dialects

A clip from the documentary American Tongues about the isolated Tangier Island, Virginia, whose dialect is among the most unusual in the US. It is often said to resemble speech from centuries ago.

Dialect coach Erik Singer tours a range of accents across North America with linguists in Part 2 of WIRED's accent series. It covers regional distinctions such as Southern Mississippi, Miami and Utah English.

A short Great Big Story piece on the Ocracoke Brogue, or Hoi Toider dialect, spoken on North Carolina's Outer Banks, which developed through centuries of isolation and traces back to the 1600s.

Dialect coach Erik Singer and several linguists tour distinct accents across English-speaking North America. It is the first part of a WIRED series on US accents.

An excerpt from the documentary Mountain Talk on Appalachian English. Residents of Southern Appalachia talk about their dialect and give examples of its distinctive words.

A Hot Fuzz clip in which Nicholas Angel struggles to understand the West Country accent of locals.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

A kinetic typography animation set to Stephen Fry's spoken essay on language. Fry argues against grammar pedantry and for the way language evolves, including the verbing of nouns.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

A 1972 song by Adriano Celentano whose lyrics are nonsense syllables designed to sound like American English to non-English speakers. It is a rock and rap-flavored novelty track with a video.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination. It revealed the oldest known account of Noah's Ark and led to a book and a documentary.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

Chris Lonsdale presents a TEDx talk on how adults can learn a language in about six months, centering on immersion, comprehensible input and a practical learning methodology.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

CGP Grey explains why "Indian" is often preferred over "Native American" in the United States, especially near reservations, and how many tribes exist in the US. He draws on conversations with people who identify as Indian.

A George Carlin stand-up bit on euphemisms, tracing how language gets softened, such as shell shock becoming PTSD, until it loses its emotional force.

The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed. The recording runs over four hours.

Vsauce's explainer on Zipf's law, the pattern in which the frequency of a word is inversely related to its rank. It shows the pattern across many domains and discusses why it remains unexplained.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

A short clip of Stephen Fry defending swearing as a rich and essential part of the English language and rejecting the idea that it is unnecessary.

The Map Men explain why British place names are so hard to pronounce, tracing it to layers of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norman influence, with a pronunciation guide.

Linguist Simon Roper reconstructs how a London accent would have sounded from the 14th to the 21st centuries, reading passages in period pronunciation. It draws on the Cambridge History of the English Language.

NativLang's 47-minute animated documentary traces the birth and evolution of writing, from early cave marks to modern scripts. It presents the history of the world's writing systems as a story.

Tom Scott-style exploration by suckerpinch (Tom7) of generalized anagrams where letters can be broken into pieces, called anagraphs, with a whimsical computational approach.

Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction. He draws on how babies pick up speech from the people around them.

Vox breaks down how great rappers build rhymes, from Kurtis Blow's simple bars to Biggie's smooth flow and Kendrick Lamar's dense, fast delivery. It uses on-screen visualizations of rhyme structure.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on language, comparing human and animal communication, ape language projects like Koko and Kanzi, and how language is acquired. It is part of his human behavioral biology course.

A maker builds a talking banana that reads YouTube and Twitch comments aloud on stream, then fights viewers who abuse it with profanity. He ends up building a pronunciation-based filter to catch bad words.

An episode of jan Misali's Conlang Critic series reviewing Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with about a hundred words. It is a short, humorous critique of the language's design.

Noam Chomsky talks with the University of Washington's Upon Reflection about how languages change over time, why a national language is a modern idea, and how language is a system of communication rooted in human nature.

Tom Scott argues that grammatical gender is a silly concept and that the singular 'they' is an established gender-neutral pronoun. The description carries later corrections and reflections he added in 2019.

David and Ben Crystal introduce the Original Pronunciation production of Shakespeare and show what it reveals about the history of English, including puns and rhymes lost in modern speech.

jan Misali traces the history of the letter W, including why it is called double u. The video is part of a series of deep dives into individual letters.

British Museum curator Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform, with a colleague following along. It is a short, lively introduction to the script.

Lex Fridman interviews MIT psycholinguist Edward Gibson on human language, syntax, grammar and how large language models relate to them. The conversation runs nearly three hours.

Linguist Geoff Lindsey explores vocal fry: what it is, who uses it, how it relates to glottal stops and accents, and why some people dislike it.

Jonathan Schiefer interviews Larry Wall, creator of Perl, in a 33-minute conversation. Wall discusses his self-designed linguistics degree and how language and programming overlap.

Tom Scott explains phatic expressions such as hello, thank you and how are you, which carry social meaning rather than information, and why replies like no problem can seem rude to some people.

A re-upload of a video breaking down Eminem's rhyme schemes, showing multi-syllable and internal rhymes in songs such as Lose Yourself. It aims to show why he is considered a standout lyricist.