Author: Gretchen McCulloch

Author of Because Internet and cohost of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

July, August, & September 2025: ASL Camp and Arroba Lengua

Gretchen McCulloch

This summer, I went to ASL camp! I spent a week at Bob Rumball Camp of the Deaf, in Parry Sound, Ontario, at their ASL Adult Immersion Summer Camp, voices off for 6 nights and 7 days! This was my first time doing any sort of language immersion camp in my various experiences learning languages, and I definitely see why people like them, I really felt liked I levelled up significantly in my signing with that much concentrated practice (and I slept very soundly in the dorm beds since my brain felt so full from learning). And I made friends and got to learn from a left-handed ASL teacher for the first time, which was helpful for me as a lefty!

Also, the Spanish-language translation of Because Internet was released. You can get Arroba Lengua — not a literal translation of the title, but Spanish Internet slangification with a similar vibe — from Piodepagina, Casadellibro, and other places Spanish-language books are sold (note that the ebook edition may be more readily available if you’re outside Europe). And for lots of juicy details about the translation process, see our Lingthusiasm bonus episode where Lauren Gawne and I interview Miguel Sánchez Ibáñez, the translator. 

More media milestones

Let’s start with the big news: The first Crash Course Linguistics video has hit a million views! If you want some fun 10 min linguistics videos to watch, here’s a great place to start.

In way smaller news, Because Internet is on one of Penguin Random House’s “credibility bookshelf” zoom backgrounds. 

And somewhere in between: Because Internet made an appearance in an episode of Words Unraveled. @efrex.bsky.social made a nice callout to my interview on Let’s Learn Everything. And Linguistic Discovery would like to remind you that the internet is encouraging, not ruining, writing. 

Lingthusiasm

We launched two new Lingthusiasm merch designs:

{Merry, marry, Mary} Holidays Whether you say them the same or differently, hope you have a joyful festive season!
The Lingthusiasm podcast logo

Lingthusiam put out six episodes, including three interviews. 

Speaking of interviews, we have more than twenty interview episodes now, and you can find them all together on our topics page, where they have their own category. We also have over 100 bonus episodes for patrons, with a few interviews there as well.

Lingcomm

It was a big few months for communicating about lingcomm. Maybe we can call that lingcommcomm? Or maybe not… 

I presented at Lingstitute 2025, the LSA summer institute, about 101 ways to communicate linguistics with a broader audience — some of which we brainstormed together in this bluesky thread.

I started a new series of interviews on the lingcomm.org blog about community collaboration linguistics projects that don’t have much of a web presence. First interview: Lingcomm IRL with Girl Scouts, an interview with Nikole Patson.

The lingcomm mailing list now has over 100 members! If you’re a lingcomm practitioner who wants to hear about lingcomm conferences, events, journal special issues, and so on, please feel free to subscribe!

Lingthusiasm cohost creator Lauren Gawne put out her yearly list of linguistics and language podcasts. Know of a good one she missed? Please let her know!  

New favorite linguistic data

Linguistics

— Gretchen McCulloch (@gretchenmcc.bsky.social) 2025-09-11T21:54:45.712Z

Miscellaneous posts

The lingthusiasm podcast logo, zoomed in to reveal many smaller pictures

This quarter’s image is a schwa and a kiki and a nondetatched rabbit part and a vowel space and a microphone and…

April, May, & June 2025: Lauren writes a gesture book!

Gretchen McCulloch

Back in 2017, when I was deep in the writing process for Because Internet, I was feeling stuck on the emoji chapter and Lauren Gawne, my cohost on the then-baby Lingthusiasm podcast (we were less than a year old!) offered to read the current draft. I’ll never forget her comment that led to me rewriting the whole chapter: “You realize this is all related to gesture, right?” 

Immediately, I wanted to dive into the gesture literature, which hadn’t been a part of either of my linguistics degrees. I asked Lauren where I should start. Was there some sort of short book or long survey article that put the rest of the literature into context so I could figure out which papers I needed to read more deeply and how they fit into relationship with each other? Lauren was like, “Read these parts of McNeill 1992, and then McNeill 2005, and then these three chapters of Kendon 2004…” — which was when I realised maybe I was going to have to solve this problem for myself. She ended up sending me her classroom slides and answering my questions herself, which led to a much-revised chapter in Because Internet and an academic paper together on emoji as gesture. 

Since then, we’ve done several Lingthusiasm episodes about various aspects of gesture, but that gap we noticed in 2017 has still been there: if someone wants a more in-depth entry point into the gesture literature, one that doesn’t assume they have any background in gesture specifically but does assume they want more details than we can fit into a podcast episode, where do they go? Especially since many people’s degrees, like mine, still don’t contain much about gesture, so a prof in linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and related fields might not know where to advise a student with a gesture-related project to start reading. 

That’s why Lauren has written a book! It’s called Gesture: A Slim Guide and it’s available now from Oxford University Press. The Slim Guides are part of an Oxford series in the genre known as academic crossover books: they’re much less technical than a typical academic monograph, but more in-depth than a trade book from a commercial publisher like Penguin. Here are some ways you can learn more about it: 

Events and media

I also did other things this quarter than just take credit for Lauren’s hard work! Quite a few things, in fact: three conferences…

…two guest appearances…

…and a few anniversaries:

Lingthusiasm

We had a few special lingnouncements this quarter. (Is that a word? It is now.)

You can now gift a Lingthusiasm membership to someone else. Depending on the tier you buy, this could get them access to bonus episodes and our Discord server, or even a spot with their favorite IPA character on the Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame.

We also celebrated our 100th bonus episode on Patreon. In celebration, we went back into the vault and revisited our very first bonus episode — with updated sweary commentary on Important Swearing Developments that have happened since 2017. We’ve made this extra bonus bonus version available to all patrons, free and paid, so feel free to send it to your friends!

Plus, we had a full quarter of three regular and three bonus episodes:

Posts

New favorite linguistic data

This quarter’s image is me, holding onto Lauren’s Gesture book with my own two hands (well, one hand had to hold the camera), since it exists in the real world! I hope it brings joy to students, researchers, and autodidacts! 

"Gesture: A slim guide" by Lauren Gawne, published by Oxford University Press

January, February, and March 2025: 100th Lingthusiasm episode

Gretchen McCulloch
A bag of popcorn labeled in French and English. Where the English says "No cheese cheesiness," the French says "Au fauxmage"

 In the first few months of 2025, we celebrated a podcast milestone: 100 episodes of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! 

To celebrate, my cohost Lauren Gawne and I did a special double-feature: our 100th episode had 100 “fun fact” reasons to be enthusiastic about linguistics (including a few from former guests) and our 101st episode finally tackles that classic “Linguistics 101” format of the micro-to-macro perspective on language. 

Plus, we made a special roundup post of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics. This is your one-stop-shop if you want suggestions for other podcasts, books, videos, blogs, and other places online and offline to feed your interest in linguistics, based on whittling down over 1000 listener suggestions from the Lingthusiasm listener survey with editing assistance from Leah Velleman. Even with a hundred and one options, we’re sure there’s still a few that we’ve missed, so also feel free to tag us @lingthusiasm on social media about your favourites! 

Also, and we feel extremely enthusiastic about this, after a bonus episode mentioned crocheting a model of the vocal tract, very talented listener Melody sent us a genuine crocheted model of the vocal tract! 

And as always we put out three regular and three bonus episodes.

Publishing news from all over 

Because Internet is now translated into four languages — three that I don’t speak (which is very surreal) and one that I sorta do. My author copies of all four have now finally arrived, so here’s a photo of them all hanging out together! 

Book covers in four languages: Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

And the famous Bunny Paper — a.k.a. Labov 1971, on evaluating kids’ language skills (using empathy and bunnies) — is back in print in open access form! When Labov passed away, someone mentioned the existence of this once-obscure paper, and Linguistics Twitter went on a hunt for a copy. We eventually did an episode about it on Lingthusiasm. Now it’s back in print so anyone who wants can read it.

Events

I went to the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting, this year in Philadelphia, where I played Spot the Canadian, felt a little bit old when I met a longtime fan, and saw “rawdog” elected Word of the Year.

To rawdog: taking on life without the usual protection, preparation, or comfort. Whether it’s diving into a challenge unprepared or skipping the safety net, rawdogging is about embracing risk, stone-cold sobriety, and rolling with it.

I also appeared on a few other podcasts:

New favorite data…

…and a few excellently coined new words

Social media

This quarter’s image is a bag of popcorn proving that people in Montreal really are using “fauxmage.”

2022 Year in Review

Gretchen McCulloch

2022 was a year of opening up again and laying foundations for future projects. I spent the final 3 months of it on an extended trip to Singapore, Australia, and New Zealand, which is a delightful reason to have a delay in writing this year in review post. 

Interesting new projects this year included my first piece in The Atlantic, why we have so much confusion on writing the short form of “usual” and 103 languages reading project: reading one paper per language for all the languages represented in the major child language acquisition journals, inspired by a paper by Evan Kidd and Rowena Garcia. 

Continuations of existing projects: 

Conferences/Talks

Lingthusiasm

In our sixth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did a redesign of how the International Phonetic Alphabet symbols are layed out in a chart, in order to correspond more closely with the principle that the location of a symbol is a key to how it’s articulated. This involved much digging into the history of IPA layouts and back-and-forths with our artist, Lucy Maddox, and we were very pleased to make our aesthetic IPA design available on a special one-time edition of lens cloths for patrons as well as our general range of posters, tote bags, notebooks, and other all-time merch. 

We also did our first Lingthusiasm audience survey and Spotify for some reason gave us end-of-year stats only in French, which I guess is on brand, but we were pleased to see Lingthusiasm is one of Spotify’s top 50 Science podcasts!

Main episodes from this year

  1. Making speech visible with spectrograms
  2. Knowledge is power, copulas are fun.
  3. Word order, we love 
  4. What it means for a language to be official
  5. Tea and skyscrapers – When words get borrowed across languages
  6. What we can, must, and should say about modals
  7. Language in the brain – Interview with Ev Fedorenko
  8. Various vocal fold vibes
  9. What If Linguistics
  10. The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory
  11. Who questions the questions?
  12. Love and fury at the linguistics of emotions

Bonus Episodes

  1. We interview each other! Seasons, word games, Unicode, and more
  2. Emoji, Mongolian, and Multiocular O ꙮ – Dispatches from the Unicode Conference
  3. Behind the scenes on how linguists come up with research topics
  4. Approaching word games like a linguist – Interview with Nicole Holliday and Ben Zimmer of Spectacular Vernacular
  5. What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫&
  6. There’s like, so much to like about “like”
  7. Language inside an MRI machine – Interview with Saima Malik-Moraleda
  8. Using a rabbit to get kids chatting for science
  9. Behind the scenes on making an aesthetic IPA chart – Interview with Lucy Maddox
  10. Linguistics and science communication – Interview with Liz McCullough
  11. 103 ways for kids to learn languages
  12. Speakest Thou Ye Olde English?

Selected Tweets

Linguistics Fun

General Fun

Books

Helpful Threads

Studies

Selected blog posts: 

Linguistic Jobs

Linguistics fun

General Fun

Language

Meta/advice

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

2021 Year in Review

Gretchen McCulloch

2021 was in many ways a very meta year: most of my writing projects were reflections on the social functions of various other projects I was working on. But those other projects were very interesting both to do and to reflect on, such as coordinating LingComm21: the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and redesigning the Lingthusiasm website. (Might they also reflect how under-socialized I got by a certain point in this pandemic? Hmmm.)

I was honoured to be the recipient of the Linguistics, Language, and the Public Award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2021. I put up my acceptance speech as a blog post.

Media and crossovers

Media

Crash Course Linguistics

The final three videos of Crash Course Linguistics came out in 2021, although it was largely a 2020 project. Here’s the full list again so they’re all in once place, or you can watch them all at this playlist.

  1. What is linguistics?
  2. What is a word? Morphology
  3. Syntax 1: Morphosyntax
  4. Syntax 2:
  5. Semantics
  6. Pragmatics
  7. Sociolinguistics
  8. Phonetics 1: Consonants
  9. Phonetics 2: Vowels
  10. Phonology
  11. Psycholinguistics
  12. Language acquisition
  13. Language change and historical linguistics
  14. World Languages
  15. Computational Linguistics
  16. Writing Systems

Each video also comes with a few companion links and exercises from Mutual Intelligibility and a list of all of the languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics is here. It was great working with the large teams on that project!

Lingthusiasm

In our fifth year of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics which I make with Lauren Gawne and our production team, we did some general sprucing up, including a new cover photo (now featuring a jacketless Because Internet), a new portrait drawing, and a new website (for which I wrote a long meta process post here). We also did our first virtual liveshow (as part of LingFest), introduced new bouba/kiki and what the fricative merch, and sent patrons a Lingthusiastic Sticker Pack. Here are the main episodes that came out this year:

And here are this year’s bonus episodes:

Conferences and Talks (all virtual unless noted)

Conferences/events attended:

LingComm and LingFest

In April, I co-organized a pair of new events related to linguistics communication: LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. One of those events was our first virtual Lingthusiasm liveshow: here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show.

LingComm21 had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference. We then wrote a 6-part blog post series on the conference as a case study in making online conferences more social, in hopes of helping other people who are interested in better virtual events. 

  1. Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
  2. Designing online conferences for building community
  3. Scheduling online conferences for building community
  4. Hosting online conferences for building community
  5. Budgeting online conferences or events
  6. Planning accessible online conferences

Selected tweets

Books and more

Helpful threads

Linguistics fun

General fun

Selected blog posts

I celebrated my ninth blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Here are some of my favourite posts from this year:

Linguistics jobs

Linguistics fun

Languages

Meta and advice posts

Missed out on previous years? Here are the summary posts from 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020. If you’d like to get a much shorter monthly highlights newsletter via email, with all sorts of interesting internet linguistics news, you can sign up for that at gretchenmcc.substack.com.

June 2021: texting periods, LingComm21 meta posts, and finally a new bookshelf!

Gretchen McCulloch

I’m quoted in a New York Times Wordplay piece about ending texts with a period. Now that Because Internet has been out for two years, I can attest that people have successfully used it as a way of opening up cross-generational conversations about changing texting norms.

Gretchen McCulloch, the Canadian linguist and author of “Because Internet,” dedicated an entire chapter of her book to “typographical tone of voice,” which explores not only periods and ellipses as signifiers of tone, but also TYPING IN ALL CAPS, which is seen as yelling; using *asterisks* and ~tildes~ for emphasis; the all lowercase “minimalist typography,” which can indicate a kind of deadpan, sarcastic monotone; and, of course, tYp1nG l1k3 th!z. (This is called “l33t [elite] speak,” and while it was once a sincere and popular way of spicing up texts, it is now employed almost exclusively in irony.)

No More Periods When Texting. Period.

For anyone else who’s been trying to figure out how to do virtual events that are actually social, the organizing committee of LingComm21 has written a six-part series on how we designed the conference:

  1. Why virtual conferences are antisocial (but they don’t have to be)
  2. Designing online conferences for building community
  3. Scheduling online conferences for building community
  4. Hosting online conferences for building community
  5. Budgeting online conferences or events
  6. Planning accessible online conferences

I was a contestant on Webster’s War of the Words, a virtual quiz show fundraiser for the Noah Webster House, and also attended two online conferences, the Dictionary Society of North America and the annual meeting of the Canadian Linguistics Association.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was an interview with Jade Abbott and Bonaventure Dossou from Masakhane, a grassroots initiative to make natural language processing tools in African languages, for Africans, by Africans. The bonus episode was about the linguistics of Pokemon names, looking at highly important Pokemonastics research like what makes a name sound cuddly or powerful. Also, Lingthusiasm now has a LinkedIn page, in case that’s a thing that’s been missing from your life. You’re welcome?

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is, finally, inside a new bookshop again! This is from Librairie l’Alphabet in Rimouski, admittedly definitely a linguistics section that overlaps considerably with “reference” but containing a few French-language books I hadn’t seen before.

A bookshelf containing linguistics and reference books in French, including 337 Expressions Quebecoises, Le tu et le vous, and Une Histoire des Languages.

May 2021: 9th blogiversary and pfinally pfizer’d

Gretchen McCulloch

I hit my 9th blogiversary on All Things Linguistic! Hard to believe I’m coming up on almost an entire decade of blogging now, but at any rate, here’s the traditional blogiversary post with highlights of the past year. It feels like I compensated for the isolation of the whole global pandemic situation this past year by working on a lot of projects with people through the internet, most notably Crash Course Linguistics and the LingComm21 conference, plus of course ongoing projects like Lingthusiasm episodes and Because Internet coming out in paperback.

In the aftermath of #LingComm21, we did a couple tours of the custom Gather space that we made for the conference. The tours are finished now, but if you want to see people’s screencaps of the parts of the space and the conference that they found memorable, you can check the photos tab of the #LingComm21 hashtag.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about negation (transcript) — or shall I say, it wasn’t NOT about negation — and the bonus episode was about “uh-huh”, nodding, thumbs up, and other kinds of backchannelling (the edited audio-only version of our liveshow last month).

Pfinally, some pfantastic inpformation:

(See the thread for further suggestions on how you can adapt your speaking style if you received a vaccine from a different manufacturer!)

Media:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

We finally started going out of lockdown here this month, so while I haven’t yet managed any new bookshop or travel photos, I did at least get to have a drink outside after the sun went down.

April 2021: #LingComm21, Lingthusiasm liveshow and #lingfest

Gretchen McCulloch

We finally ran LingComm and LingFest, the events we’d been planning for the past few months!

LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, had just under 200 registrants, around 100 of which were formally part of the programming in some way. It was fantastic to get to see old friends and meet new people and find out more about so many great lingcomm projects. Thank you to everyone involved in the conference, especially the organizing committee and those who participated through panels, posters, volunteering, and organizing meetups. My opening remarks and closing remarks are here as blog posts, and see the #LingComm21 hashtag for highlights of what people noticed about the conference.

We did a liveshow for my podcast, Lingthusiasm! Here’s a fun thread that I did about backchannels while we were getting ready for the show. If you’ve now realized that you want to belatedly watch the liveshow, here’s the archive link (for patrons, as encouraging people to become patrons is what helps us keep the show running).

The Lingthusiasm liveshow was part of LingFest, a fringe-festival-like program of online linguistics events aimed at a general audience, which contained a total of 12 events attended by a total of over 700 participants. Thank you to everyone who both created and attended events!

I also moderated a panel for the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) on NLP Applications for Crisis Management and Emergency Situations.

The main episode of Lingthusiasm this month was about R and R-like sounds (rhoticity), featuring A Thing About Eeyore that keeps blowing listeners’ minds, and the bonus was about talking to babies and small children.

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s image is a group photo of attendees from the LingComm21 conference! So much fun to get to be in a group photo again for a change!

Tweet from @LingComm reading: Look at how many lingcommers there are! Group photo from #LingComm21, tag yourself! With screencap of about 50 videogame-style avatars from Gather around the word #LingComm21

March 2021: LingComm21 preparations and two video talks

Gretchen McCulloch

This month was largely occupied in continued preparations for a pair of events in April:

The main episode of Lingthusiasm was about how linguists figure out the grammar of a language (transcript) and the bonus was about reduplication and a classic linguistics paper affectionately known as the salad-salad paper.

I did two video talks: at Planet Word, the new language museum in Washington DC, about internet language and Because Internet, and for Slate’s Future Tense about the meaning of emoji with Jennifer Daniel.

I collaborated on another video with Tom Scott, this one about the rhythms of poetry in different languages or Why Shakespeare Could Never Have Been French:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s photo, since I yet again didn’t go anywhere, is a throwback photo from ReadeBook, a bookshop in Adelaide, from when I was in Australia in 2018.

Reference section featuring linguistics books at ReadeBook in Adelaide, South Australia

February 2021: Announcing #LingComm21 and #lingfest

Gretchen McCulloch

This month, I announced LingComm21, the first International Conference on Linguistics Communication, and LingFest, a fringe-festival-style coordination of independently organized public linguistics events, together with an excellent organizing committee consisting of Lauren Gawne, Jessi Grieser, Laura Bailey, and Liz McCullough (different spelling, no relation!), both to take place in April 2021.

I wrote a thread about how we came to the idea of running a linguistics communication conference, plus a more official-looking announcement on LinguistList.

We reached our 100th episode of Lingthusiasm! This month’s main episode of Lingthusiasm was about imperatives (transcript) and the bonus was a Q&A episode featuring naming dogs, modifying English, keeping up with linguistics research outside academia, and more. (Also, the cutest IPA update.)

I attended the virtual AAAS conference, including making a virtual “hotel bar” in Gather to hang out with fellow attendees in.

I also may or may not have been in another xkcd comic, this time about the Tower of Babel. (I am choosing to consider it a representation of curly-haired linguists everywhere.)

Media:

Selected tweets:

Selected blog posts:

This month’s featured image is from xkcd. I have to say, I’m severely tempted to screencap that exultant curly-haired linguist as a new profile picture.