Lingthusiasm

Vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, imposters, and frankenstein have something in common: they're all possessed by the spirit of linguistics! In this episode we get enthusiastic about various kinds of linguistic monsters 🧟‍♀️🧛🏻‍♀️👻🐺🦇

hi yes we did a whole episode about the linguistics of pokemon names it's a 100% real area of linguistics research and it's called POKEMONASTICS

Ever since we gave the world a tiny zine about diminutives a while back, we've been dreaming of a correspondingly huge zine about augmentatives Become a member at any level on Patreon (including free!) to see the draft of this zine before it's public next week!

Ever since we gave the world a tiny zine about diminutives a while back, we've been dreaming of a correspondingly huge zine about augmentatives Become a member at any level on Patreon (including free!) to see the draft of this zine before it's public next week!

Dogs get the bouba kiki effect!! royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article...

At a meta process level, I'm particularly proud of how seamlessly this episode blends some classic lingcomm fare (the etymology of werewolf!) with stuff that to our knowledge has NEVER been given a general audience explanation before, there isn't even a Wikipedia article or blog post about impostors

You can read the transcript for 'Vampires, ghosts, imposters and more linguistic monsters' here:

This month's bonus episode is about the most deeply irrelevant pitch emails in our inbox - and make them about linguistics anyway! Help us keep the show running and get access to over 110 bonus episodes by becoming a patron:

Ohhh, this could be dangerous... @fourbitfriday.bsky.social & I have been nerding hard on conlangs lately – I'm tying mazlaani in with my personal-functional-mythology, & he's building out kingscant/kingscript for Catacomb Kids. It is EXCELLENT but i also need to do other things before Nov 30 👀

In honour of the 10th anniversary of Lingthusiasm, we're launching the Linguistics Zine Challenge! Make or share a linguistics zine and tell us about it by the end of November, and you could win prizes!

You can find more links to lots of things mentioned in this episode on the shownotes page:

Lauren, every year: you know we don't do Halloween in Australia right Also @superlinguo.bsky.social: so we should totally do an October episode about various kinds of linguistics monsters!!!

Previously in @lingthusiasm.com episodes that Just So Happen To Appear In October But You Can Listen To In Any Month We Promise (still workshopping the acronym) OooooOOoooh, our possession episode!

I taught an upper undergrad stochastic processes class last year, where I had class- and homework examples modeling various linguistic processes as (appropriate) stochastic processes. One of my students liked the class so much that he took a class at the linguistics department the next semester, & >

Ahh this looks incredible, I hope people print it out and colour it in!!

Announcing the Linguistic Zine Challenge! Make or share a linguistics zine and tell us about it by the end of November, and you could win prizes! (oooh, prizes~~) Thread, or here's a link for the blog fans: lingthusiasm.com/post/8299478...

If you do this, you might win a copy of one of my books + some Words Unravelled merch!

omg two people have entered the linguistic zine challenge already and it hasn't even been 24 hours yet, you all are KEEN ABOUT ZINES

Are you tired of AI slop taking over your feed and invading your personal space? TRY MAKING A ZINE ABOUT LINGUISTICS INSTEAD and winning a prize while you're at it! Prizes include books donated by a ton of fabulous writers (and also me). Deets and list of prizes in thread!

ps we're also huge fans of your linguistics colouring book pages 🖍️

We also used google slides to make digital versions of our zines, it's great for people who don't have a lot of graphic design background like us! We did do handwritten prototypes to start which I found helps with making it flow a little more organically than starting digitally, but ymmv

And as an example of a much lower-effort zine: I made this one years ago (in <1 hour) for class. (An example of mid-term presentation option for research papers!) The quotes are sourced from twitter--perhaps even from you! -Full zine: tinyurl.com/4tspjfmj -IDs: tinyurl.com/49vv32pa

If you’re looking for an existing zine, humbly for your consideration~ sites.google.com/view/speechp...

I was absolutely already planning a zine about portuguese you dont have to sell me on it further 👀👀👀👀

This sounds really fun! I’ve never made a Zine before but I’ll try my best to put one together on language learning by the deadline!