It’s Ben, Hedvig, and Daniel all together in the same place for the first time. We’re talking about the state of the show, the state of linguistics communication, and where we are after all these years.
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[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Ben: Hedvig wants a proper OG Because Language intro.
Daniel: There we go.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: We will shut up, which will not actually… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Okay. There we go.
Ben: We can hold hands while we shut up. It will help us shut up.
[Because Language Podcast theme]
Daniel: Hello and welcome to this very special bonus edition of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley and… augh! Here’s the team! It’s Hedvig Skirgård sitting right next to me.
Hedvig: Yes, hello.
Daniel: And the always present Ben Ainslie.
Ben: Hello, I’m going to look at this camera. That’s what I’ve decided.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: Is that what you intended?
Daniel: It’s great. I can choose.
Ben: We get to do cool newsreader things. And in other news, we’re going to…
Hedvig: This is Daniel’s self-chosen job.
Daniel: Yes, it is. All right.
Hedvig: So, we can do that.
Ben: Now, we get to do the calm chill bit, where we basically go, “This is going to be a really unusual episode.”
Daniel: This weekend has been the first time we’ve all been in the same place, even though we’ve been doing shows since — Ben — 2011.
Ben: 2011.
Daniel: Hedvig, our first show with you was in 2016 and then you were a guest. And then not for a year, and then again in 2017 a few more times, and then just all the time.
Hedvig: Fair enough. Yeah, that sounds reasonable.
Daniel: And one thing I want to do today is talk, I guess, about who were you when we first started doing this and who are you now. And what was the world when we started doing this and what is the world now?
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: And what is linguistics and language?
Ben: Oh, my god, you just broke so many journalism rules, Daniel. You’ve asked four questions and all of which were super broad. [laughs]
Daniel: I’m not a journalist and this is the broad overview.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: Anyway, Hedvig, it’s been really wonderful having you here for the weekend. We’re sitting on my deck. We’re enjoying the birds. We’re enjoying the magnolias. We’re enjoying the sounds of nature.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm. And coffee.
Ben: And most importantly, caffeine.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: This is going to be really fun. I think we should probably tell people in a sense, maybe either buckle up or if this is not going to be your thing, maybe just skip this episode, because this is not going to look like a normal Because Language episode. This is us kind of shooting the shit a little bit.
Hedvig: It’s not going to be so linguistically meaty, is what I think Ben is trying to say.
Ben: Yeah, that is what I’m trying to say.
Hedvig: But as anyone who’s listened to a podcast for a long time knows, it is… [crosstalk] No, no, no, but any podcast, it is fun to go to a video and look up what the podcasters look like when they make the sounds that you hear in your ear.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: I recently looked up some people that have been listened to for a long time and they don’t look like I expected. And when they moved their mouth, the sound still comes out and it’s like spooky.
Daniel: Yeah. It’s coming out of a human, but it’s not the human… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah. And it’s not the human… I’ve seen them on still pictures before and I was like, “Okay, yeah, maybe.” And then, I saw them in a video and I was like, “Nope, wrong.”
Ben: Wrong. So, hopefully, you’re all experiencing that cognitive dissonance now.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: You’re our seeing weird faces in motion and just being like, “Ah, no, I don’t care for this at all.”
Daniel: We did do videos, you know?
Hedvig: We have.
Ben: My students who are incredibly YouTube focused, because they’re boys, looked me up. It goes in a cycle in my profession. Every two to three years, the knowledge that I do a podcast goes away. And then, there’s a fresh awakening and students are like, “You have a podcast?” And I have to like, “It’s cool. It’s not a big deal. It’s certainly not a surprise. It’s not a secret, I hope. Blah, blah, blah.” And then, they immediately go, “Oh, where can we find you?” So, I tell them all the things that you’ve probably heard listeners many times, because we’ve said it every show. But every time they’re like, “What about YouTube?” which is arguably I think our least probably activated, and time and effort put into channel of all of the channels where we actually have a presence.
Daniel: It might be Facebook now.
Ben: Yeah. And so, they go there and they’re always just like, “Oh.”
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: There’s always almost a commiseration on there, like, “Oh, you only have this many likes, and this many…” I’m like, “I don’t need your approval, child. This is not why I do this.” But I think all of that was a long-winded way of saying I think this is a really good opportunity to put this on YouTube and have it as like a placeholder video of…?
Hedvig: Hey.
Ben: Even though counterintuitively, this is not going to be representative of the [crosstalk] episodes that we do… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah. So, does that mean that we need to do like… Why don’t we… I have a suggestion.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: We do a round of what we think our show is.
Ben: Oh, that’s interesting. I like that.
Daniel: What it is.
Hedvig and Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Should I start, because I’m the youngest and then they’ll be… [crosstalk]
Daniel: All right. And then, me.
Ben: Hedvig as the youngest, everyone, in case that wasn’t clear.
Hedvig: I’m the youngest. Also, in terms of years on the show.
Ben: Ah, I see. [crosstalk] Tenure. Yes, yes, yes.
Hedvig: And in terms of years…
Daniel: Seniority.
Ben: [laughs] I make that joke everyone listening, because we sometimes tease Hedvig about desperately wanting to hold on to Gen-Z-ness.
Hedvig: I just think they’re really cool and I want them to accept me as part of that.
Ben: [laughs] I think I agree.
Hedvig: Yes, they are really cool.
Ben: I think you have picked a good order in which to do this. I concur with your… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: Okay. All right.
Daniel: What is this show?
Hedvig: Okay. I think Because Language is the show that comes out regularly, that is a bit of the longer one in your podcast feed. So, it’ll be like 40 minutes, an hour.
Daniel: An hour 30.
Hedvig: An hour 30. In my brain, I’m like… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Consistently.
Hedvig: Okay.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Aren’t there some that are shorter?
Daniel: No… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No. Okay. All right. I’m wrong. It’s a bit of a longer one and it has different segments in it. And it’s about language and linguistics from a scientific perspective and it’s not about specific languages, but about language as a phenomenon in the brain and in culture. And we do a newsy segment, which actually is one of my favorite segments, because I think there are fun new research and news going on in language and linguistics and I like that segment. And then, we do main segment, which is an interview with someone who’s done something interesting, either written a book, or written a research paper, or done something else interesting. And that’s the main theme, chunk of the show. And then, we do an end bit, where we do Word of the Week, which is an opportunity for me, in particular, to just talk about whatever I want a bit.
Daniel: [laughs] [crosstalk]
Ben: New linguistic phenomena is what we would probably try and call that section. [laughs]
Hedvig: Yes. It’s supposed to be ones that have been in the news lately, but sometimes, it’s just once that I think about.
Ben: There’s new, and then there’s new to Hedvig.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: And the show tries to be accessible to people who haven’t done linguistics in school or at uni but are interested in language. So, we try to break down concepts. We try.
Daniel: I mean, that’s part of it, sometimes.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: That’s sort of where I come in. I can take over the explanation… [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah. And what I like about it, there are a lot of linguistics shows and YouTube channels and things and everyone has a niche. And I think our niche is the newsy and the almost like journalistic covering of linguistics [unintelligible 00:07:51].
Ben: Yeah, I’d agree with all of that.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: As the second longest running member of… I almost said Talk the Talk, Because Language… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Talk the Talk, That’s a dollar in the Talk jar.
Hedvig: Yeah, no. So many dollars in that job.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: I’ve always seen my job as everyman or everywoman. But having said that, I think my job is… Our audience is a very clever audience. So, I’m always very reticent to go too broad in my everyperson role. I think our audiences are really clever cookies, generally.
Hedvig: They’re very clever. But sometimes, they don’t know jargon.
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: Which is [crosstalk].
Ben: Yeah, totally. That’s what I mean. Things like, “What does that piece of jargon mean?” definitely fall within my thing. But I’ve never seen my job as, “Let’s make this as simple as humanly possible.” I don’t think that’s what people who listen to our show really look for one or anything like that. There are other shows like that and they do great work. And I think they are free to go and do that, but that’s not really what we’re about. We were three relatively clever, educated people with huge blind spots. I saw that grimace. You’re right. We are clever in very specific ways.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: Yeah. The one thing in your explanation that I think probably hasn’t been touched on is that we come from a very definitive perspective in our show. We are unashamed in some of our positions, and stances, and that sort of thing. I know it is gauche to use the word ‘woke these days, but we certainly try and stay as educated on and abreast of political, social, and justice-oriented issues. Having said that, we’re three white people. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: I was not going to… [crosstalk] [laughs]
Ben: We definitely, definitely aren’t on the cutting edge of that but I think we try very hard as three white people to be the least three white people-ly type of podcast we can be.
Hedvig: Well, I don’t know if we try very hard. We just try to cover language and cultural linguistics as fairly as possible.
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: I think I’m not even sure… I think sometimes people make it sound like it’s harder than it is. Just being a nice, kind person is not super effortful.
Ben: I find it is. Maybe I’m just an asshole. I don’t know. [laughs] I find it’s really, really tricky to constantly… I definitely get where you’re going their direction wise, which is just like, “Don’t be a douche,” isn’t a particularly hard mission…?” [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Is it kind of low ball?
Ben: [laughs] Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: But if we engage in therapy chat for a second, the Johari Window and your unknown unknowns-
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: -can be really, really tricky to try and get a handle on. And I think we make a bit of effort to try and stay on top of our unknown unknowns.
Daniel: I thought we are trying to make a better world through language but in other ways, if we can.
Ben: Yeah, we range. It starts with linguistics and then we will often just be talking about all sorts of random stuff.
Daniel: I was giving a presentation and I was talking about language change and getting okay with language change and she said, “My language is Cornish.”
Ben: Is that actual Cornish?
Daniel: Yeah, she was like… [crosstalk]
Ben: Whoa.
Hedvig: The Celtic language.
Daniel: Yeah. And she said, “I’m not okay with certain kinds of language change. My language is disappearing. I’m not going to be blasé about that.”
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: I said, “Okay, let me take a step back and then talk about what we’re really about.” “I talk about getting okay with language change, because I think that will help reduce discrimination and make a better world. But the real aim is to make a better world. And if that means keeping Cornish, then that’s good too. That’s a good goal.” So, the real mission is to make a good world.
Hedvig: Usually, also, when we talk about language change, we talk about within one language. It’s like English speakers getting okay with the fact that young people are not going to speak exactly they did.
Ben: Or the different varieties of that language have just as much relevance or standing… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Right. Exactly. I’m actually not even sure I would call language endangerment, that historical process, language change.
Daniel: Yeah, I don’t.
Hedvig: But I understand that someone who’s not in linguistics would, because it is changing.
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: But in that class, maybe also, there’s a discussion to be had about, there may be going to be young people who speak Cornish who want to use new words that all the Cornish speakers don’t want to use.
Ben: I think it isn’t helped by the fact that there’s bad actors in those conversations, who will deliberately try and create a narrative that is, “Oh, English is dying, English is under threat,” and all that just nonsensical stuff. Now, some people make that argument in good faith, because they’re just not very smart, because they don’t really understand what… [crosstalk]
Daniel: They just don’t do this all day.
Ben: And then, there’s other people who are making those arguments absolutely in bad faith, who are trying to engender this story of the primacy of white English culture being under threat, which is just… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: [crosstalk] even if it is, get rid of…
[laughter]
Hedvig: I don’t care. [crosstalk]
Ben: No, no, I’m going to push back on that just a little bit. Because even at that level, I feel it gives power to the people that say that narrative exists. And I don’t think it does, right?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: The narrative is false, right?
Hedvig: Yeah. No, especially false.
Ben: And so, when people are like, “I agree with you if it were to be true,” I’d still be like, “Ding-dong, the witch is dead.”
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: It’ll be fine. But I don’t even want to give bad faith arguers even that much where I’m like- [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Right. Okay, fair enough.
Ben: “Nope, incorrect. You are wrong.”
Hedvig: It is very incorrect.
Ben: So, we’ve just now given our listeners or people new to the podcast, a very good idea of exactly what happens, which is we just ramble. [crosstalk]
Daniel: Yeah, I try to bring it that.
Ben: We haven’t even gotten to Daniel’s explanation of the show yet.
Hedvig and Ben: Daniel.
Ben: Why don’t we do it? [crosstalk]
Daniel: I like your explanation. I think the one thing that sets us apart is the news. There’s also something else that I’ve become aware of in the programming and in editing YouTube for hours and hours and hours and hours. And that is that many shows are about a “thing” and they are going to try to leave it all on the field, “We have now said everything that we need to say about a thing,” and we don’t do that. We do a bit a and then maybe we’ll come back to it in the next episode or is down the road… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. That is true.
Daniel: And it’s almost where we are is part of the story, because my understanding grows about a thing. And I never say all there is to say about a thing.
Ben: You can go back, literally, hundreds of episodes into our back catalogue back when we were called like a different podcast but essentially did still very much the same thing.
Daniel: Yeah, pretty much the same thing.
Ben: And you can see really significant shifts and changes in thinking on things.
Daniel: Ooh, what’s changed? What’s changed?
Ben: Oh, I remember one of my favorite, favorite things that I ever learned on this podcast was the idea that the phonemes that we use in different languages. So, for people listening who might be completely new to the show, phonemes are things like ‘ch’, ‘ca’, ‘la’, just the different little bits of sounds that we can make with our mouths. The phonemes that we use broadly speaking map to where in the human migration out of Africa a particular culture is. Which is to say, African peoples who are the furthest back along that pathway have the most rich and complex phonemic inventories. So, this is where we will get interesting click sounds and that sort of thing. But see, Hedvig’s shaking her head, because we know that this isn’t the thing anymore.
Daniel: This turned out to be wrong. [laughs]
Ben: At the time, we could look at Polynesians, who have far fewer just letters in their alphabet, because there’s far less phonemes in the language and we’re like, “Oh, well, the Polynesians were way on the edge of the human expansion migratory wave.” And so, they have less phonemes in their language. And then, Africans who are way back in the other direction have heaps and heaps of phonemes. But as cool as it sounds and as intuitive feeling it is, it’s just not a thing.
Hedvig: Well…
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: What is the story, Hedvig?
Hedvig: There’s a general theory in evolutionary sciences, in general, biology, ecology, linguistics, all of them, anthropology, anyone who takes an evolutionary stance on their study object that, if you want to know the origin of something that’s spread out, be that sparrows, or a certain bird, or something, then you’re likely to find the most diversity at the origin.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Founder effect. Is that what it’s called?
Hedvig: Yeah, it’s really founder effect. And then, less diversity as you go out. And that works for language in some ways. A lot of language families will have a greater, not more words, but more different words at the center and less different words at the periphery, but not more words. Does that make sense?
Ben: Yes.
Hedvig: They’ll be more different from each other.
Daniel: Correct.
Hedvig: I said it several times. I’m sorry I’m babying you.
Ben: No, it’s okay.
Hedvig: And there was the theory and I think the paper you’re referring to is by someone who I collaborate with.
Ben: Oh, okay. Cool.
Hedvig: I don’t… [crosstalk]
Ben: Are we going to do a giant shit on their work? Is that what’s happening?
Hedvig: No. I actually am not going to do that, because I don’t think that’s necessary, but I also don’t remember the nuances of their claim. But I do think that maybe it had to do with diversity at the center. And when we talk about that also, the other interpretation that could come from what you said is that people in Africa are less evolved, which is not the case.
Ben: No. As far as I’m concerned from what I understood at the time, it would be the opposite of that interpretation, which is that because people in Africa have had so much time and opportunity into… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yes, that is where we want to go.
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: They’ve been in that place for a longer time, so different things have happened and-
Ben: And stable cultures and society… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: -interacting with each other in that place, and that’s a thing. But there was a sentence you said that could have sounded like, “Oh, we had a lot of words in the beginning, then people went out and got less, and then the people here just stagnated and kept that.” And that… [crosstalk]
Ben: I think what I interpreted at the time was at the nebulous origin point of the out of Africa hypothesis, we probably had a set phonemic inventory to our language, relatively speaking, right?
Hedvig: Right.
Ben: The pioneers, as it were, of that migratory frontier, who would later go on to end up being, say, Polynesians or the indigenous peoples of North and South America, and that sort of thing, the leading edge of that wave of initial human migration out of Africa would have held on to and probably had less reason to diversify and enrich their phonemic inventories, because they weren’t stable and staying in one place, and constantly coming up and finding that frictional barriers when two peoples interact. And so, because of that their phonemic inventories stayed relatively similar to where they were in that initial phase of leaving… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Whereas Africans and various peoples of that region for- what are we thinking, like 100,000 years?
Daniel: 100,000 years. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: 100,000… Oh, out of Africa, it’s like 100,000 plus years.
Ben: For 100,000 years, they have been living, farming, agricultural, staying in stasis, empires have risen and fallen. I couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the complexity of human evolution of civilization in Africa over 100,000 years.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: But in that process, so many more phonemic expressions have arisen because of that geographic stability and localization. That was what I understood it to be. But I also subsequently understood that apparently not a thing. [laughs]
Hedvig: But also, new sounds and language don’t come about just because of contact with other people. They come about for language internal reasons as well.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: So, I don’t know. I don’t know, I need to reread this paper, because… [crosstalk]
Ben: See, this is really good. I had thought that my favorite thing had been kicked to the can, right?
Hedvig: No, I don’t think it entirely is. I think there’s definitely… the basic idea, more diversity at origin, I think most people are like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then specific phenomena like language sounds, we know that they can come about through other means. So, that might not work so well for those. But I need to reread this paper before I make an ass of myself.
Ben: But to take it back, maybe I don’t know, at this point, like 10 minutes in the conversation, you asked, what have we changed on. That was only one very specific example. I think just broadly from an awareness perspective, from a justice perspective, from a social perspective, you and I, in particular, Daniel, because we’ve been doing it for 13 years, are very different human beings when we started. I started on this show when I was 24. I don’t know if anyone’s ever met a 24-year-old before. But they’re really stupid creatures, especially white male, 24-year-olds.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Assholes.
Ben: Just not done yet. You were ought to done yet.
Daniel: You were a kid. You were running around. You were appearing in the social pages of The West Australian. There’s a couple of you.
Ben: [laughs] Why would you bring that… [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I got to find it. I got a photo of that thing.
Ben: No. Was it at the Laneway Festival, where I’m dressed in my little knickerbocker shorts and stuff?
Hedvig: Ooh.
Daniel: Yeah, I think it is.
Hedvig: Oh, God. [laughs]
Daniel: We’ll have a link on our episode page for this.
Hedvig: Yeah. Hello. There’s another child. There’s a child, the same child.
Daniel: Yes, my kids are running around inside the house. Yeah, you were a very different person and you acquired this cranky personality, but you lost the cranky person… Well, I mean… [crosstalk]
Ben: I did have a divorce in that time. Things happened. And that’s the other thing about our show, because it’s been going on such a longitudinal timeframe, you and I both have had kids. You’d already had kids, but you had more kids.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: I saw a relationship end. I started new relationships. I’ve changed jobs and I changed careers in that time. All of this stuff has happened whilst the show’s been happening. And I think that by necessity means that you and I have certainly changed a whole bunch. And then on a slightly lesser, significant timescale, because I think you were… Speak to it, were you already mostly on the pathway you we’re now on by the time you joined the show?
Hedvig: I have this cognitive failure, which is that all throughout my life, I have just thought that I am the same and I don’t think that’s true. Ever since I was about 15, 16, if you asked me naively like, “Am I the same person when I was 15 years?” I’m like, “No, I’m not.” It’s really not true.
Daniel: It can’t be true. Surely.
Hedvig: It’s probably not true, but it’s very hard for me to be the same.
Ben: That would make you one of two things, right? Either you are the most ridiculously immature you-year-old person in the world or you would like the most biblically mature 15-year-old world has ever seen.
Hedvig: Well, it’s probably not true, but it’s hard for me to introspect and see what that is.
Daniel: Maybe you just don’t feel like you’ve changed in ways that matter, sort of like many Chomskyans feel language doesn’t change in ways that matter.
Hedvig: Maybe.
Ben: We’ll bring it back to linguistics… [crosstalk]
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: But I also have this other cognitive bias, which is, I think that whatever I’m doing and saying is the default, normal, most plausible thing that anyone would do.
Ben: Isn’t that inherently the psychological fallacy that all humans struggle to overcome?
Hedvig: So, when people say something like, “Oh, I really like you,” I’m like, “I am default.”
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: “I’m just person.”
Hedvig: “I am person.”
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: “What are you liking?” I don’t get it.
Ben: It’s almost like… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Like, why would anyone want… [crosstalk]
Ben: Why would anyone like a blob of fat?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah, right.
Hedvig: The things I do are the things you would do. But it’s not true, because then also some people do things that I would do and I’m very confused [laughs] and I’m like, “Oh, you’re different people. Oh, okay. Cool. That maybe means that I’m a different person.” I know that one thing that has happened since I turned 30 is that I have decided that I don’t need to optimize things as much.
Ben: Okay
Hedvig: I want everything to be the optimal version. But sometimes, amount of effort spent, amount of improvement, there’s a plateau.
Ben: Diminishing returns kind of a situation.
Hedvig: Yeah. I’ve been become better at recognizing something like, “Oh, this isn’t the best conference I’ve ever organized but it is good enough and it’s going to be fine,” is my main thing I thought that happened to me. But that’s what… [crosstalk]
Ben: I guess, my question was a little bit more geared towards like, when you joined the show, you were like, “Yep, definitely want to be a linguistic academic. That’s my path that I’m on. That’s what I’m going to do. That’s what I’m going to pursue.”
Hedvig: No, I was like, “I want to see what it’s like to do a PhD.” I’ve always thought that I’ll be in academia for as long as it’s good for me. And when it is no longer good for me, I hope I have the courage to leave.
Ben: Ooh, ooh, what’s the parachute?
Hedvig: I don’t know.
Ben: I want to know. Sure you’ve thought about it.
Daniel: Don’t know, can’t tell you.
Ben: If he thought about the idea that there is going to be an endpoint when it doesn’t work for you, what alternatives… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Well, unfortunately the alternatives that exist are also precarious labor markets like journalism or teaching, which is where I think most academics would have their out.
Ben: When you say teaching, do you mean not my sort of teaching but at an academic level?
Hedvig: No. I’ve taught at primary school.
Ben: You find primary and secondary teaching to be a precarious labor market?
Hedvig: Maybe not preca… In Sweden, it’s been not great.
Ben: Interesting. Fascinating.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I’m so spoiled as an Australian teacher, I guess.
Daniel: Yeah. [laughs]
Hedvig: Maybe. Maybe it’s less precarious than I think but… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Come teach with us.
Hedvig: Maybe not precarious, but people do very hard work for not very much money.
Ben: Oh, I see. Yes. Okay. Fair enough.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Because the classic thing we’re teaching pretty much the world over that I’ve observed is that your job security is very good. But your remuneration, maybe not so much.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Just quickly. Should be remuneration, I only learned this recently and it does [unintelligible 00:27:10].
Daniel: Many people feel it’s renumeration because number.
Ben: Yes.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: It should be. We’ve decided this… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Yeah. Okay. Everybody.
Hedvig: Also, compensation?
Ben: Oh, yeah. Okay. I could do that.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: What’s that?
Ben: As in a stand-in for remuneration.
Hedvig: Compensation.
Daniel: Compensation.
Hedvig: Yeah. So, I’m staying the same as always been. [crosstalk]
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Okay. Very good.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] For all I know, yeah.
Ben: I’m laughing at you, but my experience of having three hourly chats with you once a week to fortnight for the last five years actually holds up your hypothesis [crosstalk] changes.
[laughter]
Daniel: I can’t really disagree.
Hedvig: Yeah, the only change is that one. Because when I came into my PhD, I was in a PhD project with some of the people and I was like, “Okay, oh, I’m getting stressed that this isn’t organized the way I would like as I try to organize it.” And then, someone took me aside and he was like, “Hedvig, you don’t. It’s fine. Just focus on yourself. It’ll all be fine.”
Ben: Chill, bro.
Hedvig: Chill. And I had to be told that now and I don’t need to be told that as often now.
Ben: Fair enough.
Hedvig: As often.
Daniel: When I started doing Talk the Talk and it started becoming an hourlong show and it started to ramp up, I was… [crosstalk]
Ben: Can we explain briefly what the show was and how it started?
Daniel: So, 2009, I started doing a seven-minute segment on RTRFM, a community radio station. I would go in every Tuesday morning. Mm?
Hedvig: Seven?
Ben: Yeah. You heard right, folks. This little behemoth started as a seven-minute… [crosstalk]
Daniel: It was really just… And you got whoever was doing the thing.
Ben: It was a linguistic chicken McNugget.
Daniel: Yeah, pretty much. “Oh, let’s have the thing.” Then, it got take up more time. We let it run. It got to be a 25-minute thing. And then, Peter Barr, the station manager said, “Would you like it to be an hour thing?” And so, it was. And that was when I made the shift to prerecord so I could have more control. I was a maniac in those days. How was I doing a show every week with interviews, and stuff, and recordings, and feedback from…? And I had a full-time academic job on top of that.
Ben: Yeah, a full-time academic job. The only thing I can say is, you didn’t have small children.
Daniel: I didn’t have small… But then, I did.
Ben: Yeah. [laughs]
Daniel: And my dear partner just took a lot of that and that must have been hard. And so, she’s really the hero of the show, as far as I’m concerned.
Ben: That’s true for my partner as well, I’m sure.
Daniel: Yeah. But now, I find that I’m doing a lot less. It feels like we keep putting out episodes… I don’t know if it’s ever going to take over the world, but I’m okay with… They are my publications. I feel episodes are our publications for us, or we need to start thinking of it that way.
Hedvig: Okay, we get two DOIs.
Daniel: That would be cool.
Ben: DOI?
Hedvig: Digital Object Identifier.
Daniel: Like a stable URL.
Ben: Oh, yeah. Sorry. I know you mean like what you tag certain documents and stuff with.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Yeah. Okay.
Daniel: The other thing that I’m doing is, I’m doing shows on the Australia… It’s come back to where it began on the ABC, the Australian ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, where I do a show on Adelaide on Wednesday afternoon. I phone in on a show to Adelaide for 15, 20 minutes and then another 15-, 20-minute thing every Thursday morning. It’s a whole different audience here in Perth, a whole different audience.
Ben: Yeah. So, listeners, if you remember earlier in this episode where I talked about how I don’t want to try and dumb it down too much, forget all that. That is what Daniel has to do.
Daniel: Because I don’t have to confront things about getting cranky about language change or why we have to accept languages besides English.
Ben: “Daniel, why don’t they come to this country and learn our language?” Stuff like that.
Daniel: “Why did they call it British English? Why don’t they just call it English?” that kind of thing. The way the Queen talks sounds so lovely.
Ben: I would put it to people that it actually didn’t sound weird, and archaic, and stilted, and non-relevant…
Hedvig: It’s only good coming out of Olivia Colman, The Crown. She played… [crosstalk]
Ben: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Daniel: So, there’s two different audiences. And I started to see the divide between The Because Language audience and the ABC audiences. And now, I’m doing something new. I’m teaching a lot on the- what do I call it? Where there’s a group of people, mostly older, who want to get together and hear a lecture by someone.
Ben: Like an open universities type thing?
Daniel: That kind of thing.
Ben: Okay.
Daniel: And so, I do that sometimes one a week. I’m just going to a place, just doing a lecture, doing a thing for people, usually older, maybe 50, 60 plus, and… [crosstalk]
Ben: Retired and semiretired?
Daniel: Yeah, that kind of thing. And sometimes, I think, “Hmm, this is really different. Is this where I want to have influences? This seems like a good place to have influence. Is it really?” And then, what will happen is that older folks will come up.
Hedvig: Do they change their minds?
Daniel: I see it happening. I see it happening for some. Not everybody. At the end of one, I said, “Hey, we have to stop, but I’ll stick around for questions for a bit, if you want.” And an older gentleman said a little too loudly, “Don’t bother.” [laughs]
Ben: Hecklers.
Daniel: No, it means I’m getting people angry. But afterwards, people come up to me and they’re like, “What’s this about ‘singular they’ or ‘nonbinary language’?” And I’m realizing, these people have trans or nonbinary grandkids.
Ben: Yeah, it’s a thing, for sure.
Daniel: And they’re struggling to understand. And so, that… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: That sounds like they’re trying… [crosstalk]
Ben: That’s [unintelligible 00:33:17] always the best thing.
Hedvig: Because they can go in there to learn about and to be like, “Oh, maybe there’s something I need to learn about.” Like, “Oh, it’s hard. It’s hard.”
Daniel: “What about this?” And then, I can be there and I can say, “Yeah, that’s totally a thing and we know about this. Here’s how you can help.” Really, I feel I’m in a good place right now with the show talking to you two, which fills in a certain place, and then talking to other people, and doing lectures, which gets…
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: It’s very different from what I used to do, but I’m really glad that I’m doing it. I feel pretty happy about it.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I like the idea… Excuse me. I think I’ve mentioned it on the show before there’s a new show out called Moonhaven, which is okay. It’s not the most amazing thing in the world.
Hedvig: It’s a TV show?
Ben: It is a TV show.
Hedvig: It’s a drama?
Ben: It is.
Hedvig: It’s on Netflix, HBO…? [crosstalk]
Ben: I think that it is on…
Hedvig: Perfect.
Ben: You know how we’re in this really annoying period of decentralization of production? I think it’s on AMC+, which is another way to say that is, “Get it how you want to get.”
Hedvig: Moonhaven.
Ben: Moonhaven.
Hedvig: Okay.
Ben: It posits this sort of utopia that has grown up on the moon over the last 100 years.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah.
Ben: Right. And now, in my head, it’s just become sort of a… what’s the word I’m looking for?
Hedvig: Placeholder?
Ben: Yes. Thank you. It’s become a placeholder for an idea of what we need to do to fix the stuff. And so, what Daniel’s talking about which is almost anekistic, in the true sense of the word, localized approach to educating, to change, to culture change, linguistic change, and that sort of thing is the kind of way the future, I think. We need people like you who know stuff on a localized level to just sit with people and be like, “What up?” “Here’s what these things mean. And these things mean amazing things.” And you’re not going to convince everyone, but the people who are open, and looking for answers, and for help like navigating this new frontier, which is to their perception, certainly, just resplendent with rocks to ground your craft on go, “Oh, great, somebody who can help me navigate these waters.” That’s really helpful.
Hedvig: And I have to say as well, with great power comes great responsibility. You are not young, white man.
Daniel: Mm-hmm. I’m someone that they will listen to.
Hedvig: Yeah, which means that when you say like, “It’s okay. Let’s talk about this,” they’re going to be like, “Ooh, nice.” Coming… [crosstalk]
Ben: The white man said so.
Hedvig: No. But honestly, it helps, right?
Ben: I say it in a joking way, but I mean it.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: It’s like, “You know, I used to not get this too and let me tell you what helped me.”
Hedvig: Right. Yeah.
Daniel: I can be an interpreter they will listen to.
Hedvig: Yeah, this is the thing we also come across often in the show, which is like… Well, maybe all things considered that’s okay, but I wish it wasn’t exactly like that.
Daniel: Well, the trick is, you pass the mic. When you have the authority, you pass the mic. You highlight… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah. Are you able to in these speakeasies and things to be like, “And he’s a young man or woman who would to talk to you about you learning their language… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Yeah. It’s harder. And then what you do is you point them to Because Language, where we are able to do that more fully, I think.
Hedvig: Right. Yeah.
Daniel: It’s hard in that space.
Hedvig: It is tricky. Yeah, it’s hard. But the other thing is, teaching young people, we could… because… [crosstalk]
Daniel: I guess, we’ve covered, huh?
Hedvig: Old people were young people at one point.
Daniel: I tell the old people, you tell the young people.
Hedvig: And they went to school, and they had a primary school teacher, maybe, who if I can guess said, “You have to speak like this. Otherwise, you are not.”
Ben: Yeah. Mrs. Terwillegar was like, “Your verbs are always these and you’re…”
Hedvig: Yeah. And you can’t say, “This ain’t that.” You haven’t say, “This isn’t that,” or whatever it is. They were told it was wrong and right, and they were graded, and they handed in things, and they got good or bad grades, and that’s how they were taught. And when you go to primary school nowadays, some of that is still there. I don’t know, I’ve talked to some Swedish teachers and they talk about trying to talk to their kids about language appropriateness instead of correctness like, “Oh, there’s an appropriate style that maybe you need to employ in work interviews, but that doesn’t mean it’s the best thing.”
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: [crosstalk]
Daniel: This was something that I wanted to talk about that’s changed over the show, because I think when we started talking about stuff, your view, and I was willing to go along, was the code switching. We need to help students to be good code switchers and talk about appropriateness.
Ben: Mm-hmm. But you have become subsequently far more radical. [laughs]
Daniel: I’ve become radicalized. I’m not going to teach students appropriateness so that they can dodge discrimination for somebody else to cop it. Other people can work on that. “I want to focus on ending discrimination and working in that way. And I know that that’s… [crosstalk]
Ben: Actually, we have seen a few different roles a few different times, right?
Hedvig: Yeah. It’s the most consistent thing.
Ben: Yeah, where we keep coming back to, not just on a linguistic front, but the idea of, “Do you help people navigate a system or do you dismantle the system?”
Daniel: Do you dismantle the system? I can dismantle the system and I won’t. And maybe there will be some aspect of navigation that needs to happen.
Hedvig: Because you’re not the one-
Daniel: Who cops that.
Hedvig: -who cops that, right?
Ben: No. Not at all.
Daniel: And I’m aware of that. I’m still going to find discrimination as much as I can, because I’m convinced that helping people navigate is a red herring, because it’s not about… they don’t get them on… Even if they could speak perfectly and aped the standardized variety, they’ll get them on something else-
Hedvig: Yeah, they will.
Daniel: -because it’s not about language and it never was about language.
Hedvig: There you are. And it’s a moving target. They’ll be like, “Oh, you learn the variety we said we liked two years ago.” [crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: “Now, we like something else.”
Ben: It’s APA 8.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: So, I have little patience for helping for the code-switching approach.
Hedvig: Yeah. You are not the one who cops it, like someone is copping it…
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: And that’s not a good time.
Ben: My needle thread on that one is to acknowledge to my students, who are often teenagers, the unfairness and in a lot of ways pointlessness and stupidity of the system to say to them, “The fact that this is regarded as good, proper, higher value, higher order, all of these things is absurd and I don’t want you to think that. However, in the system that we operate in, you will be afforded some measure of preference, if you are able to do these things. To put it really bluntly, these are the white man’s tools. If you would like to know how to use them, I will teach you, but I will remind you the whole way that they are the white man’s tools and they can suck. But what you do with those tools is entirely your call, because you’re autonomous.”
Daniel: Teach that there is a standard, but also teach the fact that the standard is the standard is inseparable from considerations of power and prestige.
Hedvig: Do you think that they get that or when you say that very nuanced explanation, do they just hear, “Uh, Ben’s saying a bunch of fancy words and he wants me to learn this”?
Ben: In much the same way that Daniel’s community lectures and lessons will have a certain hit rate or success. And also, on top of that, it’s really hard to know really [crosstalk] what your success rate or your hit rate is. I get the very distinct impression some people get it in the sense that the message that I’m communicating lands relatively unchanged. Some people are more or less disinterested, because they’re going, “I just want talk. Okay. You’re waffling on, it’s not important to me,” which is completely fair. That’s their call.
And then I think we always have to account for the fact that some people will be interpreting the message that I am delivering completely differently from any kind of intent that I actually have. So, they might walk away from it going, “That guy’s a jackass and he doesn’t know what the fuck he is talking about. This is not the world I live in. And all of his cool, woke guy approaches actually don’t mean anything to me or help me at all and maybe I either dislike him, disregard him,” whatever it happens to be. And that’s also completely understandable and fair, because as you were saying, Daniel, I don’t really inherently have skin in the game.
Daniel and Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: What I do, I do because of a moral imperative, but not unfortunately, because of an actual necessity, which is not true. Most people don’t get to take their skin color off. Not most people. No people can take their skin color off.
Hedvig: No people.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Yeah. I forget some of these things, because I have chosen an industry like academia and specifically, humanities and linguistics is very open to making fun of for not adhering to some of these rules. And especially, linguists who do field work. For example, I have… [crosstalk] Oh, my God, yeah. Well, and then sometimes, they’ll be like, “No, I have very particular opinions about the Oxford comma,” and I was like, “Oh, you do? Okay.” [crosstalk]
Ben: [crosstalk] That’s an interesting hill to die on, but fair enough.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] deal with that. But usually, when you write academic papers for journals, we will usually sort of do this stuff. Okay, everything else, meh. And also, it just comes with a culture of dress code, how you address the peers, and everything. So, I don’t… [crosstalk]
Ben: Is that field specific or country specific?
Hedvig: I think it’s field specific. I think it’s similar, for example, in biology and [crosstalk]
Ben: And so, biologists in Germany, China, America are likely to have a fairly similar culture academically.
Hedvig: Yeah. Like physicists in all those countries, as far as I know, have a standard uniform, which is like a t-shirt with a funny quantum mechanics joke-
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: -and cargo shorts.
Ben: Right.
Hedvig: And they all… [crosstalk]
Ben: There’s very little variation.
Hedvig: And they are like, “Yes. we look like this.” And linguists who do field work have some sort of clothing from the place they do field work. So, if you work in the Pacific, you have Hawaiian cool shirts. I bought one now in Tahiti. Very nice.
Ben: Cool.
Hedvig: And I can wear this as a formal wear to my office every day and no one will bat an eyelid. I wear sarongs.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: I come in with sarongs and flip flops and flower shirts and everyone’s like, “Yeah, it’s fine.” When I started my PhD, my mom was like, “You have to buy a nice little black dress that you can wear at formal events.”
Ben: Yeah. Right. You also need probably a little bit of a blazer-bolero thing… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah. I’ve never used it.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Not entirely true. Used it at a funeral.
Ben: Oh, okay. Go sad.
Hedvig: But in fact, if you do wear like office neat and tidy corporate wear, I think people would be like, “What is up with you?”
Ben: “What’s your- what’s your… what’s your angle?”
Hedvig: Yeah, this is not, hmm. You have to dress a little bit quirky, I think, or very like relaxed.
Ben: Right.
Hedvig: I think if I ever left academia and had to go into suddenly a corporate job or something, I’m going to be met with a bit of a culture shock with people policing how I behave and what I say, because I can get away with being pretty darn obnoxious and cute in my current state.
Ben: [laughs] I like that you use the word ‘cute’.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: Would others?
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: No, no. I don’t know. That’s unfortunate.
Daniel: I want to know, have you two enjoyed hanging out this weekend? We’ve done a lot of things together and this has been the time when we hang out, and we haven’t gotten the chance to do that before. What’s it been like getting together?
Hedvig: It’s all the same. [laughs]
Ben: Yeah. When I first got here to Daniel’s house, because Hedvig’s only been here for like three days.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I remarked on the weirdness of the not weirdness, right? And I said, “This has happened to you before, Hedvig. It’s probably happened to Daniel, but it’s certainly never happened to me.” I’ve never gotten to know someone to such a significant degree. Hedvig and I, if we were to tally it, it would be hundreds of hours of conversation at this point.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Because we’ve been doing the show together for five years minimum. And each of those shows, given how we are, go for at a recording level-
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: -two and a half to three hours… [crosstalk]
Daniel: No. Not that long.
Ben: Yes, they do.
Daniel: Two hours normally.
Ben: No.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: That’s only when we’ve transitioned to prerecords that you’ve done, right?
Daniel: Right.
Ben: If we actually have a guest that were involved in, whoa, it balloons. So, literally hundreds of hours. And so, I rock up here. Having never physically, in person met Hedvig before and it’s, for lack of a better phrase and this might be weird, a close friend that I happen to have never been in the same physical space as her.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: So, it should be quite awkward [unintelligible [00:46:29] and it wasn’t.
Hedvig: And it helps that as I was saying like, “I’ve never seen this part of your body.” But [laughs] it’s just medium white man.
Ben: [laughs] [unintelligible 00:46:38] again?
Hedvig: Yeah.
[laughter]
Hedvig: It was like, “Nope.”
Ben: Nondescript. I’m the golden retriever of human bodies.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: [laughs] As you mentioned before, Ben, all of your interactions between the two of you for years and years have pretty much been publicly available. Everybody’s been able to listen to… If somebody listens to all of our shows, they would have heard the extent of your interaction.
Ben: Oh, that’s a fascinating thing to think about, isn’t it? There’s some people who will feel they know me as well as I know Hedvig, but it’s a unidirectional flow, instead of a bidirectional flow.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: And now, we’ve been able to have some private interaction-
Ben: Yeah, that’s true actually-
Daniel: -which is nice.
Ben: -which, I have to say, has in no way differentiated itself from…
[laughter]
Ben: [unintelligible 00:47:29] one aspect of our interactions that is in any way different from anything that you have heard. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: No, it’s true. It is true. And we say that this is the first meeting, but I’ve only met Daniel one time before.
Daniel: It was in Canberra.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: True.
Hedvig: So, it’s actually not that different-
Daniel: No.
Hedvig: -in many ways.
Daniel: No. I think I met you a couple of times. I stayed at your place once and then there was a conference a few years before that. It was once in-
Hedvig: Canberra as well?
Daniel: -2018 and then in 20… Uhh.
Hedvig: Uhh.
Daniel: Is that same visit. Am I conflating?
Ben: [crosstalk] This is certainly what people have come to the podcast for, hearing you two go, “Uhh.”
Hedvig: Uhh.
Hedvig and Ben: Uhh.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: You can pull them out and make like a… [crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah, like a compilation.
Daniel: Well.
Hedvig: Anyway, not many times. Let’s just put it like that.
Daniel: Not many times. It’s true. So, it’s been kind of the same.
Hedvig: But I think it’s been good. I think we are also people who live a lot on the internet and I have from a young age.
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: So, a lot of my relationships… It is true. I have very few that I’ve never met in real life, but I have a lot of relationships that are-
Ben: Predominantly online.
Hedvig: -significantly mediated by the internet, and they are not any less real to me.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: And I think now that millennials, the first generation to be old at the internet and Zoomers are getting into it, as Millennials and Zoomers, I think we can understand social cues and stuff through text and through, who’s liking which tweet and what’s going on, it’s a lot of nuanced. You can communicate a lot, actually.
Ben: Quite good.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I certainly had the experience of having online only… I was a tragic nerd as a teenager. So, there were plenty of friends that I had or even online. I just haven’t met them.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I never ended up meeting them later.
Hedvig: Yeah, same.
Ben: Wonder what starburst86 is up to now.
[laughter]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: The show is a different experience for me because you show up, and you say stuff, and then you’re done.
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: Uh, lazy. It is just no other way to describe it. We just rock up.
Hedvig: I’ve tried once.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: I think I’ve told this over the weekend. Because Daniel does the prep, the agenda, the plan. Sometimes, I try and help with that to more or less success.
Daniel: Love that.
Ben: And I do not ever help.
Hedvig: And he does not ever?
Ben: No.
Hedvig: And then, we record, and then we all send audio files to Daniel, and then he needs to mush them all together, and then cut out our ums and ahs and when we say stupid things or… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Weird digressions.
Hedvig: Weird digressions and things. [crosstalk] Because I was present for the episode, I don’t always listen to the full episode. But I do sometimes, I’m like, “Oh, I sound smarter.”
[laughter]
Ben: Daniel looks… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: It really comes together in the edit.
Hedvig: But it means that you listen to our voices.
Daniel: Like three times.
Hedvig: Three times.
Ben: Good Lord. I’m so sorry.
Hedvig: You’ll be like, “Oh, that was like that time when you said that.” And I said that once.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Daniel heard it when I said it and then listened to it a couple more times.
Daniel: I hear it when you say it. I hear it when I edit. And then, I hear it when I listen back to do transcript correction.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: So, I’ve seen all of the words.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: This actually throws into really sharp… I’d always thought you were a mostly functional savant with the amount of recall ability you-
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: -have over our shows. It’s only just now occurred to me that that’s because you have stupid… like, four times more exposure to the… [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: It’s true.
Hedvig: And every stupid thing we say, he remembers.
Ben: Yeah. Crazy.
Daniel: While the show is going on, while we’re talking, I’m like, “I’m not keeping this.” I’m editing-
Hedvig: Yeah, you [crosstalk] editing.
Daniel: in real time.
Ben: Do you ever make notes? Do you ever actually… [crosstalk]
Daniel: No.
Ben: Yeah. Right. So, it’s all mental flagging.
Ben: I crawl minute by minute through the show and think, “Oh, this was that bit where I was going to cut that out or I was going to put that-“
Hedvig: Wow.
Daniel: -at the end.”
Hedvig: What’s the common thing you cut?
Daniel: Umm.
Ben: Oh, that’s a good question. Yeah. Here’s how I’ll ask it.
Daniel: Digressions that I don’t think are interesting.
Ben: Okay. I was going to say, “What do you want to say to Hedvig?” and if you could give just one direction each, what would it be?
Hedvig: Yeah. We’ll be [crosstalk] students.
Daniel: Nothing. I don’t want to do anything.
Hedvig: No, no, no.
Ben: Come on. Come on, come on, come on.
Daniel: There really isn’t anything that I want to change about what we do.
Hedvig: Should we talk over each other less?
Daniel: No. It doesn’t matter, because I can fix that. Because I’ve got you on separate tracks.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: I’ve got you on separate tracks.
Hedvig: No, I feel we can take input.
Ben: See, I think he’s being… [crosstalk]
Daniel: I have none to give you, because-
Ben: I know.
Daniel: -I think that what you’re doing is fantastic.
Ben: I’m disappointed as well. [laughs]
Daniel: I know, I’m sorry. And you know what, partly don’t want to tinker with it. But also, there’s really nothing that needs to change. This is not a problem, because anything that comes up, I can fix. But you know what, I listen to the show, I get the files, and then it’s time to edit the show. And you know what, it feels like I’m spending time with you and… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: It is sort of parasocial, but you’re there.
Daniel: Kind of.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: And then, I get to the end and I just think, “These guys are great.” And I just… [crosstalk]
Ben: I’m also confused. [laughs]
Hedvig: I don’t want to do anything besides this. This is what I think. I think this is the best job. I don’t want to do anything besides just hanging out with these two. Luckily, very fortunately, I am in the privileged position of being able to do this full time, which people who have jobs can’t do. So, I feel I want to take my good fortune and show that.
Hedvig: Okay. We need to have other people in our lives to take our egos down.
Ben: Oh.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] do that?
Daniel: Well, that will happen.
Ben: Sound like I’m across that. [crosstalk] Don’t worry. I’m doing enough of that to myself. No worries at all.
Hedvig: Steve doesn’t think like…
Ben: Does he like love you and cherish you and value…? [crosstalk]
Hedvig: yeah.
Ben: Oh, my goodness. My partner does the same thing.
Daniel: Same.
Ben: And because I’m a deeply damaged, broken person, I can’t handle that at all.
Hedvig: Oh, his wedding vows were so sincere and nice. And mine had a joke in it… [crosstalk]
Ben: Oh, no.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: Oh, dear. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Hedvig: [chuckles]
Ben: The failure is ours. Do you understand that?
Hedvig: I said, “Oh, I read through our vows and you were so sweet and mine was a bit trying to not be so sincere.” And he’s like, “No, no, no, yours were great. I loved them.”
Ben: Even on this level, you [crosstalk] [laughs]
Hedvig: Ah, yeah.
Daniel: There’s different ways to be and we be them, and it works.
Hedvig: Okay. Right.
Ben: No, no, Daniel, incorrect. I need to change.
Daniel: Let’s express this brokenness. How long have you felt this way?
Ben: [laughs] Oh, no.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Did you also when you were little, get told like, “You are a diamond in the rough. You can be so great if you’re just by yourself”?
Ben: No.
Hedvig: Oh, I was told that.
Ben: No, not at all. No, I had largely pretty dysfunctional childhood, unfortunately.
Hedvig: I’m sorry.
Ben: No, it’s okay. It’s the response that I feel obligated to give any mention of such thing. But it’s a tough gig trying to human. I don’t find it particularly easy. Or, more to the point, I found it really, really easy for a long time, because I wasn’t trying very hard. Does that make sense?
Hedvig: Yeah, I guess.
Ben: Being a ‘meh’ person is really easy, because you just barrel through existence, doing whatever inherent impulse comes to you. And then… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Living consciously.
Hedvig: Yeah. I want to be really, really clear here. I’m not saying, I do that very well. But even trying on a really small level to try and start doing that, sucks. It’s really hard. It’s not fun, or easy, or any of those sorts of things. But I don’t know, I personally experience it as once you are showing a little bit behind the curtain, you can never really ever forget that you’ve seen behind the curtain and all of the magic dies in that moment a little bit. That was my experience anyway. The illusion. [vibrating] Oh, no, I have to buy you both a carton now. That was the rule back in the radio days. If someone’s phone goes off in the studio, you go buy everyone a carton of beer.
Hedvig: Oh.
Daniel: Okay. We’ll do that next time. So, what time is it?
Ben: It is 10 o’clock exactly on the dot.
Hedvig: Oh, we’re all good.
Daniel: Wow.
Ben: Yeah, we’re doing well.
Daniel: Okay.
Hedvig: We’re doing well.
Ben: We haven’t waffled too much, I don’t think.
Daniel: No, I feel we’re coming to the end of something. I feel we’re tapering down. That’s how it feels.
Hedvig: Yeah. Or we figure out how to get a second wind, but we can also taper it down.
Ben: I don’t think this needs to be necessarily super self-indulgent. Like we have two hours, so we fill two hours. We don’t need to be a gas in a certain space, fill that volume no matter what. What’s the takeaway? If we were to exert a slice of this video recording podcast to be the landing video on a YouTube page, or a pinned video on a TikTok, or something-?
Hedvig: I think the reason we’re talking so much about society, and feelings, and ourselves, and our experiences is because language is connected to all of that. And I think a lot of linguistics sometimes fail to recognize that or ignore that out of a need to just do feasible research, research I do included. And I think it’s a nice outlet actually for me the show to be able to talk about the societal impacts and things and multidisciplinary of linguistics, because it’s not often something you can do in actual research. And the way we talk about other people and the way we treat other people are quite connected. I don’t know. I think that’s why we stumble into these things so often.
Ben: I agree. Yeah, I think that necessarily, linguistics… And this is a complete outsider’s perspective in the sense that I have no formal linguistic education of any kind, is one of the most inextricable disciplines from just being alive, it’s really hard to tease apart linguistics from being a human being who lives and experiences the world.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Whereas for something like physics or chemistry, it’s really easy to do that, because those rules and those principles exist totally independent of human beings existing and being alive. Whereas linguistics, the study of linguistics could not exist without us.
Hedvig: Yeah, and that’s why linguists are such a drag at parties as well, because language is going on all the time around us. And even if people are quiet, that is a communicative signal. In your head, you’re doing things as well. So, if you’ve ever been at a party with a linguist, probably what happened is someone says something, they are like, “Oh, can you see that in the past tense as well? Ooh.”
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: And you become a little zoo animal and it’s a bit awkward and you have to tell them to stop. But it is because it’s everywhere… I experienced this when we did that interview with the translation service based in Israel. What were they called?
Daniel: It was BLEND.
Hedvig: Yes.
Ben: See what I mean? See that recall? We’re 400 episode deep, and he’s like, “Oh, you mean BLEND?”
Hedvig: Oh, I also said a falsehood in that one. I said the wrong etymology of Ukraine.
Daniel: Oh, don’t.
Ben: No. No. Focus, focus. [laughs]
Daniel: That’s my job. [laughs]
Hedvig: They asked us questions. They asked us as linguist questions about what’s going to happen with societal changes in future, specifically about for example, gender-inclusive language. And we’re like, “We study the words.”
Ben: We’re not futurists.
Hedvig: But what you’re asking us to do with something that maybe ask like a sociologist, or an historian, or an anthropologist. I’m not sure sometimes… because it is true, linguistics is linked to all these things. But the study of linguistics is not actually preparing you to study all of those things always and maybe that isn’t even possible. When you make a study, we try to focus on what are the words. And linguistics is coming more around to the fact that communication is more than just words. There’s shared common knowledge, assumptions, and hints, and like… [crosstalk]
Ben: Can we describe linguistics as…?
Hedvig: Oh, no.
Ben: No, no, no. Is it possible to carbon date linguistics into epochs?
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: So, the first bit was when we were like, “There are words and those words have rules and that is linguistics.”
Hedvig: Yes, that’s-
Daniel: Panini.
Hedvig: Yeah, Panini. One of the first grammar [unintelligible 01:00:08] written was written in India a very long time ago on Sanskrit and that was very influential. So, some people called it like Paninian linguistics up until… well, probably up until Bloomfield.
Daniel: 1700s.
Hedvig: Oh, okay. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Daniel: Jacob Grimm and … [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Oh, okay. And then, we get like, “Ooh, maybe there are language trees.”
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: And everyone gets… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Maybe languages are related to each other so much.
Hedvig: Languages are related.
Daniel: And then, maybe we can figure out what they were like earlier.
Hedvig: And as is always neat to point out, still very intertwined with racist ideology.
Ben: Of course.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Ben: That’s nearly everything throughout the enlightenment [unintelligible 01:00:51] wars.
Hedvig: Yeah. And I think this idea that people have that racism was a thing in Nazi Germany.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: It was and everywhere else massively, like all of Europe was doing eugenics.
Daniel: That’s why it was appealing. That’s why Nazism was appealing to most people.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I believe it was sort of the 1400s… My extremely limited understanding of this is starting from the 1400s onwards, a racial dimension to thinking was a relatively new aspect in the sense that there was always the other. So, if you were, say, a European citizen, you would see yourself as a Christian and then there would be everyone else. You would see yourself as Northern European and then there would be everyone else.
Hedvig: Right.
Ben: But the idea that being sub-Saharan black African was a unique racial quality to those people kind of gets its start around 1400s-
Hedvig: Mainly. Yeah.
Ben: – more or less as a justification for chattel slavery.
Hedvig: And also, I think people are fascinated by biological evolutionary theory and wanted to use that in more… I don’t know, but it definitely permeates into linguistics as well.
Ben: Of course.
Hedvig: Some of the terms like isolating and [unintelligible 01:02:09] and stuff has part of its origins in some of that stuff about primitive and betard. There’s a lot of wording, even in anthropologic linguistics into the 60s, it has a lot of wording about primitiveness, and progression, stuff that… [crosstalk]
Ben: Yeah, rudimentary and…
Hedvig: Yeah. It gets really icky. And I have this map that I was trying to remind myself off, which is the language families of the world and they’re all divided into the three races.
Daniel: We put a link up to that photo. It’s on our website.
Hedvig: Yeah. It’s good to just sit with and look at and be like, “Okay, this is a thing. It was made in 1920s. It was perfectly normal. It was taught to school children. It was perfectly normal.” Anyway… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Anyway, we had them there was Bloomfield and Jakobson.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: And then, Chomsky.
Hedvig: Chomsky.
Daniel: And then, Labov.
Hedvig: Yeah, like sociolinguistics. Yeah, I guess… [crosstalk]
Ben: Is that where we are now?
Daniel: That’s where we are. I think it’s where we are. I feel we’re doing a lot of language evolution stuff.
Hedvig: And it’s not they replace each other, right?
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: It’s more like you get more spouts.
Ben: Yes.
Hedvig: There’s still Labovian and Bloomfield… [crosstalk]
Daniel: It’s like vinyl and CDs and streaming.
Ben: Right.
Hedvig: You get all of them.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: Yeah. Maybe that’s where we are now. I definitely think that linguistics has progressed to recognizing the social context of language more. It used to be more like a logic puzzle.
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: And now, it’s like people use this to communicate and to signal identity.
Ben: So, it was approached more like a physics back in the day, where there are rules and systems that govern how this goes and… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: And that are independent that you can extract from social situation and they have exactly the same meaning, which we don’t think is true, really.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: And so, when you have gone and past sentences that are ambiguous, like when you read them on a piece of paper, you’re like, “Oh, I don’t know if this refers to that or that,” when you have them in a social context, there is no confusion.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Ben: Semantic ambiguity drops off significantly-
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: -when you get that face-to-face communication.
Hedvig: Yeah. I know Ben. I know roughly what he knows. I know that if I say these words, he’s going to probably think like that.
Daniel: So, we have guesses about each other’s knowledge and beliefs, desires, goals, and intentions. So, we use all of that information, even though we’re just guessing a lot, to disambiguate the words that we hear.
Ben: But good guesses.
Hedvig: And were really good guessers. [crosstalk] It’s really rare that we get it wrong, honestly. And when you get it wrong, sometimes, you’re like, “Oh, this person’s inner in mind is not the way I thought. The rest of my conversation, I’m going to…”
Daniel: I’m good. Or, I’m going to clarify.
Hedvig: Yeah, I’m going to stick to a different… Yeah. Sorry, you asked me a question and then I ranted off.
Ben: No, we got it.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Epochs of linguistics.
Hedvig: I think that’s the thing.
Ben: Yeah, there we go.
Hedvig: But might be different. We’ll continue evolving.
Ben: Well, yeah, that’s certainly…
Hedvig: [laughs]
Ben: If there’s a button for… Because Language is a show to just round out this really bizarre non-normal episode is that, if you wanted to know what Because Language is and is about and you wanted to just jump in now, you can reliably anticipate that we’re just going to be bringing you new, interesting, different things of a linguistic orientation, but certainly not exclusively about linguistics. And we’re probably also going to try and make it fun and funny in the process.
Hedvig: Yeah, we try. Yeah.
Daniel: We talk to interesting people who are doing good work.
Hedvig: Yeah. Speaking of, who are we talking to you next?
Daniel: Oh, that’s a good question. We’ve got a number of shows lined up in the hopper, but the exact order is going to be… [crosstalk]
Ben: Depending on availability and that stuff.
Daniel: Yeah, stuff like that. There is one thing that I want to say and that is, we made the jump from appearing on a community radio station to going independent of being ourselves.
Ben: Podcast only.
Daniel: And that’s been amazing, because I was wondering, should we do it, should we make the move? And Grant Barrett from A Way with Words, I was talking to him about this. And he said, “Do it. Jump. They’ll catch you. They’ll catch you.” And they, being the patrons, the people who have been with us since the Talk the Talk days. And they did. They’ve caught us and they’ve been great contributors to the show. Actually, one huge difference is. the media landscape, we used to be about, “Oh, Facebook,” for a long time and I didn’t even have Twitter. I didn’t even have a Twitter account, and then I got that grudgingly. And Twitter is now the way that we do it mostly and I despise Facebook. I don’t want to do Facebook. I don’t want to make Facebook. I think there’s things that Facebook is very good for. There are good things about Facebook. I don’t like it anymore. Please do something different. But we get most of our engagement from Discord. Our Discord patrons are amazing. They give us so much good stuff and they create… We’ve managed to create this fun, perking environment and you folks show up.
Hedvig: I really like Discord, but they are still active, I actually struggled to keep up.
Ben: It’s a bit intimidating. Yeah.
Hedvig: Just stop it.
Ben: But this is also… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: I try.
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: This is something that I noticed certainly when I was my nerdy teenage self is that web comics that I enjoyed, or TV show forums, or whatever it happened to be, they would often have community message boards and that sort of thing, which operate nearly, completely independently of the source material. I remember I worked on a couple of webcomic message boards and it very quickly just transitions into its own little social space. And yeah, there might be a sub forum about the comic of the week, but that is often one of the least trafficked parts of the actual community.
Daniel: It’s just for us.
Ben: And everyone’s just hanging out and chilling. A collection of likeminded individuals hanging out. One of the more populous channels of our Discord is just photos of people’s pets.
Hedvig: Ooh, I [unintelligible 01:08:28] the one with your cat.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: My cat is so good.
Hedvig: I met his cat. A she cat.
Ben: She is total sweetheart.
Daniel: Lovely cat.
Hedvig: Very cute, this one.
Daniel: Well, I just wanted to say a big thanks to our patrons for supporting us, for helping us do this. And we appreciate you and we hope that you’re enjoying what you’re getting.
Ben: You are the real MVP in this situation.
Daniel: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: Mm. Yeah. It’s fun to be on Patreon. I support other shows on Patreon as well. And as someone who for years and years and years and years and years listened to a lot of podcasts and never went on Patreon, I was like, “Oh, this is going to be very difficult.” It’s not very difficult.
Daniel: That’s two cartons.
Hedvig: That’s two cartons.
Ben: Oh, no. Sorry.
Hedvig: It’s not very difficult. It’s very easy. You can go support us or any other show you like, fairly strain free. [crosstalk] Yeah. It’s easier than I thought. And I get little emails like, “Oh, I got a picture goodie.” And I’m like, “Ooh.” But some of the time, I’m just happy that they are. I am helping people do their thing and that is the most fun bit.
Daniel: Well, this is my thing. I know you both have other things. I got other things too. But I’m glad that we come together and do this thing.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I’m glad that life has moved in such a way that allows you more free time.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: Because I used to feel a lot more guilty about contributing nothing at all. And now, I feel slightly less guilty about contributing nothing at all.
Daniel: If I needed more from you, I’ve told you.
Ben: I don’t believe you. [laughs]
Hedvig: I’m not sure either [crosstalk]
Daniel: [crosstalk] All right. There was a time when you were absent from a lot of episodes when you were taking a sabbatical, but that was because there was stuff going on for you and it worked.
Ben: Ah, yes. Life being crummy, an excellent excuse not to do things.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: I think that it is really good when you have a social sphere where you can say things like that directly.
Ben: That is true.
Hedvig: When I was at the end of my PhD, I told you guys like, “I’m going to bail a lot.”
Ben: [laughs] Yeah.
Daniel: Yeah. I can’t be here. And there were just lots of Ben and Daniel shows, and that was fine.
Ben: And the angels wept.
Hedvig: No. But as I manage other projects and sometimes, people feel bad saying when they can’t do things and that actually makes your life as a project coordinator worse.
Ben: Yes.
Hedvig: Even worse than if they just… The fact that they don’t show us one thing, but if you don’t know and I always feel comfortable telling you guys… [crosstalk]
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: That’s good. It feels good. Okay, we should definitely wrap up.
Ben: Yes.
[clapping]
Daniel: Thank you, patrons, and thank you for being here, first of all.
Ben: Yes, this has been tremendous.
Hedvig: Yeah. And then, Ben, sit here.
Ben: Oh, what do we do? Okay, we… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: We are all waving and then we can get a GIF.
Ben: This one?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: Okay.
Hedvig: Okay. One, two, three.
[music]
Hedvig: Very good. Movement is good.
Daniel: All right.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Thank you. This is so fun… [crosstalk]
Ben: No, we can be real Millennials and make a boomerang.
Daniel: Now, we do the reads…
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: Yes.
Hedvig: Oh, I will.
Daniel: Now, we do the reads. I don’t have reads.
Ben: I can do this. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Oh, are you going to try and remember patron names from… [crosstalk]
Ben: No, I’m not going to do it anyway. [crosstalk]
Daniel: I’ll have them going up the screen.
Ben: If you enjoy this episode of Talk the Talk, this very nonstandard episode of Talk the Talk [crosstalk].
Daniel: [laughs]
Ben: Classic. Has to happen like once an episode. It was… How many years? Eight years?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: The muscle memory is really struggling.
Hedvig: Wait, so, he’s got three things in the Talk the Talk jar and two cartons of beer.
Daniel: Two cartons.
Ben: Okay. If you have enjoyed this very nonstandard episode, Because Language, there are heaps of different ways you can help support us ranging from requiring basically no effort whatsoever. That includes things like going leaving a review or telling a mate who might say to you, “Hey, do you have any good podcasts to listen to?” “Yeah, absolutely. You should listen to our podcast. This podcast is about linguistics. Really fun, interesting. I really like it.” If you don’t think that, just lie and say that you do. You can leave a review in lots of different places, but generally, unfortunately, Apple Podcasts is the place where that does the best work.
You can also, if you were so inclined, become a patron and throw as much or as little money our way as you like. It allows us to do all sorts of really important things, most notably, and where most of our money goes, is towards transcribing our show so it makes it searchable for people and so that people who might not be able to hear can still engage in our podcast material about linguistics as well.
Hedvig: And we can pay guests.
Ben: Also, that. Oh, and if you want to get in touch with us, like you want to say, “Hey,” you can do it in all of the ways.
Daniel: Tell us, Hedvig.
Hedvig: Oh, no. Okay. So, Twitter, @becauselangpod, Facebook, @becauselanguage.
Daniel: @becauselangpod. We’re everywhere langpod…
Hedvig: Oh, @becauselangpodeverywhere. hello@becauselanguage.com, if you like good old-fashioned email. That’s it.
Daniel: We have a few thank-yous. Dustin from Sandman Stories who always recommends us.
Hedvig: Yes.
Daniel: The team at SpeechDocs. Our sponsors, The Oxford English Dictionary. How about that? Thanks to, of course, our patrons who are massive and help us at times.
Hedvig: And we met some of them this weekend. It was very fun.
Ben: Yeah, we had a get-together. [crosstalk] I love it.
Daniel: That was lovely.
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Daniel: The music you’re listening to is by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beano and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
Ben: Pew, pew, pew, pew. That’s a wrap.
Daniel: That’s a wrap.
Hedvig: That’s a wrap.
[beep]
Hedvig: There we go. Okay, do I look silly with this?
Daniel: I think that you should just look how you are and how you are is wonderful.
Hedvig: Ah, okay. I’m just staying warm.
[beep]
Ben: I really regret/resent that Crocs are so aesthetically unpleasing, because on so many other fronts… [crosstalk] Look, I know it has a cool young Gen Zs, but I’m not that thing. I’m just a tragic…
Hedvig: You can be a… [crosstalk]
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: It works. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you from the start.
Ben: No. [crosstalk]
Hedvig: You just really want to.
Ben: I don’t want to be [crosstalk] dressed as lamb. [laughs] I need to age gracefully.
Daniel: There’s an expression.
Hedvig: Don’t.
Ben: [laughs] Yeah. Hedvig’s like, “Nope. No grace to the aging.” I will cling on with bloody ragged fingernails.
Hedvig: Only culturally though.
Ben: Every time I’ve ever had to record outside for any reason in Australia, the birdsong comes through really, really clearly in recordings.
Daniel: Yeah.
Ben: So, people are going to hear lovely, native birds twaddling in the background.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: We hope that you enjoy what’s going on here.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]