Lingthusiasm

We're having a fun comment thread on Patreon Quips about people's childhood rhymes and games!

Catch up on the thread and add your own here (it's free!)

this looks interesting, i've always wondered about the random rhymes kids on the bus would say

Oh my god I have been wanting to hear someone's academic study of these rhymes since I was like 14 years old and realized I'd grown up with different versions than my friends from other states, ahhhhhhhhh

Learning that kids from different places said different nonsense when playing Stella Ella Ola was an early moment of anthropological excitement for me

Missed our previous bonus episode?

Get access to this bonus where we get enthusiastic about what we've been up to in 2025 and what's coming up in 2026, and over 100 previous bonus episodes by becoming a patron:

Bonus 109: Skipping rhymes, counting chants, and fortune-telling games - Children's oral culture | Lingthusiasm Get more from Lingthusiasm on Patreon

Remember those skipping/clapping rhymes, counting-off rhymes, and fortune-telling games from your childhood? They're one of the last vestiges of oral culture in our highly literate society

In our latest bonus episode we get enthusiastic about childlore!

Working on a project bringing linguistics to broader audiences? Apply for a 2026 LingComm Grant! Due: April 30, 2026. Details at link in bio.

Working on a project bringing linguistics to broader audiences?

The 2026 LingComm Grants are $300 USD grants to help you with your project!

Please apply and/or share with any up and coming lingcommers you know!

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Lingthusiasm | Patreon creating a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics!

Available to patrons at the Ling-thusiast tier and higher (that's the same tier as the bonus episodes), this is a friendly community of people around the world who are excited to share linguistics memes and pop linguistics articles, talk about word games and language learning journeys, and more!

Screenshot of Lingthusiasm discord channel menu, featuring highlighted channels called introductions, Lingthusiasm podcast, general linguistics ish, everything else, language learning, academia and jobs, linguistics memes and cute stuff, daily word games, food, non English chat, language games Plus greyed-out channels including: welcome, announcements, suggestions and help, and pronouns and optional roles

We hear this from people a lot: your podcast got me enthusiastic about linguistics too, but now I need more people to share my enthusiasm with!

While we definitely also endorse getting your friends and family on the linguistics fan-wagon, may we also suggest the Lingthusiasm Discord server?

Hello, welcome!

This episode of Lingthusiasm is really thought provoking in the context of Scots and English.

They consider the etymology of the terms diglossia and bilingual, which could mean the same thing, but don't.

Bilingual is two languages in parallel, like Welsh and English in Wales.

But diglossia is more like Scots and English in Scotland, where one is a prestige language, spoken in court, on TV or in literature, and the other is vernacular speech.

The podcast gives examples of diglossia in Arabic, where many North African nations have their own low form of Arabic.

This is an interesting thread!

Using Lingthusiasm in the classroom Lingthusiasm makes a great addition to your linguistics teaching resources! Whether you’re teaching at a university, high school, middle school, online course, or other institution, Lingthusiasm is...

Filling out our classroom survey helps convince @superlinguo.bsky.social's bosses that she should keep making the show!

Plus, we periodically compile teaching ideas with Lingthusiasm for other instructors to get inspired by on our teaching page: lingthusiasm.com/teaching

Lingthusiasm in the Classroom First things first: Thanks so much for sharing Lingthusiasm with your students! We're keeping a record of how Lingthusiasm is being used in teaching. We may refer to data from this form in aggregate (...

Sometimes we hear from teachers and professors that they're using Lingthusiasm in the classroom, which is awesome!

If that's you, we've set up this short form so you can tell us about how you use it:

113: Why Podcast Episode · Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics · 20 February · 49m

And while I’m recommending things, @lingthusiasm.com is always a good listen too. This episode today:

Glad you're enjoying it!

Gastropod is one of our favourites too!

Yay, hi! We aim to make episodes that are still fun and interesting to listen to 5-10 years later, which also means a break from current events if that's something your brain needs right now

How far back can you understand? 👀

Ah, sorry, that was the link I copy pasted from my browser, didn't notice it actually hadn't worked! But I think you found it

Yeah, this is something we're sort of thinking about but it's not an area either of us specialize in so we wanted to leave it a bit more open ended than a typical Lingthusiasm episode

But part of the thing is that these words tend to be focused on by slightly different sets of research traditions (some also argue that they're part of a continuum, or that it's relevant whether the 2 varieties are closely related)
(pdf) Guy-Lim-Diglossia-Code-switching-and-Style-shifting.pdf

Diglossia describes a particular societal structure where people broadly agree on which environments each variety is used in, whereas codeswitching is often more flexible, one person might codeswitch in different contexts than another

That's a great question and honestly it's just that we try and introduce no more than one new piece of terminology per episode, so that would have been two!

But basically diglossia can involve codeswitching, but not all codeswchng is diglossia. Eg people codeswitch btwn English & French in Montreal

LOVED this episode (hey, you, if you aren't listening to this podcast yet, I bet you'll like it.) Granted, it was about a thing I knew about intuitively but didn't know was a THING thing, and that's bound to be interesting. I bet you know about it too.

Did you know that Patreon supports free following, not just paid?

And sometimes we post fun shenanigans for all followers, like this one!

113: Why In some communities, everyone regularly uses two languages or varieties according to the social situation, with one of them being more prestigious (and more likely to be written down) than the other.

In some communities, everyone regularly uses two languages or varieties according to the social situation, with one of them being more prestigious (and more likely to be written down) than the other.

In this episode we get enthusiastic about diglossia!

soundcloud.com/lingthusiasm...

I was really thinking, you can tell who in the replies has had direct physical contact with baby chicks from whether they think they're bouba or kiki

I’ve reared chicks.
They’re kiki *disguised* as booba.

The beak is the thing!