If you watch sports, whether the recent NBA finals or the ongoing World Cup matches, you may have noticed that the athletes aren’t the only ones putting on a show. The announcers seem to be playing a beautiful game of their own, capturing the excitement and play-by-play of the game in a unique blend of sentence structure, elocution, and pitch. Linguists have even given this speech pattern a name: sports announcer talk.Sociolinguist and dialectologist Valerie Fridland joins Host Flora Lichtman to break down the patterns and rules of this register.Guest:Dr. Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and author of “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.”Other episodes you may enjoy:

Transcripts for each episode are available within 1-3 days at .Subscribe to this podcast. Follow our show on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Bluesky @scifri and sign up for our newsletters. Got a science question that’s keeping you up at night? Call us: 877-472-4374
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

99% of people are being fed 'pop-science' garbage.
If you want the real intelligence without the digital tracking, you just found the exit. Bypass the system noise now.

🔴 INITIALIZE SECURE DOWNLOAD

⚪ GET THE UNFILTERED ARCHIVE