The natural history of linguistic diversity - Many Minds
- Rating
-
- Fav.
- Waveform
-
- Action
-
- Link
- Title
- The natural history of linguistic diversity
- Description
- <p class="p1"><span class="s1">Thousands of languages are used around the world today, and this linguistic diversity is a precious part of our human heritage. But it's also more than that. Linguistic diversity provides clues—a vast crazy quilt of clues—about how language works, about how history has unfolded, about the dynamics of culture, and about the nature of the human mind.</span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s2">My guest today is <a href= "https://www.damianblasi.org/"><span class="s3">Dr. Damián Blasi</span></a>. Damián is an <a href= "https://icrea.cat/"><span class="s4">ICREA Research Professor</span></a></span> <span class="s5">based at the <a href= "https://www.upf.edu/web/cbc"><span class="s6">Center for Brain & Cognition</span></a> at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.</span> <span class="s1">Over the last decade or so, Damián's emerged as one of the most innovative researchers in the study of language and linguistic diversity. He's been widely recognized for this work, and most recently was awarded the <a href="https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/fabbs-early-career-impact-award/"> <span class="s3">2026 FABSS Early Career Impact Award</span></a> from the Cognitive Science Society.</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">In this conversation, Damián and talk about why scientists should care about linguistic diversity. We do a bit of linguistic diversity 101—how many languages there are, how we can enumerate them, how they vary from another. We discuss a recent paper in which Damian and his colleagues reconstructed the explosive rise and precipitous fall of human linguistic diversity over the last 12,000 years. We talk about the factors that drive language change. And we discuss how cognitive science relies too much on English and English speakers—and how this may be holding the field back.</span></p> <p class="p3"><span class="s1">Along the way, Damián and I touch on the Tower of Babel, a golden age of linguistic diversity, the human bite configuration, scientific aesthetics, whether children shape language, polygenetic theories of language evolution, the pace of language change, schooling, linguistic inequality and behemoth languages, and why Damián thinks that possibility space of human language might be bigger and wilder than we currently imagine.</span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s1">This is a special episode of the <em>Many Mind</em>s podcast. As I mentioned, Damián is this year's winner of an award from <a href= "https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/"><span class="s3">the Cognitive Science Society</span></a>, in recognition of his outstanding early-year contributions to the field. He recently gave a keynote at the society's annual conference in Rio de Janeiro, and we've partnered with the Cognitive Science Society to feature this conversation about his work. I'll also mention that this wasn't my first time chatting with Damián—he's an alumnus of the <a href="https://disi.org/"><span class="s3">Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute (DISI)</span></a>, the sponsor & incubator of this podcast. We met there a couple years ago, and so it was all the more fun to reconnect with him here.</span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s1">Alright friends, without further ado, on to my conversation with Dr. Damián Blasi. Enjoy!</span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s1"> </span></p> <p class="p2"><span class="s4"><em>Notes</em></span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">10:00 – The <a href= "https://www.unesco.org/en/multilingualism-linguistic-diversity"><span class="s3"> UNESCO page</span></a> on multilingualism and linguistic diversity.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">17:00 – The <a href= "https://www.ethnologue.com/"><span class= "s3">Ethnologue</span></a> database.</span></p> <p class="p1"><span class="s1">20:00 – For examples of Dr. Blasi's work on "behemoth languages" and on how languages are not represented equally in terms of technological and development investment, see <a href= "https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.376/"><span class= "s3">here</span></a> and <
- Publication Date
- 2026-08-28T21:25:00+00:00
- Status
- completed
- Website
- https://manyminds.libsyn.com/the-natural-history-of-linguistic-diversity
- Length
- 92:40
- File
- /podcasts/Many Minds/1787952300-5377.mp3
- Size
- 127.28 MB
- Bitrate
- 187-CBR
- Channels
- 1
Queries: 25 | Cache Hits: 0 | Load Time: 0.0289 | 2 MB