Bilingual Episode 🇫🇷: Flying the Flag For Loanwords (with Mathilde Hutin, linguiste française)

The intro of today's episode makes reference to the 8th of the month. This is because the episode publication was delayed by a week after recording to allow all listeners to get a chance to hear the Fluent Show statement about racism. Right, let's get to it:

When there's something étrange in your vocabulaire, who you gonna call? A LINGUIST!

Today I've got a very special linguist on the show: Mathilde from Elles Comme Linguistes, a French YouTube channel dedicated to linguistics pour tous! Mathilde visited the Fluent show to talk about what linguistics is all about and what it is like to do a PhD in Paris 🇫🇷.

"Traditional education is about languages, not linguistics."

In this show, we focused on learning more about loanwords like champagne in English, mousepad in French, kartofle in Polish and beamer in German. Every language has loanwords, but

• Why do so many loanwords come from English?
• What decides why some words come into the language as loanwords?
• Should you use them when you're learning a language yourself?

BILINGUAL EPISODE ALERT
This podcast is a bilingual episode, meaning that we occasionally switched into speaking French. This type of episode is fantastic listening practice if you are a French learner. If you are an excellent French speaker, I apologise for all the mistakes I make. If you are not an experienced French learner, there will be some parts of the podcast that you don’t understand. But like all language learners, you’re not alone in that feeling.

I always remember what the lovely Ron Gullekson said: “I want to get used to feeling uncomfortable.” So fear not, trust that we will come back to English again and again, and the interview will still be interesting for you.

Thank you to Mathilde Hutin for this episode introduction.

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Special Guest: Mathilde Hutin.