About George Walkden

NBN Episodes hosted by George:

Sali Tagliamonte, "Teen Talk: The Language of Adolescents" (Cambridge UP, 2016)

September 26, 2016

Teen Talk

Sali Tagliamonte
Hosted by George Walkden

Teenagers get a lot of bad press. Whether it's how they look, how they dress, the things they say, the way they say it - it sometimes seems as if they…

Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis, "The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics" (Cambridge UP, 2015)

July 21, 2015

The Indo-European Controversy

Asya Pereltsvaig and Martin Lewis
Hosted by George Walkden

Who were the Indo-Europeans? Were they all-conquering heroes? Aggressive patriarchal Kurgan horsemen, sweeping aside the peaceful civilizations of Old…

Anne Curzan, "Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History" (Cambridge UP, 2014)

September 29, 2014

Fixing English

Anne Curzan
Hosted by George Walkden

Language change is like a river. When people tell you how to use language, and how not to use it, they're attempting to build a dam that will put a st…

David Adger, "A Syntax of Substance" (MIT Press, 2013)

April 26, 2014

A Syntax of Substance

David Adger
Hosted by George Walkden

Nouns are the bread and butter of linguistic analysis, and it's easy not to reflect too hard on what they actually are and how they work. In A Syntax …

Aneta Pavlenko, "The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought" (Cambridge UP, 2014)

March 29, 2014

The Bilingual Mind And What It Tells Us about Language and Thought

Aneta Pavlenko
Hosted by George Walkden

Big ideas about language often ignore, or abstract away from, the individual's capacity to learn more than one language. In a world where the majority…

John E. Joseph, "Saussure" (Oxford UP, 2012)

May 20, 2013

Saussure

John E. Joseph
Hosted by George Walkden

Pretty much everyone who's done a linguistics course has come across the name of Ferdinand de Saussure - a name that's attached to such fundamentals a…

Jonathan Bobaljik, "Universals of Comparative Morphology" (MIT Press, 2012)

May 6, 2013

Universals of Comparative Morphology

Jonathan Bobaljik
Hosted by George Walkden

Morphology is sometimes painted as the 'here be dragons' of the linguistic map: a baffling domain of idiosyncrasies and irregularities, in which Heath…

Elly van Gelderen, "The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty" (Oxford UP, 2011)

March 1, 2013

The Linguistic Cycle

Elly van Gelderen
Hosted by George Walkden

In language, as in life, history is constantly repeating itself. In her book The Linguistic Cycle: Language Change and the Language Faculty (Oxford Un…

Peter Trudgill, "Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity" (Oxford UP, 2011)

November 18, 2012

Sociolinguistic Typology

Peter Trudgill
Hosted by George Walkden

If you had to bet your life on learning a language in three months, which language would you choose? Peter Trudgill's first choice wouldn't be Faroese…