How Can Words Change the World? Performative Language

How does our speech affect the world around us? How can we measure the changes that our words make? In this week's episode, we take a look at performative language: what you need for your words to work their magic, what different parts make up our speech acts, and how our word choices can change the way we perceive and remember events.

This is Topic #65!

This week's tag language: Hausa!

Last episode:
Conservative Babies: How Do Kids Avoid Saying Things Wrong? -    • How Do Kids Avoid Saying Things Incor...  

Other of our general linguistics videos:
Future Tense: How Will Language Change in the Future? -    • How Will Language Change in the Future?  
Why So Sirious: How Do Computers Understand Our Speech? -    • How Do Computers Understand Our Speech?  
Plays on Words: Is Wordplay Universal? -    • Wordplay  

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Sources:
Austin, J.L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words.
Hall, S. (2000). "Who Needs Identity?" In du Gay, P., Evans, J., and Redman, P. (eds), Identity: A Reader.
Holten, L. (2013). Mothers, Medicine, and Morality in Rural Mali. https://books.google.ca/books?id=5MTA...
Sommerstein, A. H., and Torrance, I.C. (2014). Oaths and Swearing in Ancient Greece. de Gruyter.
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/element...
http://www.simplypsychology.org/loftu...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_name
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perform...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perform...
http://www.thebuddhacenter.org/buddhi...
https://www.ualberta.ca/~francisp/New...
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spe...

Looking forward to next week!