The World in Words: Recent Episodes
The World in Words
The World in Words podcast is about languages and the people who speak them. Hosted by The World's Patrick Cox and Nina Porzucki.
In this episode, a conversation with language writer Julie Sedivy. Her memoir, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love is a kind of natural history of language, told through some of Julie’s most meaningful linguistic encounters: at home, in school, in love and in death.
Check out Julie's website for more of her writing. And listen to this Subtitle episode about her efforts to reclaim her native Czech, most of which she forgot after moving to Canada as a child.
Music in this episode by Par, Medité, Brightarm Orchestra, Laura Platt, Ookean, and Trabant 33. The photo shows Julie Sedivy and her daughter in the Czech Republic.
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As 20-year-old Olga Janáčková lay dying from typhoid fever, her father wrote down everything she said. Later, he transformed those words—and gasps—into music. The grieving father, Czech composer Leoš Janáček, called the ultra-short musical pieces "speech melodies." In this episode, language writer Michael Erard invites cellist Petronella Torin to play Olga's speech melodies. NYU's Michael Beckerman describes the controversy surrounding them.
This is among countless ways that loved ones have memorialized the final words of the dying. Michael Erard tells the stories of many of them in his new book, Bye Bye I Love You.
Music in this episode by Magnus Ludvigsson, Medité, Dream Cave, Nylonia, Alexandra Woodward, Cobby Costa, August Wilhelmsson, David Celeste, Martin Landstrom, Gavin Luke, Rand Also, Airae, Alan Ellis, Jules Gaia, Trabant 33, and Leoš Janáček. More about cellist Petronella Torin here.
The photo (via Wikimedia Commons) shows Olga Janáčková, daughter of the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, not long before her death from typhoid fever.
Read a transcript of this episode here. Subscribe to our newsletter here.
Some Icelanders are becoming unsettled by this existential question: Will their language still be spoken in the future? Comedian and former Reykjavik mayor Jón Gnarr is convinced that this uniquely archaic-yet-modern language will one day die out. He says his children express themselves beautifully in English but speak limited Icelandic. Give it a couple more generations, and who knows? For Gnarr and many others, speaking Icelandic is an essential part of being Icelandic. Without the language, Iceland's patriotic anthem "Land, Nation and Tongue" would lose its meaning. Among Iceland's multitude of avid book-readers though, the language is showing few signs of disappearing. For now at least, Icelandic authors are committed to writing in their mother tongue.
This is part two of our reporting on Icelandic. Listen to the first part, Icelandic, the language that recycles everything.
In addition to Jón Gnarr, we hear from novelists Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and Sverrir Norland, as well as literary translator Larissa Kyzer, linguist Ari Páll Kristinsson, and Ethiopian-born restaurant owner Azeb Kahssay.
Music in this episode by Luella Gren, Hysics, Medité, Farrell Wooten, J.S. Bach/Eric Jacobsen, Jon Björk, and Trabant 33. The photo is of a poster in Reykjavik celebrating the Icelandic language.
Read a transcript of the episode here. Sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly newsletter here.
Many place names in the United States are borrowed from Native American words. It's often hard to trace the roots. Over time, the original names were often transformed beyond recognition, victims of mangled pronunciation. Suzanne Hogan is our guide to the origins of Missouri, a name rooted in the Chiwere language. Chiwere has been imperiled for generations but kept alive by the Otoe-Missouria Tribe, and by one tribe member in particular: Truman Washington Dailey, a pioneer of North American language revitalization.
Suzanne Hogan is the host of the podcast, A People's History of Kansas City. Read more about this episode here, and more about the Otoe-Missouria Tribe here. A People's History of Kansas City is supported by the Midwest Genealogy Center in Independence, Missouri.
Music in this episode courtesy of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe. Other music by Gunnar Johnsen, Blue Dot Sessions, Medité, and Trabant 33. The photo shows a delegation of the Otoe-Missouria tribe in 1881. (Credit: John K. Hillers / Gilman Collection, Metropolitan Museum Of Art.)
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In this episode, we're handing over the reins to the podcast series, Home, Interrupted, produced by Feet in 2 Worlds. The series explores how the climate crisis affects immigrants across the U.S., and how immigrant communities are finding new ways to deal with a warming planet. In this episode, reporter Allison Salerno tells the stories of migrant farmworkers in Florida who face increasingly hazardous conditions. State lawmakers have blocked legislation to protect them, so farmworkers are now seeking help from outside groups who are donating ice packs, cooling bandanas, water with electrolytes and other things to help keep them alive.
More on this episode here, and on the Home, Interrupted series here. The photo of Elena Contreras and her mother Mirella Contreras, a former migrant farmworker who now is an organizer for the Farmworker Association of Florida, is by Allison Salerno.
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Icelanders are protective of their language. When a new piece of tech or a new disease emerges, people debate what to call these things in Icelandic. New words must sound and look Icelandic, otherwise they may not survive. The country's Knitting Words Committee is one of dozens of community panels charged with proposing new words. Typically, they repurpose old words that have fallen out of use. Who doesn't want to revive a word or phrase from Iceland's sagas? In this episode, we take you to Iceland to discover how, seemingly, an entire nation has coalesced around the maxim, "We have a very good old word for that."
Music in this episode by Taomito, Silver Maple, pär, Medité, Nathan Welch, and Trabant 33. Photo of Hulda Hákonardóttir and Guðrún Hannele Henttinen of Iceland's Knitting Words Committee by Patrick Cox.
Read a transcript of the episode here. And sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly newsletter here.
In recent decades, Americans' perception of bilingualism has been transformed. As recently as the 1990s, the prevailing belief was that if a child grew up bilingual, they would be at a linguistic and cognitive disadvantage. Today, many Americans believe the opposite, that speaking more than one language carries advantages. But the hundreds of studies of the bilingual brain don't all draw the same conclusions. In this episode, we sample some recent research whose findings are helping to paint a more nuanced picture of how bilingual speakers function differently from monolinguals.
Music in this episode by Walt Adams, Blue Dot Sessions, Medité, Podington Bear and Trabant 33. Photo of a bilingual street sign in Sydney's Chinatown by Jordanopia/Wikimedia Commons.
Read a transcript of the episode here. And sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly newsletter here.
How did Basque survive Spain's military dictatorship under Francisco Franco when speaking, writing and reading it were illegal? With more than six dialects, how did its speakers agree on a standard way of writing the language? And how has Basque thrived in the decades since Franco died? Nina Porzucki tells the story of Europe's most mysterious language and its tenacious speakers— a story that includes immigration to the American West, decades of exile in South America, translations of Shakespeare's plays and an epic struggle over the letter H.
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Josef Falkensköld, and Trabant 33.Photo of participants in a relay ‘marathon’ in support of the Basque language by Tintxarri via Wikimedia Commons. Info about Nina Porzucki here.
Read a transcript of the episode here. And sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly newsletter here.
Netflix's lavish new adaptation of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem is the latest 'translation' of one of this century's best, and best-selling, sci-fi novels. In this episode, we track the role of translation—on screen and on the page—in the global rise of Chinese sci-fi. Our guide is reporter and sci-fi aficionada Lydia Emmanouilidou who talks with several people involved in the Chinese literary scene, notably The Three-Body Problem's English translator Ken Liu.
More about Lydia Emmanouilidou here. Music in this episode by Ambre Jaune, Medité, Pearce Roswell and Trabant 33.
Read a transcript of the episode here. And sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly newsletter here.
The French language is replete with words borrowed from English, like 'weekend' and 'podcasting.' But French speakers' use of 'black' is in a category of its own: this one short syllable tells the story of France's racial and colonial legacies and how they stack up against U.S. history, from slavery to Black Lives Matter. Both countries are idealistic, rooted in 18th-century revolutions and grand principles. But while many in the US value racial and ethnic difference, France sees itself as a color-blind society that rejects the race-based policies of its past. So, using the French word noir is almost un-French—prompting many Black French citizens to embrace 'black.' Reporting this episode is former Paris resident, Emma Jacobs.
More about Emma Jacobs here and here. Music by Martin Klem, Medité, Trabant 33, Podington Bear and Blue Dot Sessions. Photo by Lea Dasenka.
Read a transcript of this episode here. And sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly newsletter here.
Irish is among Europe's oldest languages. It's a near miracle that anyone speaks it today. Patrick talks with online Irish teacher Mollie Guidera whose students include a Kentucky farmer who speaks Irish to his horses; also with Irish scholar Jim McCloskey who developed a love of the language when he spent a summer living with Irish speakers. Irish is changing fast, with far more of its speakers learning it as a second language, while the native-speaker population declines.
Music by Elliot Holmes, Zorro,Hugo Paquette, Medité, and Fleurs Douces. Photo courtesy of Mollie Guidera.
Read a transcript of this episode, with more photos here. And sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly newsletter here.
Israel Jesus used to be ashamed of being from the Mexican state of Oaxaca and speaking the local indigenous tongue, Triqui. When he moved to Salinas, California, a kid in his high school told Jesus he was destined to work in the fields nearby. But it was his knowledge of Triqui that sent him on a different path. A hospital in Salinas recruited Jesus to interpret for the increasing number of Triqui-speaking patients. It's part of an effort in California and beyond to expand medical interpretation to Mexico's many indigenous languages.
This episode was reported by Nina Porzucki. Music by Alexander Boyes, Blue Dot Sessions, Grupo Sin Control, Medité, and Podington Bear. Photo of Israel Jesus by Nina Porzucki. Read a transcript, with many more photos, here. And sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly(ish) newsletter here.
Mastering six languages sounds like a slog, right? But in some corners of Europe, it happens—maybe not effortlessly, but more easily than in, say, Ohio. Gaston Dorren grew up speaking Limburgish at home, and Dutch at school. He fell in love in German and picked up Spanish in Latin America, all the while keeping English and French in his back pocket. He tells Patrick about his love of verbing nouns, and Dutch people's unconsciously sexist choice of pronouns. Also, Gaston is a fabulous multilingual (of course) singer.
Gaston Dorren has written several books including two translated into English. The photo shows him in in a typically multilingual moment on vacation in Turkey. He is reading the German translation of book originally written in English: A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka. (Photo credit: Marleen Becker)
Music in this episode by Medité, Magnus Ringblom, Podington Bear and Trabant 33. Read a transcript here. Sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly(ish) newsletter here.
Does the brain of a improv comedian or freestyle rapper function in a particular way? Is it processing language faster than a regular, lower-improvising brain? Or is something else also going on, something to do with how we judge ourselves? We asked our pal Ari Daniel to look into this. He found a group of researchers and a group of professional improvisers working together on some of these questions.
Photo of Dutch-based comedy improv group Easy Laughs by Robin Straaijer. Music in this episode by Fleslit, Magnus Ringblom and Trabant 33.
Read a transcript here. Sign up for Subtitle’s newsy, nerdy, fortnightly(ish) newsletter here.
A conversation with comedian with Samir Khullar who grew up speaking Punjabi, Hindi, English and French. He does standup in all those languages, sometimes mixing them up. He has toured more than 40 countries, but audiences in his native Québec perhaps see the best of him. That's where he performs a bilingual French/English show called You're Gonna Rire (and now, You're Gonna Rire 2). As a Quebecer/Québécois, Sugar Sammy's comedy exposes the absurdity of language politics while also celebrating multilingualism and difference.
Photo of Sugar Sammy by Charles William Pelletier/Creative Commons. Check out Sugar Sammy's tour dates here.
Music in this episode by Jules Gaia, Josef Falkensköld, Stationary Sign, and August Wilhelmsson. Read a transcript here. Sign up for Subtitle's newsy, nerdy, fortnightly(ish) newsletter here.
When a word first enters the language, it sounds weird to some, radical to others and comforting to just a few. Only later does it seem 'natural.' So it was with the honorific Ms in the 20th century. So it may be with the non-binary Mx. Today, British banks and utilities routinely give customers the option to use Mx. Will American companies follow suit? And what might Shakespeare have thought? His gender-neutral 'master-mistress,' is arguably more poetic than Mx, but it might be a bit of a mouthful for our times.
This episode was reported by Leo Hornak and Nina Porzucki. Music by Stationary Sign, The Freeharmonic Orchestra, Podington Bear, Josef Falkensköld and Silver Maple. The photo of performer Justin Vivian Bond, who uses Mx, is by Rhododendrites via Creative Commons. Read a transcript of the episode here.
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American English and British English aren't different languages. But they're not the same either, even if they're getting closer. There are all those different words for things: diaper/nappy, faucet/tap and so on. More challenging are common words used in subtly different ways: sure, reckon, middle class. Who better to ask about these and other terms than UK-based American linguist Lynne Murphy and her British husband and daughter? Spoiler alert: They don't always agree.
Lynne Murphy is the author of The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English. Music in this episode by Josef Falkensköld, Stationary Sign, Rebecca Mardal and Luella Gren. Photo courtesy of Wellcome Images/Creative Commons. Read a transcript of this episode here.
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German used to be one of the most widely-spoken languages in the United States, A survey in 1900 listed 613 US-based German-language newspapers. Today, only a handful survive, and German is barely spoken at all. One exception is Cole Camp, Missouri, where Suzanne Hogan is our guide. She hosts public radio station KCUR's podcast, A People's History of Kansas City.
Thanks to Suzanne Hogan for the photo of German language activists Neil and Marilyn Heimsoth. More photos and info on Camp Cole's German-Americans are here. Find out more about A People's History of Kansas City here, and you can email the producers here. The reporting for this episode was supported by the Midwest Genealogy Center.
Music in this episode by Luella Gren, Dream Cave, Primary Color, Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions and Breath before the Plunge.
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In our upcoming season, we have stories about voice clones, tongue twisters and small languages fighting back. We'll hear from comedians, bilingual lovers and badly-behaved grandmothers. Look out for the first episode on November 1.
Music by Harry Edvino and The Freeharmonic Orchestra. Photo by Patrick Cox.
Subtitle is a production of Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America. Sign up for Subtitle’s newsletter here.
Subtitle is delighted to share an episode of Exile, a podcast about Jewish lives under the shadow of fascism. In this episode, Florence Mendheim, a young Jewish librarian in New York, risks her life to spy on the growing Nazi movement in America. Adopting a fake German persona, she attends American Nazi rallies and works in their headquarters. Everything is on the line to try to halt hate in its tracks. More on Florence Mendheim here. Listen to more Exile episodes here. Exile is a production of the Leo Baeck Institute, NY and Antica Productions.
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Never heard of the Udi language? Get ready to be beguiled by this poster child for endangered languages. The history of the Udi people and their language includes an ancient kingdom, an exodus to escape persecution, and the creation of a bespoke alphabet. Udi also has a unique aspect to its grammar—a form of linguistic behavior that scholars previously thought was impossible. No wonder the small Udi-speaking community of Zinobiani in the Republic of Georgia attracts visitors from around the world , including Subtitle's Patrick Cox.
Music in this episode by Howard Harper-Barnes, Christian Andersen, Rand Aldo, Farrell Wooten, Leimoti, and Stonekeepers.
The photo shows linguist Thomas Wier and Udi activist Alexander Kavtaradze at a memorial of Kavtaradze's great great uncle, Zinobi Silikashvili, founder of Zinobiani. For more photos and a transcript of the episode, go here.
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If you want to know where African American English is headed, listen to Shondel Nero. Shondel was born in the Caribbean nation of Guyana where she code-switched between Guyana Creolese and colonial British English. As a young adult she moved to North America, eventually settling in New York City where she became a professor of language education at NYU. Shondel tells guest host Ciku Theuri that the various versions of English spoken by Black immigrants are rubbing off on Black American speech. Aided by the likes of TikTok, African American English is now going through a period of rapid change.
Music in this episode by HATAMITSUNAMI, Matt Large, Rocket Jr., and Osoku. More about Shondel Nero here. The photo of Shondel was taken at Kaieteur Falls, the world’s largest single drop waterfall located deep in the rainforest of her native Guyana.
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Guest host Ciku Theuri speaks with music writer Jordannah Elizabeth about the intimate relationship between music and Black American speech. That connection was never closer than in the 1930s and 40s when Cab Calloway's Hepster Dictionary and Sister Rosetta Tharpe's groundbreaking rock 'n' roll established new artistic and linguistic pathways.
Jordannah Elizabeth is the founder of the Feminist Jazz Review and author of the upcoming A Child’s Introduction to Hip Hop.
Music excerpts in this episode by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Cab Calloway and His Orchestra, The Ink Spots, Roscoe Dash, Gucci Mane, Tems, Nbhd Nick and Sarah, the Illstrumentalist. Photo of Bill Robinson, Lena Horne and Cab Calloway from the 1943 musical film, Stormy Weather, via Wikimedia Commons. Read a transcript of the episode here.
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Are the roots of African American English mainly African? Or English? Or something else? Linguists—and others—don't agree. Ciku Theuri guides us through the theories. Opinions from Nicole Holliday, John McWhorter, John Rickford and Sunn m'Cheaux, who we also profiled in a previous Subtitle episode.
Music in this episode by A P O L L O, Jobii, and Tilden Parc. Photo of Michelle Obama by Pete Souza via Wikimedia Commons. Read a transcript of the episode here.
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Until recently, issuing a death threat required some effort. Today, anyone with a phone or computer can make a threat—or receive one. The result is a “golden age” for the dark realm of personal threats.
Forensic linguist Tanya Karoli Christensen and forensic psychologist Lisa Warren help us trace the history of death threats from eloquently penned letters to casually written social media posts. As the platforms for making threats are changing, so too are the methods for assessing their potency.
Music in this episode by Magnus Ringblom, 91nova, Fabien Tell, BLUE STEEL, Peter Sandberg, Amaranth Cove and Andreas Boldt. Illustration by James Gillray (1756-1815) via Wikimedia Commons.
Read a transcript of this episode here. Subscribe to Subtitle’s newsletter here.
If Latin is dead, why is it easy to find meetups of people speaking it? Why are a group of scholars and lexicographers working on what has become a century-spanning Latin dictionary project? Former Latin student Cristina Quinn challenges Patrick Cox to seek answers to these these and more questions about the supposedly dead language that it all around us.
Photo by Patrick Cox. Music by Marc Torch, Arthur Benson, Frank Jonsson, Farrell Wooten, and Andreas Boldt. Read a transcript of this episode and see more photos here. Subscribe to Subtitle’s newsletter here.
Ellen Jovin belongs that rare breed of human with a passion for grammar. You will too if you spend a few minutes with her, your grammar anxiety melting away in minutes. That's what happens when apostrophe-challenged Patrick meets Ellen at her Grammar Table in New York's Central Park. There, Ellen fields questions from passers-by about commas, semicolons, ellipses and weird-sounding neologisms. Ellen tells Patrick about her word-obsessed childhood, her love of hyphens, and why a Jehovah's Witness who approached the Grammar Table, "was not fully there for the apostrophes."
Ellen Jovin's new book about her Grammar Table adventures in 47 states is Rebel with a Clause.
Photo by Patrick Cox. Music by Greatfool, Frank Jonsson, Arthur Benson, Jules Gaia. Read a transcript of this episode here. Subscribe to Subtitle's newsletter here.
Steve Jobs' last words were: "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." Oscar Wilde went with: "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." (At least, that's how the story goes.) But the way most of us part company with language at the end of our lives is more halting and gradual. Even when a dying loved one is unable to speak clearly, other forms of communication often take over: noises, gestures, touch and eye contact.
We have stories in this episode from a hospice nurse, from journalists covering mental health and internet culture, and from language writer Michael Erard who is writing a book about last words and their relationship to first words.
Photo by Duncan C via Flickr/Creative Commons. Music by Dream Cave, Nylonia, Alexandra Woodward, Cobby Costa, August Wilhelmsson, David Celeste, Martin Landstrom, Gavin Luke, Rand Also, Airae, Alan Ellis, Jules Gaia. Read a transcript of this episode here.
How do you keep your language alive while also protecting the health of elders? That's been the quandary facing Ojibwe educators during the pandemic. As native speakers, Ojibwe elders were the primary teachers of the language, but they were also the most vulnerable to COVID. Leah Lemm of Minnesota's Mille Lacs Ojibwe band tells us how she and others figured out how to continue learning while also ensuring the wellbeing of teaching elders like her own father.
Music in this episode by Airae, Gridded, Megan Woffard, Headlund, Joseph Beg, Jules Gaia, Rymdklang Soundtracks, Molecular Machine. Read a transcript of the episode here.
Some Ojibwe language resources recommended by Leah: James Vukelich's Ojibwe Word of the Day; the University of Minnesota's online Ojibwe dictionary; the Ojibwe Rosetta Stone project; and the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe and the Minnesota Historical Society's Aanjibimaadizing book project.
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For centuries, Russians have dismissed the Ukrainian language as "Little Russian," its speakers as simple-minded peasants. The Kremlin has sporadically and unsuccessfully tried to suppress the language. Now Russia's invasion of Ukraine has driven even some Russian-speaking Ukrainians to switch to Ukrainian. We trace the defiant rise of this language with the University of Washington's Laada Bilaniuk, American-born daughter of Ukrainian parents.
Photo of Andriy Khlyvnyuk via YouTube screengrab. Music in this epsiode performed by Andriy Khlyvnyuk, Mad Heads XL, Jay Varton, Farrell Wooten, Lucention, Frank Jonsson, Felix Salt. Read a transcript of this episode with more photos here.
Kavita Pillay recently moved to Helsinki with her Finnish husband and half-Finnish daughter. While husband and daughter effortlessly embraced their new linguistic surroundings, Kavita...didn't. In this episode, she seeks guidance from other immigrants with varying degrees of Finnish mastery. Among them, an opera singer who finds melody in verb conjugations, and an Iraqi-born linguistics major whose fluent Finnish is sometimes questioned by locals.
Photo by Sauli Pillay. Music by Greatfool; Farrell Wooten; Jharee; Aoroa; Vanity Street; Raymond Grouse; Matt Large; At The End of Times, Nothing; Dye O. Read a transcript of this episode here.
We can't always find words to describe our emotions—not in English, at least. In this episode, Saleem Reshamwala asks friends who speak other languages to share their favorite emotion words and phrases. He also seeks guidance from psychologist Ashley Ruba, and Tim Lomas, author of Happiness Found in Translation: A Glossary of Joy from Around the World.
This is a guest episode from the new Ten Percent Happier podcast, More Than a Feeling: more info and show notes here. Photo by allyaubry via Wikimedia Commons.
For hundreds of years, people living in Louisiana's bayou country have spoken French. But rising sea levels are submerging entire communities, forcing people to abandon their homes. As native French speakers move away, will the language survive in this most French of American states? We hitch a ride to the bayou with linguist Nathalie Dajko.
Music in this episode by Alces Adams, View Points, Amos Noah, Earle Belo, Finn Danniell, Sture Zetterberg and Lindsey Abraham. Photo by Julia Kumari Drapkin. More photos and a transcript are here.
They're not in American dictionaries yet, but the terms, 'punching up' and 'punching down' are on the lips of many comedians. With the help of linguist and journalist Ben Zimmer and British comedian Richard Herring, we trace the migration of these words from sports to cable news to comedy. Along the way, we catch up with the history of performers and writers targeting the rich and powerful (punching up) or mocking the oppressed and vulnerable (punching down).
In reporting this episode, we owe a debt of gratitude to this piece in The Baffler and this episode of WTF with Marc Maron.
Music in this episode by: Zorro; Sarah, The Illstrumentalist; peerless; Farrell Wooten; Hell Nasty; Tigerblood Jewel; Mary Riddle; Divorce Applause; Amaranth Cove; VARPU. Read a transcript here.
In this episode, we tell the inspiring, heartbreaking story of Radio Haiti. For several decades, the station broadcast not just in French, spoken by Haiti's elite, but also in Kreyòl, spoken by rich and poor alike. The Kreyòl-language programs communicated directly with the rural poor—the 'outside people'—popularizing issues of inequity and corruption. Helping us tell Radio Haiti's story are Michèle Montas, widow of the station's assassinated owner Jean Dominique, and archivist Laura Wagner.
Music in this episode by Samba Zao, Sosyete Grandra, Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (Jean-Rabel), MIUT, Nico Rengifo, and Timothy Infinite. The photo is of a painting by Maxan Jean-Louis, courtesy of Radio Haiti Papers, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University.
Read a transcript with some great photos here.
Does your grandmother call a chest of drawers a dresser? Or a bureau? Or perhaps a chiffonier? Over the years and across regions, Americans have favored many different words for furniture—and much else. Since 1929, the Linguistic Atlas Project has been documenting these lexical changes. We tell the story of the Project, from its early days of interviewing retired male farmers, through its initially clumsy attempts to engage Black Americans, to today's scientific, demographically diverse approach.
Music in this episode by View Points, The Undertowns, Farrell Wooten, Arthur Benson, Mica Emory. Photo courtesy of the Linguistic Atlas Project. Read a transcript here.
If you’ve ever set boundaries, taken up a gratitude practice or manifested, you’re already well-versed in the language of self-help. Over its long history, self-help has acquired its own lexicon, often repurposing words along the way. Nowadays, the flavor is American but that wasn't always the case. We delve into the past and present of self-help language with Kristen Meinzer, co-host of the podcast, By the Book.
Music in this episode by Frank Jonsson, Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen, Airae, Howard Hopper-Barnes, Amaranth Cove, Jones Meadow, Trevor Kowalski, and The Fly Guy Five. Photo by Tanya Im via Creative Commons. Read a transcript here.
Why do so many of us laugh at a word like 'poop' but not at, say, 'treadmill'? Is it all down to their meaning? Or are we also responding to the sound of these words? Psycholinguist Chris Westbury set out to discover the answer. Assisted by an inventive computer, Westbury and colleagues dreamed up a bunch of non-words (like "snunkoople"), and tested their funniness on the public. We discuss the results, as well as our favorite funny words—and we get some authentically amusing help from comedians Joanna Hausmann and Filip Jeremic.
Music in this episode by The Fly Guy Five, Little Island Leap, Arthur Benson, Josef Falkenskold, V.V. Campos, Birdies, Chasing Madison and Mike Franklyn. Photo by Nola Cox. Read a transcript here. And watch the strangest soccer match of all time (think Schopenhauer) here.
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When Julie Sedivy was four, her Czech family emigrated to Canada. In this episode we hear how Julie became estranged from her native Czech, only to rediscover it after the death of her father. Julie Sedivy's linguistic memoir is Memory Speaks: On Losing and Reclaiming Language and Self.
Photo (courtesy Julie Sedivy) shows Julie, center, and two siblings on their arrival at Montreal's airport. Music in this episode by Gavin Luke, Arthur Benson, Esme Cruz, Aerian, Jon Bjork, Spectacles Wallet and Watch. Go here to read a transcript and see photos of Julie's family in the Czech Republic.
Is it easier to sing than speak in another language? Artist Wen-hao Tien is putting that idea to the test. She has invited friends from around the world to teach her a song in their mother tongue. Patrick listens in on a few of the lessons and also teaches Wen-hao one of his favorite (punky) […]
Some people have origin stories. Pardis Mahdavi has a hyphenation story. Her Iranian family was the target of a hate crime in Minnesota. She was stripped of her citizenship in Iran. Eventually she embraced the hyphen between the words ‘Iranian’ and ‘American’ as her identity: two cultures within one person. But what exactly is the […]
In our upcoming season, we’ll have stories on people who have “lost” their mother tongue, the language of self help, why certain sounds make us laugh, and much more. The first episode drops December 15. Subtitle is a production of Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America. Music by Organized Chaos. Photo by Nola […]
Gwich’in is among Alaska’s most threatened languages. but Princess Daazhraii Johnson is determined to change that. Her mother, she says, was of “that boarding school generation that was hit for speaking Gwich’in.” Today, more Gwich’in people are learning their language, and kids are exposed to it by shows like PBS’ Molly of Denali. In this […]
Who writes the fortunes in fortune cookies? Why are so many of them not really fortunes at all? Why did some fortunes turn ominous for a while? (“After today, you shall have a deeper understanding of both good and evil.”) And who was behind the theft of countless fortunes? Lidia Jean Kott has the answers to […]
With the Scripps National Spelling Bee back after a Covid-enforced year off, we conduct our very own spelling quiz. Also, Kavita Pillay offers her take on why Indian American kids perform so well in spelling bees. And author and self-described “crummy" speller David Wolman tells us why he wrote a history of English spelling and the many attempts to reform it.
The German word “Volk” usually translates as “people,” but it means a whole lot more than that. In 1989 as Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, they chanted, “Wir sind das Volk!” (“We are the people!”) Today, though, “Volk” no longer unites Germans. Some understand it to mean everyone living in Germany. Others define it […]
In 2012, a children’s book in Sweden sparked a nationwide debate— not about the book’s content but a three-letter word used by the main character. Hen was a relatively new, gender-neutral pronoun which challenged Swedish grammar norms. The use of hen tapped into a conversation the country was already having about gender and equality. Can the introduction of one word make a difference in changing societal views? Nina Porzucki goes to Sweden to find out.
If you’re under the impression that encyclopedias and dictionaries in the West were always organized from A to Z, think again. We have chosen to classify knowledge in many ways, each reflecting the values of the age. Patrick Cox speaks with Judith Flanders, author of A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order about the centuries-long resistance to alphabetization, and why A to Z may now be here to stay.
Japan is an ethnically homogenous nation where everyone speaks Japanese, right? Not exactly. Other groups including the Ainu also have called Japan home, perhaps for longer than the Japanese themselves. Today, the Ainu language is spoken by only a handful of people. One of them, Russian-born linguist Anna Bugaeva, takes Patrick Cox to meet Ainu speakers (and non-speakers) on the island of Hokkaido. Along the way, we learn about the mysteries of Ainu, a “language isolate” unrelated to any other language in the world. Bugaeva says Japanese children aren’t taught about the Ainu because their presence—and language—contradict standard Japanese history.
Music in this episode by Tonality Star, Podington Bear, Circus Marcus and Blue Dot Sessions. Photo of Ainu language activists Maki and Kenji Sekine by Patrick Cox. More on Anna Bugaeva’s research here. Read a transcript of the episode here.
Will technology make Braille obsolete as the primary reading tool for blind people? Will talking apps and audiobooks win out over embossed dots? Braille has been written off before; each time it has come back stronger. We trace Braille from its beginnings in Napoleon’s France, through the “War of the Dots” in the early 20th century to the age of the smart phone, and beyond.
Photo by Brickset. Music in the episode from Marcel, Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear, Cuicuitte and gargle. More on contributors Sheri Wells-Jensen here, Joshua Miele here and Chancey Fleet here. Read a transcript of this episode here.
You may not have heard of Frisian, but it’s spoken by about 500,000 people. Once upon a time, an older form of the language was barely distinct from Old English. We take you to the Dutch province of Friesland to hear why people there care so deeply about their mother tongue. Texting, social media, music and theater are all giving Frisian a new lease of life.
Photo of Frisian teacher Anna Marije Bloem and students by Patrick Cox. Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear, Lobo Loco and Frisian metal band Baldrs Draumar. Connect with the Frisian Academy here, Frisian-language theater company Tryater here and author Willem Schoorstra here. Read a transcript of this episode here.
Digital consultant Ivanka Majic was such an early user of Twitter that she was able to snag the handle @Ivanka. Which was great, until the rise of another Ivanka caused confusion. Many Twitter users— including the other Ivanka’s father— mistook one for the other. In this archive episode, Ivanka Majic tells the story of her brush with fame, and how the name she was innocently given at birth has affected her. Also, Subtitle host Kavita Pillay discusses her in-the-works documentary about people in southern India who are named after Lenin, Stalin and other political heroes of their parents.
The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions and Podington Bear. The photo on the left is courtesy of Ivanka Majic; on the right from the US Embassy, Berlin, via Flickr. Listen here to Michael and Ivanka’s Grand Podcast. Read a transcript of the episode here.
In our upcoming season, we have stories on notorious names, the future of Braille, a history of alphabetical order and much more. Look out the first episode with Patrick and Kavita on March 17.
Subtitle is produced by Quiet Juice and the Linguistic Society of America. Music by Blue Dot Sessions. Photo by Patrick Cox. Patrick’s dog, Louis, is working on coming up with the right words to tell his story.
Here’s a guest episode from our friends at A Better Life?, a podcast from Feet in 2 Worlds about the immigrant experience in the time of COVID-19. The episode follows two US-based immigrants. Heeja, born in South Korea, and Elsa, born in Mexico, both wrestle with the same question: “Should I stay or should I go?”
Music in this episode by Fareed Sajan. The photo of Heeja and her children Jeff and Mia is courtesy of Mia Warren. Read more about A Better Life? here. More on Subtitle here.
Tina Tobey was born and raised in Texas. She’s used to non-Texans expecting her to know all about oil-drilling and ranching. And of course to speak “like a Texan.” While she barely meets those expectations, Tina has come to realize that she speaks more Texas English than she thought. Also in this episode: how difficult is it to win an accent bias lawsuit? And to overcome our own accent biases? This is the fourth and final part in our series on speech, identity and bias.
Notes on contributors: Tina Tobey is Subtitle’s sound designer. Lars Hinrichs is the director of the Texas English Language Lab at the University of Texas. Erica Brozovsky is also at the University of Texas where she researches the speech of Taiwanese Texans. New York-based attorney Melinda Koster has argued accent discrimination cases. Erez Levon teaches sociolinguistics at Queen Mary University of London and is the principal investigator of the Accent Bias in Britain project.
The music in this episode is by Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear, Biddy Sullivan, Moss Harman, Alexandra Woodward and Alan Carlson-Green. The photo is courtesy of Tina Tobey who is pictured in her youth atop a Texas-bred horse. Read a transcript of this episode here.
Why doesn’t Ciku Theuri sound Black? Her friends wanted to know. Eventually, she wanted to know. Ciku tells the story of how she came to speak the way she does—and how others, from Ohio to Kenya, perceive her speech. (Spoiler alert: she does sound Black.) Also in this episode: why many Americans choose the voices of Black celebrities for their digital assistants. This is the third in our four-part series on speech, identity and bias.
Ciku Theuri is a producer with WBUR/NPR public radio show, Here & Now. Nicole Holliday teaches linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. Much of her research is focused on one question: What does it mean to sound Black?
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Jobii, and Podington Bear. The photo of Ciku Theuri (credit: Amanda Pitts) is from her graduation at Oakwood University, Alabama, in 2015. Read a transcript of this episode here.
Verónica Zaragovia lives in Miami but she was born in Colombia. Although she has a Colombian passport, her Spanish doesn’t sound Colombian— at least that’s what people tell her. During a recent stay in Bogotá, she decided to change that: she took lessons in Colombian Spanish. Along the way, she gained a new understanding of how language and identity interact. This is the second in our four-part series on speech and bias.
Verónica Zaragovia is a reporter with Miami public radio station, WLRN. Phillip Carter is the author of many articles on Spanish in the United States.
Music in this episode by Podington Bear, BLAEKER, Headlund, and Louie Wuatton. The photo is of Verónica Zaragovia in Cali, Colombia. Read a transcript of this episode here.
We are how we speak, right? Well, it’s complicated— enough so to spend Subtitle’s next four episodes on this question. We’ll tell the stories of a diverse collection of people, tracing how each came to speak the way they do. Along the way, we’ll ask: Is speech a good barometer of identity? Does anyone truly speak authentically? Why are we so judgmental about how others speak? And how can we overcome our biases? In this first episode, hosts Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay tell their stories.
Jane Setter’s book about speech and accent bias is Your Voice Speaks Volumes. Colleen Cotter researches the language of journalism and cultural representation. Dennis Preston is the editor of the Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology. Romona Robinson’s memoir is A Dirt Road to Somewhere.
Music in this episode by Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear, Spectacles Wallet and Watch, Honeycutts, Alan Carlson-Green, Moss Harman, Josef Bel Habib and Arthur Benson. The photos are of Patrick and Kavita when they were so very young.
In 1986, Nicaraguan officials invited American linguist Judy Shepard-Kegl to observe a group of Deaf children. The kids were using an unrecognizable signing system. Over the following years, Shepard-Kegl and other linguists found themselves uniquely placed to observe what they came to realize was the emergence of a new language. Today, Nicaraguan Sign Language has its own complex grammar and a broad vocabulary. What can it tell us about how languages evolve?
Photo of Deaf youth with Deaf outreach workers in rural Nicaragua courtesy of Nicaraguan Sign Language Projects, Inc. Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear and Martin Klem.
Read a transcript of this episode here.
Finland has been named the happiest country in the world. So why is sisu the word that best describes Finns? Associated with war and endurance, sisumeans stoic perseverance against almost insurmountable odds. But this small, cold nation is changing, as is the meaning of sisu. In these tumultuous times, this short Finnish word may have something to offer the rest of the world.
Photo by fintuq via Pixabay. Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Isobelle Walton, Trabant 33, Chill Cole, Podington Bear.
In unsettled times, we reach for metaphors. They help us make sense of the nonsensical—or at least that’s what we tell ourselves. In this episode, we hear from linguist Elena Simino, editor of a crowd-sourced publication called the Metaphor Menu intended for people with cancer. She assesses the merits of coronavirus metaphors, from battlefield clichés to forest fires to contaminated swimming pools.
Photo by Jo Zimny Photos. Music by Moss Harman, Megan Woffard, Alexandra Woodward, Heath Cantu, Sights of Wonder, Remodal, Sons of Hades, Podington Bear.
Joe Wong is a brilliant bilingual comedian. In the US, he does standup. In his native China he hosts a popular TV game show. Recently his comedy has become more political: he is confronting US racial tensions head-on. In quarantine, Joe is writing a book, cooking for his son (to his son’s dismay), and decrying virus-related anti-Asian hate crimes.
Music in this episode by Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions, Particle House and Treadline.
Bilingual comedian Joanna Hausmann (pictured with her mother Ana Julia Jatar-Hausmann) is sitting out the lockdown at her Venezuelan parents’ New England home. She tells us of her love of outdated Venezuelan slang; also about parenting her parents (in both Spanish and English); and how the restrictions of quarantine are unleashing her creative instincts.
Photo by Joanna Hausmann. Music by Podington Bear, Isobelle Walton, Nathan Welch, Flooaw, and Million Eyes.
In this episode, we talk with American medical student Esther Kim (pictured). She’s trying to overcome her suspicion of people with a particular accent, one that she’s come to associate with racist taunts. The COVID-19 wave of anti-Asian harassment has made things worse. Also, Stanford professor Seema Yasmin tells us why pandemics bring out the language of war.
Photo by Esther Kim. Music by Bonnie Grace, David Celeste, Podington Bear, Philip Ayers, Craft Case, Airae, and Joseph Alesci.
We can’t travel. We can’t hug or visit loved ones. But we can talk our way through this pandemic — and we’re doing just that, in most of the world’s languages. In this episode we hear from Kavita Pillay’s mother, who tells a story from her childhood in southern India. And a filmmaker in New York talks about her home quarantine activity, translating Russian video footage full of phrases from the past.
Photos: Nola Cox and Sauli Pillay. Music by Podington Bear and Blue Dot Sessions.
Hassnae Bouazza was born in Morocco. She didn’t speak a word of Dutch when she immigrated to the Netherlands, though today it’s effectively her mother tongue. The Dutch government now insists that would-be immigrants like Bouazza pass a Dutch language “entrance exam.” Are Dutch officials using language to keep “undesirables” out? Or is speaking the local language an essential part of living in the Netherlands?
Photo by Patrick Cox. Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear, Atisound, and Gridded. Thanks to Sara Wallace Goodman, Ben Coates, Jeremy Helton, Liesbeth Siers, Tracey Keij-Denton, Jos Beelen, Carol Zall, Clark Boyd, Laura Rumbley, and Rose Stories in Amsterdam.
If there are extraterrestrials out there, what kind of messages might they be sending us? How might we decipher those messages? And should we hit reply?
Image by Mike Licht via Flickr Creative Commons. Music by Million Eyes, From Now On, Heath Cantu, Christian Andersen, Podington Bear.
In 2005, Hurricane Katrina displaced tens of thousands of New Orleanians. Many never returned to the city. Others have since moved in, bringing with them different languages and dialects. Some locals now wonder if they have lost ‘ownership’ of New Orleans English. Has the linguistic footprint of one of America’s most historically rich and diverse cities changed forever?
In folklore and fiction there’s a rich tradition of trees that talk, from Greek mythology to The Wizard of Oz. But that’s make-believe, right? Well, maybe. Many ecologists now believe that trees are in constant communication with their surroundings. Linguists may roll their eyes at claims of ‘talk,’ or ‘language.’ But observing how trees interact helps us understand the limits of language.
Photo by David Baron via Flickr creative commons. Music by Josef Falkenskold, From Now On, Silver Maple, Imprisoned, Josef Bel Habib and Podington Bear.
Susanna Zaraysky with a printout of her brain scan.
Susanna Zaraysky, speaker of nine languages, is one of those people who seem able to pick up French or Portuguese almost overnight. In reality, it’s not so effortless—but is she cognitively predisposed to attaining fluency in so many languages? We follow her to an MIT lab where researchers put her through series of tests.
Photo by Patrick Cox. Music by Silver Maple, Lucention, Pause For Concern, Podington Bear and Blue Dot Sessions.
Stereotypes about Mormon missionaries tend to overshadow their great success in foreign language learning. Why is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints so skilled at teaching languages? We hear from missionaries, teachers and scholars, in Utah and Finland.
Photo by Kavita Pillay. Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Booker and the Yeomans and Podington Bear.
There’s a new language class on offer at Harvard. Gullah Geechee is a creole language developed by enslaved Africans and still spoken today. As far as anyone knows, it’s the first time it’s been taught anywhere. Sunn M’Cheaux — native speaker turned Harvard instructor — tells his story and the story of Gullah Geechee, a language that is as African as it is American.
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Podington Bear and Ranky Tanky. Photo courtesy Sunn M’Cheaux.
‘Real’ or ’synthetic’? ‘Authentic’ or ‘lab-grown’? ‘Bloodstained’ or ‘green’? The highly-regulated words that describe diamonds define their narrative — and maybe even their value. We take you to New York’s Diamond District to meet some of its most engaging characters as they struggle to come to terms with the new lexicon of diamonds.
Music in this episode by Podington Bear and Blue Dot Sessions. Photo by Alina Simone. More at https://subtitlepod.com/
Are you repelled by certain words? Do you get that fingernails-on-chalkboard feeling when someone says ‘moist,’ ‘dollop’ or ‘fascia’? In this week’s episode Kavita Pillay, who has some word aversions of her own, seeks answers from linguists who study this phenomenon.
Music in the podcast by Podington Bear, Kikoru and Blue Dot Sessions. Photo by Sauli Pillay.
Want to say or write something anonymously? Or pretend you’re someone else? Good luck. Linguists are using evermore sophisticated means to figure out who you really are. In this episode we trace the rise of forensic linguistics, from identifying the Unabomber to the case of the Trump Administration’s ‘lodestar’ insider.
Music in the podcast by Podington Bear, Blue Dot Sessions and T. Morri. Photo by Marco Verch/Flickr Creative Commons.
Coming up in the first season of Subtitle with Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay: Words we love and hate. Words that solve crimes. Words we lose and find. Words that resist translation. Subtitle brings you stories about languages and the people who speak them, starting in November 2019.
Ever wondered why language simultaneously unites and divides us? Mystifies and delights us? Patrick Cox and Kavita Pillay tell the stories of people with all kinds of linguistic passions: comedians, writers, researchers; speakers of endangered languages; speakers of multiple languages; and just speakers—people like you and me.
In the West, we are used to sci-fi written by English-speakers who dream up English-speaking utopias and dystopias. Often in the final reel, humanity is saved by English-speaking heroes. So what should we expect from China's newly-thriving sci-fi scene? Does it have its own hopes and fears, specific to Chinese values and encoded in the language? Or is the sci-fi genre more global than local?
When American Lynne Murphy says 'sure' to her British husband, he thinks she means 'not really.' After 18 years together, they still disagree-- and not just on 'sure.'
Some people see British poet Ira Lightman as a champion of poets whose verses he valiantly defends. Others view him as a blowhard who delights in ruining other people's reputations. Either way, the story of his poetry sleuthing might make you think differently about what exactly plagiarism is.
Some people believe technology will render Braille obsolete, that blind people will choose talking apps and audiobooks over embossed dots. Maybe, but Braille has been written off many times before. Each time, it has come back stronger. We trace Braille from its beginnings, in Napoleon's France, through the "War of the Dots" in the early 20th century to the age of the smart phone, and beyond.
Professional soccer used to export its English-language terminology, giving other languages words like 'penalty' and 'goal.' But now, the roles are reversed. English-speakers use expressions loaned from other languages to describe skill moves: 'rabona,' 'panenka,' 'gegenpress.'
Basque is a language isolate. Spoken in a region that spans northern Spain across the border into southern France, it is not part of the Indo-European language family. It’s not related to Spanish or French or German or Greek or any known language. The origins of the language are a bit of mystery. In fact you can almost hear the history of the European continent in the language according to Basque language scholar Xabier Irujo.
“The Basque language has words coming from all languages that have been in Europe since prehistory from Latin and Celtic languages, and probably from languages before these Celtic languages. Who knows what was spoken in Europe at the time.”
This week on the podcast we talk about this mysterious language. How did it survive the military dictatorship of Francisco Franco when writing and speaking were illegal? How has this minority language thrived and even grown in the years since Franco’s dictatorship ended? And what’s the future hold for the language?
Ever wondered about people who can improvise on stage? How the words seem to come so easily? Neuroscientist Charles Limb and comedian Anthony Veneziale did. First came the bromance, then Veneziale found himself improvising inside an fMRI machine.
Lea is a teenager born and raised in Japan. Her mother is Chinese, her father American. She speaks English, Mandarin and Japanese but isn’t sure which of them is her mother tongue. Karolina lives in Boston but grew up in several countries and speaks a bunch of languages. Her English is perfect but she doesn’t feel completely at home in it, or in American culture. Welcome to the world of third culture kids, a fast-growing group of people who fit in everywhere and nowhere.
Alina Simone was born in the Soviet Union to Russian-speaking parents and now lives in New York. She initially raised her daughter to speak both English and Russian. So why did she give up on Russian and send her daughter to a Chinese immersion school?
Do you talk to your dog? Does your dog talk back to you? Dr. Doolittle’s dream of talking to the animals is one many of us can share. But what do all of those howls and growls mean and is it really language? This week on the podcast NOVA’s Ari Daniel joins us to explore the communication patterns of three different species: Túngara frogs, Humpback whales and Diana monkeys. And if you listen and still want more...continue to nerd out with NOVA. They're going deep this month with a new program, "NOVA Wonders: What Are Animals Saying?" www.pbs.org/novawonders
From X-rated to Gen X to Latinx, the meaning of 'X' has shifted while retaining an edgy, transgressive quality. We trace the meandering semantic route of 'X' through the 20th and 21st centuries, with help from Afro-Latinx writer Jack Qu'emi, retired linguistics professor Ron Smyth and film historian Adrian Smith.
In 2012, a little known Swedish press published a children’s book that sparked a nationwide debate. The debate wasn’t about the plot of the book, nor the pictures, but concerned a three-letter word used by the main character of the story. That word was the relatively new, gender neutral pronoun “hen.” Traditionally, Swedish does not have a gender neutral pronoun for people. "Hen" tapped into an ongoing conversation in the country was already having about gender and equality.This week on the podcast we go to Sweden and examine whether gender neutral language can help shape shift societal views on gender equality.
This is part of a series on language and gender in collaboration with the Across Women's Lives project. For more stories on language and gender around the globe head to: www.pri.org/acrosswomenslives.
Thanks to engineer Tina Tobey and Nathalie Rothschild for help on the podcast.
The UK is obsessed with honorifics. Remember, this is the land of Barons and Earls and Ladies and Sirs and the ultimate HRH, "Her Royal Highness." But even if you can't claim HRH, selecting "Mr." or "Mrs." or "Miss" is a standard part of filling out many forms and documents. Very often these titles are gendered. But what if you don't identify with either gender? Or what if you don't want to reveal your marital status? Some folks are trying to ensure that you don't have to be a doctor or a reverend to claim a gender neutral title.This week on the podcast we take a look at the campaign for the gender neutral honorific "Mx." in the UK. Where does the honorific come from? And how has language and gender has been debated in the UK since the days of Shakespeare. This is the first part of a three-part series exploring language and gender. For the series we have teamed up with the Across Woman's Lives project. Check out more in-depth stories about language and gender around the globe at www.pri.org/acrosswomenslives
In 1984, the professional wrestler “Dr. D" David Schultz smacked the TV journalist John Stoessel to the ground backstage at Madison Square Garden. Why? One word, kayfabe. If you’ve never heard of the word “kayfabe,” don’t worry. This week on podcast we throw on some tights and get into the ring to explore a word you were never supposed to hear. Plus, there's a lot of excellent, throw-back wrestling tunes.
Humans are the only creatures on Earth that can choke on their own food. Yes, that’s right. Because we have funky plumbing. There’s a crucial split in our throats – one path that leads to the esophagus and the stomach, and another that leads to our larynx, or voice box. Why would humans have evolved such potentially fatal architecture? Some experts say the reason is speech, suggesting speech might pre-date Homo sapiens, going back to Neanderthals, or even Homo erectus, our likely ancestors from millions of years ago. This is all theoretical of course. There are no million-year-old recordings. But some of these ideas are gaining steam. This week on the podcast, reporter Ari Daniel from our partner program NOVA explores several theories about where language comes from.
He wrote to her mainly in Swedish, and she replied in Finnish. The correspondence of "Finlandia" composer Jean Sibelius and his wife Aino is funny and touching. And their letters are a goldmine for the study of code-switching.
In which we hear from another Ivanka, another Stalin and another Lenin. Ivanka's brush with fame came thanks to Donald Trump's carelessness on Twitter. But Stalin and Lenin were purposely given their names, by parents in the Indian state of Kerala. Do they have a date with destiny?
English is spoken with countless accents by both native and non-native speakers. But a hierarchy persists: there are 'good accents and 'bad' ones. So whether you're from Thailand or Tennessee, you may want to get rid of your accent. We hear from a few such people, and from someone who has no interest in changing his accent.
What are the words and images that best describe this past year? And why do some people think "whom" is obsolete? We talk with Buzzfeed's copy chief Emmy Favilla and Cartoon Queen Carol Hills who monitors political cartoons from around the world.
Remember the 1990’s flick Sneakers with Robert Redford? Robert Redford’s character leads a group of hackers on a mission to steal a decoder from the NSA. And there’s a part in the film when Redford needs to bypass security to sneak into a building. Only problem, the security is a voice activated; at least in 1992 that might’ve been a problem. Today, if José Sotelo has anything to do with it, Redford’s crew need not worry about imitating a voice.. Sotelo co-founded a start-up called Lyrebird that can synthesize your voice with as little as one minute of recording.
This week on the podcast: computers speak.
We talk about the original chat bot “ELIZA” who created as a therapy bot and , yes, was named after Eliza Doolittle. We look into the history of speech synthesis from brazen heads of the medieval times to the animated tones of the Voder, the electronic attempt to replicate speech. And best of all Patrick Cox has his voice synthesized.
Plus, we fret about the ethical implications of it all. How will this technology further erode our notion of truth? Are we entering a black mirror moment?
US politicians have been using the word, 'assimilation' for more than a century. How has it evolved? What does it mean in Trump's America? And how is 'assimilation' understood differently in other countries like France? Nina enlists Rupa Shenoy, host of PRI's Otherhood podcast to try to figure it out, while Patrick seeks to banish the word, 'ex-pat.'
In 2000, American poet Jennifer Kronovet began taking Yiddish classes for just one reason: to translate Yiddish poetry into English.
"Antifa." The buzzword of the summer, especially after Charlottesville. Reporter Lidia Jean Kott explores how "antifa" came into being in 1930s Germany-- and how it was resurrected in 21st century America. WARNING: this episode has explicit language and content.
Dubbed TV and movies suck, right? Those odd-sounding voices and that lamely-synchronized dialogue? In Germany, it's not like that. Dubbing it a highly evolved craft, with actors who specialize in voiceover and writers who genuinely improve the dialogue. The pod goes to Berlin to find out why Germans are so good at (and so addicted to) dubbing.
When Twitter comedian Jonny Sun began to write his book, "everyone's a aliebn when ur a aliebn too," he had to write down the rules of the cutesy grammar of the language he invented.
Germans do not agree what the word 'Volk' means. Does it denote ethnic Germans or people who live in Germany? The Nazis racialized 'Volk' and its derivatives. Now Germany's New Right are reviving some of these terms.
In the run up to the presidential election Cristina López kept coming across language on the internet that she didn’t quite understand; words and phrases like “meme magic,” and “red-pilled” and “nimble navigator.” These expressions kept popping up in Reddit and 4chan on Trump supporter message boards.
“It felt like I was looking in to a group and I didn’t understand the group joke,” said Cristina.
But understanding the group joke is Cristina’s job. She works for a non-profit called Media Matters For America, a left leaning non-profit that monitors the conservative media for misinformation. Since the election Cristina and her colleagues have spent many hours lurking on these message boards deciphering the words and memes of what she calls the #MAGA troll dialect. This week on the podcast Cristina Lopez explains some of the dialect.
Who was Frank Zappa? Virtuoso guitarist? Modernist composer? Smutty lyricist? Anti-censorship activist? All of the above....and in much more the former East Germany. There his banned records fetched small fortunes among rebellious young men who dreamed of freedom. We spend 30 minutes in the company of one such man who now runs a Zappa-themed festival. We also hear from an American translator who explains Zappa's obscure lyrics to German fans, line by line.
This week on The World in Words we talk about swear words from around the world and the bad words our grandmothers teach us. We hear from swearologist Stephen Dodson and author Marilyn Chin. Plus, Nina Porzucki interviews her grandmother about the meaning of a Polish word.
This week on the podcast we step gingerly into scalding waters to explore the question: What is the difference between a language and dialect? Linguists hate to define it. “As a linguist I will not engage in trying to define language and trying to define dialect and I’m not alone in that,” said linguist Bojan Belić. He’s certainly not alone. We reached out to linguists and language experts and were met with sigh after sigh. There are many rubrics that people cite as indicators of a dialect versus a language. Take mutual intelligibility. Two varieties of speech that are mutually intelligible surely must be dialects. But what happens when they’re not? Then there’s the old cliché, coined apparently by a Yiddish scholar, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Is language and dialect purely politics? This week we discuss two places where these labels might make you scratch your head: Scandinavia and the Balkans.
Many Russians perceive Donald Trump as an American version of Vladimir Putin. It's partly based on Trump's bombastic rhetoric, but also on how his speeches and tweets are translated into Russian.
Linguist Edward Vajda went to Siberia with a hunch. He returned with evidence linking a remote Siberian language with Navajo.
This week, The World in Words podcast visits the Moldova Authentic Restaurant in Newton, Massachusetts. Patrick Cox and Nina Porzucki talk with restaurant owners Artur and Sandra Andronic about their mother tongue. Also, what happens if you put a group of monolingual speakers of different languages on a deserted island? Linguist Derek Bickerton was determined to find out.
Sonia Paul grew up California, the child of immigrants from India and the Philippines. No wonder she's fascinated by the heated debates among Indian-Americans over how school textbooks characterize Hinduism and caste.
Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan novels have become a global hit. Their plot is rife with love and sex and the mob AND language. This week on the podcast we explore Italy's linguistic history and the tensions between Italian dialects like Neapolitan and the lingua franca. BONUS: Patrick Cox will sing for you in his best Italian accent.
Have you attended any “Matthew parties” lately? Or ever felt “too blessed to be stressed, too anointed to be disappointed”? If the answer is yes, you speak Christianese, a "religiolect" that linguists have recently started tracking.
The Arab world used to be home to hundreds of thousands of Jews who spoke their own variants of Arabic. Today, Judeo-Arabic survives only in exile. We hear stories of language and exodus from three Judeo-Arabic speakers now living in Montreal. Plus, novelist Louie Cronin on satirizing linguistics.
Many French people favor the English word 'black' over the local equivalent 'noir.' Why? There's a history behind it that dates back decades— in fact, two histories: the French version seeks to be colorblind while the American one recognizes race at every turn.
Mosul-born Anoud first came to the US when Obama was president. Now she doesn’t dare leave the country. Written in English, her satirical fiction targets ISIS, the international community and even refugees.
Ekegusii is spoken by about two million Kenyans but has been losing ground to Swahili and English. Now it is taught in some schools, thanks to local language activists assisted by American linguists.
Trump hotels, Trump wine, Trump golf courses, Trump steaks – we've heard a LOT about how Trump has made millions from his name. In English the word "trump" connotes a certain grandiosity but how does his name translate into other languages? And more importantly what do the translations say about how Trump is viewed in other countries, in other people's minds? This week on the podcast translating Trump.
We’ll look at Trump’s name in three different languages: American Sign Language, Mandarin, and Russian. And we enlist the expertise of several Davids and one Jami: Chinese linguist David Moser, The Washington Post's Moscow Bureau Chief David Filipov, Princeton Professor of French language and literature David Bellos, and American Sign Language Coordinator at the University of Pennsylvania, Jami Fisher.
Are the 300,000+ Dutch people who speak Frisian stubborn? Maybe...and maybe that's not a bad thing. We head to the Netherlands to hear from artists, writers, politicians and kids at a trilingual school.
WARNING: This podcast has explicit language and sexual content. This has been an election season of words: “bigly” or is it “big league,” “basket of deplorables” and you can’t forget “nasty.” But one word has recently caught a lot of people's attention: cuck.
It’s a slur being used by white nationalists and white supremacists, the so-called "alt-right,” people like Richard Spencer, the president of the National Policy Institute. The deceptively generic sounding organization espouses white nationalist ideology. During their conference held in Washington DC right after the US election, Spencer made headlines by using the phrase “Hail Trump” in his speech. In the same speech he also used the word “cuck.”
But long before white nationalist grabbed hold of cuck, the word, which has roots in the ancient insult “cuckold” took some interesting turns in its modern usage.
On the podcast this week we focus on the word "cuck." What does it mean? Who uses it? And how did it become the slur of choice for white nationalists? We'll hear from and linguist Michael Adams, sex columnist Dan Savage, and white nationalist Richard Spencer.
Hakuna Matata. You may recognize this phrase. You may even find yourself humming the earworm-provoking song of the same title from Disney's the Lion King. "It means no worries" goes the lyric. But Disney fails to mention that "Hakuna matata" means "no worries" in Swahili. Swahili – known as Kiswahili in East Africa – has its roots in a small tribal Bantu language spoken along one strip of Africa's eastern coastline. But these days, it's spread across the African continent. Today its spoken by more than 100 million people. More people speak Swahili than Korean or Italian.This week reporter Daniel A. Gross investigates how Swahili became a prominent language on the African continent and increasingly around the globe.
Standing Rock is more than a social movement for clean water rights. It's also where the Lakota language is re-inventing itself.
The language you would expect to hear in the United Arab Emirates is Arabic. Yet in a place like Dubai, English is the language on the streets, cafés and malls. Many Emiratis struggle in their own mother tongue. When oil was discovered in this mainly desert nation in the late 1950s, money and rapid development followed. An outside workforce poured into the country and a lot of them spoke English. So they communicated in English. At the same time, leaders in the UAE started to view English as the language of future. English entered the schools and classrooms. Slowly English became the lingua franca in the UAE. Arabic, meanwhile, slipped. This week on the podcast, reporter Shirin Jaafari heads to the UAE where she investigates what happened to Arabic in this Arab nation.
Folks from Salinas, California like to remind you that their valley is the “Salad Bowl of the World.” Not that you can forget. When you drive around town, everywhere you look there’s fields growing lettuce, strawberries, and broccoli. A growing number of the farm workers picking the broccoli and lettuce from those fields speak neither English nor Spanish but several Native Mexican languages like Mixtec, Triqui, Zapotec. How are these farmworkers navigating life in California speaking their languages? Turns out, it's not so easy. This week on the podcast we visit Natividad Hospital in the town of Salinas on California’s Central Coast. This hospital, surrounded by fields, serves many of the farm workers in the valley. Four of the most commonly spoken languages at the hospital are Native Mexican languages. For years doctors and staff at Natividad struggled to communicate with their indigenous language speaking patients. And finding qualified indigenous language interpreters proved to be difficult. Then hospital officials realized finding indigenous language interpreters was as easy as visiting their own waiting rooms. Many bilingual and trilingual farm workers were already informally interpreting for their family members and friends. What if they trained these folks to become qualified medical interpreters? In the podcast we’ll meet some of Natividad’s indigenous language interpreters. We’ll also head 250 miles south of Salinas to Oxnard, California where a new community radio station is broadcasting in some of these Native Mexican languages.
We know much more about bilingualism than we did 18 years ago when Californians voted to ban bilingual education. What does the research tell us? And will it effect Californians' upcoming re-vote on the issue?
The Keres language, spoken by the Laguna Pueblo of New Mexico, is dying. When younger tribal members tried to revive it, they were blocked by elders fearful that spiritual essence of the language would be lost.
A group of anarchist Christians known as the Doukhobors emigrated to Canada in the early 1900s after becoming outcasts in Russian society. Their descendants don't use the old Doukhobor-Russian dialect, except for when they sing.
Miami, the Magic City is bilingual in practice, but not in theory, says one linguist. During the 1960's Miami was an example of bilingual education; the place where educators around the world went to see how bilingual ed was done. Somehow that got lost along the way. Today Miami-Dade County, the sprawling bureaucracy that surrounds the City of Miami, is about 70 percent Latinx, yet, most kids in public schools only get about an hour of Spanish education, not really enough to be proficient in a language. This week on the podcast, guest host Maria Murriel heads down to her hometown to explore how Miamians, including herself, feel about Spanish in Miami.
What is it like to learn a second language when you can't read and write in your first one? That's the challenge for this Afghan teenage refugee now going to school in Belgium.
What happens when the last native speaker of a language has died? Is that language 'dead' or just 'sleeping'? And can it be woken up again?
When Netflix launched their talk show "Chelsea" this past May, they promised to deliver it three times a week in more than 20 languages. To do that, they had to invent a whole new translation process. We're in this interesting moment in media. The internet has made communicating with others across the globe easy and instant. But despite all the chatter about the global rise of English, the Tower of Babel still stands. The world remains multilingual, and not always translated. But more than a century ago, filmmakers thought they had found the key to tumbling the Tower of Babel. Directors like Charlie Chaplin and D.W. Griffith felt that silent film was the perfect medium to bring the world together, unite us all, be our “visual Esperanto.” And then sound came and wrecked everything. This week on the podcast we go back to the silent film era and examine what happened when sound entered the picture. We also get a peek into Netflix’s solution to translating Chelsea at a rapid rate and ensuring that the show is still funny in 20 languages.
A Vietnamese-American stays in touch with her cultural roots through language and song. But which language besides English will she pass on to her own children? Vietnamese or...Spanish?
The Canadian government eliminated many indigenous languages by sending children to church-run boarding schools. But the government has apologized and pledged to help bring back those languages. In British Columbia, the Ktunaxa language is making a modest comeback.
What pronouns do you use? Have you ever been asked? Do you ask others their pronouns? This week on the podcast, we hand over the reins to our talented summer intern Paulus van Horne to share a very personal story about pronouns. In the spring of 2016, Paulus came out as non-binary at college, asking friends and teachers to use the gender neutral pronouns they/them their. This summer at The World, Paulus came out for the first time at a workplace. This is their story.
Hawaiian is often offered up as a language revitalization success story, a model for other endangered languages to follow. But language revitalization isn’t so simple. While activists are reviving the Hawaiian language, opening up pre-schools, teaching thousands of second language learners there was and still is a small group of native speakers who have never lost the language, a group of native Hawaiians from the island of Niihau. This week The World in Words takes a trip to the Hawaiian Islands to meet some of Hawaii’s last native speakers. How have they managed to hold onto the language? What struggles do they face going forward? Is the variation of Hawaiian that the Niihau speak different from the language spoken by the activists leading the Hawaiian revitalization movement?
This just in: Arabic is not a violent ideology. It is a language that a handful of Americans are learning and loving.
Nina, Patrick and friends record this episode in front of a live audience at the New York Public Library. They discuss the rewards and challenges of language revitalization, complete with singalongs and a few dodgy jokes.
In the late 1970s the writer Alberto Manguel was working in Milan for an Italian publisher that had taken to publishing hidden or little-known manuscripts found in secret libraries. One day the publishing house received a package that contained a strange manuscript written in incomprehensible script. There was no note with the manuscript. No sign of who sent it or where it came from. This manuscript was more than strange, it was as if the publishing house had been gifted the encyclopedia of an alien planet with diagrams of everything on that planet from microbes to fantastical beasts to unusual vehicles and houses, the elements of a completely unknown civilization, all described in a strange swirly script. A note soon followed from the author of the text, Luigi Serafini. This week on The World in Words podcast, a mystery of encyclopedic proportions.
Japan's indigenous Ainu language is a mystery. Russian-born Anna Bugaeva is one of several non-Ainu linguists who have become semi-fluent in the language. They are on a mission to document Ainu, and figure out where it came from, before it disappears.
Dutch-born writer Gaston Dorren grew up speaking two languages, fell in love in a third, and added a fourth and fifth along the way. OK, he's obsessed with languages but in much of Europe multilingualism is common. Also, who owns Klingon?
New England is full of names that have odd and unexpected pronunciations. Woburn is more like WOOOOburn; Billerica gets transformed into Bill-Ricka. One of the more unexpected variations comes from a small town in New Hampshire with a familiar name — Berlin — but a pronunciation that isn’t at all like that of the German capital. Instead, it becomes BARlin, with emphasis on the first syllable. This week on the podcast Nina Porzucki sets out to unravel the mystery of how Berlin became “BARlin” as part of our Nametag series on place names. Plus Patrick Cox gets put to the test in pronouncing village names around Norfolk, England, and we speak with a Viking expert who studies place names in Old Norse around England.
The Etruscans lived in central Italy more than 2500 years ago. They were "the teachers of our teachers," the Romans. Yet we still can't be sure where they came from. The key to unlocking the Etruscan enigma may lie in genetics and linguistics.
If you want to upset French language purists, learn to speak Chiac. It's a dialect of Acadian French spoken in New Brunswick that borrows liberally from English. Even as other North American dialects and languages are vanishing, Chiac seems to be sticking around.
What’s in a name? Turns out more than you might think. What’s the deal with Tightsqueeze, Virgina? Where did the name for Dallas’ famous Reunion Tower come from? This week on the podcast we’re going to dive into some of these Nametag stories. Nametag is our occasional series on the stories behind places names. We’ll hear from The World’s intern Kenny Sokan on the stories behind some of the seedier place names in the United States. And producer Julia Barton takes us to her hometown of Dallas, Texas where she’s uncovered a dusty footnote in Dallas history linking a French socialist experiment to the Texas town.
For centuries, colonialists, church leaders and educators discouraged Irish people from using their native tongue. When Ireland won its independence, its leaders had no idea just how difficult it would be to bring the language back. Despite that, there's hope for Irish today.
Have you ever wondered about the name of a place? Why that name? Who named it? Why is it pronounced the way that it is? Well, The World in Words is going to dig into the stories behind place names in the United States and abroad. This will be part of an occasional series we’re calling Nametag. Our first Nametag story comes from reporter Alina Simone. She went on a quest to find out why 26 towns around the US are named Moscow.
We want questions from you, dear listeners! What names have always tickled your fancy and made you scratch your head why? They can be names of streets or towns or buildings or mountains – anything! Send us your queries via email: language@pri.org or hit us up on The World in Words Facebook page or tweet at us @lingopod.
English speakers may not realize it, but the world is full of people who speak more than one language. A couple of recent studies show that we begin to develop our ear for language-- or languages-- long before we learn to speak.
New to The World in Words? Well, first off, thanks for listening. And if you liked the Eddie Izzard episode last week, you might enjoy our episode with French comic Gad Elmaleh or our episode about the Pop Punk Accent.
For all that and more head to www.pri.org/language
This week the World in Words goes down several internet worm holes to explore the intersection of love and language. Valentine’s Day may have come and gone but love shouldn’t be sequestered to one measly day. So, bring on the love. In this episode Patrick Cox goes on a musical quest to find the most beautiful Danish love song. And Nina Porzucki speaks with linguist and romance novelist, Julie Tetel Andresen about her theory on why love and language at their very heart (pun intended) are driven by the same human need. Finally, writer Virge Randall shares her very personal story of losing love and subsequently language. It’s a heartfelt episode the week after Valentine’s Day. Come spend some quality time with us.
This week on the World in Words: Comedian Eddie Izzard. Eddie Izzard has often joked about language from the silliness of Latin to why English speakers are so stubbornly monolingual. However, in late ‘90’s, Eddie decided that it wasn’t enough to joke about language; he wanted to joke in other languages. So in 1997 he took the stage and did his first set in France in French. It wasn't funny, he admits, but it was the start of a career goal to do stand-up in as many languages as possible. Eventually he did feel funny (and fluent) in French. Now, nearly two decades after that first French show, he has toured in not only French but German and Spanish. He intends to learn Russian and Arabic next. This week The World in Words sat down with Izzard to find out why he’s decided to take his humor around the globe and how he’s managed to learn all these languages.
Bradley Campbell goes home to Dallas, Oregon, to find out why his Honduran-born father decided to "kill" Spanish a couple of years before Bradley was born.
Two years ago the Moroccan-French Comedian Gad Elmaleh had a dream to do 10-minutes of stand-up in English for an American audience. Elmaleh is a pretty big name in France. He can fill enormous arenas. But he left notoriety behind in France and came to the US. And for the last year he's been traveling across the US and performing in small comedy clubs honing his English routine. Elmaleh stopped by the studio on his way through Boston to talk about this English language learning adventure.
Among the mansions and golf clubs of the Hamptons, Shinnecock Indians are trying to re-learn their language which died out more than a century ago. Plus, David Bowie and the word, "They".
Emoji is a Japanese term for the cute little symbols you can text and tweet from your phone and PC. There are emojis for pizza and taco and apple but recently writer Jennifer 8 Lee discovered that there is no official dumpling emoji. Dumplings are one of the world's most ubiquitous foods, why dumpling emoji? Lee decided to change that and she found herself in a boardroom in Silicon Valley meeting with the Unicode Consortium. The World in Words talks Lee about her quest to create the first official dumpling emoji and about the mysterious Unicode Consortium, the entity that encodes emoji and makes them "official."
To close out 2015 the World in Words wanted to leave you smiling. Here's one of our favorite interviews with Canadian comedian Sugar Sammy.
In South Korea, mastery of American English is a status symbol. Families send their kids to academies chosen for their American instructors. We hear from an English teacher from Ireland who was told by a Korean recruiter, "You don't speak English."
There are mysteries aplenty in David Bowie's song lyrics, Jennifer Tseng's story of love and Noam Chomsky's theory about language. But do we really need to solve these mysteries?
Cheesesteaks, Peanut Chews, Tasty Cakes, oh yeah, the Liberty Bell – there’s so much to love about Philadelphia but one of the best things about the city of Brotherly Love is the accent. This week on the podcast we learn about the Philadelphia accent in American Sign Language. What is an accent in ASL? ASL speaker and researcher Jami Fisher explains it all. She is part of the team of researchers at the University of Pennsylvania who is working on the study to document this “weird” as she calls it way of signing. Plus, we hear from the actors of the Broadway musical, “Spring Awakening.” This new production features 8 deaf actors. John Hockenberry from our friends at The Takeaway got the chance to interview some of the actors.
Israeli linguist Arik Sadan is an authority on the Arabic language. Palestinian Sobhi Bahloul is Gaza's best-known Hebrew teacher. The two have never met.
In the wake of the Paris Attack French President François Hollande was quick to denounce the alleged attackers, 'Daesh.' Many people call this same jihadist group ISIS. Alternatively they've been called ISIL and even the Islamic State. But many in the Arab speaking world and increasingly Western leaders have taken to calling the group 'Daesh.' This week in the podcast we explore the meaning of the term 'Daesh.'
Many Lebanese speak a full-on mix of Arabic, French and English. Calling this linguistic melange a "mother tongue" started out as a joke, but now it's become a part of Lebanon's national identity — even if it means that sometimes people don't understand what they are saying. Also, to be a Lakota Indian how much of the language do you need to speak?
Adele, the Rolling Stones, Cliff Richard, Iggy Azalea, Nicki Minaj, The Killers, Snow – what do these artists all have in common? Their accent. That is, the fact that they sometimes put on an accent other than their own when they sing. This week’s edition of The World in Words podcast we tackle the complicated questions that arise when artists sing in an accent that’s not their own. We’ll hear from linguists Bill Beeman and Jane Setter and ethnomusicologist Langston Wilkins as we explore what it means to fake the funk and “how” and “why” we do it. It’s a wild musical ride from the Rolling Stones to Cliff Richard and the Shadows to Iggy Azalea. Plus, Marco Werman, host of PRI’s The World and the newsroom’s resident music nerd makes a special appearance on the podcast to take a musical accent quiz.
On a recent road trip reporter Dan Nosowitz and his girlfriend found themselves belting out the lyrics to a Blink-182 song in the highly affected style of lead singer Tom DeLonge. Singing in DeLonge’s nasal, Southern California surfer twang, is a hilarious way to pass the long hours on the road says Dan. But that road trip serenade got him thinking, what the heck was going on with DeLonge’s strange pop punk voice? He enlisted a linguist's help to find out. This week’s podcast we explore the strange vocal stylings of the lead singer of Blink-182, Tom DeLonge. We’ll learn about elongated vowels and rhotacism. Plus, we will talk about how the punk accent has evolved from New York City to London and in California. Come listen and sing along!
What is it about Texas that sparks the global imagination? Persian and Turkish both have an expression that means, "This is not Texas." The Norwegian adjective, 'Texas' means out of control.
Pope Francis has switched the official language of Vatican doctrine from Latin to Italian. He's also democratized his meetings with bishops. So why do some conservative bishops believe that contentious reforms are being deliberately lost in translation?
Donald Trump is hardly the only political candidate to complain about immigrants not learning English. But has he ever tried to find a convenient, affordable English class?
Memory is a mysterious thing. A few years ago my grandmother had a series of strokes and dementia set in. She's a polyglot, she speaks seven languages. But suddenly, post stroke she started speaking a mixture of Polish and Russian -- two languages that my family doesn't speak. She's stuck in this linguistic fog and nobody in my family can find our way through. And I wondered why does the brain latch on to one language and not another? This week on the World in Words podcast we delve into dementia and bilingualism. I speak with two scientists Ellen Bialystok a psychology professor at York University in Canada and Thomas Bak a neuropsychologist at the University of Edinburgh about their research into dementia and bilingualism. You’ll also get to hear from the expert, my grandmother, and hear a bit of my own crackpot theory as to why she’s chosen to speak Polish and Russian.
Yowei Shaw was born in the United States and speaks virtually no Mandarin. Her grandparents are from Taiwan and speak virtually no English. Kid talk was fine when Yowei was a kid. But now she's grown up, she's determined to have proper conversations with them— before it's too late.
Online dictionary Wordnik wants to give a home to a million "lost" words that aren't in traditional dictionaries. But do words like "lookupable" and "budthrill" really belong in a dictionary?
Recently, an old friend of mine had a language question she wanted me to investigate: Where does the word “hapa” come from? My friend Julie considers herself hapa. Her father is from Chile, her mom is Japanese American. And she calls herself “hapa” that is, half Asian, half something else. Julie had never questioned this definition before until one day, she was at the market, and she met a women who caused her to reconsider how she defined the word. This week, The World in Words takes a deep dive into the meaning(s) of the word hapa. I speak with Joanna Sotomura and Stephen Chang hosts of HalfTime, a YouTube talk show about Hapa issues. I interview professor Wei Ming Dariotis about how she became a hapa evangelist and then lost faith in the word. And we hear from Hawaiian linguist Kaeo NeSmith about the etymology of hapa and the term “hapa haole.”
A lawsuit has drawn the Japanese public's attention to 'matahara,' a word coined from the English 'maternity harassment.' It refers to the practice of demoting or even laying off women when they become pregnant. It joins 'sekuhara' (sexual harassment), 'pawahara' (power harassment) and several other terms used to describe different types of harassment.
Part acronym, part abbreviation, NOLA is an increasingly popular nickname for New Orleans. But does it reflect the city's cultural and linguistic heritage?
In the early 1940s, virtually no one in the UK spoke Japanese. The British War Office tried to change that after Japan invaded British-held Malaya and Singapore. The results were mixed.
A chance encounter in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park gives an 87-year-old survivor hope that his memory will live on after he dies. Plus, a lexicon of atomic bomb-related words.
New Zealander Nigel Richards recently rocked the competitive scrabbling playing world when he became the 2015 French Scrabble World Champion. The World in Words digs into the backstory of the Scrabble genius. Also in the podcast we hear from a researcher who has been observing a slow change in the Scottish dialect – Scots seem to be swallowing their R’s.
When linguist Bert Vaux posted a corpus of words and questions on his Harvard website back in the early 2000’s, little did he know that he would spawn an international meme. The quiz was supposed to test his students’ regional American accents. Did they say soda or coke or pop? Was it a roly-poly or a doodlebug? Do they wear sneakers or gym shoes or tennis shoes? His quiz went viral eventually becoming an international trend on YouTube. In this podcast I speak with writer Debbie Nathan who traced the origins of the meme for the language journal Schwa Fires. And I get to chat with linguist Vaux about what it's like to spark an internet phenomenon.
There’s a new documentary out in movie theaters analyzing stereotypes surrounding the “gay voice.” I’ll talk to linguist Ron Smyth featured in the documentary about those stereotypes and how they translate to other languages. Also, linguist and writer Arika Okrent explains the etymology of the word “disabled.”
This podcast we're headed down to the heart of French-speaking Louisiana. First we'll visit the French language radio station KVPI in Ville Platte, Louisiana. Since 1953 this commercial radio station has been broadcasting daily the local news in French. Even as the number of fluent French speakers dwindles in the area, the station is dedicated to reviving the heritage language. Next we'll head east to visit a public foreign language immersion elementary school in Baton Rouge. Kids spend the majority of their school day speaking either French or Spanish. The school began as a magnet program under East Baton Rouge Parish School System's desegregation order. Finally, we head back to KVPI to hear a little swamp pop. Never heard of swamp pop? Well, you'll just have to listen.
The year is 1793 and Horatio Lord Nelson is given command of the ship Agamemnon. Wait, “is” given command? Shouldn’t it be “was” given command? 1793 is the past, right? In this podcast, Patrick Cox delves into the historical present. And The World’s history guy, Chris Woolf lets the cat out of the bag on the lingo of the high seas. Plus other bits of fun tape. We won’t leave you high and dry.
Welsh is thriving. Or maybe it's not. While it is making a comeback in cities like Cardiff, the language is spoken much less in its traditional rural heartlands. All the same, efforts to keep Welsh alive are considered a model for other struggling languages.
Remember that Verizon commercial where some guy "tests" his cell signal in swamps and deep in the woods and in the middle of rush hour? The "can you hear me now?" guy is based on the real thing. Verizon engineers traverse the country testing signal but they aren't using the phrase "Can you hear me now?" They're using a set of special sentences written in a secret basement lab at Harvard during WWII. More about these Harvard Sentences in the podcast and British Justice Minister Michael Gove lays down the grammar laws for his staff. Gove's not-so-secret list of grammar no-nos.
So, Hollywood finally took note. Piper, the protagonist from the TV series Orange is the New Black named checked the big show, The World with Marco Werman for teaching her the meaning of the word "kibun." Except, well, we never did a story about that word. No worries. Find out what kibun means in the pod. We'll also explore the meaning of the word cowardice. Ever wonder why it's associated with the color yellow? Or the gut? The World's Clark Boyd found the courage to talk with author Chris Walsh about his book, "Cowardice: A Brief History."
Happy Birthday Magna Carta! The groundbreaking document turns 800-years-old this June. The "Great Charter" changed governance as we know it. But while the charter has long been revered, we really only cite a small part of the 5000 word document. So what does the rest of it say? The World's history guy Christopher Woolf explores the lesser known clauses of this great charter. Plus, The World in Words host, Patrick Cox takes a trip to the Salisbury Cathedral to see one of the four remaining copies of the Magna Carta.
The holy trinity of Icelandic identity is, according to a popular poem, land, nation and tongue. Remove one, and the others will collapse. So will the Icelandic nation survive if, as some predict, the Icelandic language eventually dies out?
For centuries, Icelanders have looked backward to move forward with their language. When they need to come up with words for a new technologies or ideas, they dredge up archaic terms-- and try to talk the public into re-using them.
Sponsored by state TV, the Star of Outlook English Competition is like a cross between the National Spelling Bee and American Idol. It claims to attract five million school-age entrants, as Chinese families chase the promise of an English-speaking life.
Many North Koreans try to drop their accents when they defect to the south. They must also learn the South Korean version of Korean, which eschews some traditional expressions for English loanwords. Even with a new smartphone app to guide them, it's a tough and unnerving challenge.
Alan Eyre has never been to Iran. But this State Department Persian speaker is a huge hit there, with his recitations of poetry, proverbs and policy.
Today, 'thug' is a nasty mess of a word with racial overtones. Its origin is Hindi, and its popularizers include Mark Twain, Margaret Thatcher and Tupac Shakur.
The English language is where diacritics go to die. Except in Minnesota, where the governor has ordered the reinstatement of two dots over the 'o' in Lindström.
"Our American Cousin" was a British melodrama that poked fun at uncouth Americans. When it transferred to the United States, a rewritten version turned it into a farce that mocked pompous Brits.
Martin Luther is best known as the instigator of the Protestant Reformation, but his Bible translations used a form of conversational language that Germans had never before seen in print. It marked the beginning of modern German.
Twelve centuries after the golden age of Chinese Tang poetry, China is celebrating a new generation of poets: punk poets, micro-blogging poets and farm girl poets. That's annoying traditionalists who worry that poetry has become a little too popular and accessible. American poets may just look on in envy.
Utah's public schools rank dead last in the nation in per-student state spending. Yet, the state has decided that its economic future lies in foreign language education. In the words of one state official, "Monolingualism is the illiteracy of the 21st century."
This ancient religious language is championed by India's Hindu nationalists. The new Hindu nationalist government is promoting Sanskrit over the objections those who favor a secular, pluralist India. All of which may put off some people from learning Sanskrit-- but not everyone.
In the early 1800s, native English speakers like Scotsman Hugo Reid and New Englander Abel Stearns settled in Mexican California, married Spanish speakers and took Spanish names. In letters to other local Anglophones, they peppered their English with Spanish expressions and idioms. Comedian George Lopez might have been thinking of them when he said, "We've always spoken Spanglish."
Pop Up Archive is making spoken word audio searchable. It joins a similar effort by the BBC to tag and transcribe words spoken into microphones but until now not written down. Plus, Argentina’s President posts a dumb tweet about the Chinese pronouncing rice, ‘lice.’
We humans have been dropping 'um,' 'uh' and other expressions of hesitation into our speech for a long time— maybe for as long as we've had language. More recently, linguists are noting a shift in usage across a number of Germanic languages from 'um' to 'uh.'
An online photo album is casting new light on a forgotten episode in Hawaii's history, when U.S. authorities imported 1,500 Russian Siberians to work on sugar plantations. Most of the migrants never made it past the language and cultural barrier, but the story of how they came to Hawaii says plenty about American attitudes to race and language.
"Africans are incredible linguists," says Lori Thicke, founder of Translators Without Borders, which enlists Africans to translate everything from medication instructions to election materials into some of Africa's 1,000+ languages.
People on the fringes of society—criminals, discriminated-against minorities, rebellious teenagers—often need to speak in code. So they create argots, or secret languages. In Turkey, the LGBT community keep their words to themselves with the help of an argot called Lubunca.
Most Haitian kids do not speak fluent French, but that is the language of instruction in the vast majority of Haiti's schools. Recently, some schools have dropped French in favor of Creole, which is universally spoken but often disparaged.
Turkey's president is demanding that students study the Ottoman language in schools. Is this a genuine effort to get Turks to better understand their history? Or a veiled attempt to undermine secularism and democracy?
Students learn in English, Spanish and Nahuatl. But this charter school has had to fight off an effort by officials to close it down.
If you live in California or eight other US states and you're fluent in more than one language, you can now get a bilingual seal on your high school diploma.
"Mafia" pits a well-connected minority against a civilian majority. It was invented as sort of spoof of KGB thinking, but it has gone global: the Russian government uses it to train spies, and would-be entrepreneurs around the world play it to practice their negotiating skills.
We like to know where our food comes from. We tend to know less about where the words for our favorite foods come from.
It's cheaper to crowd-source subtitles for TV shows and movies. But are these translations accurate and concise enough for viewers?
The web is supposed to be killing off mondegreens. But misheard lyrics are alive and well, even on the sites that try to end the confusion.
If you've ever struggled through Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past," you have C.K. Scott Moncrieff to thank. Moncrieff's translation introduced the French novelist to the English-speaking world. What's more, Moncrieff's own life was a veritable novel.
As the British Army departs from Afghanistan, it's taking a whole new vocabulary with it, to add to an already rich tradition of adopting foreign words and jargon. The Americans too, are adding to their lexicon of military slang.
Reporter Aaron Schachter met Iraqi interpreter Ayub Nuri in Baghdad in 2003. Since then, they have forged a relationship based on a shared desire to bear witness.
We may be in the midst of a golden age of vernacular English literature. Writers like Junot Diaz and M. NourbeSe Philip are introducing readers-- and the the English language-- to thoughts and expressions from their cultural backyards.
A conversation with Michael Wood, one of the editors of the "Dictionary of Untranslatables."
Russian filmmakers must either avoid using profane dialogue or seek alternative ways to show their films, now that Russian 'mat' is no longer permitted in public performances
Don't be fooled by all those Latin, French and German words, says Princeton science historian Michael Gordin. English has long since won science's language war. How that happened has more to do with history than science.
Because the word's origins are murky, it's difficult to know just how insulting calling someone a 'coonass' used to be. For some Cajuns today, it's a badge of honor.
Conceived at the Nuremberg trials, simultaneous interpretation is widely used at global meetings. The interpreters at the UN, EU and elsewhere are humans, not bots. And they're all about getting the nuances right in real time. Take that, Google Translate!
Every cuisine has its own rules about what you eat, when you eat it and how you eat it, says Dan Jurafsky, author of "The Language of Food."
In his retelling of Grimms' fairy tales Adam Gidwitz returns to the blood and gore of the original, while adding his own comments that have a distinctly contemporary flavor.
The Big Show's Marco Werman chats with his mom, Marjolijn de Jager, about her translations of West African French literature, and to David Bellos, author of a history of translation.
Some topics are off limits, but debate contests are part of an effort to instill independent thinking in young Chinese.
The Kazakh language uses the Cyrillic script, but Dutch-born linguist Allard Jongman is helping this oil-rich former Soviet state switch to the Latin Alphabet.
Despite her better judgment, New York-based Russian writer Anya Ulinich uses the web to seek out potential mates. She finds it all but impossible to interpret the profiles of American men, and they don't understand her any better.
Hindi and Urdu are similar when spoken, but they use different scripts. Over time, they have become cultural and religious symbols. Plus, the People's Linguistic Survey of India.
How long does it take for a new variety of a language to evolve once somebody lands in a particular part of the world?
Back in the 17th century there was a big move to create rules for English, based on Latin. The man behind it, poet John Dryden, thought that Shakespeare and others had turned English into an unruly mess. Had Dryden succeeded, would his academy have fostered linguistic snobbery?
Shakespeare may not have invented as many words as once thought, but he turned the English language on its head. Perhaps that's the reason that both he and English have such global appeal.
Despite what grammar sticklers think, there was never a golden age of pure English: the language always been an unruly mishmash of other languages. Just consult the Venerable Bede, a 7th century monk who documented the beginnings of English.
During the Cold War, you could get a job at the Pentagon or State Department job if you spoke Russian. Today you're guaranteed nothing more than the agony of grappling with Russian grammar. Still, there are signs that a few Americans are taking the plunge.
Researchers at the University of St. Andrews have compiled a list of 66 gestures that that they say chimpanzees use to communicate with each other.
Native Spanish speaker Fernando Palomo does English language TV commentary for ESPN. He offers US viewers instant analysis that draws on his soccer-obsessed Latin American background.
The man Lady Gaga called the "mayor of Iceland" is obsessed by language: the language of professional politicians, the Icelandic language and the restrictive rules in Iceland that prevent him from officially changing his name.
In a World Cup match in 1966, a German referee sent off an Argentine player. The player, who spoke only Spanish, says he didn't understand and refused to leave the field. Plus, Canada has its own racism controversy over the name of a sports team.
Before it became the predominant language of Israel, Hebrew hadn't been spoken for 1,700 years. That's presenting a challenge for the editors of the Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language. Also, Azerbaijan's war on Russian names.
Many words sound similar in English and Spanish: car, carro; fruit, fruta. But watch out: 'hospice' and 'hospicio' do not mean the same thing.
From Peter the Great to Stalin, Russian leaders have issued edicts to reform the Russian language. But top-down language reform rarely works. And it may fail again now.
Listen closely to the slurs being slung back and forth between pro-Russian separatists and pro-government Ukrainians, and you can hear the echoes of history.
Multilingual mixologist Joaquin Simo is steeped in cocktail culture. For his concoctions, the names are borrowed from foreign languages, overheard phrases and racehorses.
What's the best way to campaign for Scottish independence? Create a fictional opponent who expresses souped-up, pro-British slogans to the tune of a Lady Gaga song.
British blogger Shaun Usher collects letters from and ancient and recent history. The best of the letters are now reproduced in his book, "Letters of Note."
Author Kristie Macrakis got interested in invisible ink a few years ago while researching the Stasi, East Germany's secret police. Now she's written a history of steganography, or "hidden writing."
When Toronto Star reporter Mitch Potter was approached by a group of angry Pro-Russian separatists in the Eastern Ukraine town of Slovyansk, he thought he was going to be detained. Then he spoke French.
Language editor Patrick Cox can't decide between three Chinese names given to him by Chinese friends and colleagues. The first uses clever wordplay, the second adheres to fortune telling conventions, and the third looks and sounds majestic.
China may be experiencing a golden age of memorable English names. Millions of young Chinese are giving themselves English names of all shapes and sizes. But there’s also evidence that the trend may be peaking.
In Russian, the word for “pregnant” can mean “burdensome.” In Chinese, “pregnant” appears to imply “happiness.” But be careful reading too much meaning into these words.
The rhetoric of apology in China today is nuanced and coded. Though some people seem genuinely contrite for their actions during the vigilante violence of the Cultural Revolution, they are careful not to blame the government.
Are you too mildly dissatisfied with your choice of sign-off? Don't like "Best"? Find "Cheers" to British? And "XO" creepy? Help is on the way.
Fifty years ago, kids caught speaking French in Maine schools might be punished. Today, the state is proud of its French heritage and is trying to keep Maine French alive.
Alina Simone's Russian family and American friends aren't on the same page — not even close — when it comes to responding to this simple question.
Colombian ballots contain only numbers, not names. So candidates have to get noticed in other ways. The favorite method: a memorable jingle.
When a TV host criticized others for their "pretentious" pronunciations of French names, Canadians of all stripes rounded on him-- and he was forced to apologize.
Sid Caesar, who died this week, was a master of what comedians call double talk: gibberish masquerading as a foreign language. Carl Reiner pays tribute to Caesar's mastery of double talk, while Moshe Waldoks traces it back to Caesar's multilingual upbringing.
Sochi, the venue for the Winter Olympics, is usually anglicised as SOTCH-i (-o as in not, -tch as in catch, -i as the "y" in happy)
German designer Otl Aicher created the pictograms for the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. His designs influenced not only future Olympic pictograms but many signs we see every day.
Handbills, political tracts and posters are created for instant, fleeting consumption. But collecting ephemera is big business-- and in the age of the internet, it's only getting bigger.
You'd never guess that this blonde singer performs in completely fluent Cantonese. Carinna Chamberlain, aka Chan Ming Yan, has become something of a Cantopop sensation in Hong Kong.
Gary Shteyngart writes in English, but his memoir draws on the Russian and Yiddish of his Leningrad childhood, and the Hebrew of his schooling in New York.
Disney has released a version of the Oscar-nominated song from "Frozen" that includes lyrics sung in 25 languages. It sounds global and inclusive but most of languages are European.
Bruce Willis, Jim Carrey and the Simpsons are all voiced for the Latin American Spanish market by Mexican actors. But low wages and outsourcing to other countries are chipping away at Mexico's monopoly.
The words that athletes from India, Germany and Costa Rica draw on to prepare for big games.
Patrick and Carol talk language stories in the news, including: two new studies on infant language acquisition; why some cultures love to say sorry; and the mysterious presence across many languages of the expression, 'huh?'
It's hard to be an entrepreneur in France these days, what with government regulation and a French attitude that failure is just bad form. So some French entrepreneurs are settling in Silicon Valley and bringing their French style with them.
'Selfie' is topping some word of the year lists. Its rise to fame has been so rapid that it doesn't exist in most other languages. Speakers of those languages just use the English word, and they don't have much choice about it if they want to be part of the conversation on social media.
Marco Antonio Tabin Garcia has never left Guatemala. When he was younger, he considered moving to the United States. But he decided against it and instead taught Spanish at a local school in Antigua for over 20 years. But in the past few years, he's found a way to make a better living, by teaching Spanish lessons over Skype.
Linguist Alison Wray talks about how different cultural attitudes around the world about dementia may be key to helping us cope better with the disease at home.
Two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa's eleven official languages don't always sit well together. And their relationships are changing.
Why is saying something like "The Sheik's Sixth Sheep's Sick" so darn hard to say? A psycho-linguist wants to know, so she can help people with speaking disorders.
The last emperors of China, the Qing Dynasty, were Manchus. Their language is close to dying out in modern China, so now there's a last-ditch effort to save it, and the link it provides to China's history and traditional medicine.
Beijing wants all Chinese citizens to speak Mandarin, but that's easier said than done.
Beijing has long wanted the world’s most populous country to be unified under a single language. Now, it may actually happen, thanks to increased mobility and migration.
If you want to learn English as it's spoken, you have to practice phrases like "the guy's a total flake." That's how students learn at UCLA Extension's American Language Center, where the slang is snappy and up-to-date.
Writer and musician Alina Simone loved the comforting anonymity of her adopted name — until she met another woman with the same name.
A University of Pennsylvania professor tweeting as “Nein Quarterly" has attracted more than 40,000 followers with his wry observations on everything from US politics to the sexiness of the German umlaut.
Fans of 19th century novelist are split over the Bank of England’s choice of image for the new £10 note.
The language of tech start-ups, innovation and business deals are deeply influenced by the many Indians who live and work in Silicon Valley.
Japanese baseball player Koji Uehara is pitching for the Red Sox this World Series. And while Uehara may not be fluent in English, he has no problem communicating on the field without an interpreter by his side. So how does he speak with his teammates?
Anonymous street artists are putting accent marks on a New York City subway line to draw attention to the growing number of Spanish speakers in the city.
Many athletes crave noisy crowds. So do sports TV viewers. Some people go to great, sometimes even artificial, lengths to connect crowds with athletes and viewers.
We visit language services company Cetra, whose contract to provide interpreters at an international defense chiefs conference has been canceled.
If you want to revive vanishing languages, don't just document them. Get people to speak them on stage-- and then videotape it.
Governments go to extremes to keep minorities in their place. In Turkey, leaders banned several letters of the alphabet. Now that is set to change.
You might think world leaders care a lot about the words they choose and how powerfully they deliver them. Guess again. Sometimes all that matters much less than deciding whether to speak English or not.
Relations between the US and Iran have been so bad for so long that there may be an understandable urge to make up for lost time, and get right down to business. But that may not be best in the long run
When Spanish-speaking actresses come to this country, they often spend a bundle on trying to lose their accents. But these days,a Latino accent can be an asset. Sara Loscos of Feet in Two Worlds has the story.
Belgium's favorite comic book son, Tintin, gets to speak Scots in a new translation by Susan Rennie. Listen as she speaks some of the dialogue, and explains why this particular Tintin adventure got the Scots treatment.
After a multi-lingual Google Translate test of a Winston Churchill speech, we visit Google headquarters to hear about improvements to instant web translation. Then we hear of the contrasting approach of SRI International, which developed Apple's Siri translator. Their goal: "Do no harm."
Nothing translates as badly as humor and the more different the foreign language the less funny the joke it seems. So how can we in the US understand Chinese humor? The World's Nina Porzucki recently went to China to figure it out.
Chile claimed Easter Island over a century ago. Since then, Spanish has chipped away at its Polynesian-based language called Rapa Nui. Now its fate rests in the playground as the island tries to raise a new generation of speakers.
Irish poet Seamus Heaney passed away today. He was 74-years-old. The poet won numerous writing awards including the Nobel Prize. But another Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, says few in US understand what an extraordinary role the poet had in Irish life.
Scholars and the OED have cited Shakespeare as the originator of more than 1600 words. While he was the first to write down many words, new research fueled by computer analysis indicates he didn't invent as many words as once thought.
The capitals of Hungary and Romania are confused so often one Romanian candy company has taken it upon itself to educate the world about the difference. It has Romania's capital stamped into each bar.
From a distance, in Los Angeles, Mexicans with indigenous roots are keeping their traditions and languages alive.
After winning Major League Baseball's home run contest this week, Cuban-born Yoenis Cespedes was interviewed by ESPN's Pedro Gomez. Gomez was blasted by many on Twitter for speaking Spanish. Host Marco Werman speaks with Gomez about the angry reaction.