The 5-Minute Linguist is a book of short, accessible essays by linguists who answer the questions they commonly hear from laypersons. For example, what’s the difference between a language and a dialect? What causes someone to have a foreign accent? The book is based on an annual competition held by the Linguistic Society of America. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Five-Minute Linguist”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. I always appreciate it when an expert in a specialized field can talk to non-experts in a way that’s clear and concise and understandable. And that’s why I was interested in a book called The Five-Minute Linguist. It’s a collection of dozens of very short essays by linguists from across the country. And each of them addresses some question involving language, the kind of thing that they might be asked at a dinner party or just sitting around drinking a beer. Things like, what causes somebody to have a foreign accent? Or what’s the difference between a language and a dialect? And the essays in this book are really bite-sized. They’re just three to five pages with references at the end, which makes it a really intriguing way to sort of wander through the topic of language and just follow whatever aspect intrigues you.
I had the good fortune to see the live version of The Five-Minute Linguist at the annual convention of the Linguistic Society of America conference in New Orleans.
Oh, I bet that was fun.
It was very fun. They presented it kind of like the moth. So all of these prepared speakers who clearly had rehearsed and had fantastic slideshows got up exactly five minutes, presented very exciting material in a very familiar, fun way, and there was voting.
The audience voted, and there were judges in the front. The emcee was John McWhorter, whom you may know from the Lexicon Valley podcast, and the judges were other podcasters, Gretchen McCulloch from the Lengthusiasm podcast. There was Patrick Cox from the Subtitle podcast, formerly of The World in Words. Ben Zimmer, who writes about language for The Wall Street Journal, and Ann Curzan, who does a language podcast for Michigan Radio, was there. Lane Green, who writes the language column for The Economist, was also one of the judges, and it was just the best. They really know how to take complicated subjects and explain it so that you enjoy it and understand it.
Yeah, there’s a real art form to taking a complicated subject and just distilling it in a way that makes people understand it. I’d love to read The Five-Minute Physicist or The Five-Minute Geologist. Right, The Five-Minute Astronaut or The Five-Minute Farmer. I would read that. Anyway, I appreciate what The Five-Minute Linguist is doing, both the live version and the book. It’s something that you and I try to do, take this wonderful topic of language and make it something that everyone can understand. And if you would like to join us on the radio to talk about language, 877-929-9673. Email us words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.
