For the Love of Language

In which we create a theoretical constructed language (conlang) and dive into some of the fundamentals of Linguistics.

What are language families? From English to Proto-Indo-European and Nicaraguan Sign Language, our ramblings hopefully bring you something you didn't know before.

La Malinche, also known as Malintzin or Marina, was gifted as a slave to Hernán Cortés by the Tabascans, and became the intermediary between him and the Aztec king Moctezuma. To learn more about La Malinche, check out: Malinche's Conquest by Anna Lanyon (1999). Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (Tomo A) by Bernal Diaz Del Castillo (1984) describes La Malinche's origins and ment...

We discuss everything from the Latin alphabet to Egyptian hieroglyphs, and somehow manage to digress into how we only scream in vowels.

Is language an innate, human thing, or is it the same as every other cognitive process? We discuss the timeless debate between innatists and interactionists that originated with Noam Chomsky and B. F. Skinner.

We cover one of our most requested topics: swearing. Why do people swear? How do we rate the severity of swear words? What does taboo language tell us about a culture? EJ mentioned feeling the emotion from swear words more in a first language than in second languages. There have been several studies that mention this, including Emotion and lying in a non-native language ( Caldwell-Harris & Ayçiçeğ...

In which Stacie describes what it really means to rain cats and dogs and other ramblings on the topic of semantics and pragmatics.

A conlang is a constructed language. What goes into creating a language? Why do it? Have any conlangs been successful? We mention Michael Adams' book From Elvish to Klingon.

Alexis shares some of her knowledge and experience from working as an American Sign Language (ASL) Interpreter.

Do sounds have meaning on their own? We reference the following if you want to look up more details: The Bouba/Kiki Effect Pokémonikers: A study of sound symbolism and Pokémon names On sound symbolism in baseball players' names

We discuss how we name things and different naming conventions. Also, the podcast we mention on capoeira is called Only the Strongest.

We chat with one of EJ's high school friends, Esteban Ramos, about multilingualism and the experience at international schools.

We discuss the what, the how, and the why of grammatical gender.

Lelling joins us to talk about the Eurovision Song Contest and the way different languages are used in it.

Katherine Cowley tells how she replicated the language of Jane Austen's time in The Secret Life of Miss Mary Bennet and her other historical mystery novels.

Are language-learning apps effective? How should you choose which one to use?

Taylor tells how she started a multilingual book program at her school and other ways to help multilingual students know they belong.

Are we all seeing the same blue? What is a corpus? We answer your questions.

We dive into optimality theory and Stacie's plans for her dissertation.

In which we digress through ideolects, linguistic accommodation theory, and conlangs to answer the question of whether programming languages are languages.

What is the hardest language to learn and why?

Do the languages you speak impact how you think?

From conquests to song contests, what makes languages global and is it a good thing?