The LSA is proud to serve as the lead sponsor of the Subtitle podcast.  This ongoing venture is made possible, in part, by the receipt of two grants totaling more than $400,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH).  The podcast, called Subtitle, is produced by Patrick Cox, winner of the LSA's Linguistics Journalism Award in 2019, and by documentary film and radio producer Kavita Pillay. Cox previously served as the producer of the World in Words podcast that was also supported by the NEH.  The LSA is excited to assume sponsorship of this outstanding forum for informing the public about language and linguistics research.

The NEH grants only cover about 80 percent of the total project expenses, with the remainder to be raised through individual donations, corporate sponsorships, private foundation grants, and paid advertising. As a charitable, tax-exempt non-profit organization, the LSA welcomes financial contributions to support its mission, including production costs associated with the Subtitle podcast. Donations for this purpose may be made by visiting our secure online donation facility.

Subtitle is back with new episodes starting September 7, 2022.



About Subtitle

Subtitle tells stories about languages and the people who speak them. Why is linguistic discrimination so prevalent?  How can we help keep endangered languages alive? How does language make us laugh? And cry? (Sometimes at the same time!) Subtitle seeks answers to these and many other questions. 

Subscribe to Subtitle on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, RadioPublic or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcripts of each episode can be found on the individual episode pages, below.

  1. Your Next Favorite Podcast
  2. Not So Anonymous
  3. Words We Love to Hate
  4. The Language of Diamonds
  5. Gullah Geechee enters the academy
  6. Why Mormons are so good at languages
  7. Is a Polyglot's Brain Different?
  8. The Talk of the Forest 
  9. Did Katrina Kill the New Orleans Accent?
  10. How to Communicate with Aliens
  11. Going Dutch
  12. One virus, many languages
  13. At war, and not at war
  14. In quarantine with Joanna Hausmann
  15. In quarantine with Joe Wong
  16. A metaphor for our times with Elena Simino
  17. 'Sisu' gets an update
  18. The birth of a language
  19. We Speak: Patrick and Kavita
  20. We Speak: Verónica
  21. We Speak: Ciku
  22. We Speak: Tina
  23. Subtitle presents A Better Life?
  24. Season 2 is Coming
  25. My notorious name
  26. The language closest to English
  27. The dots and their future
  28. Japan's mystery language
  29. How the alphabet won our hearts
  30. The little pronoun that could​
  31. We are the people​
  32. The pleasure and pain of spelling
  33. A tale of edible intrigue
  34. A language that survived the boarding schools
  35. Season 3 is coming
  36. Once upon a hyphen…
  37. Teach me your song
  38. A mother tongue reclaimed
  39. Why some words are just funny
  40. ‘Manifesting’ the language of self-help
  41. No episode
  42. The speechways of the folk
  43. The language of the outside people
  44. When did comedians start saying ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’?
  45. Will climate change wipe out French in Louisiana?
  46. Presenting More Than a Feeling
  47. The rare joys of learning Finnish
  48. Ukraine's linguistic patriotism
  49. How the Ojibwe language survived the pandemic
  50. Hello, Goodbye
  51. Learning to love apostrophes
  52. Latin, the undead language
  53. A brief history of death threats

 

 

About Patrick Cox 

Patrick Cox worked as a theater sound designer in Copenhagen and London before graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with a Masters in Journalism. He then worked in radio journalism, mainly for The World public radio show where he reported from dozens of countries. The stories he brought home that most intrigued him were about language: the street slang of Singapore, the linguistic spats of post-apartheid South Africa, the lost words of the lost nation of Yugoslavia. In 2008, he founded The World in Words podcast. In 2018, the Linguistic Society of America gave him its Linguistics Journalism Award. A year later, Subtitle was born. 

About Kavita Pillay

Kavita Pillay was born and raised in northeastern Ohio, where the myth of the “General American” accent runs deep. She came to audio by way of documentary film. She has reported for The World and the BBC on comedians in Singapore, Catholicism in Poland, and Finland’s insecurity complex. Her feature-length documentary on Indian men named Stalin and Lenin is in post-production. Her work has received the support of many organizations, including the LEF Foundation, the Sundance Institute, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the Fulbright Scholar Program.