english language

Finnish comedian Ismo does a stand-up routine on Conan about the many meanings of the English word 'ass'. He riffs on the confusing quirks of English as a second language.

Finnish comedian Ismo riffs on how the English word for shit is the most complicated word in the language, with its many meanings and uses. It is a four-minute comedy bit.

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.

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.

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 George Carlin stand-up bit from Doin' It Again about soft language and euphemism, showing how softened words hide uncomfortable facts. It touches on topics like shell shock and aging.

A 15-minute clip of linguist Stephen Krashen discussing language acquisition, drawn from the 1980s. It presents his input hypothesis and the distinction between acquisition and learning.

'Skwerl' is a short film by Brian and Karl made entirely in fake English, imitating how English sounds to people who don't speak it. It was made for Kino Sydney and shown on QI.

A lecture from the 1980s by linguist Stephen Krashen on how people acquire language. He explains his comprehensible input hypothesis for second-language acquisition.

A Polish linguist tests whether speakers of Bulgarian, Polish and Croatian can understand Interslavic, a constructed language built from Slavic languages. It shows how well they follow it without prior study.

A comedy segment where Eddie Izzard travels to Friesland to try speaking Old English, claiming English originated in Holland and buying a cow to prove it.

A sketch from the Norwegian NRK show Uti Var Hage poking fun at the Danish language and how hard it is to understand.

A Fry and Laurie sketch about language, full of absurd phrases and wordplay, which also plays on the distinction between langue and parole.

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.

A clip from George Carlin's 1990 special 'Doin' It Again' in which he describes how American English has been sterilized with euphemisms, using examples such as shell shock becoming PTSD.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Noam Chomsky gives a Talks at Google lecture covering his work on politics and language. It touches on his linguistic theory, including universal grammar, alongside his political criticism.

Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA keynote on designing a programming language that its users can grow. He builds the talk using only one-syllable words and terms he has defined, to demonstrate the idea.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.

Guy Steele's classic 1998 OOPSLA keynote on how a programming language must grow with its user community. He delivers it in a playful style, starting with only monosyllabic words and defining new terms as he goes.

A SXSW talk by W Watson that uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, with nods to Zizek, to critique popular programming languages. It argues that people choose and defend languages for emotional and ideological reasons rather than rational ones.

Shriram Krishnamurthi's PWLConf 2019 talk on the formal notion of expressive power of programming languages, based on Felleisen's paper. It explains how to tell when a feature adds power by whether emulating it requires global rewriting.

Stephen Wolfram gives a 13-minute tour of the Wolfram Language, a symbolic, functional programming language with a built-in knowledgebase. He demos querying large datasets, interactivity and deployment.

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

Michael Arntzenius's Strange Loop talk on Datafun, a functional query language that brings database-style querying into a general-purpose language. It discusses bridging database theory and programming languages.

A 10-minute clip from a Jonathan Blow Twitch stream in which he argues that game engines do not really need separate scripting languages. He questions the value of embedded interpreters when the main language can do the job.

Jonathan Blow demos his prototype programming language, covering the base language and compile-time execution, including running a game while compiling. The video is about 70 minutes of demo followed by Q&A.

Paul Biggar's Google Tech Talk on compiling and optimizing scripting languages, drawn from his work on the phc ahead-of-time PHP compiler. He covers runtime typing, aliasing and code generation challenges, and argues AOT can compete with JIT.

Rob Pike's October 2009 Google Tech Talk introducing Go, a new experimental systems language designed for fast builds, concurrency and garbage collection. It covers the goals, syntax and type system.

An animated ranking of the most popular programming languages from 1965 to 2019, built from popularity indexes, GitHub access data and historical surveys.

A short excerpt of Rob Pike's Lang.NEXT 2014 talk where he describes Go's target audience as young Google programmers who are not researchers. The language has to be easy for them to understand and adopt.

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.

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.

Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.