Best Play on Words POWer Half Hour Podcast Podcasts (2025)

1
104: Reading and language play in Sámi - Interview with Hanna-Máret Outakoski 47:57

20d ago47:57

47:57

When we talk about language reclamation, we often think about oral traditions. But at this point, many Indigenous languages also have considerable written traditions, and engaging with writing as part of teaching these languages to children is important for all of the same reasons as we teach writing in majoritarian languages. In this episode, your…

1
103: A hand-y guide to gesture 48:02

2M ago48:02

48:02

Gestures: every known language has them, and there's a growing body of research on how they fit into communication. But academic literature can be hard to dig into on your own. So Lauren has spent the past 5 years diving into the gesture literature and boiling it down into a tight 147 page book. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen…

1
102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf 51:19

3M ago51:19

51:19

It's a fun science fiction trope: learn a mysterious alien language and acquire superpowers, just like if you'd been zapped by a cosmic ray or bitten by a radioactive spider. But what's the linguistics behind this idea found in books like Babel-17, Embassytown, or the movie Arrival? In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch ge…

1
101: Micro to macro - The levels of language 48:36

3M ago48:36

48:36

When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words a…

1
100: A hundred reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics 41:16

5M ago41:16

41:16

This is our hundredth episode that's enthusiastic about linguistics! To celebrate, we've put together 100 of our favourite fun facts about linguistics, featuring contributions from previous guests and Lingthusiasm team members, fan favourites that resonated with you from the previous 99 episodes, and new facts that haven't been on the show before b…

1
99: A politeness episode, if you please 56:05

6M ago56:05

56:05

If it wouldn't be too much trouble, if you have a spare half hour, could we possibly suggest that you might enjoy listening to this episode on politeness? Or, if you'd prefer a less polite version, "Listen! Now!" In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what politeness and rudeness are made up of at a l…

1
98: Helping computers decode sentences - Interview with Emily M. Bender 56:10

7M ago56:10

56:10

When a human learns a new word, we're learning to attach that word to a set of concepts in the real world. When a computer "learns" a new word, it is creating some associations between that word and other words it has seen before, which can sometimes give it the appearance of understanding, but it doesn't have that real-world grounding, which can s…

1
97: OooOooh~~ our possession episode oOooOOoohh 👻 44:56

8M ago44:56

44:56

Eye of newt and toe of frog,Wool of bat and tongue of dog...In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic and ~spooky~ about possession! We talk about how the haunting type of possession and the linguistic type of possession do share an etymological origin, but how the term "possession" itself is misleading, becau…

1
96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train! 35:13

9M ago35:13

35:13

We're taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don't forget to hold on! In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about metaphors! It's easy to think of literary comparisons like "my love is like a red, red rose" but metaphors are also far more common and almost un…

1
95: Lo! An undetached collection of meaning-parts! 43:51

10M ago43:51

43:51

Imagine you're in a field with someone whose language you don't speak. A rabbit scurries by. The other person says "Gavagai!" You probably assumed they meant "rabbit" but they could have meant something else, like "scurrying" or even "lo! an undetached rabbit-part!" In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic ab…

1
94: The perfectly imperfect aspect episode 39:01

11M ago39:01

39:01

When we're talking about an activity -- say, throwing teacups in a lake -- we often want to know not just when the action takes place, but also what shape that action looks like. Is this a one-time teacup throwing event (I threw the teacup in the lake) or a repeated or ongoing situation (I was throwing the teacup in the lake)? Both of these actions…

1
93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones 45:25

12M ago45:25

45:25

There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone's voice, it's useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they're wearing and who they're talking with. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiast…

1
92: Brunch, gonna, and fozzle - The smooshing episode 49:32

1y ago49:32

49:32

Sometimes two words are smooshed together in a single act of creativity to fill a lexical gap, like making "brunch" from breakfast+lunch. Other times, words are smooshed together gradually, over a long period of speakers or signers discovering more efficient ways to position their mouth or hands, such as pronouncing "handbag" being pronounced more …

1
91: Scoping out the scope of scope 30:09

1y ago30:09

30:09

When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "everything". That's because words like "everything" and "all" really mean something more like "everything typ…

1
90: What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are 47:48

1y ago47:48

47:48

On Lingthusiasm, we've sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibilit…

1
89: Connecting with oral culture 55:19

1+ y ago55:19

55:19

For tens of thousands of years, humans have transmitted long and intricate stories to each other, which we learned directly from witnessing other people telling them. Many of these collaboratively composed stories were among the earliest things written down when a culture encountered writing, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, the Mwindo Epic, and …

1
88: No such thing as the oldest language 41:36

1+ y ago41:36

41:36

It's easy to find claims that certain languages are old or even the oldest, but which one is actually true? Fortunately, there's an easy (though unsatisfying) answer: none of them! Like how humans are all descended from other humans, even though some of us may have longer or shorter family trees found in written records, all human languages are sha…

1
87: If I were an irrealis episode 34:59

1+ y ago34:59

34:59

Language lets us talk about things that aren't, strictly speaking, entirely real. Sometimes that's an imaginative object (is a toy sword a real sword? how about Excalibur?). Other times, it's a hypothetical situation (such as "if it rains, we'll cancel the picnic" - but neither the picnic nor the rain have happened yet. And they might never happen.…

1
86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez 47:25

1+ y ago47:25

47:25

Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who gr…

1
85: Ergativity delights us 46:00

1+ y ago46:00

46:00

When you have a sentence like "I visit them", the word order and the shape of the words tell you that it means something different from "they visit me". However, in a sentence like "I laugh", you don't actually need those signals -- since there's only one person in the sentence, the meaning would be just as clear if the sentence read "Me laugh" or …

1
84: Look, it's deixis, an episode about pointing! 38:55

1+ y ago38:55

38:55

Pointing creates an invisible line between a part of your body and the thing you're pointing at. Humans are really good at producing and understanding pointing, and it seems to be something that helps babies learn to talk, but only a few animals manage it: domestic dogs can follow a point but wolves can't. (Cats? Look, who knows.) There are lots of…

1
83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro 41:06

2y ago41:06

41:06

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 …

1
82: Frogs, pears, and more staples from linguistics example sentences 43:56

2y ago43:56

43:56

Linguists are often interested in comparing several languages or dialects. To make this easier, it’s useful to have data that’s relatively similar across varieties, so that the differences really pop out. But what exactly needs to be similar or different varies depending on what we’re investigating. For example, to compare varieties of English, we …

1
81: The verbs had been being helped by auxiliaries 37:39

2y ago37:39

37:39

In the sentence “the horse has eaten an apple”, what is the word “has” doing? It’s not expressing ownership of something, like in “the horse has an apple”. (After all, the horse could have very sneakily eaten the apple.) Rather, it’s helping out the main verb, eat. Many languages use some of their verbs to help other verbs express grammatical infor…

1
80: Word Magic 37:19

2y ago37:19

37:19

The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, pla…

1
79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation! 40:43

2y ago40:43

40:43

Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonation. When the pitch affects the meaning of an individual word, such as the difference between mother (high mā) a…

1
78: Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge 28:53

2y ago28:53

28:53

Communicating is about more than the literal, dictionary-entry-style words that we say -- it’s also about the many subtle ingredients that go into a message, from how you keep your audience in mind to how you portray the actions of the people you’re talking about. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch interviews Dr. Gabrielle Hodge, a deaf …

1
77: How kids learn language in Singapore - Interview with Woon Fei Ting 44:28

2+ y ago44:28

44:28

Singapore is a small city-state nation with four official languages: English, Mandarin, Tamil, and Malay. Most Singaporeans can also speak a local hybrid variety known as Singlish, which arose from this highly multilingual environment to create something unique to the island. An important part of growing up in Singapore is learning which of your la…

1
76: Where language names come from and why they change 37:17

2+ y ago37:17

37:17

Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “language” in the language itself; other times the name that outsiders call the language is completely different from the insider name. Sometimes they come from mistakes: a name…

1
75: Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions 27:02

2+ y ago27:02

27:02

Emotions are a universal part of the human experience, but the specific ways we express them are mediated through language. For example, English uses the one word “love” for several distinct feelings: familial love, romantic love, platonic love, and loving things (I love this ice cream!), whereas Spanish distinguishes lexically between the less int…

1
74: Who questions the questions? 37:36

2+ y ago37:36

37:36

We use questions to ask people for information (who’s there?), but we can also use them to make a polite request (could you pass me that?), to confirm social understanding (what a game, eh), and for stylistic effect, such as ironic or rhetorical questions (who knows!). In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic…

1
73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory 39:18

2+ y ago39:18

39:18

Maps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re also often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number of languages, like 7000, mapped to dots or coloured zones with suspiciously exact and un-overlapping locations. And yet, if you’ve ever eavesdropped on people on public transit, you know that any given location often plays hos…

1
72: What If Linguistics - Absurd hypothetical questions with Randall Munroe of xkcd 49:32

2+ y ago49:32

49:32

What’s the “it’s” in “it’s three pm and hot”? How do you write a cough in the International Phonetic Alphabet? Who is the person most likely to speak similarly to a randomly-selected North American English speaker? In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about absurd hypothetical linguistic questions with sp…

1
71: Various vocal fold vibes 40:18

3y ago40:18

40:18

Partway down your throat are two flaps of muscle. When you breathe normally, you pull the flaps away to the sides, and air comes out silently. But if you stretch the flaps across the opening of your throat while pushing air up through, you can make them vibrate in the breeze and produce all sorts of sounds -- sort of like the mucousy reed of a gian…

1
70: Language in the brain - Interview with Ev Fedorenko 38:15

3y ago38:15

38:15

Your brain is where language - and all of your other thinking - happens. In order to figure out how language fits in among all of the other things you do with your brain, we can put people in fancy brain scanning machines and then create very controlled setups where exactly one thing is different. For example, comparing looking at words versus nonw…

1
69: What we can, must, and should say about modals 42:23

3y ago42:23

42:23

Sometimes, we use language to make definite statements about how the world is. Other times, we get more hypothetical, and talk about how things could be. What can happen. What may occur. What might be the case. What will happen (or would, if only we should have known!) What we must and shall end up with. In other words, we use a part of language kn…

1
68: Tea and skyscrapers - When words get borrowed across languages 40:48

3y ago40:48

40:48

When societies of humans come into contact, they’ll often pick up words from each other. When this is happening actively in the minds of multilingual people, it gets called codeswitching; when it happened long before anyone alive can remember, it’s more likely to get called etymology. But either way, this whole spectrum is a kind of borrowing. In t…

1
67: What it means for a language to be official 37:33

3y ago37:33

37:33

The Rosetta Stone is famous as an inscription that let us read Egyptian hieroglyphs again, but it was created in the first place as part of a long history of signage as performative multilingualism in public places. Choosing between languages is both very personal but it’s not only personal -- it’s also a reflection of the way that the societies we…

1
66: Word order, we love 33:23

3y ago33:23

33:23

Let’s say we have the set of words “Lauren”, “Gretchen”, and “visits” and we want to make them into a sentence. The way that we combine these words is going to have a big effect on who’s packing their bags and who’s sitting at home with the kettle on. In English, our two sentences look like “Gretchen visits Lauren” and “Lauren visits Gretchen” -- b…

1
65: Knowledge is power, copulas are fun 37:18

3+ y ago37:18

37:18

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The pen is mightier than the sword. Knowledge is power, France is bacon. These, ahem, classic quotes all have something linguistically interesting in common: they’re all formed around a particular use of the verb “be” known as a copula. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCull…

1
64: Making speech visible with spectrograms 40:07

3+ y ago40:07

40:07

If you hear someone saying /sss/ and /fff/, it’s hard to hear those as anything other than, well, S and F. This is very convenient for understanding language, but it’s less convenient for analyzing it -- if you’re trying to figure out exactly what makes two s-like sounds different, it would be helpful if you could kinda sorta turn the language proc…

1
63: Where to get your English etymologies 34:56

3+ y ago34:56

34:56

When you look at a series of words that sorta sound like each other, such as pesto, paste, and pasta, it’s easy to start wondering if they might have originated with a common root word. Etymologists take these hunches and painstakingly track them down through the historical record to find out which ones are true and which ones aren’t -- in this cas…

1
62: Cool things about scales and implicature 37:20

3+ y ago37:20

37:20

We can plot the words we use to describe temperature on a scale: cold, cool, warm, hot. It’s not as precise as a temperature scale like Celsius or Fahrenheit, but we all generally agree on where these words sit in relation to each other. We can also do the same with other sets of words that don’t necessarily have an equivalent scientific scale, suc…

1
61: Corpus linguistics and consent - Interview with Kat Gupta 44:26

3+ y ago44:26

44:26

If you want to know what a particular person, era, or society thinks about a given topic, you might want to read what that person or people have written about it. Which would be fine if your topic and people are very specific, but what if you’ve got, say, “everything published in English between 1800 and 2000″ and you’re trying to figure out how th…

1
60: That’s the kind of episode it’s - clitics 41:37

3+ y ago41:37

41:37

Here’s a completely normal and unremarkable sentence. Let’s imagine we have two different coloured pens, and we’re going to circle the words in red and the affixes, that’s prefixes and suffixes, in blue. “Later today, I’ll know if I hafta get some prizes for Helen of Troy’s competition, or if it isn’t necessary.”Some of these are pretty straightfor…

1
59: Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Theory of Mind 38:59

4y ago38:59

38:59

Let's say I show you and our friend Gavagai a box of chocolates, and then Gav leaves the room, and I show you that the box actually contains coloured pencils. (Big letdown, sorry.) When Gav comes back in the room a minute later, and we've closed the box again, what are they going to think is in the box? In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloc…

1
58: A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip 39:39

4y ago39:39

39:39

What do the sounds fffff, vvvv, ssss, and zzzz all have in common? They're all produced by creating a sort of friction in your mouth when you constrict two parts against each other, whether that's your lips, your teeth, your tongue, the roof of your mouth, or in your throat. This whole class of sounds that are produced using friction are known as f…

1
57: Making machines learn Fon and other African languages - Interview with Masakhane 37:19

4y ago37:19

37:19

When you see something on social media in a language you don’t read, it’s really handy to have a quick and good-enough “click to translate” option. But despite the fact that 2000 of the world’s languages are African, machine translation and other language tech tools don’t yet exist for most of them. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch int…

1
56: Not NOT a negation episode 31:40

4y ago31:40

31:40

“I don’t have a pet dinosaur.” This sentence is, we assume, true for everyone listening to this episode (if it isn’t, uh, tell us your ways?). And yet it has a different feel to it than a more ordinary sentence like “I don’t have a cat”, the type of negated sentence that’s true for some people and not others. In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawn…

1
55: R and R-like sounds - Rhoticity 40:45

4y ago40:45

40:45

The letter R is just one symbol, but it can represent a whole family of sounds. In various languages, R can be made in various places, from the tip of your tongue to the back of your throat, and in various ways, from repeatedly trilling a small fleshy part against the rest of your mouth to an almost fully open mouth that’s practically a vowel. In t…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Play on Words POWer Half Hour Podcast

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Quick Reference Guide