Category: minority languages (page 4 of 7)

237: Hinglish (featuring Sana Bharadwaj)

Hinglish. It’s not Hindi. It’s not English. So what is it?

It’s a hybrid language spoken by about 350 million Indian people. And it’s getting bigger all the time. But what’s it like, and what function does it have for …

235: Worst Words (featuring Don Watson)

Are our vocabularies shrinking? Is bureaucratic double-talk a sinister form of code designed to short-circuit original thought?

Author Don Watson thinks so, and explains why in his latest book Worst Words. But how does his view stack up to language …

234: Disruptive Language Tech

What happens when computers can use language like humans can? Language workers may be out of a job.

Translators, teachers, and others are watching with concern. But is there reason to think that we’re on the verge of solving all …

233: Comedy in Translation (featuring Kuah Jenhan)

A joke’s a joke, but is it still funny in translation? How does a comic have to adapt things for different language audiences? And what’s going on in Malaysia’s burgeoning comedy scene?

Multilingual writer and comedian Kuah Jenhan is in …

232: Rabid Linguists

People are asking questions about language and gender equality.

What’s Oxford Dictionaries doing about some of its questionable definitions? And linguists are wondering why Disney princesses don’t talk more.

Linguist Daniel Midgley is listening on this episode of Talk the

227: Are Emoji Words?

Can an emoji be a word?

Oxford Dictionaries thinks so — they chose one as their Word of the Year. And this has language purists fuming. But what exactly is a word?

Linguist Daniel Midgley explains on this episode of …

215: Is Cantonese Endangered? (featuring Zoe Lam)

When we think of endangered languages, we tend to think of those with a small number of speakers in remote areas.

We don’t usually think of Cantonese.

And yet this language with millions of speakers on multiple continents is facing …

214: Whistled Languages

Human language isn’t all about speech — some communication happens by whistling.

Whistled languages are found around the world, and they give us a chance to learn about language and the brain. How do they work? And why are they …

212: Fourth Floor

Language change is all around us — even at department stores.

It’s there that linguist Daniel Midgley travelled to get in touch with a 50-year-old linguistic experiment that changed the world. And it all starts with a question: What’s on …

199: Computer Humour

Why did the computer cross the road?

Linguists are trying to get computers to do very human things: detect humour, recognise irony, and even write jokes. But can computers do funny? What makes something funny, anyway?

Linguist Daniel Midgley hacks …

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