The Strategic Linguist Podcast

You walk into an exam room. The test is supposed to measure whether you can use English. The writing section: write a 250-word essay on “the advantages and disadvantages of online learning.” You have 30 minutes. Introduction, thesis statement, three body paragraphs, conclusion. Grammar correct. Vocabulary recognisable. Structure clear. Linear. You write it. You score well. The test confirms it: yo...

LinkedIn has a genre problem. Not a content problem — the platform has always traded in self-presentation. A genre problem: the systematic borrowing of executive discourse by speakers who have not yet occupied the positions that discourse was built to describe. These posts share a structure. They borrow a register. And LinkedIn applauds every one of them. The standing ovation is the mechanism wort...

What my logo means, and why it represents The Strategic Linguist so well This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribe

Subscriber count is the linguistic hierarchy on Substack, for me. I think Bourdieu would agree. I’ve dedicated 52 weeks, over 45,000 words, to showing how power shows up in language, I must’ve learned a thing or two by now, right? Don't forget to see my post for a special discount to celebrate my one year anniversary This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or...

Picture a team meeting. Someone makes a comment about a colleague’s accent — not a slur, nothing disciplinable, just a brief impression. The room moves on. Later, the same colleague submits a report drafted partly with AI assistance; their manager, who also uses AI but would never say so, flags the writing as “not quite right.” Both moments feel minor. Neither registers as an event. Together, they...

Ask someone how they’re doing financially and watch what happens. The pause before the answer. The slight shift in posture. The decision — usually in under a second — about how much to reveal and to whom. Money carries a story people tell about themselves. Whether they’re competent, responsible, secure. Whether they belong in certain conversations, deserve certain things, are the kind of person wh...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com Speech Act Theory, and the frameworks that follow, describe what language does in social spaces — the structural effects it produces in interaction. They say nothing about what any individual speaker consciously intends to produce. That is the theoretical position this series has taken from the start: t...

The Intention Shield and the Perlocutionary Fallacy Imagine you are parked at a red light, and another driver rear-ends your car. The impact is loud, your bumper is dented, and your neck is sore. The other driver gets out, looks at the wreckage, and says, calmly: “I didn’t intend to hit you.” Statistically, they are probably telling the truth. They likely didn’t wake up that morning planning to ca...

Brené Brown and Adam Grant were talking about how to politely end a conversation in a recent episode of “The Curosity Shop”. Adam mentioned something he hears often: when a meeting ends early, you’ll hear the phrase: “I’m going to give you your time back.” Brené heard that and her face changed. She recognised something linguistically that most people miss. Adam continued, “One of my biggest pet pe...

There’s a moment in every feedback conversation where power shifts. Someone’s voice gets softer. Someone else’s gets firmer. Someone hedges; someone doesn’t. And in that moment, language does the work that hierarchies used to do explicitly. We think of workplace feedback as neutral—objective assessments of work done. But language doesn’t work that way. Language carries assumptions about who can do...

You’re typing something you haven’t told anyone. Something that keeps you awake at 2 AM. You tell an AI about it, expecting either nothing or judgement. Instead: “That sounds really hard. I can hear how much this matters to you. You’re not alone in feeling this way.” The warmth lands. It feels like someone listened. Like someone understood. You come back the next night, and the night after that, b...

Thank you Viktoria Verde, PhD , Claire Machado , Mariam Vossough , Diana , Jeff Long , and many others for tuning into my live video with Des Kennedy ! My Linguistics Lounge series lifts linguistic theories and frameworks off the page and into the lived experiences of experts on Substack. It was such a pleasure talking to Des Kennedy about how language shapes creative teams. Language, Belonging, a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com I’ve written about linguistic capital. About discourse asymmetry. About how the same interruption costs one person a nod and another person silence. How an explanation offered to you about something you already know signals what the speaker has decided about your category. How a woman’s hedged proposal...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com You’re in a meeting. You propose something directly: “We should trial this in Q2.” Your manager nods, writes it down, credits you in the follow-up email. Same meeting, same table. Your colleague proposes an identical idea: “I wonder if we could maybe try this... if that seems reasonable?” The manager as...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com I almost always pull from my existing posts so these rarely sit as discrete thoughts. My body of work remains free for all subscribers — find more of my work on corporate narratives under the Professional Communication section in The Library. This is the first in a three-part series on how founding narr...

The video edition of Linguistics Unscripted where I discuss the key themes of my body of work on Substack This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thestrategiclinguist.substack.com/subscribe

In Part 1, I argued that hedging is not a weakness. That I think, I believe, as far as I know are epistemic markers — they tell listeners exactly how you are holding your knowledge. That coaching them out of your speech doesn’t produce clearer communication; it produces communication that carries less information about whether you actually know. All of that stands but I promised something more unc...

At some point, someone told you to stop hedging. Maybe it was feedback after a presentation. Maybe it was a manager preparing you for a senior stakeholder meeting, or a coach working on executive presence, or a well-meaning colleague who noticed that you kept softening your statements before you made them. The advice probably felt consistent across whoever gave it: drop the I thinks . Speak declar...

Thank you Jen Benford , Mother Hood , Claire Machado , Stephen Scheidell , and many others for tuning into my live video with Anna | how to boss AI and Cristina ! Accent, Identity, and the Cost of Linguistic Performance With Anna from Anna | how to boss AI and Cristina from Cristina This week I sat down with Anna and Cristina — two non-native English speakers working in professional environments —...

There’s a good chance someone, at some point, stood in front of you with a PowerPoint slide and declared with absolute confidence: “93% of all communication is nonverbal.” What Mehrabian Actually Said (01.55) The Slide Always Wins (06.08) What the Misquote Actually Taught People (10.35) What Linguistics Actually Says (13.24) The 38% Problem (16.13) Two Stories Running at Once (19.48) The World Thi...

Welcome to my second episode of Linguistic Unscripted where I go off script and discuss topics from my posts that didn’t quite fit on the page. Today, we’re talking about accents. I talk about my experiences in my phonetics and phonology classes, why I love accents and a defining moment in my teaching career teaching accent reduction at call centres in Sri Lanka. We get into some interesting conso...

A note before we begin: This piece examines how linguistic authority operates in online platforms, with particular focus on Substack as a case study. It draws on sociolinguistic research into computer-mediated communication, stance, and algorithmic systems. The analysis focuses on specific patterns rather than offering comprehensive coverage of all digital linguistic phenomena. I also want to make...

A note before we begin: This piece draws on both academic research and lived experience. My graduate thesis on linguistic identity in post-civil war Sri Lanka forms the foundation of this analysis. I also grew up through Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983-2009) and taught English across multiple contexts in Colombo, in private language schools, government institutions, and multinational companies. This a...

A quick note before we begin: the study of voice, accent, and identity is vast and complex, encompassing decades of research across sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and related fields. This article offers a curated exploration focused on specific use cases rather than a comprehensive audit of the field. Many important perspectives and dimensions of this topic remain beyond the scope of this p...

You speak English every day. You’ve been doing it since you were a toddler. You text, you chat, you argue about the Oxford comma. So naturally, you might think: How complicated can the study of language really be? This assumption is the field’s biggest problem. The Identity Crisis The Illusion of Expertise Seeing Systems Where Others See “Just Talk” The Invisible Infrastructure Why Linguistics Rem...