Because Language - a podcast about linguistics, the science of language.

Translating Shakespeare takes a knowledge of language, culture, and poetry — both in English and in the target language. There are tradeoffs and pitfalls, but a skilled translator can bring Shakespeare closer to our...

Each letter in our Latin alphabet tells a story. But what about spaces? Or writing direction? Should we get rid of some letters, or could we even do with more? Here to answer all these questions is Dr Danny Bate...

We created software that could generate human-like text output quickly and easily. Now we're dealing with the societal upheaval it's caused. What are the risks and rewards, and what can we learn about language from...

Australian magpies are even cleverer birds than we thought. New research from Dr Stephanie Mason shows that they do two language-like things we used to think only humans could do: learn their calls socially, and combine...

Wherever Irish speakers in the world get together, you can have a "pop-up Gaeltacht"! And we're having one on this episode. We've got author and TG4 presenter Laura Pakenham taking us through the history and orthography...

What goes on in our minds when we construct an utterance? Linguists often use syntax trees to represent the structure of sentences, but are they psychologically real? Yngwie Nielsen and Dr Morten Christiansen have found...

What will happen to the languages of climate refugees? Dr Mary Walworth has been working with the small island community of Nusi in Papua New Guinea, which was recently featured in an episode of Pole to Pole with Will...

"More people have listened to this episode than you have." Why does this sentence look so right, but feel so wrong? When your grammar says one thing, but your brain says another, you may have found a linguistic...

How do you define what blue is? What even IS colour? Turns out, the quest to define colours was happening along with a standardisation crisis and a dictionary crisis at the venerable Merriam-Webster. Lexicographer and...

We all have an accent — or several! And we use them to communicate things about us, and highlight aspects of our identity. So what's going on with the accents we hear? Are we losing some accents, or are they just...

We're talking to Dr Kelly Wright , friend of the show and data czar for the American Dialect Society. They run the biggest and most prestigious Word of the Year event, and she was there when the 2025 WotY votes came in...

Video for this episode: https://youtu.be/Mqf05kN-TaI It's Word of the Year season, and we're counting down our Words of the Week of the Year! In the time-honoured tradition, we gathered them all up from our 2025 shows...

You know the story. The language you speak doesn't determine your savings. If your language has a future tense, there's no impact on the way you see or describe the future. Language and perception are separate. Well...

We've asked linguists about how language began, but what would an evolutionary biologist tell you? Prof Madeleine Beekman says it's part of a complex web of body, brain, and community, and at the heart of it is (perhaps...

Among so many great word games, crosswords still reign supreme. How have they survived — and even expanded — in our digital age? What goes into a good puzzle, and will computer techniques take over? Daniel chats with...