And in honor of that, it is time for a recap of last year’s event and participants.
Let us set the scene
It’s the second of May of 2025, a Friday evening, where summer is lurking just around the corner. The room is filled with eager linguists, hands filled with cake and coffee, waiting for the festivities to begin. Sebastian Hauptmann is our host in fabulous attire, as always, and as he stands up to present this year’s LingoSlammers, the chit-chat turns to occasional murmuring. The game is on. The first participant is Andreas Østergaard. He presents “The Language of Magic: The Gathering” with an overview of what can get lost in translation in the search for puns and intertextuality, accompanied by funny memes and real-life cards put out on a table. A truly creative use of language, very pragmatic, very lemure.
The spirit of the true gamer continues, as Jonathan Kristoffersen presents his own virtual fieldwork and comparative study of Minecraft phonetics. What a fucking nerd. <3 Not only did he present the sound inventory of the Villager and Illager languages, concluding they must stem from the same ancestor language: proto-villlager, while performing out loud what the language might have sounded like. An interesting twist between phonetics, sociolinguistics, and historical linguistics – now that is how you use your linguistics degree.
The atmosphere then turned a bit away from the humouristic and nerdy gaming scene to something more serious. Sebastian emerged to our surprise as the third LingoSlammer: serenading the audience with a song “men are a myth” in Danish with English translation. As his poetic WORDS traveled through the room, our minds were pondering how difficult it is to play the mandolin at the same time as singing about gender roles. A mind-provoking and impressive performance.
It was time again for some serious listening for a humorous and impressive presentation of putting one’s linguistic skills to use: “ЗЪТТAP°IН”/“ЧӉAДЗAAМЗAТЗAP” AKA MY CRIMES AGAINST SOLIA” by James Warnica. James introduced his conlang from SOLIA with its messed-up use of orthography, phonetics, and morphology. Everyone’s brains were hurting trying to understand his very impressive system, which was showcased in his fun glossing example.
As the last segment, Silas Lind Rasmussen made our brains hurt even more with his semantic definition of doors and wheels, followed by the philosophical question: “are there more doors or wheels in the world?”. After some not-so-complex, but still overwhelming math, he came to the discovery that hinges could be perceived as wheels. There was a clear winner.
The winners of LingoSlam 2025 are pictured holding their diplomas. In the order of appearance from left to right, they are: Jonathan (winner of the HUMDINGER – best of all), James (winner of the Academic category), Andreas (winner of the Creative category), Silas (winner of the Humouristic category), and Sebastian (winner of the Poetic category).
This was epic! Come and experience more epicness in 1485-123 (Nobelsalen) on April 17th, 2026.
Laura and Jeanne are both part of the student organization ViGør at Aarhus University. ViGør is an academic and social student organization that hosts lectures, student talks and other social events. The events take place every friday from 2:15pm – 4:00pm. There is always cake and coffee, meaning the atmosphere is always informal and cosy.
