Last week I taught a course at the Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics (LOT) on how to engage the public with (language) science. In just five days, students designed their own demo for children aged 6 to 12 years old. They presented the results on the last day. I was blown away by what they came up with! We heard about making moral decisions in different languages, forensic linguistics, linguistic stereotypes, colours in different languages, semantic networks, implicatures, similarities between distant languages, semantic priming and how you can sometimes say ‘no’ without actually saying ‘no’. Can’t wait to see the final versions and I hope we can integrate a couple at the Kletskoppen language festival!

With thanks to Roy Meijer for sharing slides on his goal-audience-message-means mantra, and to Laura Wagner (Ohio State University) and Cecile McKee (University of Arizona ) for giving me access to the proofs of their forthcoming book “How to talk language science with everybody” (it’s brilliant!).