PickVidsBest Language & linguistics Videos
The 84 Language & linguistics videos here were recommended by different people across different months. Choose by who it is for: 1 introductory, 3 intermediate, 80 for a general viewer, and 0 for someone who wants the harder derivation. Most of them are an explainer. What they share is that one picture or analogy is used to supply a missing concept. Channels you will keep seeing include Tom Scott, TEDx Talks, CGP Grey.
George Lakoff: Moral Politics
Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics.
Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language
A kinetic typography animation set to Stephen Fry's spoken essay on language.
What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners
Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them.
Adriano Celentano - Prisencolinensinainciusol
A 1972 song by Adriano Celentano whose lyrics are nonsense syllables designed to sound like American English to non-English speakers.
Irving Finkel | The Ark Before Noah: A Great Adventure
Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination.
Cracking Ancient Codes: Cuneiform Writing - with Irving Finkel
Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.
How to learn any language in six months | Chris Lonsdale | TEDxLingnanUniversity
Chris Lonsdale presents a TEDx talk on how adults can learn a language in about six months, centering on immersion, comprehensible input and a practical learning methodology.
The Unanswered Question 1973 1 Musical Phonology Bernstein Norton
Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology.
RSA ANIMATE: Language as a Window into Human Nature
An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly.
Jorge Luis Borges: This Craft of Verse Lectures - thepostarchive
The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed.
The US Has More Tribes Than the World Has Countries
CGP Grey explains why "Indian" is often preferred over "Native American" in the United States, especially near reservations, and how many tribes exist in the US.
George Carlin - Euphemisms
A George Carlin stand-up bit on euphemisms, tracing how language gets softened, such as shell shock becoming PTSD, until it loses its emotional force.
A London Accent from the 14th to the 21st Centuries
Linguist Simon Roper reconstructs how a London accent would have sounded from the 14th to the 21st centuries, reading passages in period pronunciation.
Thoth's Pill - an Animated History of Writing
NativLang's 47-minute animated documentary traces the birth and evolution of writing, from early cave marks to modern scripts.
The Zipf Mystery
Vsauce's explainer on Zipf's law, the pattern in which the frequency of a word is inversely related to its rank.
The surprising pattern behind color names around the world
Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order.
Anagrams, but where you can break apart letters: "Anagraphs"
Tom Scott-style exploration by suckerpinch (Tom7) of generalized anagrams where letters can be broken into pieces, called anagraphs, with a whimsical computational approach.
Stephen Fry on the Joys of Swearing
A short clip of Stephen Fry defending swearing as a rich and essential part of the English language and rejecting the idea that it is unnecessary.
Why are British place names so hard to pronounce?
The Map Men explain why British place names are so hard to pronounce, tracing it to layers of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norman influence, with a pronunciation guide.
Music as a Language: Victor Wooten at TEDxGabriolaIsland
Bassist Victor Wooten argues that music should be learned the way children learn their first language: by immersion and play, without early correction or rigid academic instruction.
Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time
Vox breaks down how great rappers build rhymes, from Kurtis Blow's simple bars to Biggie's smooth flow and Kendrick Lamar's dense, fast delivery.
23. Language
Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on language, comparing human and animal communication, ape language projects like Koko and Kanzi, and how language is acquired.
I made a talking banana
A maker builds a talking banana that reads YouTube and Twitch comments aloud on stream, then fights viewers who abuse it with profanity.
Conlang Critic Episode Twelve: Toki Pona
An episode of jan Misali's Conlang Critic series reviewing Toki Pona, a minimalist constructed language with about a hundred words.