Language

American sign language is the third most commonly used language in the U.S., but for many Deaf folks, it's about so much more than communication. An author, a poet and two scholars share the history and culture of ASL.

Stuttering has been the butt of many jokes. People who stutter are working to change that.

Stuttering occurs in every culture with a spoken language. So why do many communities treat it as a source of shame? Two speech-language pathologists and a comedian help Anita question cultural assumptions about stuttering and explore the growing movement to embrace speech diversity.

Stuttering occurs in every culture with a spoken language. So why do many communities treat it as a source of shame? Two speech-language pathologists and a comedian help Anita question cultural assumptions about stuttering and explore the growing movement to embrace speech diversity.

Host Anita Rao talks about how emojis get created with Charles Carson, the managing editor of Duke University Press’ linguistics journal, American Speech, and a member of the Unicode emoji subcommittee. Susan Herring, professor of information science and linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington, also s to talk about the linguistic use of emoji. Rao also gets hot takes on emoji usage from two teenagers: high school seniors Ellie Stevens and Amanda Tsuetaki, who are also a part of WUNC’s Youth Reporting Institute.

In 2019, The State of Things met musical visionaries, people fighting to save endangered cultures, and folks who ed their neighbors through another…

Marty Richardson wanted to know more about his culture. He grew up with his family in Maryland, a ways removed from the Haliwa-Saponi Indian Tribe in…

Makeba Wilbourn has been immersed in the subtleties of language since she was a child.As the daughter of a northern white mother and southern black…

Makeba Wilbourn has been immersed in the subtleties of language since she was a child.As the daughter of a northern white mother and southern black…

The stigma of stuttering forces many people who have the speech disorder to avoid talking at all costs.And for millions of people, the act of trying to…