linguistics

#1209 Patrick Foote - Immigrant Tongues: Exploring How Languages Moved, Evolved, and Defined Us

Jan 30, 2026

Patrick Foote is the creator of the YouTube channel Name Explain (@NameExplain), where he uncovers the origins of names and highlights many other aspects of language. He founded the channel in 2015 whilst working in retail, as a creative outlet and as a means to share his love of all things language. Since then, Name Explain has amassed hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views. The channel’s success led Patrick to write his first book, The Origin of Names, Words and Everything in Between, in 2018. His latest book is Immigrant Tongues: Exploring How Languages Moved, Evolved, and Defined Us. More»
#1122 Daniela Rodrigues: Communication in Apes and Humans, and the Cognitive Foundations of Language

Jul 11, 2025

Dr. Evelina Daniela Rodrigues is an invited assistant professor at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, where she teaches Master’s students about the cognitive foundations of language. She studies gestural communication in human and non-human primates. Beyond communication, she is also interested in other aspects of social development and cognition, including interactions among social partners (such as hierarchy and social bonds), social learning and culture, object manipulation and tool use, and theory of mind. More»
#1098 Karen Stollznow - B*tch: The Journey of a Word

May 16, 2025

Dr. Karen Stollznow is a researcher at Griffith University and a host of Monster Talk, an award-winning science-based podcast. She is a linguist and the author of On the Offensive, Missed Conceptions, God Bless America, and Language Myths, Mysteries, and Magic. She writes for Psychology Today, Scientific American Mind, and The Conversation and has appeared on the History Channel’s History’s Greatest Mysteries and Netflix’s The Unexplained Files. Her latest book is Bitch: The Journey of a Word. More»
#1039 Jonathan Bobaljik: Linguistics, Morphology, Syntax, and Universal Grammar

Dec 30, 2024

Dr. Jonathan Bobaljik is a Professor of Linguistics at Harvard University. He specializes in morphology, syntax, and typology. He is the author of Universals in Comparative Morphology: Suppletion, Superlatives and the Structure of Words, which was awarded the Linguistic Society of America's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award. More»
#1017 Erica Cartmill: The Evolution of Ape Gestures and Human Language

Nov 8, 2024

Dr. Erica Cartmill is Professor of Cognitive Science, Anthropology, and Animal Behavior at Indiana University. She studies the acquisition and evolution of human language. Her work bridges the biological and linguistic subfields and involves both comparative and developmental approaches to communication. She is interested in how the multimodal aspects of communication contribute to and constrain the construction of meaning in spontaneous interaction. She is particularly interested in whether gesture played a role in the origins of human language. More»
#942 Fernanda Ferreira: Linguistics, Fluency, Speech Disfluencies, and Comprehension

May 17, 2024

Dr. Fernanda Ferreira is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Fair Open Access journal Glossa Psycholinguistics. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and the Association for Psychological Science (APS). Dr. Ferreira’s area of research is psycholinguistics. She uses basic insights from formal linguistics, especially theories in sentence phonology and syntax, to develop models of processing. The fundamental aim of her research is to uncover the mechanisms that enable humans to understand and generate language in real-time and in cooperation with other cognitive systems. More»
#926 Michael Frank: Child Development and Language Acquisition

Apr 11, 2024

Dr. Michael Frank is David and Lucile Packard Professor of Human Biology and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University. He studies children's language learning and how it interacts with their developing understanding of the social world. He uses behavioral experiments, computational tools, and novel measurement methods like large-scale web-based studies, eye-tracking, and head-mounted cameras. He is the founder of the ManyBabies Consortium, a collaborative replication network for infancy research, and has led open-data projects including Wordbank and MetaLab. He was a Jacobs Foundation Fellow and has received the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the FABBS Early Career Impact Award, and the Marr Prize and Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. He served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society and has edited for journals including Cognition and Child Development. More»
#911 Caleb Everett - A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think

Mar 11, 2024

Dr. Caleb Everett is a Senior Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Miami and a Professor in the Anthropology Department, with a secondary appointment in Psychology. He is a member of the inaugural class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. His work explores language, cognition and behavior across the world's cultures. His latest book is A Myriad of Tongues: How Languages Reveal Differences in How We Think. More»
#824 Valerie Fridland - Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English

Aug 21, 2023

Dr. Valerie Fridland is Professor and former Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the University of Nevada in Reno. She is an expert on the relationship between language and society. Dr. Fridland also speaks and writes widely for a popular audience. Her language blog, Language in the Wild, appears in Psychology Today and her lecture series, Language and Society, is featured with The Great Courses. She is the author of several books, including Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. More»
#820 Joseph Errington: The History of Linguistics, Colonialism, and Language Ideologies

Aug 11, 2023

Dr. Joseph Errington is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. He studies language change as a source of insight into the ways languages constitute intimate parts of our everyday lives, and at the same time are foundational for large-scale institutions, social groups, and social dynamics. He has worked mostly in Indonesia, studying Javanese (90 million speakers), Indonesian (250 million speakers) and a range of Malay dialects. He has also worked on questions of language ideology and practice: how conceptions of language can shape and reflect social interests, naturalize images of social groups, and shape everyday ways of talking. He is the author of books like Language and Social Change in Java, Shifting Languages, and Linguistics in a Colonial World. More»