Ben Zimmer, a language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, is a self-described "linguist, lexicographer, and all-around word nut," but I think this episode proves him to be a paragon of linguistic curiosity. He's committed to bringing the nuances and complexities of language to a general audience, and all through his work on words—which, as we know, are often persona non grata in the linguistics community. But nevertheless, this episode focuses on words, specifically, their political impact.

Words—signifiers—have power; they can index history (re: slay), political allegiance (🍉), in groups and out groups, overt and covert prestige, age, gender, and a whole lot more. Whether it's cunty, -ussy, rizz, nasty woman, enshittification, or ucalagon, we will discuss words' potential to be used and abused for political power. What happens when language becomes a conscious phenomena wherein the symbols we invoke index a political teleology?

This episode stretches across time and space to get at the importance of language when it’s invoked in a word-like form. From Bakhtin to Saussure to discussions of Trump and Biden, this conversation is alive with the awesomeness of language.

On a personal note I would like to thank Ben for being such an inspiring figure for young language scholars like myself. Thank you for the work you do, and thank you for doing it so thoughtfully.

Full interview on YouTube

Ben Zimmer - WSJ

Ben Zimmer - Twitter

Traveling Among the New Words: Lexical Adventures in the Digital Age

Ben Zimmer on CNN

Slang Trends Through History

Artwork by: Maja Mishevska, Brown '27 (https://mishevska.myportfolio.com/)

People often talk about language as "a window" into many things. Language can teach us about the mind, the brain, history, etc. But language is also a medium for discrimination, ridicule, oppression, unequal labor, and various other insidious practices. Linguistic oppression, as Kelly Elizabeth Wright tells us, isn't really about language, it's about how practices of oppression exploit language in their conquests.

Kelly E. Wright uses language to study and address forms of oppression, labor, racism, sexism, ableism, and the ideologies of what makes something "standard." This episode will address the question of sociolinguistic labor: why it exists, why it persists, and how to address it. We discuss how language is used as a barrier, a tool for discrimination and inclusion, a proxy for race and gender and class, among other things. If nothing else, this episode will show how studying language empowers you to make a difference in the world and highlight systemic issues.

For the full, unedited version of this episode, head to youtube.

Kelly E. Wright Website

Dr. Wright's Public Scholarship

Housing Policy and Linguistic Profiling

Hearing Rachel Jeantel

You Met My Ambassador

Shifting: The Double Lives of Black Women in America

Sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology of US Latinos

There’s a lot that I can say about Emily M. Bender, but I think that a philosophy professor of mine said it best when he described her as the “cutting edge of technology and AI and linguistics and ethics.” Obviously some of her cutting-edge-ness concomitantly stems from the cutting-edge-ness of large language models, deep fakes, and 'artificial intelligence' inventions. But out of all the computational linguists, Emily M. Bender stands out to me because she's made the problem of unregulated AI pertinent and understandable to everyone—linguists, computer scientists, climate activists, lawyers, everyone. Her message about LLMs and other AI inventions is clear: we have to do something, and soon, preferably yesterday. Because there is great incentive for AI to remain unregulated at the cost of our democracy, our right to privacy and ownership over our data, our planet, and (as she calls it) our "information ecosystem."

This episode answers all the questions you've had about 'AI' technology: how is the language of an LLM intrinsically different from the language of a human? What are the legal implications of un-watermarked synthetic media? What's going on with deep fakes? How can linguists use their knowledge to effect change? And throughout it all, you'll hear Emily's wisdom and empathy radiating through her wealth of knowledge.

Emily's Website

Collection of links about the 'Stochastic Parrots' paper and the subsequent firing of multiple coauthors

On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜

Baldwin: Understanding the link between joint attention and language

George Carlin

NBC News: Deepfake porn

Patricia Kuhl TedTalk: The Linguistic Genius of Babies

Language and Linguistics on Trial: Hearing Rachel Jeantel

Abeba Birhane

⁠Wesley Leonard ⁠

To study language is to study something uniquely human. To study language throughout time and history is to study the evolution of something uniquely human, to determine the variables and constants which shape human existence. Historical linguistics remains one of my favorite subfields of linguistics because it’s so much more than just one subfield. To study language diachronically (through time), historical linguists can examine many different aspects of language at once. We can wonder about the social conditions that might cause semantic change, or think about biological evolution as a catalyst for sound change.

Brian Joseph (OSU) has been in the field of linguistics since the late 70s. He’s written books on everything from syntax universals, to morphology, to clitics. He’s written papers on things as specific and niche as phonesthemes, to broader concepts like the connection between historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, or the problematic of “change” and historiography. On top of all that, he was the President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2019. Needless to say, I was humbled by the chance to speak with him. This conversation encompasses questions of why and how language changes. Whether through physical, cognitive, or social means, language responds to human evolution accordingly, leaving all linguistic utterances as evidence of both our history and our future. After all, what is "synchrony" if not a contradictory quality nearly impossible to qualify?

Brian Joseph's Website

Presidential Address: What is Time?

Picture this: it's early January, 2024, and hundreds upon hundreds of linguists have gathered for the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)'s annual meeting in New York City. With so many language nerds in one place, I couldn't help but interview as many people as I could about their favorite linguistics fact.

This episode contains tantalizing tidbits of information about everything from onomastics, non-concatenative morphology, and the McGurk effect—to historical events effecting language change, and statistics about sociolinguistic judgements. There are allusions to the debate of creole uniformitarianism vs exceptionalism, as well as examples of the Great Vowel Shift and the ongoing discussion of language's encapsulation of culture. From etymology facts, to tricky syntactic constructions, to cross-linguistic phonological observations, to the entrenchment of misogyny through language, you will be entranced and entertained for the entire episode.

The voices showcased here represent a diverse field; linguists hail from all backgrounds and subfields, and they work in industries like academia, healthcare, technology, journalism, and media. Who knew linguistics was such a versatile discipline that can totally and most definitely aid you in a lucrative career where you'll never have to worry about "tenure"??

Several interviews were filmed and posted to Nicole Holliday's tiktok page, accessible here.

Thank you to all who participated in this episode. Being a linguist is one of the greatest privileges I have ever known. I feel immeasurably lucky to be able to share that title with all of you.

Voices heard throughout the episode, in the order they appear:

Daniel Ginsberg, Director of Strategic Initiatives at the American Anthropological Association

Nicole Holliday, Professor at Pomona College

Heidi Harley, Professor at University of Arizona

Canaan Breiss, Professor at USC

Caitl Light, Academic Advisor at Loyola University Chicago

Kirby Conrod, Professor at Swarthmore College

Allison Casar, PhD candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Joshua Dees, PhD candidate at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Walt Wolfram, Professor at North Carolina State University

Gretchen McCulloch, Internet Linguist and host of Lingthusiasm: a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Kelly Elizabeth Wright, Post-doc at Virginia Tech

Jordan Douglas Tavani, PhD candidate at UCSB

Rachel Burdin, Professor at UNH

Gabby Poplawski, Undergraduate student at Pomona College

Jamaal Muwwakkil, Post-doc at UCLA

Michel DeGraff, Professor at MIT

Aaliyah Bullen, Undergraduate student at Swarthmore College

Paul Reed, Professor at University of Alabama

Alex Johnston, Professor at Georgetown and Consultant

Brad Davidson, Director of Medical Anthropology at Havas Health and You; Penny Eckert, Professor Emeritas at Stanford

Ceci Cutler, Professor at CUNY Graduate Center and Lehman College

Valerie Fridland, Author of Like, Literally, Dude, and Professor at University of Nevada, Reno

Mike Stern, PhD student at Yale

Katie Russel, PhD candidate at UC Berkeley

Bruno Ferenc Segedin, PhD student at Brown

Alexa Little, Learning Experience Designer at Veeam Software

Emily Bender, Professor at University of Washington

Ben Zimmer, Columnist for the Wall Street Journal

Aiden Malanoski, PhD candidate at CUNY Graduate Center

Jon Stevenson, PhD candidate at University of York

Byron Ahn, Professor at Princeton

and me, Talia Sherman, Undergraduate student at Brown

Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has studied the mind through a myriad of lenses, including language. Throughout Steve's career, he’s published books and articles on topics such as language acquisition, rationality, human nature, trends of global violence, writing and style, and language structure. He went from academic, to public intellectual—in 2004, he was named one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in the world today. And inevitably, the algorithms suggested I listen to his speeches.

As a younger linguist, I spent many an hour watching Youtube videos of Steve Pinker. Through his speeches, informational videos, interviews, and TedTalks, I learned how to use language as a means to learn about humanity and cognition. I began to see language as a product of evolution and culture and society: language exists because of human existence, but also in light of human proclivities, as a tool to advance our relationships and inventions. So naturally I spiraled into jittery nervousness when he responded to my email. But as it turns out, Steve is a really nice guy. He’s brilliant, he’s famous, he’s certainly well-read, but no amount of accolades, I’ve come to realize, can darken Steve’s blinding elucidations or his ability to educate any individual, regardless of their background. This is the genius of Steve Pinker: he’s able to educate the general public about all sorts of topics without diluting the significance or complexity of his message. It was an honor to interview him not only because of his impact, but because of his passion for interdisciplinary theories and inquiry.

After explaining the trajectory of his career, Steve talks about his research on language and language acquisition, including his work on pragmatics and their social and political implications—why do humans say things like “wanna come up for Netflix and chill?”? If language is an evolutionary adaptation, how can we use that insight to better understand the evolving purpose of language? What makes language so essential to the human experience? And what’s Steve working on right now?

Steve's Website

What our language habits reveal

Linguistics, Style and Writing in the 21st Century

Linguistics as a Window to Understanding the Brain

The natural history of song

The 4th law of behavioral genetics

Although Cory Shain (currently at MIT, soon to be at Stanford) studies language, therefore making him a “linguist,” his research could easily be classified as belonging to a number of other disciplines. To understand the computations responsible for language processing, he engages heavily with computer science. To study the functional organization and architecture of language in the brain, he uses methods of neuroscience. To round out the complexities of his research, he pulls from the theories and insights of cognitive science and psychology. Thus, Cory Shain actively questions the boundaries between language and other parts of human communication and cognition by remaining curious about how language works, not just what language is.

In this episode we first dig into the section of his research that’s dedicated to understanding the problem of difficulty in language processing. What mediates the difficulty of processing cost: a sentence's predictability or its frequency?

Then, we come to a truly awe-some question: how and why do we define what counts as language? Is language solely the processes that a specific network or cortex carries out? Can language encompass our intuitions into what someone else might be thinking? Why is there a common assumption that a language-specific network exists, and how does such an assumption influence our understanding of both the brain and of language?

No matter your previous understanding of language processing, the language network, or theory of mind, you will finish this episode having learnt something new about language, the brain, dependency locality, the importance of similar results across studies with varied methods, or perhaps the overlap between industry and academia.

Cory Shain's publications:

• No evidence of TOM reasoning in human language network
• Word frequency and predictability dissociate in naturalistic reading
• Robust Effects of Working Memory Demand during Naturalistic Language Comprehension in Language-Selective Cortex

Eve Federenko

Language and thought are not the same thing: evidence from neuroimaging and neurological patients

Broca-Wernicke Theories: A Historical Perspective

Rebecca Saxes

Ben Deen

I've heard it said that the best way to concretize a friendship is to interview your friend on a podcast. So that's what this episode is: a conversation between myself and my brilliant friend, Joseph Rager. Despite studying both Linguistics and Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard during undergrad, Joseph is now pursuing a doctorate in Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. How does his knowledge of linguistic methods and theory inform his analysis of literature and poetry? If literature is truly language, how do we study it scientifically? How can literature represent our spoken language, with all its indexicalities and quirks? Joseph and I discuss all these questions and more.

We talk about his thesis, which investigated the role of Spanglish and code switching in poetry and poetic analysis. We dive into the politics of aestheticizing of sound, of translanguaging, of linguistics itself; this episode is a reminder that language can and has been used as a means of exploitation and colonization. We express wonder and even frustration at the many barriers to education, the existence of genre, the way that language mediates our world, our conception of self, and our identity presentation. We inevitably gab about literary theory (Derrida! Barthes! Structuralism!), his favorite books, and the "brutal" world of academia—all this encapsulated in an episode that could be mistaken for a conversation between two people on a cross country flight at 3am (which, by the way, we've had).

In all teary-eyed-ness, I would like to thank Joseph for being so thoughtful, so intelligent, so kind. He's brought so much joy into my life and he will soon light up yours. I believe we can all learn from his experience and example: literature is fun, and it can be inaccessible, but at the end of the day, anything can be analyzed as a literary object. And it is the methods that matter, not the content of what you read. So start analyzing and questioning, and you might end up in academia. Which can't be such a bad place to be if people like Joseph are in it, right? Roland Barthes' The Death of the Author

Unspeakable Sentences by Ann Banfield

Tato Laviera

Nicolás Guillén

Negra, Si Tú Supieras: song based on works of Guillén, heard throughout episode