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Language & Linguistics

Language & Linguistics

Learn to investigate family expressions, surprising word parts, regional dialects, language contact, mishearings, reanalysis, word retrieval, speech sounds and slips, conversation signals, turn-taking, repair, context-bound reference, category labels, shifting meanings, and etymology. A Way with Words supplies memorable cases; dictionaries, dialect archives, corpora, experiments, official terminology, and linguistics research supply the methods for testing them.

36 lessons ~4 h

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Who it's for

Curious language users who want more than trivia: repeatable ways to collect examples, distinguish evidence from a good story, and explain how language varies without treating one dialect as the default measure of intelligence.

Unit 1

Words Close to Home

3 lessons · 23 min

  1. 1 The Words Families Hand Down 8 min Start
  2. 2 The Words We Wish Existed 7 min Start
  3. 3 The Word-Making Machine 8 min Start
Unit 2

Word Parts That Refuse to Behave

3 lessons · 25 min

  1. 1 When Un- Doesn't Mean Not: Meet the Unverb 9 min Start
  2. 2 Gruntled, Ruthful, and Other Missing Partners 8 min Start
  3. 3 Words with Two Faces: Contronyms, Polysemy, and Context 8 min Start
Unit 3

Dialect Has an Address

3 lessons · 24 min

  1. 1 Can a Word Place You on a Map? 8 min Start
  2. 2 A Wisconsin Language Field Guide 8 min Start
  3. 3 Grammar Has Geography 8 min Start
Unit 4

Language Meets People

3 lessons · 23 min

  1. 1 Accent, Identity, and Eye Dialect 8 min Start
  2. 2 Words Cross Borders—and Change on the Way 7 min Start
  3. 3 Why the Ear Invents Words 8 min Start
Unit 5

Words Under Revision

4 lessons · 21 min

  1. 1 Back-Formation: The Word That Looks Subtracted 6 min Start
  2. 2 Metanalysis: When the Word Boundary Moves 5 min Start
  3. 3 Semantic Bleaching: How Strong Words Fade 5 min Start
  4. 4 Folk Etymology: When an Opaque Word Learns Familiar Clothes 5 min Start
Unit 6

Language in the Mind

3 lessons · 15 min

  1. 1 Semantic Satiation: When a Word Goes Strange 5 min Start
  2. 2 Frequency and Recency Illusions: Did Everyone Start Saying That? 5 min Start
  3. 3 Lethologica: The Word You Know but Cannot Reach 5 min Start
Unit 7

What Conversation Is Doing

3 lessons · 24 min

  1. 1 Friendly Noise: Phatic Communication 7 min Start
  2. 2 Yeah, No, Mm-Hmm: Backchannels and Discourse Markers 8 min Start
  3. 3 Can You Not? Indirect Requests, Implicature, and Politeness 9 min Start
Unit 8

Change and Investigation

3 lessons · 23 min

  1. 1 Meaning Moves: Awfully, Preppy, and Platform Speech 7 min Start
  2. 2 Etymology Without the Fairy Tales 7 min Start
  3. 3 Capstone: Build a Word Dossier 9 min Start
Unit 9

Sound Systems in Motion

4 lessons · 23 min

  1. 1 When Two Vowels Become One: Contrasts, Allophones, and Mergers 6 min Start
  2. 2 The Many Lives of T: Stop, Flap, Glottal, and Silence 5 min Start
  3. 3 When Sounds Appear, Disappear, or Trade Places 6 min Start
  4. 4 What a Slip Reveals: Spoonerisms and the Architecture of Speech 6 min Start
Unit 10

Conversation Builds Itself

3 lessons · 17 min

  1. 1 Who Speaks Next? Turn-Taking, Gaps, and Cooperative Overlap 6 min Start
  2. 2 How Conversation Repairs Itself: Huh?, Who?, and I Mean 5 min Start
  3. 3 Pointing with Words: Deixis, Joint Attention, and Vocatives 6 min Start
Unit 11

Names, Categories, and Social Meaning

4 lessons · 20 min

  1. 1 The New Name for the Old Thing: Retronyms and Category Splits 5 min Start
  2. 2 Speaking Around the Taboo: Euphemism, Dysphemism, and Context 5 min Start
  3. 3 What Do You Call Someone from There? Demonyms, Endonyms, and Local Authority 5 min Start
  4. 4 When a Brand Becomes the Thing: Genericization and Verbing 5 min Start