Category: African-American English

377: Mailbag of Uncomfortableness

The mail keeps coming, and we keep answering.

  • Is English really a dialect of Chinese?
  • Why do people say “uncomfortableness”, when we already have “discomfort”?
  • Are “ankh” and “anchor” related?
  • How does learning traditional languages help communities?
  • Is there a

363: Talking Race (with Jessi Grieser)

What happens to language when newcomers move in?

Language isn’t just for communication — it also signals membership in a group, and this is especially clear in a gentrifying community in Washington DC. Black residents are using African-American English to stake …

355: The Bee Show (with Stephen Mann)

Bees: not just great pollinators; great communicators.

The dance of the European honeybee is one of the most famous methods of communication in the animal kingdom, and shows features that are very similar to human language.

But are bees losing …

353: Mailbag of Highly Intelligent Listeners

Listeners have sent us a bracket of great questions.

Will there ever be only one language on earth? When was the beginning of buzzwords? And why do some people say I have went?

We’ll give our best answers on …

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