Subtitle: An LSA Podcast
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.
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.
- Your Next Favorite Podcast
- Not So Anonymous
- Words We Love to Hate
- The Language of Diamonds
- Gullah Geechee enters the academy
- Why Mormons are so good at languages
- Is a Polyglot's Brain Different?
- The Talk of the Forest
- Did Katrina Kill the New Orleans Accent?
- How to Communicate with Aliens
- Going Dutch
- One virus, many languages
- At war, and not at war
- In quarantine with Joanna Hausmann
- In quarantine with Joe Wong
- A metaphor for our times with Elena Simino
- 'Sisu' gets an update
- The birth of a language
- We Speak: Patrick and Kavita
- We Speak: Verónica
- We Speak: Ciku
- We Speak: Tina
- Subtitle presents A Better Life?
- Season 2 is Coming
- My notorious name
- The language closest to English
- The dots and their future
- Japan's mystery language
- How the alphabet won our hearts
- The little pronoun that could
- We are the people
- The pleasure and pain of spelling
- A tale of edible intrigue
- A language that survived the boarding schools
- Season 3 is coming
- Once upon a hyphen…
- Teach me your song
- A mother tongue reclaimed
- Why some words are just funny
- ‘Manifesting’ the language of self-help
- No episode
- The speechways of the folk
- The language of the outside people
- When did comedians start saying ‘punching up’ and ‘punching down’?
- Will climate change wipe out French in Louisiana?
- Presenting More Than a Feeling
- The rare joys of learning Finnish
- Ukraine's linguistic patriotism
- How the Ojibwe language survived the pandemic
- Hello, Goodbye
- Learning to love apostrophes
- Latin, the undead language
- A brief history of death threats
- Where did African American English come from?
- How music has shaped African American Speech
- The future sound of Black English
- The precious secrets of Udi
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.