Our latest is live! ✨ Maria Temming reports on the worlds of fictional constructed language (aka conglang) speakers. For fans gathering around Na'vi, Elvish, Klingon, Dothraki, or High Valyrian, it’s about more than a connection to canon—it’s about community.
Conlang aficionados will also note that the definition of a “useful” language depends on who you want to communicate with. Sometimes, that’s a friend with a different native language, or the people who live in a country you want to visit; other times, it’s the people in your fandom. That doesn’t just make a conlang useful. “Once it starts to have real speakers,” Mikaelon says, “in a way, it becomes a real language too.”
Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!
Bonus 113: Czeching out…the Voynich Manuscript? Deleted scenes from Danny Bate & Claire Bowern
Learning languages and solving linguistic puzzles: two great topics that we’re always interested in a new angle on!
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic 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 Danny Bate, host of the podcast A Language I Love Is… about a language he loves: Czech! We talk about learning languages through in-laws, stock phrases, and hidden etymological parallels, and Danny attempts to teach Gretchen the most uniquely Czech sound (ř, the voiced alveo-palatal fricative trill). Second, more from Claire Bowern about the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, including a peek inside her super multidisciplinary class on the topic (which draws on related fields from medieval studies to information theory) and the story of World War II codebreakers who worked on the manuscript in between solving lightning-fast crossword puzzles and the Enigma Machine.
On Connor Storrie’s excellent Russian in HR (from a linguist)
Ok it’s time to put my Russian and linguistics (and Slavic linguistics) degrees to work and tell you why Connor Storrie’s Russian and accent work in this show is so freaking good. (Links added for those who want more info about stuff.) Hey other linguists — I’m playing fast and loose with notation here, ok, we’re not doing phonemes and IPA.
We’re going to go over overall mouth shape, palatalization, lack of aspiration, vowel reduction, and intonation with examples from Ilya’s dialogue! I’m going to talk about this from the perspective of an English speaker learning Russian since that’s what Connor (and I) did. Here we go.
1. Overall mouth shape
Every language has what you could think of as its own neutral or resting mouth position (aka, basis of articulation). One way to think of this is what the “I’m thinking” noise is — in English it’s uhh, in Spanish it’s often ehh. In Russian it’s mmm or ehhh or ahhh. The other thing is that the mouth typically does not open as much vertically when speaking Russian as when speaking English, but rather wider (horizontally).
Connor is doing a good job of maintaining a more Russian resting position (and I have a theory that this is one of the reasons his face looks so different as Ilya).
You can see Connor doing this when he says “ehh no” to Shane about whether this is his first time with a man in episode 1.
Also when he’s yelling at Alexei during the funeral in episode 5, we get to see him head on speaking Russian for an extended time, and you can see he is opening his mouth wider but not taller.
2. Palatalization
Every consonant has a place of articulation in your mouth, aka a place where your tongue touches the inside of your mouth or is positioned so that the air flows or is stopped in such a way as to make the sound. Making sounds is all about changing how air flows through our vocal tracts (throat, mouth, nose).
I’ve progressed from my menu of only gelato-making videos in Italian to other recipes in general, and in particular to lots of cooking videos from this popular Italian home cooking channel which was in the recommended videos after another one I watched. Maybe I’ll branch out again at some point to other speakers, but for now it’s nice to be able to stumble into more videos without having to think up new keywords to search. Also, I might need to make some of these recipes now…
In Estonian, so far I have learned one (1) highly useful word, “tere”, which this video tells me is an all-purpose neutral greeting (neutral with respect to both formality and time of day). Ooh, I’ve just realized while writing this post that it’s probably cognate to Finnish “terve”, a greeting I learned from Duolingo! (Yes, I just looked this up, seems like they both mean something to do with health.) So I’ve already learned one neat thing!
I’m also recognizing a few Estonian cognates from the Finnish Duolingo lessons, especially the verb “on” (which means “is”). I’m not recognizing many other words though, and I’m wondering how much of that is differing vocab and how much of that is not having learned many common words in Finnish yet (I’ve been especially chafing at how few verbs we’ve learned yet, it would be really useful to have a word like “I want” even if it’s unanalyzed because the grammar is more complicated than they want to introduce early).
Youtube’s algorithm has, after about a week, adjusted to the fact that I now want to watch videos entirely in Italian, and started recommending further Italian videos on my home feed (it was already doing so at the end of previous Italian videos). Tiktok’s algorithm, so far, has not done this yet, and is still recommending me stuff in English, despite me aggressively liking basically all of the Estonian videos I watch and nothing else.
Troubleshooting
I’ve noticed that it’s been easier to remember to do the podcast listening in Dutch and the youtube videos in Italian because I already have habits related to opening those apps, whereas I don’t have habits around using tiktok so I kept forgetting to open it and look at some Estonian videos. But a couple days ago I moved the tiktok app on my phone to a more visible location, and now it’s getting easier to remember.
Something else very weird that I noticed about listening is that when I play the tracks on my phone fairly loudly, it’s relatively easy to focus on trying to listen to them, sometimes while playing a simple visual game on my phone for something to fiddle with (I’ve already noticed that unfamiliar languages need to be played louder than familiar ones). But when I beam the podcast over to my speaker at a distance, suddenly I very quickly start tuning out the unfamiliar language and opening up apps that involve reading and completely ignoring it. I have no problems listening to podcasts on speakers in English; in fact, it’s my preferred method when I’m at home, but for some reason this causes my brain to reclassify Dutch as background noise to be ignored, even if it’s the same loudness as it would be when it’s played right near me. Super weird, has anyone else ever noticed anything like this?
you know what? accents are actually lovely. like you can learn all the languages in the world and you still have a part of your own with you. that’s cute
I hope to run into lots of interesting people at these events! If you’re already in one of these places and I know you, including from the interent, feel free to reach out and see if we can fit something in!
This whirlwind list of events and places has also gotten me thinking: this trip is going to be a fun chance to learn some more about some languages! I’m already fairly familiar with Spanish and Scottish English (I doubt people will speak much Broad Scots to me with my Canadian accent), and I’m confident on my ability to brush up on them by a bit of exposure and possibly watching a relevant movie on the way there, but the other four languages are going to take a bit more doing. Here’s my initial situation, in order of familiarity:
Italian - I studied it for two years in undergrad and spent about a week in Italy shortly thereafter, and by the end of the week I was finally beginning to feel like it was starting to “click” but then I haven’t really touched it since then. So I feel like it would come back with exposure but I wonder if there’s something I could do in advance to help it come back sooner/faster rather than taking the whole week of being there again
Dutch - I went through the whole Duolingo tree on rapid-speed back when you could skip through lessons for new material only and not practice drills over about a year in 2019-ish just for fun and as an excuse to look up lots of Germanic roots (I studied German before I knew any linguistics so it was fun to triangulate there). Never actually been anywhere Dutch was being spoken but I did find I could get the gist of youtube videos about linguistics in Dutch so it probably needs “activation” similar to Italian
Finnish - No background except for a few linguistics factoids (case! vowel harmony!), and that it’s a Uralic language (related to Hungarian but not to any of the Indo-European languages, so this is a fun chance to learn some things about a language family that’s unfamiliar to me)
Estonian - Also no background, also Uralic, clearly the fun thing to do would be to learn enough bits of Estonian and Finnish that I could compare them with each other (also since I’m meeting with linguists in both countries, this would be a fun topic for small talk conversation)
At the same time, there are a lot of language learning strategies floating around out there, and I have two nearly matched pairs of languages on this list: Italian and Dutch, both of which I am pretty good at cognate languages for and have studied some a while back, so I could test two activation strategies, and Finnish and Estonian, both of which I have essentially zero familiarity with, so I could test two strategies for getting somewhere near a basic functional ability.
I have about a month until I start this cycle with a flight to Helsinki. One month, four languages. What could possibly go wrong?
Here’s my tentative plan so far:
Activation, Italian and Dutch - I’m pretty sure what I need for these languages is largely as much audio imput as possible (given what’s feasible around like, all the other things going on in my life). I’ve decided to aim to watch one or two youtube videos in Italian per day, focusing on relatively concrete, daily life topics (such as gelatomaking) and to listen to one episode of a podcast in Dutch per day, aiming to get through the back catalogue of Kletsheads, a podcast about multilingual children.
Why these strategies? Well, I’m meeting up with linguists in the Netherlands but not in Italy, so it makes sense to try to learn more linguistics vocab there. Also, I’m curious about the effect of medium between video and podcast: will being able to see people talking and what they’re talking about have much of an effect on how much I can understand? Will I find it easier to integrate one or the other of watching videos vs listening to podcasts into my life at a practical level? Plus, will concentrating on a single, more academic topic vs watching a scattered, unsystematic list of videos have effects on my vocabulary?
Basic function, Finnish and Estonian - I’m probably looking for some phrases to say to people in shops and restaurants and the ability to pronounce things written on menus adequately and match heard words/placenames to written versions on signs. I started doing a very minimal one lesson a day on Duolingo for Finnish in January, when planning for this trip started, for the very simple reason that I was already familiar with Duolingo and it doesn’t have Estonian, so I decided to just start by doing a thing I was familiar with until I got around to doing more research. I’ve been casting around trying to figure out a source of basic Estonian phrases online when a friend mentioned learning French on tiktok, so I searched for “learn estonian” and voila! I think I’ll also aim for a video or two of Estonian phrases per day but I want to do more rewatching than with Italian or Dutch, since I’m aiming to remember specific common phrases. So maybe one rewatched video and one new video, per day? They’re shorter on tiktok than on youtube.
Why these strategies? This is a comparison of Duolingo’s more systematic approach with lots of repetition and gamification and word-by-word translation in a relatively sterile environment versus a more organic and free-styling approach with more grounding in real people and faces and full phrases where I’m not really trying to understand the individual words. There are lots of factors to compare and it’s not a completely fair comparison since I started Duolingo in January and I only thought to start the TikTok idea this week, but hey, learning anything still counts as progress.
Summary: I have four languages, each focused on a different app: YouTube, my podcast app, Duolingo, and TikTok. Hopefully for the video apps, this will help their algorithms kick in and start recommending me further useful videos. The difference between the two video strategies is that for Italian, I’m watching monolingual videos that are aimed at people who already speak Italian and just want to learn something about the topic, whereas for Estonian, I’m watching bilingual videos aimed at English speakers who want to learn some words or phrases in Estonian.
Am I going to get these four languages mixed up? Probably! I’m hoping that choosing a different app/strategy for each is a little bit helpful on that front.
Do I think these strategies are optimal? Probably not! But I’m aiming to choose things that feel relatively clear to implement consistently, rather than getting bogged down in researching language learning methods instead of actually getting exposure to the languages. I’ll probably do a basic “look up some key phrases and try to learn them” a day or two before entering each place too. And maybe shift other aspects depending on how things are going, stay tuned!
At any rate, I figured it would be more fun to blog about my attempts to use myself as a guinea pig for a few different language learning strategies here than to just do it in my own head (and hopefully help me with staying motivated). And maybe people will have tips of either language learning strategies that have worked for you in general or specific ideas for these particular languages, so this is the beginning of a series that I’m calling #Language Guinea Pig Diaries and future posts will also be posted under that tag!
Young kids growing up in Guatemala often learn Q’anjob’al, Kaq’chikel, or another Mayan language from their families and communities. But they don’t live next to the kinds of major research universities that do most of the academic studies about how kids learn languages. Figuring out what these kids are doing is part of a bigger push to learn more about language learning in a broader variety of sociocultural settings.
In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro, who’s an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, a native speaker of Q'anjob'al and a learner of Kaq'chikel. We talk about Pedro’s background teaching school in Q’anjob’al and Spanish, which sounds kids acquire later in Q’anjob’al (hint: it’s the ejectives like q’ and b’), and gender differences in how kids speak Q’anjob’al. We also talk more broadly about why this work is important, both in terms of understanding how language acquisition works as a whole and in terms of using the knowledge of how children acquire Indigenous languages to create teaching materials specific to those languages. Finally, we talk about Pedro’s newer revitalization work with a community of Itzaj speakers and the process of building a relationship with a community that you’re not already part of.
We love reading up on an interesting etymology, but the history of a word doesn’t have to define how it’s used now - and to celebrate that we have new merch with the motto ‘Etymology isn’t Destiny’. Our artist, Lucy Maddox has brought these words to life in a beautiful design in black, white, navy blue, Lingthusiasm green, and rainbow gradient. The etymology isn’t destiny design is available on lots of different colours and styles of shirts, hoodies, tank tops, t-shirts: classic fit, relaxed fit, curved fit. Plus mugs, notebooks, stickers, water bottles, zippered pouches, and more!
We also have tons of other Lingthusiastic merch available, it makes a great gift to give to a linguistics enthusiast in your life or to request as a gift from someone. Special shoutout to our aesthetic IPA chart redesign, which now comes in rectangle (looks great as a poster if you have an office or corridor that needs to be jazzed up), and with a transparent background for t-shirt purposes! Or get it on a tote bag or notebook so you can bring it to conferences!
In this month’s behind the scenes bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about the linguistic process of transcribing podcast episodes with Sarah Dopierala, whose name you may recognize from the credits at the end of the show! We talk about how Sarah’s background in linguistics helps her with the technical words and phonetic transcriptions in Lingthusiasm episodes, her own research into converbs, and the linguistic tendencies that she’s noticed from years of transcribing Lauren and Gretchen (guess which of us uses more quotative speech!)
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, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
Describing grammar for language learners: Living Languages Learners Guide for Pama-Nyungan revitalisation
Living Languages have created a Learners Guide grammar template, for people who want to create language-learning materials for their language. The Learners Guide is written in plain English, and includes extensive information about what could be included, and how to talk about it. The guide is designed for Pama-Nyungan languages, the most wide-spread language family in Australia.
From the Living Languages website:
The template has been written with Pama-Nyungan revitalisation languages in mind. We hope it will be used and adapted by communities for their own needs - giving life to, and showcasing the individuality and beauty of, their languages. It has been created for people to make it their own and share their language in a way that would best suit their community of language speakers and future generations.
The reference group has designed this resource as a tool for Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people working on their own languages. Please respect the people who are the authority for the language and follow their wishes and protocols if you are not from the language community.
We would like to keep a record of who has a copy of the template, so that if we make any updates or additional resources, or find any errors, we can let you know.
The Learners Guide was a major project for Living Language in 2019. They had a team of people writing and reviewing the document. I helped out with some of the general sections – after writing a descriptive grammar it was an interesting challenge to help with a grammar specifically for learners.
The Learners Guide template document can be requested from Living Languages through their website. The materials have been specifically written with Australian languages in mind, but it could be adapted if you’re working on creating resources for other communities.
other people, quarantime-googling: how to cut own hair
linguists:
day ?? of quarantimes:
*googles “how to learn old english”*
(just to be clear that this is not about ~productivity~, I am very much not saying that I expect anyone to be particularly effective at learning languages under quarantimes, but like with haircuts, the impulse…the impulse is there)
Lingthusiasm Episode 42: What makes a language “easy”? It’s a hard question
Asking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is – it all depends on where you start. And for babies, who start out not knowing any of them, all natural languages are eminently learnable – because otherwise they wouldn’t exist at all!
In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about a common question: what are people really asking when they ask about “easy” or “hard” languages? It turns out that there are several things going on, including which languages you already know, whether you’re approaching a language as an adult or a child, and what sort of motivation and contexts to speak it you have.
—
This month’s bonus episode is about teaching linguistics, and how you can be your own best teacher even if you aren’t heading to university any time soon. We discuss ways to make learning about more than just terminology, how to get right into data from the beginning, and how to keep a clear picture of how linguistics is relevant to other things you’re studying or enjoying. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the teaching linguistics episode and 36 previous bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord. New this month we’re also doing a couple listen-along chats in the Discord as well, so you can stream the episode at the same time as fellow lingthusiasts and chat with each other in the channel for that!
Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for yourself or other lingthusiasts! Check out IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at lingthusiasm.redbubble.com
—
Have a great idea for a linguistics communication project, but need a
bit of money to get it off the ground? Looking to support emerging
lingcomm projects? The LingComm Grant is a $500 grant for communicating
linguistics to broader audiences in 2020.
If we reach 790 patrons by the 1st of May 2020, we’ll give out four grants instead of two. Applications close 1st of June 2020. Find out more and apply here.
You can help keep Lingthusiasm advertising-free by supporting our Patreon. Being a patron gives you access to bonus content and lets you help decide on Lingthusiasm topics.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
