linguistics podcast | Paul Meier Dialect Services

Episode 56 (Sounds Appealing)

For the September 2022 episode of In a Manner of Speaking, Paul welcomes back renowned linguist and author David Crystal for his fourth appearance on the podcast. They discuss various topics related to David’s 2018 book, Sounds Appealing, including pronunciation, phonetics, phoneticians, speech melody, intonation, and stress patterning.

David ( a native of Liverpool, England, and North Wales) has authored more than 100 books in the field of language, including several Penguin books, but is perhaps best known for his two encyclopedias for Cambridge University Press, The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language. His books on English phonetics and phonology include Prosodic Systems and Intonation in English and The English Tone of Voice.

He was founder-editor of the Journal of Child Language (1973-85), Child Language Teaching and Therapy (1985-96), and Linguistics Abstracts (1985-96), and associate editor of the Journal of Linguistics (1970-73). In addition, he has been a consultant, contributor, or presenter on several radio and television programs and series. David is currently patron of the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) and the Association for Language Learning (ALL); president of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading, the UK National Literacy Association, and the Johnson Society of London; and an honorary vice president of the Institute of Linguists and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

David is also a renowned Shakespeare and Original Pronunciation (OP) scholar. For more on his work with the Bard, visit ShakespearesWords.com.

For a full biography and more information on David, visit his website, DavidCrystal.com. Go here for a list of all of David’s published works and here to purchase them.

Visit David’s YouTube channel for more information relevant to this podcast. We present here just two of his many videos.

Lastly, for a discussion of English long and short vowels, one of the topics that David and Paul discuss on this podcast, go here.

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

Episode 49 (You Are What You Speak)

Paul’s guest for February 2022 is Lane Greene, language columnist and Spain correspondent for The Economist. This month’s episode takes its title from one of Lane’s books, You Are What You Speak (2011), and Paul and Lane tackle a variety of topics related to linguistics, accents, and the myths, fears, hopes, history, and politics surrounding language.

Before Lane moved into his current role at The Economist, he covered digital news, books and culture, European business, law, energy, the environment, and American politics for the publication. He is based in Madrid, after living in London, Berlin, and New York City.

In addition to the aforementioned book, Greene is the author of Talk on the Wild Side (2018) and the winner of the journalism award from the Linguistic Society of America in 2017. He is a former adjunct assistant professor in Global Affairs at New York University and a consultant to Freedom House, a non-governmental organization. He received an M.Phil. from Oxford in European politics and a B.A. with honors from Tulane in international relations and history. Lane, who speaks nine languages, was born in Johnson City, Tennessee, and grew up in Marietta, Georgia.

For more information on Lane, visit LaneGreene.com.

Episode 46 (Highly Irregular)

For the November 2021 episode of the podcast, Paul discusses the peculiarities of the English language with Arika Okrent, author of Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don’t Rhyme.

Arika is also a linguist and author of In the Land of Invented Languages. She worked in a brain-research lab on her way to a Ph.D in psycholinguistics from the University of Chicago and now writes about language for publications including Mental Floss, The Week, Smithsonian Magazine, Popular Science, Slate, and Aeon. For more information on Arika, visit http://arikaokrent.com.

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)