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...
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...
Will technology make Braille obsolete as a primary reading tool for blind people? Will talking apps and audiobooks win out over embossed dots? It's possible, but Braille has been written off before; each time, it has come back stronger. We trace...
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...
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...
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.
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...
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 Semino, editor of a crowd-sourced publication called the Metaphor...
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...
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 She tells us of her love of outdated Venezuelan slang; also about parenting her...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
‘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...
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...
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...