Six videos about language

Rather than wait for the next linkfest to share these videos about language – there’s no telling when that would happen – I thought I’d bundle them all together. Most are bite-sized.

First up is Arika Okrent, whose book on conlangs has featured on Sentence first a few times. Her YouTube page has a growing selection of clips on various aspects of language, their charm enhanced by animation from Sean O’Neill. Here’s a recent one on animal sounds in different languages:

At The Ling Space, Moti Lieberman and team are prolific makers of entertaining videos aimed at people learning linguistics or interested in it. The Ling Space Tumblr blog supplements the videos with further discussion. This one is on the anatomy of the human voice:

Tony Zhou’s excellent Every Frame a Painting channel is about film-making. In August 2014 he made one about an emerging convention of presenting text messages in TV and film:

Macmillan Dictionary (for whom I write a regular column) is doing a series called Real Vocabulary that looks at disputed uses of certain words. They’re presented by language-teaching expert Scott Thornbury. In this one he discusses a newish use of the verb grow:

Kory Stamper of Merriam-Webster gave a fine talk last year about what happens when new words spread, why English is like a river, and how dictionaries fit in:

Finally, at the Linguistic Society of America’s recent annual meeting, John Rickford spoke about social attitudes to vernacular speech and linguistic prejudice against minority dialects. It’s comparatively long and detailed, but well worth it if you have the time and interest: