmatism,” “acomma” vs “a comma,” etc. though I think some of those examples are actually different phenomena from each other. I thin...
Jan 18, 2026•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 20
Wherein we are pro-winter until approximately February 15. Jump right to: 4:38 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Allophones 26:50 Question 1: Why do we say “And you will be… (this person)?” when confirming identity? Why is it future tense? This cannot possibly be English. This cannot exist. Am I just wrong or is this one of those weird linguistic things? 34:59 Question 2: If you had to remove one sound from the human phonemic inventory, which one would it be and why? 42:05 Question 3: So, English’s ...
Dec 06, 2025•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 19
Wherein we are not professionals. Jump right to: 4:44 Language Thing of the Day: The short scale vs the long scale 21:38 Question 1: Why do we use 'on' to refer to spiders being 'on' ceilings? To me the spiders aren't on top of the ceiling, they're under. All the languages I know use a very similar preposition to 'on' in English, so I'd like to know if any other languages use a different preposition or postposition. 38:20 Question 2: Morphologically and grammatically Japanese and te reo Māori be...
Aug 04, 2025•1 hr 24 min
Linguistics After Dark will be live next month! Come see us at CrossingsCon in Philadelphia, August 15th–17th. More details at crossingscon.org transcript: ELI: Hey, hey, Sarah, what do you call it when a corvid recites a poem by Coleridge? SARAH: …what? ELI: A crow sings Khan. SARAH: But why? that doesn't make any sens—ohhh, a CrossingsCon, because we're doing a live show there! ELI: Yeah! And, and, hey, Sarah, when are the Ides of August? SARAH: Well, CrossingsCon is the 15th through the 17th....
Jul 22, 2025•49 sec
Wherein we learn how to learn how to read. Jump right to: 4:53 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Existential “be” versus straight copula 16:32 Topic of the day: Phonics vs. the 3-cueing model, AKA how learning to read works, and how teaching people to read works (or doesn’t) 1:37:43 The puzzler: “Second in command managed jewel branch. A boy, last minute, made breakfast spread (6,9)” Covered in this episode: The best holiday dinner foods Existential verbs Copulas The science of reading “Vibes-based ...
Jul 16, 2025•1 hr 47 min•Ep. 17
Wherein we guess that’s part of our grammar now. Jump right to: 6:16 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Vowel shifts 44:23 Question 1: Why do British people say “I was sat there” instead of “I was sitting there,” are they afraid of gerunds or something? 57:11 Question 2: I’ve noticed distinctions between how numbers are pluralised and ordinalized not only between languages, but within them. English has “number mod 100 = 11 or 12 or 13, use ‘th’; number mod 10 = 1, use ‘st’; number mod 10 = 2, use ‘nd...
Apr 20, 2025•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 16
Wherein we enjoy swearing, big lakes, and ambiguity more than most people. Jump right to: 6:25 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Swearing 26:10 After marrying my wife, who is from Chicago, I (who am a native of Boston) often get comments from my in-laws or wife's friends that my accent sounds "British" to them. I think that's ridiculous, but I'm wondering why I consistently get the observation that Bostonians are "British-sounding." Incidentally, I don't think I have a Boston accent at all, but a lo...
Mar 07, 2025•1 hr 30 min•Ep. 15
Wherein we have an actual disagreement on the podcast! Jump right to: 2:42 Linguistics Thing Of The Day: Ways to Make Words! 42:18 Is it possible to have a different accent in your speaking voice versus your inner monologue voice on a regular basis? when I’m tired mine just throws from one accent to another, even ones I can’t make my mouth do but my brain knows the sounds of. 49:58 I would love to hear y’all talk about Unicode and Unicode normalization and the Basic Multiligual Plane from a ling...
Dec 29, 2024•1 hr 44 min•Ep. 14
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 li...
Oct 06, 2024•52 min•Ep. 13
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”...
Sep 03, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 12
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...
Jul 30, 2024•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 11
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...
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr 24 min•Ep. 10
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? Fur...
Apr 27, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 9
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 ...
Mar 22, 2024•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 8
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 ...
Dec 10, 2023•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 7
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 los...
Nov 11, 2023•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 6
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 frica...
Sep 23, 2023•2 hr 14 min
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 frica...
Sep 03, 2023•2 hr 14 min
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 wi...
Aug 07, 2023•1 hr 46 min
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 ...
Jul 28, 2021•2 min
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 qu...
Jul 02, 2021•1 hr 47 min•Ep. 6
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 http...
Apr 09, 2021•1 min
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...
Aug 03, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 5
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 ver...
May 16, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 4
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 Th...
Apr 02, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 3
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 com...
Feb 13, 2020•57 min•Ep. 2
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 rea...
Dec 24, 2019•44 min•Ep. 1
