Our listeners and patrons send in so many great ideas, stories, and words. For this episode, listener and prolific contributor Diego has put together an entire show for our edification.
- ASL may have changed to include copular BE
- What’s going on with French-only laws in Quebec?
- Why is an Indian airport broadcasting covid information in Sanskrit?
- And more.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Sign languages change, too: The evolution of SELF in ASL
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220606181215.htm
American Sign Language: “self”
https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/s/self.htm
[PDF] Sampson and Mayberry: An emerging self: the copula cycle in American Sign Language
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/sites/default/files/06_98.2Sampson.pdf
[PDF] Elly van Gelderen: The Copula Cycle
https://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/Copula.pdf
South Africa is getting a NEW official language – taking us up to 12!
https://www.msn.com/en-za/news/other/south-africa-is-getting-a-new-official-language-taking-us-up-to-12/ar-AAXKmFl
List of countries by the number of recognized official languages | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_the_number_of_recognized_official_languages
Ce qu’il faut pour vivre | IMDB
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1280501/
Law Requiring French in Quebec Becomes Stricter
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/24/world/canada/quebec-language-bill-96.html
Now that Quebec’s new language law has been adopted, many wonder how it will be enforced
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/bill-96-enforcement-1.6472094
Varanasi Airport’s Sanskrit Announcement Draws Mixed Reactions on Twitter
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/why-use-dead-language-varanasi-airport-s-sanskrit-announcements-draw-mixed-reactions/ar-AAYJivh
Why is Sanskrit so controversial?
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28755509
Latin ATM: Inserito scidulam quaeso ut faciundam cognoscas rationem
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sethschoen/2735975602/
Varanasi Airport’s Sanskrit Announcement Draws Mixed Reactions on Twitter
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/why-use-dead-language-varanasi-airport-s-sanskrit-announcements-draw-mixed-reactions/ar-AAYJivh
Latin ATM: Inserito scidulam quaeso ut faciundam cognoscas rationem
https://www.flickr.com/photos/sethschoen/2735975602/
Vatican City – Postage stamps (1929 – 2022)
https://www.stampworld.com/en/stamps/Vatican-City/
Hawai’ian Lawmakers Apologize for Language Suppression
https://www.languagemagazine.com/2022/07/01/hawaiian-lawmakers-apologize-for-language-suppression/
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, THIRTY-FIRST LEGISLATURE, 2022, STATE OF HAWAII: H.C.R. NO. 130: HOUSE CONCURRENT RESOLUTION
APOLOGIZING TO THE NATIVE HAWAIIAN PEOPLE FOR THE EFFECTIVE PROHIBITION IN HAWAII SCHOOLS OF THE INSTRUCTIONAL USE OF THE HAWAIIAN LANGUAGE FROM 1896 TO 1986.
https://www.capitol.hawaii.gov/session2022/bills/HCR130_.HTM
Bucket list | GRAMMARIST
https://grammarist.com/phrase/bucket-list/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
[CROSSTALK]
BEN: Can I ask…
DIEGO: Sorry, I was just going to say…
HEDVIG: I’m wondering if there’s a protection for Indigenous languages… sorry.
BEN: All three of us at same the time. My bad. Diego, go.
[CROSSTALK]
DIEGO: Well, I was just going to say…
HEDVIG: I’m wondering if there’s… [BLOWS RASPBERRY]
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Diego and I are… I am so rude to Diego. Diego has first priority, I’m second.
DIEGO: No, I have a big lag.
[LAUGHTER AND TUMULT]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to this special bonus episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. She’s everyone’s favourite Swedish/kinda Australian linguist, living in Germany. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: I like that. I have very little competition. It’s like when I tell Ste he’s my favourite husband.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: “I’m your only husband!” Well, about that….
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Hey, look… from what little I know of Swedes, polyamory isn’t the most unpopular relationship dynamic in your home country.
HEDVIG: Ah. I mean, it’s popular in a lot of places, but I don’t know, you can’t legally marry more than one.
BEN: Ah, fair enough.
DANIEL: Good to know! He’s everyone’s favourite…. It’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Okay, I guess I win. I mean, also, that was clearly a lie, because it’s just categorically untrue, but I will take it for this episode. This episode! I’m going to be everyone’s favourite, this episode.
HEDVIG: People like you, Ben.
DANIEL: You’ve got one fan at least: Jack. [LAUGHTER] We have a very special guest with us for this episode. He’s got a nose for news. He’s suggested so many stories that we just decided to have him curate a whole news show. It’s Diego. Hey, Diego. Thanks for joining us.
DIEGO: Hello, everyone. Thanks for having me.
BEN: Oh, Diego. I can’t tell you how great it is when other people do work for us.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, there is that. Yes.
DIEGO: My pleasure. My pleasure.
DANIEL: And you know, so many of our listeners help us by suggesting stories and news and words, and we’re really grateful for all of them. But this episode is the first in a series where we feature some of our most prolific contributors, of which Diego is one. There’ll be more, but thanks for keeping us going. And thank you for being up at a terrible hour over in West Coast, USA.
DIEGO: Not a problem at all.
BEN: I feel like one week, we need to do a show where we have managed to get it so that every single person has a terrible… [crosstalk] like, ’cause normally it’s, like, one or two on a given show. We need to figure out exactly there’s going to be some sort of planets-align moment where everyone has terrible time.
DANIEL: Including us. Okay.
BEN: Yeah, exactly.
DANIEL: It will be 6am for Perth time. And then, it’s like daytime over the Pacific Ocean. And then, night for everybody else.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, and night for everybody else, I like that.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Diego, what is it about linguistics and language that fires you up, keeps you going, keeps you hunting down those articles?
DIEGO: Yeah, I guess it’s just that there’s always something. There are so many languages in the world that there’s just always some sort of news going on somewhere that’s language or linguistics related. So, it’s actually pretty easy to find them. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Way to make us sound lazy AND inept!
[LAUGHTER]
DIEGO: I also have some time on my hands to do it.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, thanks for doing that. And that’s really true though, because we’ve been doing linguistic communication for years. In my case, 10 years. And I still kinda don’t really feel like I’m repeating myself, except maybe on animals and language and Whorfianism, maybe a couple of those things, but for most things…
HEDVIG: Academie Française.
DANIEL: Ah. Yeah, sometimes.
HEDVIG: Every now and then, they just do bullshit.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Or, like woke trademark names and stuff. So maybe sometimes, but that’s more like an ongoing thing. But yeah, there’s ample scope to keep going, so we’re going to get you to bring us in on some stories. We’re going to say what we think about them. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We’re calling this episode Diego’s Digest.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: The first of many Diego’s Digests.
DIEGO: Let’s do it. Let’s do it.
BEN: I feel like we need to get a picture. Either, Diego, you need to completely orchestrate this or we can just do a really cheesy Photoshop of your face onto, like, an older man in a leather armchair in front of a fire with like a balloon of brandy and his hand on the head of an English setter or something, like: [SOPHISTICATED VOICE] “Welcome to Diego’s Digest.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Fireplace in the background.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Yeah, exactly.
HEDVIG: Very cute.
DIEGO: Yeah, I’m trying to remember who recommended the name on Discord. But thank you, whoever you are.
DANIEL: It was Rhian. Thanks, Rhian.
DIEGO: Okay.
BEN: I find alliteration is like puns, right? It’s so cheap and so easy, but it doesn’t mean it’s not fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DIEGO: Well, my last name is Diaz, so we could…
BEN: Oh.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s even better.
BEN: I love it.
DANIEL: Big thanks to all you patrons for being patrons. You’re listening to this now, because you’re a patron. So, thank you for keeping the show going. If you’re listening to this later as a non-patron, why not become a patron? Then, invent a time machine, come back in time, and listen to this earlier when we release it. You might think that if you had a time machine, you’d have better things to do than go back and hunt this episode down when we release it, but you do not have better things to do. And so, you should do that if you can.
BEN: I love the idea. “Infinite possibilities. I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to go back in time and make it seem like I’m hearing this when it was first released. That’s the single most important thing I can do with a time machine.”
DANIEL: No, wait. Killing Hitler is the first thing and then going back and listening to that episode. If you want to know how to operate a time machine, you can hit us up. You can hang out with us on Discord. You can compare your scores to my scores on all the -LE games. That’s a lot of fun. And you can do that by joining up: patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Shall we get to the news?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Let’s get started.
BEN: Let’s start digesting some Diegos.
DIEGO: All right.
DANIEL: Diego, start us off. This first one is about…
DIEGO: American Sign Language, ASL.
DANIEL: I am not a speaker of ASL, are you?
DIEGO: I am currently actually studying it. I have an italki instructor.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay.
HEDVIG: Nice.
DIEGO: Yeah. But I also took a couple of semesters in college.
BEN: What’s your sign name, Diego?
DIEGO: So I actually unfortunately haven’t met any actual Deaf people, except for the instructors. So, I’m not really part of the community, so I don’t have a sign name yet. It has to be given to you.
BEN: Yes.
HEDVIG: Is there a short version of Diego that already exists?
DIEGO: A short version?
BEN: Like, instead of spelling it out?
HEDVIG: Yeah, like instead of spelling Diego hand spelling.
DIEGO: Oh. I’ve never seen a Diego with a sign name, yeah. So, I’m not sure.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, what’s going on in ASL?
DIEGO: Yes. Actually, thanks to my instructor, Kimmy, I had her take a look at the article with me today when I had a class by chance. And just to give you some context, but pretty much in most of the history of studying sign languages, people thought that you can’t really treat them like spoken languages. And so, there are plenty of things that they said that ASL doesn’t do or can’t do, including having the use of copulas, which is a word that means TO BE, like IS or WAS or ARE or WERE. And so this new study has been able to get some document evidence to show how the sign for SELF, which is like a vertical fist with the thumb out on top of the index finger. You touch the thumb to your chest twice, and that can mean MYSELF, this is YOURSELF, different things like that. And so, they’ve found that this is being used as a substitute or as an equivalent for what we have in English as IS, because in other instances in ASL, you would just say, ‘Maria woman’ — you wouldn’t need to say IS — and so a version of that is to say, ‘Maria, SELF, woman’. So, they’ve been able to prove how it came to be, starting with French Sign Language, which is where ASL kind of comes from. And it’s a big deal, because not only does it prove that there is the use of copula in ASL, but they have hard evidence to show how it has transformed over the years. Yeah, it’s pretty cool.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s really cool!
DANIEL: I learned that zero copula was a thing in lots of languages. At least when I learned Russian…
DIEGO: Yeah, like Russian. Exactly.
DANIEL: Yeah, you would say… instead of “I am a doctor,” you would say, “I doctor,” at least in the present tense. If we go to different tenses, then things get weird. But yeah, okay. So, it looks like the word SELF is functioning as a kind of copula.
BEN: Can I… So, help the non-linguist understand. First of all, piece of information I didn’t know, that ASL is roughly based on French Sign Language. So, there’s a new piece of information for me. But I would assume, in French, they use copulas, like in English, in spoken French.
DANIEL: Je suis.
HEDVIG: Je suis suédois. Yeah.
BEN: Yeah. So, why did French sign language and then later ASL, American sign language, NOT use these copulas? Because I have to assume, as we’ve just discussed, it is possible. So, what was the absence about?
HEDVIG: Well, maybe we should clear out one thing first, which is that French Sign Language is not a signed version of French.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: Like Diego said, American Sign Language, and I believe also Australian Sign Language, and lot of sign languages around the world are based around the history of who started Deaf schools. And in America, a lot of French people were the ones who were starting Deaf schools.
BEN: Right. Okay.
HEDVIG: So that’s why you get that sort of line, and you get that in other places too. Sometimes it mixes with local varieties that exist there already, either Indigenous people or settler people maybe who have developed a community lect of Deaf language, and then that merges with what the Deaf school people teach. But then also, like Daniel was saying, there are a lot of spoken languages that don’t have what we’re calling copulas.
It’s a little word. Sometimes, it looks like a verb. Sometimes, it doesn’t. Sometimes, it looks like just a little particle and you can’t really tell where it’s from, that links something to another and say they are the same. Like, Ben is Australian, like Australian is a property of Ben. And it goes in one direction, right? Not all Australians are Ben. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Right right right, yeah. A square is… no, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Which is lucky for us.
HEDVIG: Oh, well, I would argue the opposite!
BEN: No, no, no, no, no. Daniel’s right.
DANIEL: He’s got a point.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: What I was going to say was when you think about it, if you think about communication as a way of expressing what’s necessary to express, and maybe cutting off what’s not necessary, if you have a situation where you say, “Ben, Australian”…
BEN: It makes sense.
HEDVIG: …you can infer what’s going on. The question I would ask is actually: why is ASL evolving a BE copula?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: So to answer my question, economics, essentially, like in a language that requires a fair bit more… or maybe to put it another way, because of the nature of the transmission of the language, it has to slow down quite a bit, you kind of maybe start asking yourself, “Okay, what are the things we can drop and have everything still make sense?” And so, copulas kind of fit that bill.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Or, what are things we don’t need to evolve, because we don’t need them? So, what is the need that it’s serving? So think about communication instances where this… that you could be confusing. So, either there are too many things going on at once, and you need to have some redundancy maybe in the communication. So, you do this to mark… I don’t know. I mean, I can ask the same question of spoken languages. I don’t know why spoken languages have copulas, man.
BEN: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: We don’t just cut it down. We also beef it up sometimes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, sometimes we beef it up when we think it’s important for redundancy of communication. Some of the pressures that can lead to this kind of stuff is, like — I don’t know — is having a lot of… No, that should slow it down. I was going to say having a lot of second language learners would like do things to your language, but I don’t think you’d evolve a copula for it.
BEN: I’m getting the vibe here that copulas are clearly the letter C, and we just need to fuck them right off. Like, it’s just…
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: No, no, no, we can’t though, because they seem to pop up. I noticed in the article that there was something called the copula cycle. We talked about the Jespersen’s Cycle where negatives tend to reduce and reduce and reduce, and then they’re too small, so then you need to add something else to beef them up. And it looks like the copula is something that is kind of the same thing. It reduces and reduces, and then you need to throw something else in — if you’re going to, not all languages do — but you need to throw that in to beef it up again. Hedvig, do you know anything about the copula cycle? Does that mean anything to you?
HEDVIG: No, but I can imagine it happening. Well, when we say beef it up, it’s like… in the negation, it’s not only beefing it up, the emphatic one is getting bleached, and it’s getting replaced.
BEN: What I’d love to know is, if it’s… so perhaps this is a good question for Diego who brought us this story. Is it a case of: this has always been happening in ASL and someone’s just gotten around to actually paying enough linguistic attention to go: “Hey, check it out, this is being used like a copula”? Or, alternatively, is this something that’s only started to happen relatively recently? And if that’s the case, my question is: why?
DIEGO: Well, from the article or from the study, it looks like they found stuff dating back to the 1860s, some old French language…
BEN: Okay, so: a while!
[LAUGHTER]
DIEGO: Right, right.
DANIEL: That is recent.
DIEGO: Right. One thing that my instructor did bring up was that — not always, but sometimes — it can be a matter of formality or register. So, maybe you’ll see it used in more formal settings, but not necessarily always. So, there’s that.
BEN: Fascinating.
DANIEL: The interesting quote for me was about an example of SELF. Because when we say, “Ben is Australian,” we use IS as the copula. We’re saying Ben is a member of the set of Australians. So, they use this example. We see that SELF, the word SELF, the sign… I can say word, right?
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Mhm.
DANIEL: “The sign SELF is positioned between the subject and object noun phrases expressing a class membership. For example, “Lester Holt is a member of the set of writers with NBC.” If we omit SELF from this utterance, our ASL consultants consider that sentence ungrammatical.”
HEDVIG: Oh! They said, like: That’s not a good sentence.
BEN: There we go. Okay.
DANIEL: It’s not good, I don’t like that. What this means is the sign languages do the same kind of things that spoken languages do, and that’s pretty cool.
DIEGO: Exactly. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Who would’ve thunk it?
HEDVIG: Yeah, and it makes sense, right? because the communication needs and pressures, regardless of the medium should be fairly similar. That’s really cool. Thank you, Diego, for that one.
DANIEL: Yeah, that is cool. All right. Next one!
DIEGO: So the next one is that South Africa is hopefully soon getting a new official language. And that’s going to be South African Sign Language.
DANIEL: Yay.
DIEGO: Yes, exactly.
BEN: How many is that in total now, because they got a few?
DIEGO: Right. So, makes it 12.
BEN: Whoa!
DIEGO: There are currently 11.
DANIEL: There you go. [CHUCKLES] South Africa, showing us how it’s done!
BEN: I would love to know, before we move on to, like, the grist of this, do they win?
HEDVIG: Win?
BEN: Yeah. Is South Africa officially the largest number of officially supported languages?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Bet it’s not.
HEDVIG: China has 55 recognised ethnic minorities.
BEN: Yeah, but hang on. They don’t provide governmental support across the board for all of those, right? Whereas I’m thinking South Africa might do, because official language status means that all of your government documents, all that kind of stuff, right?
DANIEL: No, Bolivia’s got 37.
BEN: Oh, wow!
DIEGO: It might be Zimbabwe.
DANIEL: Zimbabwe’s got 16. According to Wikipedia, Bolivia’s got 37… Hang on. This is official languages.
HEDVIG: I thought that the Chinese Communist Party at least said that they provided official material in all the 55.
BEN: It’s so funny that you say that because everything I’ve ever copped from the Chinese is like, “We have a language, Mandarin. It is Chinese.” [CHUCKLES] And everyone in Hong Kong is like, “Are you sure?”
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, but for the official minorities, because it’s part of, I think, that Communist Party propaganda that “We are a nation made out of multitudes, and look at us living together in harmony. Unlike the Americans, where they have all of their racial riots, and we don’t. We respect all of our ethnic minorities.”
BEN: Yeah: “We just send Uighurs to reeducation camps. You guys should try that.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It looks like South African sign language is the first language of about a quarter million South Africans, about a half of 1%. And that’s really cool that… how many times have signed languages become official languages? I am struggling to think of another example.
HEDVIG: Swedish one does.
DANIEL: It is?
HEDVIG: I think a lot of them do. Sometimes it has a special status because Deaf people… since we don’t do horrible oral education anymore to Deaf people, if you want to communicate with a Deaf citizen, there’s no… you can’t say: you should have learned Swedish, or you should have learned Xhosa. That doesn’t work, right?
BEN: Right, doesn’t fly. Like, there’s no legal defense for that.
HEDVIG: It physically doesn’t work. So, in that way, for people who have sign language as the first language, you can say, “Oh, you can learn another sign language,” but you can’t really be like: You should learn English or Afrikaans or something. So, I think a lot of governments do provide sign language support. But whether it’s an official language or not… in Sweden, I think it’s a special case. It’s not an official minority language, because then you have to have an ethnicity linked to you.
BEN: Should we as a show do a quick update on… these are just questions that I have in my head that I presume you guys have the answers to, because you’re way smarter than me. First of all, do all countries mean the same thing when they say official language?
HEDVIG: No.
BEN: Right? So, I figured not.
HEDVIG: I looked that up for some publications that I’m trying to write. Yes, that’s not true, unfortunately.
BEN: There’s thing number one, like official language is not official language is not official language. Thing number two: what, broadly speaking, is understood to be the… when people say official language, and they believe that it’s… what is the attached sort of connotation to that?
HEDVIG: I think, like, you can request to have an interpreter in court.
BEN: Okay. If it’s one of the official languages?
HEDVIG: Yeah. And you can request to get government documentation translated into your language. You might not get it at first. It might not happen at first, but you can be like, “I am not recognising this.”
BEN: Okay. So, that’s what people believe it means. Now, Hedvig, based on your research, what does the variation look like? What is the crummiest kind of official language and what’s the most amazing, in terms of governmental recognition and support?
HEDVIG: I think, if we look at a country that really says that they follow this very broadly, for example, Canada, Canada says that English and French are national languages that you should be able to do everything in at a national level. Then at state levels, it’s different depending on what state you’re in. But I know when I was living in Manitoba, where there is a significant French-speaking minority, that often there will just be problems in the implementation. So like, people would get tickets on their cars, and be like: “I don’t recognise this because it’s not in French.” And then, the police officers would be like, “Oh, my god. Argh.” And then…
BEN: [LAUGHS] Sorry. It’s just such a French thing, isn’t it? [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, but like, that’s a silly example where people are willfully going out of their way, those people could probably understand their ticket.
BEN: I wonder what their incentive might be!
HEDVIG: But some of them were pushing it intentionally to be like, “No, this is actually my right.” Sometimes, the words in the constitution and things can sound very nice. But when it comes down to where the shit hits the fan, where the boots hits the ground, where the police officers and the lawyers and the judges, and everything have to implement it, there’s not always the infrastructure to support those fancy words, is my experience when I’ve been reading it, but I’m not an expert. This is just what it seems like to me.
DANIEL: Maybe this is the part where we should bring in — since we’re mentioning Quebec, and French — maybe we should be talking about Bill 96, which just came on June 1st this year.
BEN: So like a month ago.
DANIEL: A month ago, but it won’t activate for another year. So, it’s a law now, but it’s going to activate next year.
BEN: What is the law?
DANIEL: Go on, Diego, tell us.
DIEGO: Yes. This concerns Bill 96 in Quebec, which is essentially reinforcing a bill from the 1970s called Bill 101. And it’s pretty much aiming to protect the French language in the seven-million Francophone province of Quebec. They feel that the French language is in danger, mainly from English, and the cultural value and significance needs to be recognised and protected accordingly. And it has a lot of repercussions, but the biggest thing that’s happening is that it’s very ambiguous. It’s very confusing, it can be interpreted in many different ways. And people are concerned about what the consequences could be.
DANIEL: Can I just say: we’ve had a lot of opportunities to discuss Quebec French, and I’ve almost always ignored it, because I’m afraid of this issue, because it gets a lot of people mad, and I haven’t understood it well. But I was just looking at some of the provisions here. Let me just read some of these. Starting next year, all government communications and services will be written in French. Immigrants living in Quebec will still be able to access government services and sites in languages other than French, but only for six months after they arrive. You’ve got six months.
HEDVIG: Oh, Scheisse.
DIEGO: Six months to become competent enough in French to talk to a doctor or do other bureaucratic things.
HEDVIG: Wow. That’s short.
DANIEL: Yep! And the only people who are exceptions… no exceptions for Indigenous languages that I can find. No exceptions for sign language users.
DIEGO: Nope. Nope.
DANIEL: It’s immigrants who have been in Quebec for less than six months — by the way, the word ‘immigrant’ is not well defined in this legislation — and also so-called historic Anglophones people, who were educated in English.
BEN: Wait. So, they’ve made an exception for powerful Anglophones? That sounds like? And no one else.
DANIEL: I do not understand well the concept of historic Anglophones and maybe somebody can help.
HEDVIG: Do they just mean like minority communities that have lived in Quebec for a very long time and have always spoken English?
DIEGO: I think that’s what it is.
DANIEL: Okay. That makes sense.
BEN: Surely, there would have to be exceptions for the Indigenous communities, like the First Nations people!
DANIEL: It’s not here.
BEN: No, that’s what I mean. If you’re giving that allowance like: “Oh, well, Anglophones have been here for a long time,” it’s like, “What?”
HEDVIG: Hmm, if you talk about like… I know there are other people who have been there for a long time!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: If there’s a line, Anglophones got there quite recently!
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Well, this is to Diego’s point about this being vague, right?
DIEGO: Right. And vague, ambiguous, confusing. It can be interpreted as: don’t speak any other language other than French after six months. It doesn’t actually say that, but it doesn’t not say that. So, the other factor that’s added on is that for businesses, places of work, for individuals at these places of work, a teacher at a school, multicultural, multilingual, if a parent happens to hear a teacher talking to a student or a staff member in something other than French, they could send an anonymous tip saying, “I think that this teacher is infringing on our rights to have education in French.” And the same thing in the workplace, “You’re infringing on my right to be able to work in French, in the French language.”
BEN: Is anyone else, like… I promise I’m not trying to make light of this, and I realise the parallel is structural, and not in terms of severity, but is anyone else getting whiffs of some of this bounty hunter abortion shit that’s going on in the States? Where, like, not only can you not do this thing in Texas, but like, “Oh, I heard about a person who drove a person to get an abortion, so that person can be put in prison,” and stuff. There’s some real awful aspects to this. I don’t know. It’s just odious. I don’t care for this at all.
HEDVIG: I wonder how much it is like that though, because, for example, here in Europe, a lot of antivax people had the understanding that in Australia, it was like that with covid restrictions. So, I have an friend… well, I have an acquaintance who is an antivaxxer, and who had the good sense of asking me about some things he had heard about Australia before he just acted on them. And he heard that in Australia…
BEN: Oh, God bless. [CHUCKLES] Such a rare thing now.
HEDVIG: Yeah. He heard that in Australia, you couldn’t go into your backyard, and if you did during quarantine, your neighbors could call the police and a helicopter would come and, like, take your children.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
DIEGO: Wow.
HEDVIG: I was like, I doubt…
BEN: I don’t know about you guys. I had the mental image of those deer wranglers in New Zealand who hang out the side of helicopters with the big net guns. Just like: THUNK! ~Oh no, Mum!~
HEDVIG: But this hidden informant, like any citizen could inform on each other, is really creepy and really ugh.
BEN: Yeah, I don’t like that at all.
DANIEL: And keeping the law vague makes sure that people will be intimidated into not using other languages because they won’t know what the police can do, and what they can’t do. They’ll just avoid it just to stay out of trouble, because it’s that vague.
DIEGO: Exactly. There are people who, of course, support it. But there are people who don’t support it, because they either think it doesn’t do enough to protect French…
BEN: Oh, god!
DIEGO: …or they think it’s not doing the right things to protect French, like whatever the bill says is going to happen isn’t going to do anything for French. And then, of course, you have the many different scenarios of people — immigrants, refugees, First Nations, etc. — who are concerned about what this is going to mean. And they don’t think it even needs to have a place, it might not even need to exist because French is not under attack. It’s not endangered, seven million speakers, more or less, in Quebec.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Can I ask a question that none of you might actually have a good answer to and that’s totally fine because who spends their time reading demographic analysis of places? But like… Okay, so there’s seven million native speakers of French in Quebec. How many people are in Quebec? I guess what I’m trying to get a sense of here is, is this in any way even remotely a minority language?
HEDVIG: 8.5.
BEN: Oh, god. Okay. [LAUGHS] This is a law for one and a half million people, basically?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: And not including… actually, no, because you’ve got this juicy exception for all the historical English speakers. So presumably, it’s actually for maybe a mil, half a million people possibly.
HEDVIG: I guess what they want is that immigrants that arrive that aren’t from Canada, or… well, maybe that aren’t either Indigenous or from these circles of communities, that when they arrive, they should first learn French and then later English. So, if you arrive there as a refugee from Afghanistan, you should learn French first, and then English. I think that’s what they want to happen.
BEN: Yeah, because you could see how a person migrating for whatever reason, be it refugee or just sort of… What would you call by-choice migration?
HEDVIG: Immigrant. I’m an immigrant.
BEN: Yeah. An immigrant, right?
DANIEL: Yeah, me too.
BEN: From a utility standpoint, there’s rather a lot more incentive to learn English than French even if you’re going to a francophone place like Quebec, because a lot of people speak English there and English can do you a lot better good internationally.
HEDVIG: And also in the rest of Canada. So if you first moved to Quebec, and later you’re like, “I want to go to Toronto or Vancouver,” or whatever, then yeah.
DIEGO: Apparently, even within Quebec, it can be difficult for monolingual Francophones to find work in certain positions. So, the bill aims to reassert a person’s right to work in French and not have to speak English, to be able to work in Quebec, but it doesn’t actually say that in the bill. So, the intent is kind of there, but…
BEN: Right. So hence, the protests from the Francophones who are like: It doesn’t go far enough!
DIEGO: Right. And so if you poll people outside of Montreal, which is supposedly very multicultural, melting pot, multilingual, but there are these people outside of Montreal who really don’t know non-French speakers and are kind of surrounded by them, you poll them and say, “Oh, do you support a bill that’s going to increase the protection of the French language in Quebec?” of course, they’re going to say yes. Who would say no to that? Because they don’t really know what the situation is like in Montreal where people come from all over the place.
BEN: Because my totally myopic echo-chamber place is just like: Well, everyone speaks French. What’s the problem?
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: I understand about language maintenance, but at some point, it becomes about punishing people who speak minority languages. I mean, can you imagine if this were… I know I don’t know the Quebec situation. But if this were in Australia about English, I would be furious. I’d be pounding on tables saying, “You’ve gone too far!” So, my stand: Quebec, you’ve gone too far, you need to knock this shit off.
BEN: I agree.
HEDVIG: If the thing they want to do is protect a monolingual French speaker from being discriminated on the job market, I bet the bill also includes something like that. You can’t discriminate against people if they speak one of the official languages of Canada. So, if they speak French, you can’t say you can’t have this job. I suspect maybe something like that is in the bill. And that seems to be getting at what they want, better than this like, punishing immigrants.
BEN: Punishing people for not speaking French, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Also, if you’re interested in Quebec and Indigenous populations in Quebec, there’s a really good movie for 2008 called The Necessities of Life, Ce qu’il faut pour vivre. And it’s in French and Inuktitut. And it’s about an Inuit man who comes to Quebec City, I think he comes to because he has tuberculosis, but he doesn’t speak French, and he doesn’t speak English. And he has to live in these French white-speaking people’s worlds while he’s recovering from tuberculosis. It’s really good. I really recommend it, Necessities of Life.
DANIEL: Okay. Let’s go on to our Ryanair story. Diego, what do we got? Let’s have some good news.
BEN: We quickly went over to Canada, and now we’re coming back to South Africa!
[LAUGHTER]
DIEGO: Yes. So in case you don’t know the backstory, Ryanair, big airline, Irish airline, I believe, they are dealing with a situation of transporting many South Africans from South Africa to the UK, and there’s apparently a surge of counterfeit documents and passports. So, in an attempt to try to crack down on people trying to enter the UK illegally via Ryanair, Ryanair implemented a test for passengers to prove that they’re from South Africa, and the test they chose to administer was in Afrikaans, which is not even one of the top two spoken languages in South Africa. And it just had so much backlash from the other people of the country who speak the other languages, who don’t speak Afrikaans, or who have a very minimal understanding of the language. People thought it was reminiscent of Apartheid and very…
HEDVIG: Yeah, because we should say Afrikaans is a Dutch contact language spoken primarily in South Africa because of… by Dutch settlers.
BEN: And to put it even less delicately, it was, like, the language of the horrifically racist ruling caste of South Africa for, like, a hundred and something years.
DANIEL: So, that’s the backstory. What’s new about this?
DIEGO: Right. So Ryanair has heard all the backlash, and they’ve decided to take a step back and they are dropping the Afrikaans test. They haven’t really given a reason.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Lookin’ bad really sucks!
DIEGO: They’re saying, like, “We’ve heard the backlash and it’s not really necessary and maybe it doesn’t make sense. Were we being racist? No. Were we trying to profile people? No, that’s rubbish, but in the end, it’s gone. So, victory.”
DANIEL: Okay, so I noticed this grab from a press conference from Michael O’Leary, CEO of Ryanair. He says, “The South African government have acknowledged that there’s a problem with the vast number of false or fake South African passports, but we have ended the Afrikaans test because it doesn’t make any sense.” Okay. Good admission there.
BEN: Can I ask, from a structural point of view, if I’ve read between the lines here, what was happening is a lot of people not from South Africa, but presumably from surrounding nations were using fake documentation and Ryanair as a pipeline to get to Europe/England/the UK where they would presumably sort of overstay their visas or claim refugee status or something like that?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DIEGO: Exactly.
DANIEL: That’s right. When Hedvig and I talked about this last time, we pointed out that governments are fobbing off the job of making sure that people have visas and passports onto airlines, when they should really be controlling this stuff themselves. And it’s not fair.
BEN: [SCOFFS] Nothing bad has ever come from taking governmental duties and privatising it into profit incentive! I see no problems there!
DIEGO: But I also believe the airline incurs a fee every time somebody gets through. Something like that.
BEN: Right.
HEDVIG: Exactly. So even though you have police officers at the UK passport control, if they say, “Oh, no, this isn’t the correct one,” then there is either fee and/or I think the airlines are responsible for transporting the person back.
BEN: Right.
DIEGO: Exactly.
HEDVIG: So, they have to do that. This is the main reason why even though there are flights out of places like Syria and Afghanistan, refugees don’t take the flights, because the airlines can’t evaluate correctly if they would get refugee status in Europe, so they deny them access to getting onto the flights. So, that’s why you get people in boats. That’s why you get people walking across the Balkans. That’s all of this bullshit. Yeah.
DANIEL: Speaking of airports, let’s go on to our next story.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES] A little lighter. So, yes, in the Varanasi Airport in India, Twitter is going crazy, because they have chosen to add to the list of languages in which they’re giving covid announcements in, they are adding Sanskrit, or they have added Sanskrit to Hindi and English. And there’s a mixed reaction on Twitter about whether it’s good or interesting or pointless.
DANIEL: So, let’s see. Sanskrit appears to be spoken by less than 1% of people in India.
BEN: Which to be fair, is still a fuckload of human beings. Okay? Let’s just be abundantly clear.
HEDVIG: Well, if India is trying to define itself as a cohesive nation state, or if states within India is trying to do that, then latching on to something that is clearly of Indian heritage and using that as a lingua franca could make political sense. Even though Sanskrit is spoken by very few people, it is still like the Vedas, like a lot of important texts are still in Sanskrit, so people might have a passing knowledge of it. And Sanskrit is either the ancestor language of Hindi or a sister of one of the ancestral languages. So, it still shares a lot of features. As with a lot of the news we’ve discussed so far in this program, these aren’t necessarily things done for linguistic or demographic reasons, they’re done for political reasons. But I think we should recognise that it’s not about how many people speak it. It’s about making a political stance, trying to say, “No, there’s something Indian that we want to highlight and make more.”
BEN: My relatively limited understanding of the place that Sanskrit occupies, it is the Latin to Indian languages. Right? It occupies the same place as Latin does to European languages, generally speaking. So my brain then goes: okay, I’m just going to do a little mental hypothetical. What if, let’s say Charles de Gaulle and Heathrow, I’m trying to think of some other… like Frankfurt and a bunch of other places, you get announcements in Latin. Would it be great for many people? Probably not. Is it doing all that much harm though? Not really, because from my understanding here, it’s not like they’ve gone: Right! No more Hindi announcements, no more Urdu announcements. We’re only doing Sanskrit, which isn’t happening. So, is it that bad?
DIEGO: Yeah, that seems to be the split of the people who are okay with it and the people who aren’t is that the people who like it are thinking, “Okay, it has some cultural value, it’s nice to hear, it’s such a beautiful language.” And then, the people who are against it are like, “What’s the point? Why are you going to communicate this information when nobody’s going to understand what’s being said? It’s a waste. It’s pointless. Why do it?”
HEDVIG: I wonder… I know that the current government in India is more sort of pro-Hindu culture and anti-Muslim.
BEN: Yeah. That was the one thing I was about to bring up, which is this might be — and I would definitely want to hear from a desi person about this — but if there is some really, really… it’s very believable to me that this could be some dog whistling going on. Like: “Hey, Muslims, screw you,” basically.
DIEGO: Well, the article does mention that there’s a village about 45 kilometers away, where — and I haven’t independently confirmed this one way or the other — but that this district, there is a village where these people have chosen to fully adopt Sanskrit as the native language, and that’s what people speak on the streets. I don’t know if there’s any connection to that, I don’t know how many people there are. But yeah, India is currently going through a similar linguistic situation to other places where Hindi and English are the main linguas franca, and all the other regional and minority languages want their recognition as well. Yeah, so this seems like it doesn’t really fit into that debate one way or the other because it’s not one of those languages. But yeah, it’s just a very interesting idea. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s an interesting idea. I wonder if there are places in the Vatican City. The Vatican City is tiny, right? But they still very much keep Latin alive.
DANIEL: For a while, there was an ATM that you could use in Latin if you wanted.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Exactly. That’s what I mean. I wonder if they do stuff like that. I know they have a tiny train station, I think? And they have stamps, and they have a couple of other things. I wonder if they put Latin on those. Maybe they do. There is a Latin enthusiast in Europe, there’s a radio station, I believe, that broadcasts in Latin. And there are people who choose to speak Latin to their kids, there are people who chose to speak Esperanto to their kids. So, this village that revives Sanskrit like, to me that that’s a thing people do. The fact that governments pick it up and put it on the airport is like, no.
DANIEL: Dog whistle. I think Ben got it right.
DIEGO: But have an ulterior motive.
HEDVIG: Maybe we’re just too cynical.
DANIEL: Sanskrit means a lot to a lot of people, which is totally cool. But for many people, it goes beyond being the language of their religion or language that they learned in school, and it becomes this weird object of veneration. I’ve run into a lot of Sanskrit supremacists, who will say things like, “Oh, it’s the oldest language. It’s existed for a billion years, and it’s never changed.” And there’s just a lot of weird…
BEN: The same thing exists with Latin as well. Let’s be abundantly clear. It’s wealthy, educated people who had an education in Latin and are able to put that forward as a kind of flex. It’s a thing. And I have to imagine, based purely on the people that I’ve met, who have purported to me to be able to speak or read Sanskrit, I see exactly the same thing [CHUCKLES] in those communities as well. It was better educated, better wealthier, that sort of thing.
DANIEL: I just still feel it’s an odd choice, especially when covid info needs to be in a language that people can understand.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: But like you were saying, Daniel, it’s in addition, right? The airport, for example, here in the case, in Varanasi Airport, they’re broadcasting in multiple languages, so they’re not retracting one of those, they’re adding. I also feel like I should say, when people say Sanskrit is the oldest language in the world, there’s also a lot of Tamil nationalists who claim that Tamil is the oldest language in the world. You can find them in funny YouTube comments.
DANIEL: Oh, yes.
HEDVIG: I think sometimes, as scientists and researchers, we need to detach from what we’re doing from what other people are doing, because they are feeling threatened by the Anglo cultural sphere, which has a lot of money, a lot of media. And Anglos spheres are winning most of these battles by the sheer economy and demographic force of it. So, I think people feel threatened and they pull like: “Look, we can’t compete on English with these and these things, but maybe there’s another value we can say that our language has.” I don’t think that makes it right. But I’m wondering if sometimes when people project backwards in history, they’re not actually doing historical research. They’re doing synchronic contemporary politics. And those claims should not be, I don’t know, evaluated against… I don’t know. anyway.
DANIEL: Well, then, let’s say then that what’s happening here is mostly harmless, but just a bit odd. Can we say that?
HEDVIG: It’s a bit odd.
BEN: It’s got hints of not-good. Notes of bad.
DANIEL: Ooo, I’m getting… mmm! nom nom nom.
DIEGO: Something fishy.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Exactly. As a person who despises all seafood, you don’t know how apt that particular phrase was for me. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Oh.
DIEGO: I do, because I hate seafood too. I mean, not that I hate it. I didn’t grow up with it. So, I haven’t tried most of it. And the smell just puts me off.
DANIEL: I hate seafood twice as much as both of you combined! All right, Diego, bring us home with one more story about official languages and rights.
DIEGO: Yes. So, our last story, we will go back to the US. And in Hawaii, they have adopted an act that officially apologizes for the suppression of the Olelo Hawaii, the Hawaiian language. And there’s some good wording, some good verbiage in the actual act that really has the US take responsibility for what happened to the Hawaiian language…
BEN: Good.
DIEGO: …which was that after taking the Hawaiian kingdom from the Hawaiians, English slowly took over, became the official language, people started coming from the mainland and immigrating from other places, and just the number of speakers was really on the decline. They started some revitalization efforts in the 1980s. And today, there’s an estimated 18,000 fluent speakers of Hawaiian, compare that to 40,000 before European contact. And yeah, it’s just a really good thing all around that the US is acknowledging what happened.
BEN: Question: Is it the US acknowledging, or is it the Hawaiian state legislature that’s doing this?
DANIEL: Let’s see. Let me just get to the right page.
HEDVIG: Hawaiian state legislature.
BEN: Which is really, really cool, because that means that there’s almost certainly significantly more First Nations representation in that legislature, because Hawaii has decent numbers of elected officials who are Hawaiian, which is great. It’s sad though, that because — of course, this isn’t going to be a thing that gets acknowledged by the federal government because who wants to admit to mistakes? — but just in general, Hawaii is just such a wonderful sort of look at how successful language revitalisation projects can be. And one of the really early renaissances of culture and language, and those two things really being tied together quite strongly.
A lot of different endangered languages around the world that have suffered at the hands of colonialism really have a lot to thank Hawaiians for, for doing some of this work, because they were really early in the piece. And some of those Hawaiians just did some bloody brilliant work in the ’70s and ’80s and just really pulled it back from the brink. Like in this article, it says here, like, 2,000 native speakers was whatever the opposite of the high watermark is, like the low tide mark. I’m so glad we’re ending on a bit of a good news story. I’m just always happy for a chance to chat about how well Hawaiian has done as a language and as a culture and as people and all those sorts of things, because colonialism fucking blows, and the Americans, like so many different colonial powers did their darndest to really fuck this shit up. All the awful stuff that we see in Australia and we see in Canada, and all these other places happened there too. And so, I’m just always so happy. Sorry, Hedvig, you go.
HEDVIG: Oh, no, I was just going to say that it’s interesting. I found Hawaii really interesting for many reasons, because I’m interested in Austronesian languages, Hawaiian is interesting for some of those, and the Hawaiian contact languages and stuff that are really cool. It’s worth noting that there was a unified political unit — a kingdom, you could call it — of Hawaii that was actively overthrown by Continental American white settler/coloniser parties. And prior to that colonisation, as they also say in this article, there was the development of literacy in Hawaiian. They had developed print and people were speaking Hawaiian, writing Hawaiian. So, they started out from what you could say in what we know about how colonisation works, a pretty strong position. They were fairly homogenous within the islands, they had writing, they had unified goals. And this decline is very tragic and it’s very impressive that they’re coming back from it. As a different situation, I think, from some other places in the colonised world, like Canada or the United States, where United States colonised so many people at once from the continent, so there’s less of that.
BEN: Just an awful scythe sweeping across the land.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So Hawaii, they had essentially one language, one culture, one society versus the ones that’s coming in. Whereas in many other states in America, there are many, like thousands and hundreds of ethnic groups that are together fighting it and that’s a different ballpark. I don’t know about this, but I think that’s also a bit of a difference between like New Zealand and Australia.
BEN: I was about to ask, Hedvig, in your experience with Māori, whether they had a fairly cohesive and unified language setup prior to colonisation?
HEDVIG: My experience with Māori is not very big. But I have read a paper about dialectal variation in Māori prior to colonisation and there were significant dialectal differences. There were… we could at least group Māori and Moriori into, like, maybe three or four different languages. But that’s still… three or four is very little compared to-
BEN: 600, yeah.
HEDVIG: two, three hundred that we have in Australia. And that’s not to say that those languages don’t deserve to exist because there’s more of them in one place, but it’s a different fight to fight, right?
BEN: It’s a different context when talking, when looking at… yeah.
HEDVIG: And the way our society works, unfortunately, it’s probably rougher. There’s something Mary Walworth, one of my colleagues here at the MPI [Max Planck Institute] for Evolutionary Anthropology has called Trickle-Down Endangerment. So she works in French Polynesia, and she works in the Austral Islands where there are a lot of distinct of Austronesian languages spoken, but that are now getting outcompeted by Tahitian. And in Tahiti, Tahitian is getting threatened by French.
BEN: Oh, god. Right.
HEDVIG: So there’s this like…
BEN: Trickle down, yeah.
DANIEL: It’s like that cartoon where the big fish eats the middle fish eats the smaller fish.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. The way societies and human communities work, that seems to be happening maybe in other places too. I don’t know if that happens in in Australia. I know there are some larger… like Yolŋu and a couple of other larger Indigenous Australian languages, I wonder if people are switching to those from other languages, maybe that’s happening.
BEN: Interesting. Yeah, maybe. Look, I’m the furthest thing from a linguist, but I haven’t heard about a lot of that personally. And Daniel, you can probably speak to this better than me. I’ve heard about some Indigenous languages here in Australia getting sort of like neo versions. They’re not being sort of let go of in favor of a different an Indigenous language, but a new and different thing is evolving in the mouths of the younger generation. So Daniel and I are living in Western Australia, the traditional owners are the Nyungar. So, Neo-Nyungar is a thing.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: Also, Aboriginal English is huge.
HEDVIG: Aboriginal English and Creole and things like that are different as well. This is the case also what happens with revitalisation, in general. We know that speaker counts go down to very, very low, like, for example, Hebrew. Ancient classical Hebrew and modern Hebrew are not the same. And some of the differences in modern Hebrew are probably also due to influence from Yiddish, or maybe Spanish or other languages that Jewish people were speaking in the diaspora. And the same thing could happen. If we become obsessed with like reinstating some sort of pure past version, then I don’t know, it sounds like that…
BEN: That’s not how language works. We’ve learned time and time again. The younger generation is just going to do what they want, no matter how many French laws get put on books.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah. And bringing it back to Hawaii, I just wanted to have this chance to say to our listeners also that as far as I understand from people who live in Hawaii, who are either ethnically Hawaiian and Polynesian or not, they don’t appreciate the tourists as much as maybe we think they do.
BEN: Yeah yeah yeah. I was going to say something similar, in that I’ve seen a lot of people from those communities basically being like, “Go home. Don’t come here.”
HEDVIG: “Just don’t come here.”
BEN: “We don’t want it. We don’t need it.”
HEDVIG: Both because of covid, like, “Don’t come here and spread your covid.” But also, people want to see the Hawaiian state shift away from so much relying on tourism as an industry and develop other industries in addition or instead of. I have been thinking about… Ste and I were talking about where to go for a honeymoon, and I was like, “Oh, maybe Hawaii.” And then, I was like, “Or maybe not!”
[CHUCKLES]
BEN: I’ve seen several people on Tik Tok being like, “Don’t come here! Go do your own thing.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It’s worth reading the text of the whole resolution. It’s not very long. It’s in English and Hawaiian. So, we’ll slap a link up on our website, becauselanguage.com. That’s all the news. Man, that was quite a ride. I’ve got to say there were some themes. But, Diego, thank you so much for bringing us these news items.
BEN: The first of many…
DIEGO: No, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
BEN: …Diego’s Digests.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you did a very good job.
DIEGO: Let’s do it. Thank you.
DANIEL: Let’s get some comments. Kitty, yes, the Cambridge-educated linguist Kitty, from an earlier episode says, “I’m catching up on your recent episodes and I’ve just listened to the Slang Episode where you bring up PLATTY JUBES for Platinum Jubilee.”
BEN: Still hate it.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Okay, good, hasn’t gotten better. Okay, cool.
BEN: Nope. It is un-wined. It has gotten worse with age.
DANIEL: But the thing was I was asking, this whole Platty Jubes thing seems to partake in a linguistic template for abbreviations that I can’t figure out. What are some other examples? So she’s got some. “Latty flows for lateral flows.” Okay. “Ali G.”
BEN: Ah, what?
DANIEL: Well, Ali G for Alistair Graham. Sacha Baron Cohen’s…
BEN: I have never in my life known that that’s what that stood for.
DIEGO: No.
HEDVIG: I thought… This is very interesting, because, Ben, I thought his name was Ali G, and his first name was Ali, or Ali. But that’s really funny, that Sacha Baron Cohen has made the character’s full name be Alistair Graham. That’s very smart!
BEN: Did I misunderstand? Was the point of Ali G that he was just a tragic white guy? Is that something that I’ve… has gone above my head because I was too young?
DANIEL: You can still have that name even if you’re a racialised person.
BEN: No, what I mean is, is he… Yeah. Okay. I’m just reading it now. Yeah, okay! I’ve completely misunderstood Ali G for my entire life. I thought he was a member of the community that he purports to be part of, but he’s just like a stupid white boy.
HEDVIG: I’m reading here on the Wikipedia page for Ali G, and it says that he is a fictional stereotype of British suburban male chav.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah!
HEDVIG: Who imitates inner-city, urban British hip hop culture and British Jamaican culture.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, yes, Ali G is supposed to be understood as a white guy.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh!
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: And I never understood it that way. I did not.
BEN: Look, I’ll be honest. It’s been 15 years.
HEDVIG: I mean, one of the few Ali G things I’ve watched is when he interviews Noam Chomsky, which, if you can go on YouTube and watch that, that’s so funny. It’s like the only thing I’ve ever seen of him, so I didn’t know. Okay, more examples! Yeah, we got very caught up.
DANIEL: More examples. Kitty says, “My school had a cafe named after a man called Balgarnie. And the space was often referred to as Bally G’s. And even from a non-linguist friend’s Instagram, captioning a picture of Durham Cathedral, Cathy D, Durham Cathedral.”
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: Kitty says, “In all, definitely a productive template. All these examples have [æ] as the first stressed vowel and I can’t figure out whether it has to be [æ] for it to be acceptable. Anyway, great episode as always. It was surreal to hear an old person talk so lucidly about drill.” That was Mr Slang. “Hope you guys are having a good winter/summer.” Thanks, Kitty. That’s great. Great examples. Also, Bren on our Discord. “Sorry, late to this,” says Bren, “but is Mickey D’s short for McDonald’s also a bit like Platty Jubes?” I think so. “Thanks for another great episode BT Dubs.” All right. Well, once again, Diego, thanks for joining us on this episode. Thanks to everybody who contributes.
DIEGO: Thank you.
DANIEL: And it’s great to have you.
[END THEME]
HEDVIG: If you like our show, which hopefully you do if you’re listening to this… if you’re hate listening, you know, a download is a download.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: If you subscribe to our show and download episodes, in our stats, that’s sort of the same. So, hey, if you hate the show, and you know someone else who would enthusiastically hate the show, and subscribe and download, why don’t you tell them about us? Because all downloads…
DANIEL: I’m not sure like where this is going.
BEN: No, no, no, no. I want to see how this plays out. This is good.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, you should tell a friend about us. And wouldn’t it be really ironic if you really hated the show, but you gave us a five-star review, but you could write something mean? I’ll take it. I don’t know. Daniel looks very unhappy with this.
BEN: I’m digging it, but I’m curious about how effective… you’re trying to reverse-psychology people who hate us into giving us good reviews and leaving bad comments.
HEDVIG: Yeah, because like there’s no analytics on the comments. People only care about reviews.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: It’s all about the stars, baby.
HEDVIG: And I recently… Oh, fudge it. When it comes to podcast reviews, I know everyone who listens to a lot of podcasts hears podcasters talk about reviews a lot, and they do matter. And one of the places that people care about is the iTunes Apple Music universe. But there are other places, and I forget the name now. There’s a popular… What’s it called Podcast…? Oooh.
DANIEL: Podcast Addict?
HEDVIG: No. Podcast review place. There’s, like, another place that we’re on that people should review us on not rate this podcast… Podchaser, I think. Yes, Podchaser is a good place if you care about us and want to let us know. Podchaser is not Apple, it’s not Spotify. It’s not, like, Android or Google or anything like that. It’s a third party. So, if you wanted to leave us a review, but you don’t want to open the iTunes music app, I totally understand you. Every time I open it, I’m like, “Oh, no, Apple ID. Oh, ugh.”
BEN: It just feels like firing up a Soviet-era car for me. Anytime I open iTunes, I really feel like I’ve got like a hand crank out. [ONOMATOPOEIA]
HEDVIG: Yeah, me too. So, Podchaser is an alternative for that, and maybe we can keep more of an eye on. There’s other reviewing apps. If you hear about other reviewing places where you go to look for podcast reviews, tell us about it, and you can tell us about it at hello@becauselanguage.com. You can also leave us a message using SpeakPipe. If you go to our website, becauselanguage.com, there’s a link to the SpeakPipe, so you can send a little audio message to us. And you can tell a friend about us. I already told you to do that, hate or love, downloads are downloads, no matter what Daniel says. And if you really, really like us, and you’re already listening to the show, so you are either a Patreon subscriber if you listen to it when it comes out. But if you’re not, if you’re listening to it when we re-release it for the general plebes…
DANIEL: Two years from now.
HEDVIG: …you could become a Patreon supporter. You’ll get bonus episodes, and you get to hang out with us on Discord, and you get to hear about all the suggestions that Diego has that don’t always run on the show. [LAUGHS] If you want, like, even more news…
DANIEL: The unfiltered Diego.
DIEGO: Even more.
HEDVIG: Yeah. That’s it for me.
BEN: It is through the patrons who are currently listening to us that allows us to do a whole bunch of cool stuff, most importantly of which is transcribe our show so that… [STUMBLES, LAUGHS] so that it is accessible to people who cannot hear. That is done by the wonderful team at SpeechDocs. Hi, SpeechDocs, hope you’re going well. And a big shoutout to our top patrons who are doing the most to allow that to happen. And that is [INHALES] Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, Larry, Kristofer, Andy B, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, and Kate B who smashed the one-time donation button on our website, becauselanguage.com. Thanks to all of our amazing patrons.
DIEGO: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[MUSIC ENDS]
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
HEDVIG: Well done.
DANIEL: Nice reading, Diego.
BEN: Nicely done.
HEDVIG: That is not easy. That one is not easy.
[CHUCKLES]
DIEGO: Yeah, thank you. This was so much fun.
DANIEL: Did you have fun?
DIEGO: Yeah, yeah.
BEN: Diego, you are a deadset legend and we should definitely do more digesting of Diego in the future because that was a primo episode.
DIEGO: [CHUCKLES] Yes, I’d love to be digested.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Wow, okay!
BEN: I’m going with it! I’m not even embarrassed or shy. That’s what I’m doing now. I’m fine with it.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Now that you’ve mentioned BUCKET LIST, I’ve been thinking about the term BUCKET LIST a lot.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Because…
BEN: Because you’re dying? Are you about to tell us something awful?
DANIEL: Uh. We’re all dying, Ben, but nothing that serious. So, the thing about that term is that people talk about, “Oh, their bucket list. The thing I want to do before kick the bucket,” and there was even a movie, The Bucket List.
BEN: The Bucket List, yeah.
DANIEL: But the screenwriter for that movie coined that term. Literally invented that term.
BEN: Yes! I remember this. We had this idea that it’s like old, or at least not young.
DANIEL: Older than the film.
BEN: Yeah. But it’s like: yep, it’s about 17… like, whenever that movie was released, that’s how old it is.
DANIEL: That’s how old it is! And people, they will swear up and down. And it’s like, “No, I’ve been using that phrase since 1972!” And no, you have not, because nobody was.
BEN: Can I do one?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: I had a crazy version of this. This is very niche, and I wish Hedvig was here for this… Ah, she’s literally just asked to let her in.
DANIEL: Oh, there she is.
DIEGO: She was waiting for you to say her name.
BEN: Yeah, that was… okay. [MANIFESTING TO THE UNIVERSE] I’ve been waiting for a Ferrari to arrive.
[PAUSE]
DANIEL: Nope, it’s just Hedvig.
BEN: Damn. I found out an amazing one like that just the other day. I was watching TikTok, and someone basically informed me via TikTok that rolling a 20-sided die in D&D is less than 20 years old.
DANIEL: What did they do before, I wonder?
BEN: They just rolled a bunch of D sixes. Like the whole funky die thing, like lots of different… like you’ve got a D8, a D6, a D4, all these sorts of things — that’s really new, and… well, comparatively speaking, it’s like less than 20 years old in D&D. It’s like third, fourth and fifth edition. In my brain, the brand of D&D is a D20. Right? Like, that’s the single biggest mental association, I think, more of that than either Dungeons or Dragons.
[LAUGHTER]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]