LinguistiCafé

Join us for a relaxed and engaging gathering where we explore fascinating linguistics topics inspired by the Lingthusiasm podcast. Whether you're a linguistics enthusiast or just curious about how language shapes our world, this is a space for thought-provoking discussions, shared insights, and friendly conversation. Enjoy a warm cup of coffee and refreshments as we dive into language-related themes, exchange ideas, and build connections with fellow language lovers.

Though we highly encourage you to listen to the scheduled podcast before the meeting—just bringing your curiosity and a love for language will be enough!

Click HERE to view our meeting topics schedule.

This week's discussion episode: Lingthusiasm Episode 101: Micro to macro - The levels of language
"When we first learn about nature, we generally start with the solid mid-sized animals: cats, dogs, elephants, tigers, horses, birds, turtles, and so on. Only later on do we zoom in and out from these charismatic megafauna to the tinier levels, like cells and bacteria, or the larger levels, like ecosystems and the water cycle. With language, words are the easily graspable charismatic megafauna (charismatic megaverba?), from which there are both micro levels (like sounds, handshapes, and morphemes) and macro levels (like sentences, conversations, and narratives).

In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch take advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspective often found in Linguistics 101 classes. We start with sounds and handshapes, moving onto accents and sound changes, fitting affixes into words, words into sentences, and sentences into discourse. We also talk about areas of linguistics that involve language at all these levels at once, including historical linguistics, child language acquisition, linguistic fieldwork, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Plus: why we don’t follow this order for Lingthusiasm episodes or Crash Course Linguistics and how you can give yourself a DIY intro linguistics course.

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here."