Superlinguo @superlinguo - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Remembering Desmond Morris (and, the only time anyone has a good story about obtaining copyright permission for reusing an image in a publication)

Desmond Morris was a zoologist, surrealist painter, and his website is the best of what the internet looked like in the late 1990s. I was a teenager who purchased weird books from charity shops and remember reading The Naked Ape, his somewhat creative interpretation of human behaviour through the lens of primatology, which I'm sure is not the weirdest second hand book I read, but it was certainly one I remembered.

The Morris book I've returned to more than any other (and there are more than 100) is Gestures: Their Origins and Distributions, which he was lead author on with three other colleagues. I have multiple copies of the UK version, a copy of the US version and a version in Italian. I'm not sure why I have the Italian version, I just thought it was fun.

Gestures is, more than 45 years after publication, still one of the most comprehensive documentary projects about gesture use - surveying participants in 40 cities across 25 countries about the use of 20 different emblem gestures. I still constantly have reason to cite it.

One place I've cited it is in an upcoming handbook chapter. I wanted to talk about the geographic distribution of emblem gestures, and how they open are distributed in ways that don't match national boundaries, but reflect historical cultural contact. Gestures has some beautiful maps that illustrate this for Europe and I decided to include one. I wrote the draft a while ago, but at the start of the year the handbook moved into production and I got told it was time to figure out permissions for reusing the map from the book.

I spent a couple of hours poking around, figuring out that the old publisher Jonathan Cape's permissions are now managed by Penguin Random House. I found their form, filled in what I could and wondered if I'd hear back in time and wondering what I might be able to do if I didn't get permission.

A week or two later, a very apologetic member of the PRH team emailed me to say they no longer held the rights to that book and they had sent the request on to the person they had reverted to. Later that day I got an email from Desmond Morris himself, saying he was so delighted to get the request and happy for me to use the map (stay tuned for this publication!).

To be completely honestly never thought that Desmond Morris was actually a real human who spent time on email and would be interested to hear from me about a book he worked on over four decades ago. It's kind of like wanting to use a Beatles track and when you write to get permission Paul McCartney writes back and says "cool, yeah go for it!".

I had a lovely back and forth with Morris over a couple of weeks, we discussed Aussie Rules Football (which he was introduced to during a trip to Australia), and the story of how some of the production of Gestures came together. Desmond Morris passed away on the 19th of April 2026. I am grateful that this unexpected administrative adventure gave me the opportunity to thank him for writing a book that has been so influential to my work.

#language #linguistics #gesture #Desmond Morris #permissions

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

Where to publish research on lingcomm

I love seeing linguistics communication work, and the wonderful ways people do lingcomm to bring linguistics to new audiences. I do lingcomm as part of my job as an academic, which means that I also love seeing people share what they learnt about lingcomm with academic audiences. As my Lingthusiasm cohost Gretchen McCulloch says, it's great to explain linguistics to public audiences, and it's great to explain public audiences to linguists (and other academics).

Lingcomm research does not have a dedicated publishing venue. There are sometimes edited books with chapter contributions or maybe journal special issues. This does not mean there are not avenues for publishing about lingcomm work. I've learnt a lot building and maintaining the LingComm Bibliography, and thought I'd share what I learnt about linguistics and non-linguistics venues for publishing.

Language and Linguistics Compass has a long history of publishing excellent lingcomm work. This journal operates on a slightly odd "invitation" model, but you can always pitch your idea to the lead editor for Education & Pedagogy and see how things go. Really good for overviews and big picture topics.

Innovations in Linguistics Education does not say so explicitly on their website at the moment, but they’re open to discussions of linguistics education in all contexts, including lingcomm contexts. It is just starting out, but I appreciate that it's a diamond open access journal, meaning it's free to publish and read content.

Linguistics Vanguard is an online journal for short (3000 word) articles about innovative approaches in all major areas of linguistics. They publish on lingcomm, I know this in part from doing the bibliography and in part because I'm currently (2024-2026) an Area Editor with lingcomm as one of my listed specialisations.

Journal of Science Communication (JCOM) is the journal outside linguistics that most aligns with lingcomm. It's also great because it's a diamond open access journal. They run a whole series called "Practice Insights” about specific projects and their success, which are under 5000 words. I know with some scicomm journals there can be a challenge in convincing them that linguistics is a topic in scicomm (argh), so might require some careful framing.

It can also be good to check in with your area or specialisation journal and encourage them to accept papers about engaging the public in linguistics. I always want to see more research about effective and successful lingcomm projects. And, of course, if you do publish something, don't forget to add it to the LingComm Bibliography so I can keep up to date with suggestions for where to publish!

Updates!

Research for All is a diamond open access journal that focuses on engagement in research. If you are doing a project that has a lingcomm element that is about engaging the community you are doing the research/lingcomm with, this might be a possibility! (thanks to Hannah Little for this suggestion)

#linguistics #language #episode #lingcomm #academia #research #publication #open access

lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm Episode 117: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking

Sometimes, a phrase seems to leap off the page and lodge into your mind, crisp and shining like a precious jewel. Other times, you're reading something and it just won't stick, your eyes wandering away no matter how hard you try.

In this bonus episode, Gretchen gets enthusiastic about what psycholinguistics can tell us about creative writing, with Julie Sedivy, who's a psycholinguist based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and the author of two general-audience linguistics books, Memory Speaks and Linguaphile. We talk about moving from the style of scientific writing to literary writing by writing a lot of unpublished poetry to develop her aesthetic sense, how studying linguistics for a writer is like studying anatomy for a sculptor or colour theory for a painter, and how you could set up an eyetracking study to help writers figure out which sentences make their readers slow down. We also do a small linguistic experiment on air using the following words, which you can play along with: luggage, liminal, withstand, tremulous, pulchritude, zoo.

Note that this episode originally aired as Bonus 96: What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking, and we’ve added an updated announcements section to the top. We’re excited to share one of our favourite bonus episodes from Patreon with a broader audience, while at the same time giving everyone who works on the show a bit of a break. 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 linguistics podcasting with Helen Zaltzman, host of The Allusionist podcast! We talk about being nearly teenaged in the world of language podcasting (Lingthusiasm turns 10 later this year, and The Allusionist turned 10 last year!) and alternative careers that we had on the way to becoming podcasters (did you know Helen once worked for a reality TV show?). We also talk about breaking the kiki/bouba test, the importance of publishing "failed" experiments, the Bender Rule and the Holliday Rule (both previous Lingthusiasm guests!).

Note that this particular bonus episode is available to everyone who follows us at any level (including free!) on Patreon, so welcome if you're joining us as an Allusionist fan (or a broke lingthusiasm fan tbh, we're trying to give you some treats while also trying to keep the show running!!).

Speaking of which...a few people found Patreon's new community gifting feature before we even knew what to do with it so we've been able to give out 7 community-supported memberships so far to people who follow us for free on Patreon. If anyone else is feeling comfortably off in this economy and wants to help both us and your fellow lingthusiasts, we'd be happy to do this again! Follow us as a free member to get announcements whenever we might have gifted memberships to distribute!

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. Plus: we've been posting more and more fun things for free followers on Patreon, such as helping us decide what bonus episode to unlock next and this exciting new announcement about zines!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Original Patreon bonus episode 'What makes for beautiful writing, scientifically speaking'

Julie Sedivy's website

Julie Sedivy on Bluesky

Julie Sedivy on Twitter

'Julie Sedivy on Amplifying the Pleasure of Language' on Lit Hub

Excerpt from 'Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love'

Lingthusiasm episode 'What it means for a language to be official'

'Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love' by Julie Sedivy on Goodreads

'Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self' by Julie Sedivy on Goodreads

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.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

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. This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #Julie Sedivy #interview #psycholinguistics #creative writing #memory speaks #linguaphile

2026 LingComm Grantees

The 2026 LingComm Grants awarded seven $300 (USD) grants, thanks to Lingthusiasm patrons, as well as Lukas Graf, Sarah Kelen, Daniel Currie Hall, enchantedsleeper, Rob Monarch, and Kirby Conrod and friends. Each grant winner was connected to a relevant lingcomm expert for advice and support. The 2026 LingComm Grants received 111 applications.

Tundealao Toyi Joshua, Tone Deaf AI: Visualizing the “Digital Divide” in African Languages

Garima Sukhwal, Menu Linguistics

Ngoungouo Yiagnigni Abass, The Sound Detectives

Cooper Bedin, Drag video essays on language and pop culture

Sabela Morais Martínez, Hugo Parra, Sabela Treinta Lomba, Marco Bravo Rodríguez, Samuel Fentanes Barrozo, Lucía Vieitez Portas, Dálle á lingua. Conversas sobre lingua na taberna

Nastasja Deretić, Lingvistasja – Linguistic Emancipation

Kirby Conrod LGBTQ+ LingComm Grant

Suvarna P, Gender and Sex In Malayalam Podcast

Commendations

Melissa Schuring, Expedition Youth language

Baqau Hassan Omotayo, CivicLingua Lab

Martina Guzzetti, Mind the Gap: A Zine for Decoding the Language of Your Body

Lacey Wade, Phil Duncan, Jeff Holliday, Utako Minai, Steve Politzer-Ahles, Adam An, Bayleigh Baldwin, Lillianna Lamagna, Language Exploration at the Library

For more on the 2026 grants, the winners from previous years, and other lingcomm resources, check out the LingComm website.

#linguistics #language #lingcomm #grants

lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm Episode 116: Cross-cultural communication (in space!)

Sometimes, you're talking with someone and you just seem to click. Other times, you just can't seem to get comfortable: they're standing too close or too far away for comfort, making too much or too little eye contact, touching or not touching you in a way that just doesn't quite feel right. But where do our senses of what feels comfortable in a conversation come from, and how can they be so different from each other?

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all, other human cultures. We talk about a science fiction book called Hellspark by Janet Kagan (which was recommended by a listener!) which is a murder mystery set on a planet of cross-cultural communication gone wrong, and which sent us on a whole deep dive into the world of proxemics, aka the linguistics of personal space. We also talk about how these early roots of cross-cultural communication studies have shifted in modern-day linguistic anthropology, and compare several newer speculative fiction books about alternative structures for human societies (plus aliens and/or dragons), including What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed and To Shape A Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose.

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

Announcements:

Check our our updated topics page! It's a great resource if you're not sure what episode to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. We've added some new topics that let you browse, for example, which episodes analyze the linguistic elements of all the science fiction and fantasy that we've been reading! And we've kept the ability to browse episodes by linguistic structural features, which is perfect for when you're looking for an episode to pair with a topic you're teaching or studying.

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about idioms! We talk about some of our favourite idioms, the interplay between idioms and metaphors, why linguists are so excited about breaking idioms by changing one word slightly, and in particular why "the shit hit the fan" was responsible for multi-hour-long discussions that Gretchen participated in during grad school. (Swear warning, because there's really not another idiom that uh, hits the fan in the same way.)

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 110+ 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:

Hellspark by Janet Kagan on Amazon

What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed on Amazon and Bookshop

To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose on Amazon and Bookshop

The Bluesky post from Trish B that started it all

Wikipedia entry for 'Edward T. Hall'

Wikipedia entry for 'Proxemics'

Wikipedia entry for 'Mosuo'

'Moniquill Blackgoose: Also There Are Dragons' on LocusMag

'An Indies Introduce Q&A with Moniquill Blackgoose' on BookWeb.org

'A wish for something different at the frontier' by Jo Walton for Reactor

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

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.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

Peer Observation of Teaching - a structured worksheet template

This post links to a template for a peer observation of teaching activity. It's been designed for university teaching, but is flexible enough to be applied to other contexts too. Peer observation can feel quite threatening, this template is designed to encourage structured conversations with meaningful outcomes that can be acted on.

Peer Observation of Teaching template (google doc)

I created this template as part of a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education I completed in 2021. I had to write a motivation for the worksheet as part of the activity, and I've made that available too, to explain the motivation behind some of the design choices.

Peer Observation of Teaching - motivation of the template (google doc)

I've used this form in peer observation, and had people use it to provide structured feedback on my teaching. I've shared it often enough that I thought I'd post it publically here for anyone else who might find it useful.

If you find these documents at all useful, please let me know!

#linguistics #academia #teaching #peer observation #lecture #tutorial #professor #lecturer #solt

lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm Episode 115: The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked

What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who spoke it?

In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about a crossover episode with Claire Aubin of This Guy Sucked! Lauren's Guy who Sucked is Daisy Bates, who did a lot of early 20th century work documenting over 100 Indigenous languages in western and southern Australia, while also directly adding to policies and narratives that continue to harm Aboriginal Australians to this day. We talk about Lauren's history with the original archive, how much has changed since Daisy Bates's day, and where linguistics (and society) still has room to improve.

Please note that this episode includes reference to deceased Aboriginal Australians, as well as reference to attitudes and actions that are harmful to the self-determination of Aboriginal Australians.

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 the second half of our interview with Kory Stamper about her book on defining colour words, and this half contains spoilers!! We talk with Kory about how she learned about Margaret Godlove and many other women whose labour has been forgotten in early colour science and dictionary making.

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:

This Guy Sucked

This Guy Sucked on Patreon

Daisy Bate - Dangerous Women Project

Digital Daisy Bates project

Wikipedia entry for 'Daisy Bates (author)'

Wikipedia entry for 'Breaker Morant'

'Yarning with Youth: Our new Commissioner for Aboriginal kids' episode of the 7am Podcast

Uluru Statement from the Heart

Wikipedia entry for 'Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum'

The Yoorrook Justice Commission

Books:

'Finding Eliza – Power and Colonial Storytelling' by Larissa Behrendt

'The Passing of the Aborigines: A Life Time Spent Among the Natives of Australia' by Daisy Bates on Project Gutenberg

'Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen of the Never Never' by Elizabeth Salter on Goodreads

'Daisy Bates in the Desert: A Woman's Life Among the Aborigines' by Julia Blackburn on Goodreads

'Into the Loneliness: The unholy alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates' by Eleanor Hogan on Goodreads

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

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.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

superlinguo

This was such a fun cross-over!

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #podcasts #episodes #episode 115 #This Guy Sucked #crossover #Daisy Bates #historical linguistics #anthropology #anthrolinguistics #linguistic anthropology #anthropological linguistics #australian history #australian colonial history

I've been working at the same university for almost ten years, and last year I moved into a new office with a lovely bookshelf. I had maybe one or two shelves worth when I came to La Trobe. There is an organisational principle that makes complete sense to me and pretty much no one else.

This set of shelves make me happy and I just wanted to share. It'll be interesting to see how these shelves grow and change over the next few years.

#linguistics #language #academia #books #bookshelves

lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm Episode 114: 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'

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

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.

#linguistics #language #lingthusiasm #podcast #podcasts #episodes #episode 114 #color #colour #color terms #interview #Kory Stamper #True Color #historical linguistics #dictionaries #SoundCloud

Linguistics books for kids: What Makes Us Human, Victor D. O. Santos and Anna Forlati

"When you were a baby you hardly knew me."

"I'm sure you saw me today. Or Heard me. Or felt me."

Victor D. O. Santos has written an utterly charming first person riddle of a picture book. The text balances the rich, multimodal, diverse reality of what language is with accessible vocabulary that is approachable with younger readers.

Re-reading is rewarded by Anna Forlati's expressive illustrations, which provide some visual red herrings alongside clues to pick over when you come back around.

A fun one for introducing early and mid-primary school children to the diversity of ways language works beyond whatever their own experience of language is.

Get the book: Bookshop, Amazon [buying through these links provides financial support to Superlinguo]

See also: Linguistics Books for Kids - the Superlinguo list

#linguistics #language #review #kids #kids books #picture book

•18+ Adults Only

Watch Anya Live on Cam

Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.

✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions

Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming

lingthusiasm

Lingthusiasm Episode 113: 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'

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

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.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

#language #linguistics #lingthusiasm #podcast #podcasts #episodes #episode 113 #diglossia #bilingualism #multilingualism #arabic #french #portugese #english #greek #haitian

My Recommendation: Give a Commendation!

Awards and prizes are a lovely way to acknowledge good work being done in your workplace or community. Academia is full of prizes, some of these require self-nomination, others have open nomination or winners are selected by a committee.

These awards recognise good work, but they also act as a signal that this kind of work is valued by a particular group of people. Sometimes, these awards and prizes are created because the specific work being celebrated is not visible within established norms. I was involved in the establishment of the Australian Linguistic Society's Talkley award, which recognises good work being done to communicate about linguistics outside of academia. This kind of work is not easily recognised within formal workloads of academics, but if there's one thing universities love, it's when their academics win prizes.

One of my biggest critiques of awards is that people are not awarded commendations enough. It's great someone wins the main prize, but there are also usually many other very worthy people who should be given an honorable mention/runner-up/commendation. Even if you don't print them a certificate or give them a cash prize, it's still a great thing to do.

I love commendations! And they serve the whole ecosystem well:

Commendations functionally do not cost anything. You don't need to award a formal prize/trophy/cash. If there's work that you think honours the spirit of your award but isn't the winner this year, why not acknowledge that good work?

Commendations boost the aim you are trying to achieve. If your award is aimed at encouraging more of some behaviour, recognising more of that behaviour is good!

Commendations make the scope of your award clearer. Giving a couple of commendations helps people better triangulate what you think is good work. If your public engagement award only gives out prizes to people who write books, then the people making YouTube videos might give up nominating. If your commendations include a variety of genres, it affirms you believe they have value.

Commendations are useful and important currency in academia. Look, CV inflation is real and I hate it, but it's the game we're all playing, and there are many people who are doing lots of good work and have no external validation of this work to show for it. Commendations are straight-up academic currency and you can support the early career colleagues in your area by recognising the work they do, even if it doesn't meet the full prize standard. Giving awards and commendations is the closet you can get to straight up printing money for nothing in the world of academia.

Commendations do not detract from main award winners. You can still give your main prizewinner a trophy, a chance to collect an award at a ceremony, a bigger write up in the newsletter afterwards. Commendations do not dilute the value of the principle award, they demonstrate the highly engaged field in which the winner is seen as the best demonstration of the behaviour you're trying to encourage.

Shortlists (heck, even long lists!) also operate as preemptive commendations, especially if the awards in your professional world focus on books. Publishers know this, it's why you see books with stickers like "<book prize> shortlisted" on shelves.

Sometimes you might just not have exemplary work to commend. In such a case, I'd suggest you may have to get stuck in the trenches to build that capacity. I've taken to writing to awards bodies in my field, even when I'm not nominating someone, to encourage them to give more commendations. We've been giving out commendations since we started the LingComm Grants in 2020 and it's really affirmed my belief in the net benefit of the practice.

I also love the commendation-to-winner pipeline, I don't think a commendation should be a disincentive to apply in future years.

If your institution, organisation or academic society has a awards or prizes, make this year the year you also give out a commendation or three!

#academia #linguistics #awards

New article: Who Listens to Linguistics Podcasting? A Survey of Lingthusiasm Listeners, in Language and Linguistics Compass

For three years between 2022 and 2024, we ran a Lingthusiasm listener survey. We've used the survey for internal planning, answers to some linguistics questions were shared in bonus episodes and we are writing up some of the answers to those sections. I still wanted to share the things we've learnt about the Lingthusiasm audience. One thing that I find myself saying a lot when I do training about lingcomm or science communication is that we are not competing against each other, we are all on team linguistics/science and competing for peoples attention against reality tv or reels of people pretending to cook inedible food.

Digging into the results of our listener survey we found that there are some audience segments that have a deeper connection to linguistics, and some segments where Lingthusiasm is their only way into the topic. Separating out general audiences and academic ones is not always straight forward, and there are many different ways people engage.

One highlight of putting together this article was bringing several of our team members into the writing process! I'm a big fan of collaborative writing and while we've worked together for years, it was great to work on this new thing together.

Abstract

Podcasting is now an established entertainment medium, and is a useful platform for content that can find a niche global audience outside of traditional broadcast media. Linguistics is one topic that benefits from this model of internet distribution. Linguistics podcasting can serve both educational and entertainment aims, with audiences that encompass non-linguists interested in scicomm-adjacent topics as well as linguistics students and educators in secondary and tertiary education. To better understand these heterogeneous audience(s) for linguistics podcasts, this article presents survey data for listeners of the Lingthusiasm podcast (2024, 963 participants). We explore survey participant demographic data, as well as people's relationship to both formal linguistics education and linguistics as a topic of general interest. We show that the distinction between general and academic audiences is complex, and that there are audience segments that are highly-engaged auto-didacts. These results demonstrate the value of linguistics podcasting both as an educational resource and in advancing awareness of linguistics for new audiences.

Reference

Gawne, L., M. Tsutsui Billins, S. M. Dopierala, L. Velleman & G. McCulloch. (2026). Who Listens to Linguistics Podcasting? A Survey of Lingthusiasm Listeners. Language and Linguistics Compass 20(2). e70030. https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.70030

Trending Blogs

Last Seen Blogs

Superlinguo