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Bonus 108: Collaborations, your latest pop ling reading list, and assigning ourselves IPA symbols - 2026 updates! | Lingthusiasm

Bonus 108: Collaborations, your latest pop ling reading list, and assigning ourselves IPA symbols - 2026 updates!

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about what we’ve been up to in 2025 and what’s coming up in 2026! Plus, we go behind the scenes on the Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame: we finally take our Which IPA character are you? personality quiz ourselves and use the results to give you a look into our artisanal process of assigning phonetic symbols to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier.

In 2025, Lauren published her academic-ish book Gesture: A Slim Guide , coauthored an article about crowdfunding Lingthusiasm, and coedited a special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics in memory of her mentor and friend Barb Kelly, which is a traditional way of honouring people you love in academia. In 2026, she’s celebrating her promotion to Associate Professor as of January 1st (finally, a job title that’s more legible internationally!) with uh, more meetings. Lauren is grateful that Lingthusiasm patrons let us pay other people to do the editing, transcripts, and other behind-the-scenes podcast admin work so she can stay involved in the episodes themselves around her increasingly busy schedule.

Gretchen went to ASL camp in Ontario for a week last year, did a talk called 101 ways to communicate linguistics with a broader audience (slides), and enjoyed several interviews and books, including Talking Hands by Margalit Fox (nonfiction about Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) and Hellspark by Janet Kagan (science fiction, recommended by a Lingthusiasm listener!). Plus: a special not-yet-public announcement only in the episode itself! Gretchen is grateful that the Lingthusiasm patrons let her stay afloat while working on projects that one day you’re going to love…but which aren’t bringing in their own money yet.

We both enjoyed celebrating World Linguistics Day in November (greetings from 70 cities in over 30 countries!) and attending the International Conference on Linguistics Communication in April, where we talked about lingcomm collaboration with academia. Plus: we hit our 100th Lingthusiasm episode and celebrated by compiling a list of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics.

Join us on Patreon to listen to this episode now, and help us keep making this podcast ad free and grow the broader lingcomm ecosystem (make sure to send the lingcomm grants to your favourite up-and-coming lingcomm creators!).

If you’re a person who enjoys finding things out before other people, this might be a particularly interesting bonus episode for you to listen to, I’m just saying.