New York City is home to a lot of languages! Sometimes a sizeable language community can live on just a couple of floors of an apartment building. Dr Ross Perlin is working to find and promote minority languages in NYC. He’s the co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, and author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. Ross joins us for this episode.
Timestamps
Intro: 0:36
News: 8:13
Related or Not: 32:52
Interview with Ross Perlin: 43:12
Words of the Week: 1:24:13
The Reads: 1:39:54
Listen to this episode
Videos
@becauselangpod Ross Perlin is coming on to tell us about his new book “Language City” and his work with the Endangered Language Alliance. How do we promote the multitude of languages that we find all over NYC? @languagecitybook
Patreon supporters
Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to:
- Termy
- Matt
- Whitney
- Chris L
- Helen
- Jack
- PharaohKatt
- LordMortis
- Lyssa
- Elías
- gramaryen
- Larry
- Rene
- Kristofer
- Andy
- James
- Nigel
- Meredith
- Kate
- Nasrin
- Joanna
- Nikoli
- Keith
- Ayesha
- Steele
- Margareth
- Manú
- Diego
- Ariaflame
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Colleen
- Ignacio
- Sonic Snejhog
- Kevin
- Andy from Logophilius
- Stan
- Kathy
- Rach
- Cheyenne
- Felicity
- Amir
- Canny Archer
- O Tim
- Alyssa
- Chris W
- aengryballs
- Tadhg
- Luis
- Raina
- Tony
- WolfDog
- Molly Dee
- J0HNTR0Y
- sæ̃m
And our newest patrons:
- At the Listener level: James, and Reecy with a yearly membership
- And at the Friend level: Joey and Sean
- Also unleashy, Tim, and Jordan, joining up as free members
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
Languages of New York City
https://languagemap.nyc
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York, by Ross Perlin | Grove Atlantic
https://groveatlantic.com/book/language-city/
What’s in a Meow? A Study on Human Classification and Interpretation of Domestic Cat Vocalizations
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33327613/
How do cats communicate with each other?
https://www.loc.gov/everyday-mysteries/zoology/item/how-do-cats-communicate-with-each-other/
Estonia’s dictionary reform drives wedge between linguistics experts
https://news.err.ee/1609285548/estonia-s-dictionary-reform-drives-wedge-between-linguistics-experts
Native vs. Borrowed Material as Approached by Estonian Language Planning Practitioners: The Experience of the Dictionary of Standard Estonian
https://academic.oup.com/ijl/article-abstract/31/2/151/4999876?redirectedFrom=PDF
Child rape conviction overturned due to judges’ uncertainty of ‘snippa’ meaning
https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/child-rape-conviction-overturned-due-to-judges-uncertainty-of-snippa-meaning
Ellison and Miceli (2017): Language monitoring in bilinguals as a mechanism for rapid lexical divergence
https://research-repository.uwa.edu.au/en/publications/language-monitoring-in-bilinguals-as-a-mechanism-for-rapid-lexica
[DOCX] sj-docx-1-qjp-10.1177_17470218231181380 – Supplemental material for New in, old out: Does learning a new language make you forget previously learned foreign languages?
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17470218231181380#supplementary-materials
Anishinaabe Names | ojibwe.net
https://ojibwe.net/projects/anishinaabe-names/
Maazhimaagwanjige = Eat Stinky Things (Ojibwe Word of the Day)
“vandal, sandal, and the folkvandring thing”
SV: Folkvandringstiden
https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folkvandringstiden
EN: Migration Period
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period
GitHub link
https://github.com/Language-Mapping/language-map
Solar Eclipse Will Pass Over Every US City Named Nineveh on April 8, 2024?
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/2024-solar-eclipse-cities-nineveh/
2 places named Nineveh, not 7, in path of totality for April 8 eclipse | Fact check
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/04/05/april-8-eclipse-totality-path-nineveh/73215252007/
Why Do Colors Change during a Solar Eclipse?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-do-colors-change-during-a-solar-eclipse/
From bone smashing to chin extensions: how ‘looksmaxxing’ is reshaping young men’s faces https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/feb/15/from-bone-smashing-to-chin-extensions-how-looksmaxxing-is-reshaping-young-mens-faces
FBI Associates Meme Slang Words ‘Looksmaxxing,’ ‘Based’ And ‘Redpilled’ With Extremism, According To Internal Documents
https://www.msn.com/en-us/lifestyle/lifestyle-buzz/fbi-associates-meme-slang-words-looksmaxxing-based-and-redpilled-with-extremism-according-to-internal-documents/ar-AA19Mkm1
Boeing CEO bizarrely calls Alaska Airlines plane door blowout a ‘quality escape’
https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/boeing-alaska-airlines-door-plug-b2477577.html
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: First question, when people write your name in the possessive, like “Ross’ book”, do you like two S’s or three?
ROSS PERLIN: Oof. I’m sort of a two S… I’m a two S guy. It feels… the apostrophe does enough. But you know, I’m not a prescriptivist.
DANIEL: Classy.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. And with me now, it’s Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, I want to ask you a question. I’d like you to finish this sentence. I always cry at…
HEDVIG: I always cry. Hmm, emotional moments in movies and TV shows.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. Okay.
HEDVIG: I am actually crying.
DANIEL: So, you’re really able to immerse yourself into it.
HEDVIG: Oh, I have. It’s unvoluntary. There are a lot of things I cannot watch because I get a very strong emotional reaction.
DANIEL: Ooh, what’s a movie that you’ve noped out of or just refused to watch entirely?
HEDVIG: I can only watch two Peep Show episodes in a row. I cannot watch three.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: That is way too much social anxiety and stress for my little body.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Like, we watched a movie recently, a kids movie called Robot Dreams, that I can really recommend. If you see Robot Dreams, it’s very beautiful. It’s a very nice movie. It’s about a robot and a dog. Roughly, that’s what it’s about. And it takes place in New York City. There’s no dialogue. So, we watched it. There’s no one speaking in any language. There are some songs with English lyrics, but there’s no dialogue. And it has some sad stuff in it. And I watched it with my godchildren, and when we came out of the cinema, one of them asked me, “Why do people watch things that make them feel sad?”
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s a really good question. What did you say?
HEDVIG: It’s a really good question. Well, I don’t know if it was a good answer, but I was like, “Well, it’s supposed to be good to explore negative… feelings that make you feel pain in a safe environment that is pretend, and you practice feeling the feelings without it being your actual life.
DANIEL: That’s a really good answer. That’s what I was going to say.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s true though.
DANIEL: Then you can come back and say, “Then why don’t we experience happy things vicariously?”
HEDVIG: Well, we do.
DANIEL: That would be good. [LAUGHS] We do.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: It’s a safe place to explore feelings without having to live in the sadness.
HEDVIG: Right. But, why do we need to practice that? Why not just, I don’t know… anyway. Yes. [LAUGHS] This is our intro. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Why are you asking me these questions, Daniel?
DANIEL: I will now answer the question for myself. I always cry at planetariums. Yep.
HEDVIG: Why?
DANIEL: Because the universe is just so big. And also, I get to go with a couple of tiny children. And then, we talk about our world and the universe and how we know stuff. And I love being science dad. Science dad is a really good version of me.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: But it’s just so big and we are so tiny and it fills me with feels.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. That’s unexpected, actually.
DANIEL: Crying at planetariums is really on brand for me.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: Hey, thanks for joining me on this episode, Hedvig. We’ve no Ben this time because at school holidays and Ben is off doing Ben things. He has cast off the shackles of teacherdom and he is ranging about in his pure Ben form.
HEDVIG: Wild and free.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah. Teacher free.
HEDVIG: Teacher free… child… Well, other-people’s-children free. But perhaps spending time with his child.
DANIEL: That’s a good thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, we miss him, but we’re looking forward to having him back one of these days.
HEDVIG: We miss him.
DANIEL: On this episode, we are talking to Dr Ross Perlin of the Endangered Language Alliance.
HEDVIG: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: They do good work.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Trying to maintain languages in New York City. I’m going to be having a chat with him about his new book, Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York.
HEDVIG: New York’s a big place. They’ve got a lot of people. They’ve got a lot of languages.
DANIEL: It is. Somebody asked, was it Billy the Kid, why do you rob banks? And he said, “It’s where the money is.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: So, I guess that’s where the language is. There’s a lot of languages in New York City. I mean, some places you can have an apartment full of people speaking one language, and it’s more people than are even in the original place where that language comes from.
HEDVIG: Yes, I know people who have traveled to faraway places to talk to people who speak a particular language and then met them at the laundromat in New York and been like, “Oh, I could have just gone around the corner. Well, that was cool. Hey, can I pay you? and we talk?” And they’re like, “Yeah, that’s great.”
DANIEL: But you might not know which corner to go around unless you look at the website of the Endangered Language Alliance. And the website is called Languages of New York City. It’s languagemap.nyc, and it shows where people speak other languages. Take a guess Hedvig, out of the 7,000-ish languages in the world, how many languages do they have on this website, languagemap.nyc.
HEDVIG: Is it possible that there’s only one person who speaks a language and that qualifies?
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: In that case, 7,000 in the world. Some of them are no longer spoken. And how many in New York? There’s about 2,200 in Oceania, plus Island Southeast Asia.
DANIEL: We’re constrained by their ability to notice as well.
HEDVIG: Constrained by their ability to notice. Okay, well, 1,100.
DANIEL: That’s a really good guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Oh, is it.
DANIEL: The actual number they have listed is 700.
HEDVIG: Okay, so I was not far away.
DANIEL: You were not far away at all. That’s really good. But think about that. That’s 1/10th of the world’s languages that have been observed in New York on this website.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty darn impressive. That’s really cool.
DANIEL: Ross also writes that this is seven times the number of languages recorded by the US Census.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh. Yeah, I can totally believe that.
DANIEL: I’ve been reading it. He says, “Nowhere on the planet square mile after square mile is more linguistically diverse than the borough of Queens.”
HEDVIG: [MURMURS] Nowhere on the planet, borough of…
DANIEL: Not even Papua New Guinea?
HEDVIG: Well.
DANIEL: Interesting contention.
HEDVIG: Well, the thing about New Guinea is that not everyone lives in Port Moresby.
DANIEL: True.
HEDVIG: Right. So, the country as a whole might have more languages, but are all of those spoken in Port Moresby? Maybe they are. Let’s see if anyone from Papua New Guinea, or who travels there regularly, can contest this. So, we put out a challenge, don’t we?
DANIEL: We do. That’s what we do.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This book is a portrait of the language seen in New York City. It’s history, it’s present and its future. So, I’m looking forward to that chat with Dr Ross Perlin. One nice thing I got to do is I got to put the word out to patrons on our Discord that Ross was coming on, and did they have any questions…
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: And they did have some great questions, so I got to ask them to Ross. And that is just one benefit that you get as a patron. You get a heads-up on upcoming episodes.
HEDVIG: And did they ask questions that you were going to ask, or did they also suggest questions that you thought were really good but you would never have asked?
DANIEL: There were both. I just took a look at the questions, and then I got to structure them in an order that I thought was going to work, and it really did. It formed the backbone. The backbone of the interview. It’s a case where, once again, our listeners hand us great stuff and help us push the show forward.
HEDVIG: Yeah, they’re like our little editor teams, except they’re working for free, which you shouldn’t do, but they seem to like it, so.
DANIEL: Well, we try to give back.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: So, if you’re not a patron, why not sign up and you’ll get that kind of bonus, but also lots of others. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
HEDVIG: Boop.
DANIEL: All right, Hedwig, we got some news. So, this story is a little bit older, but it’s really fun and you noticed it. Do you want to tell us about the cat story?
HEDVIG: Well, so I have cats, as long-time listeners of this show will know, and they’re very sweet, and they will vocalise and do little meows. And I’ve been asking myself, what do they think that they’re doing? And what do they think that I’m doing? Because what does happen is they say [MAKES CAT SOUNDS]. And then I say, [MAKES SIMILAR CAT SOUNDS] and then I don’t know what happened? I think, minimally, it’s something like, “I’m here, you’re here.”
DANIEL: We’re here.
HEDVIG: Meh, that’s probably it. But in this paper from 2020, Emanuela Prato-Previde et al tried to… They played clips of cats in three different scenarios and then tested to see if humans could predict what scenario the cats were vocalising about.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: So, the scenarios were waiting for food.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: This is… I can attest, as a cat owner, there’s a lot of meows happening when they know food is…
DANIEL: This would be the bulk of the corpus, wouldn’t it?
HEDVIG: Uh-huh. Yeah. There’s a lot here. Isolation. They’re in an unfamiliar environment, and there is no cat… like, the owner isn’t there. The cat was free to roam in the room for 30 minutes in the presence of the owner, and then they were left alone in the room for five minutes. So, what sounds do they make when they don’t see a human?
DANIEL: [MAKES A SHARP MEOW] Unhappy noises?
HEDVIG: Well, they’re strange. Sandy makes them sometimes. They’re odd. And then finally, they’re being groomed and brushed by their owner, what sounds do they make then? So, they play these sounds to humans and to see if humans… So, this is not a can cats understand humans? This is a can humans understand cats question.
DANIEL: Right. Okay, I see that they had to figure out what was the context. Was it food, isolation, or brushing?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And they had to guess, for want of a better term, I’m going to say whether it was a happy noise or a sad noise. Was it good or was it bad? Okay. So, were humans good at this?
HEDVIG: Well, they were. Less than half of the participants were able to correctly identify the vocalisations in the correct context.
DANIEL: Doh.
HEDVIG: The one that was easiest to identify was, surprise, surprise, waiting for food.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
HEDVIG: Those sounds are very… at least in my cats, they’re very signal excitement. They’re like, [MAKES EXCITED MEOWING SOUNDS]
DANIEL: [MAKES EXCITED MEOWING SOUNDS] Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Female participants and cat owners, surprise, surprise showed a higher ability to correctly classify vocalisations. So, surprise if you know cats.
DANIEL: Yeah. If you know cats or if you are female.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: That’s interesting. Regarding the emotional value, the cat sounds that they made when they were in isolation were perceived as negative, which I can understand, but I think it’s good to remind that doesn’t mean that they are negative.
DANIEL: No, that’s right. They were able to pick brushing and isolation better than average.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: They matched the human judges’ intuition that this was a negative or a positive noise.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I think that’s about what we can say.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. So, I thought that was pretty cool.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s a cool study. And I guess it just shows that… I remember reading a while ago that cats don’t usually meow to each other. They usually just meow to humans.
HEDVIG: Yes. And when they’re kittens, they meow to their mother.
DANIEL: Yes. Okay.
HEDVIG: And a lot of domestication in general of animals is correlated with keeping them in an infant-like state. So, a lot of things that domesticised dogs do are similar to what wild dogs would do when they’re puppies, etc. The same is true for cats.
DANIEL: Hmm, okay. Interesting. Well, it’s too bad that we suck at interpretation.
HEDVIG: Did you take from the study that we suck at it?
DANIEL: No, I took from the study that most people are worse than random chance.
HEDVIG: Uh, okay.
DANIEL: Well, worse than 50%. So, that’s not exactly the same as random chance, but not great. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Okay. Okay. Okay. All right.
DANIEL: But you can learn to read cat. You can learn to sort of understand cat if you have a cat.
HEDVIG: And unfortunately, cats might be different from each other. So, even cat owners might hear these cats that they don’t know and do wrong but would have heard their own cats right.
DANIEL: Exactly. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: Okay, cool.
HEDVIG: Cool. Anyway, thank you for that. That was fun.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: We’re always up for a bit of the language interpretation. I wonder what this means for tech tasks where they try to do pet interpreters and things.
HEDVIG: Oh, those apps that you can download that will just randomly pick. So, you record the sound of your cat, and then it says wants food, wants pets, wants outside, whatever. Those are fun for seven-year-olds.
DANIEL: You could probably get a high accuracy by just saying it’s food.
HEDVIG: Yes. Oh, my god. Yes.
DANIEL: This one was suggested to us by Ramsey via email, hello@becauselanguage.com. It’s about Estonian. How well do you know Estonian? Are you aware of the Estonian language scene, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: A little bit. I know that I have some friends who are Estonian, who speak Estonian. I know that Estonian is part of the Uralic language family, which also is where we find Finnish, and that Finnish and Estonian are relatively close in that genealogy. I know that Estonian has contrastive consonant length, so they have three lengths of consonants. This came up in my linguistics 101 class this year because we had some examples, and because all of our examples were only written down, I asked an Estonian speaker that I know to record a short, a long, and a very long ‘ka’ which is fun. Basically, you mainly draw out the occlusive face.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense to me intuitively, but I’m having a hard time thinking of ‘ka’ as anything but the length that it just is because I have an English-speaking brain.
HEDVIG: Well, these are all three different words. So, they are different, and there is a sound difference. And the only difference has to do with the middle consonant, which is a velar, unvoiced plosive. I have to translate in my head from Swedish terminology to English because I just taught phonology in Swedish.
DANIEL: In other words, it’s a k sound.
HEDVIG: It’s a ‘ka’ and they mean different things. They mean, if I’m right, they mean package and something and then into the package. So, like a case ending.
DANIEL: All right. Let’s hear them.
HEDVIG: They sound like buki, baki, baaki.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. So, we’re just delaying the release that little bit.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And there’s some tension things happening as well. It’s fun. It’s fun. Anyway, those are the things I know about Estonian.
DANIEL: That was not very difficult. Well, there’s something else going on with the Estonian scene that Ramsey is telling us about. This is from an article in Estonian Public Broadcasting by Hanneli Rudi.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: The link will be in the show notes for this episode. So, on the one side, we’ve got the Dictionary of Standard Estonian and people who like it. So, that’s one side. This dictionary is based on standard literary Estonian, which is a thing.
HEDVIG: Many dictionaries are based on that. Yes.
DANIEL: Yep. I think one way that you know this is a literary dictionary is that the corpus that it’s based on is about one-third fiction. So, there’s your literary aspect to it.
HEDVIG: Right, yeah. Okay, cool. Mm-mm.
DANIEL: And just in my study for this, I won’t say it’s a prescriptive dictionary, but it might be maybe a normative dictionary, like, this is how you should use Estonian. They release a new version of the dictionary every seven years, and that’s coming up next year.
HEDVIG: Okay, fair enough.
DANIEL: Then, we’ve got the Institute of the Estonian Language, the EKI. They want to reform the dictionary. They want to use a corpus that’s only 4% literary.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: They want more scientific texts.
HEDVIG: More scientific texts, not more spoken corpora.
DANIEL: That is part of it as well.
HEDVIG: Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: I wasn’t able to figure out the breakdown for the entire thing in this article.
HEDVIG: Fair enough. Fair enough.
DANIEL: But specifically, they want to replace the Dictionary of Standard Estonian and the Dictionary of Foreign words, because Estonian is always soaking up lots of foreign words, they want to take those and replace it with a single, unified dictionary.
HEDVIG: This is where I may know something, which is that the Baltic countries, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, are next to each other and have, at various points, been part of other political units, including units that have been dominated by Russia in some way, like the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation. And as a result of that, there are a lot of Russian speakers and other people in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It appears to me as an outsider, and I may be wrong, that a part of their nation, statehood, is to differentiate themselves from their neighbors, and especially from their Russian big neighbor. So, they have, at various points, been antagonistic towards loanwords from Russian into their languages.
DANIEL: Fair.
HEDVIG: And I suspect this might be why they have two different dictionaries. Is that the case?
DANIEL: Mm, it is. I’ve found articles where the writers explain that Estonian is a small language. So, keeping track of the foreign words and marking them off as separate is considered to them a form of guaranteeing the survival of Estonian.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: So, into this mix comes the chancellor of justice, Ülle Madise, who maintains that this reform to replace the dictionary is in conflict with the law.
HEDVIG: Law?
DANIEL: She’s threatening to take the issue… taking it to court.
HEDVIG: Wait, wait, wait, [LAUGHS] wait. There’s a law?
DANIEL: Let me put it this way. It’s not that it’s against the law to adjust the dictionary.
HEDVIG: Uh-huh.
DANIEL: Instead, let’s just say that you take a dictionary and you get rid of a lot of the definitions. Now, you’ve got a legal problem because…
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: If a word means a certain thing in the old dictionary, but now in the new dictionary, it doesn’t, and you’ve got a whole bunch of legal precedent that involves the old word, now you’ve got an interpretation problem.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. This is why we have… lawyers are educated. Because when you use words and you say something, for example, peanut is a type of nut, and then people would say, “No, it’s not, not according to the way phylogeny and biology works,” you can say, “Well, in regular language term, we would call it a nut. And in biology classification terms, we call it a, whatever fruit or whatever seed.”
DANIEL: A legume.
HEDVIG: A legume. There we go. And the same is true for all kinds of specialisations including, I would have thought, law, that when they say something like, “The person was badly hurt,” you don’t go into the dictionary and define badly hurt. You go into some special legal dictionary or precedents or whatever else, and you find out what “badly hurt” means. Is that not the way it works?
DANIEL: Well, and it’s weird to derive legal precedent from a dictionary which is admittedly literary in nature.
HEDVIG: Yes. I’m not sure that the fact that it being literary would speak in any way to or from this. This is very odd.
DANIEL: Nevertheless, this is the aspect that has been taking the bulk of the discussion here. It would be a problem if some definitions disappear, especially in a legal context. But is that really what they want to do? Is that what they’re talking about doing? I’m not sure, but it seems like they could agree on, “Hey, let’s add definitions, but not remove.”
HEDVIG: Well, now that I think about it a bit more, we have a case in Sweden that got a lot of attention, which is trigger warning about sexual violence and children. So, just there was a girl who was touched in a way she didn’t appreciate. I don’t know all the details of this case, but part of the issue had to do with a new word for female genitalia that this child used.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: And turns out that the definition of rape has to do with whether you go inside the vulva or not.
DANIEL: Yep. Okay.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah. And the jurors didn’t know if the new word that the child used covers that or not. So, the definition of whether this was rape or not was dependent on the juror’s knowledge of this word that the victim used. Yes.
DANIEL: Oof.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: How do you solve that kind of thing?
HEDVIG: Well, when you don’t know, you solve in favor of the accused. You say, this is unclear whether this is rape or not. So, the person was not accused of rape. And then, the whole of Sweden were like, “Who are these old people who don’t know words for female genitalia? Fuck right off.” And it became a whole debate. And I’m just saying why I’m bringing this up is I don’t know. People are going to write in and tell more details about this case. But the point is the word mattered. The word that this victim used mattered. And they couldn’t understand what the word meant, and that had a consequence for the case. So, maybe that can happen.
DANIEL: Okay. Thanks for bringing that in. It really does show that this stuff matters. Defining words really matters. I like this story because I like dictionaries. But it’s also, it’s good to see that the struggle over language isn’t just particular to English, that lots and lots of other languages are sorting through issues relating to language change.
HEDVIG: Oh, of course. Oh, my god. Did you think you were special? Oh, my god, Daniel.
DANIEL: No, I don’t. But I do like bringing other cases to light because as we work through our issues, it would be beneficial to see what other people are going through so that we can take the good stuff.
HEDVIG: I’m curious what happens with this case. I would love if people who know stuff about Estonian would keep us continuously updated on what the conclusion is here. Because it’s not obvious what to do.
DANIEL: We’ve got Estonian listeners.
HEDVIG: Yeah, Estonian listeners. Please write in to us at hello@becauselanguage.com and give us a running commentary of this because I’m interested.
DANIEL: Thanks for that. And thanks, Ramsey, for the story. This last one was suggested by Diego. Hedvig. What’s your experience with learning multiple languages? Do you find that when you learn new words in a new language, it kicks out words you learned in an older language or in a language that you learned earlier?
HEDVIG: Not kick out. If I don’t use a language for a long time, I forget words. That’s unrelated to that. But I do find that my first languages, Swedish and English, live in one place in my brain and everyone else lives in another box. And that box can—like, when I need to reach into that box, I can get a random one from that box.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Yeah. So, let me just clarify then. So, for you, your L2 box is basically an undifferentiated box that can get mixed up.
HEDVIG: Yeah, my L2 box, exactly. For example, I was learning Samoan. And in Samoan, there is one article that is “le,” and I have also learned French in my life, and it’s “le,” but it’s spelled the same. And my brain would often impose French grammar on Samoan because it was like those words are really similar and they belong both to the L2 box. Why don’t you just grab randomly?
DANIEL: Yeah, that’ll work.
HEDVIG: Did not work. Did not work.
DANIEL: I can’t say that I take it any of my languages… That’s not true, actually, you know what? I did a minor degree in Spanish. I was learning Spanish with native speakers.
b Yeah?
DANIEL: So, yeah, I took it pretty far. I always had the intuition that my L2’s were separate boxes and I never seemed to get them mixed up. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. Good for you. Good for you. Look at you.
DANIEL: I know, I’m so great. Well, this is work from Dr Anne Mickan from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. Maybe you’ve heard of it. This was published in the quarterly journal of Experimental Psychology. They found Dutch speakers who knew English but not Spanish. They gave them a test to see what English words they knew. And then out of those English words they knew, they got them to remember some Spanish words-
HEDVIG: Mm-mm, mm-mm.
DANIEL: -that were equivalent. And for the Spanish words they learned, it turns out those Dutch speakers were slower to recall the English words, if they could even remember them at all, compared to English words they hadn’t learned in Spanish. It seems like the new Spanish words crowded out the old English words.
HEDVIG: Now, you and I both know the wonderful Mark Ellison.
DANIEL: Yes, we do.
HEDVIG: And we know that he conducted some experiments with Dutch and English bilinguals about what he called the Doppel avoidance effect together with Luisa Miceli, right?
DANIEL: Correct.
HEDVIG: Correct. Luisa Miceli. And they’ve done some other experiments as well. And so now my question is, are these new words that they learned similar to the words that were getting kicked out? Because then this could be Doppel avoidance.
DANIEL: You’re right. If it’s Doppel avoidance, then when a word that you want to say is similar to a word in a different language, your brain goes, “I’m going to say the word. Wait, no, don’t say that because that’s too close. That’s like the other word that you don’t want. Oh, wait, no, wait. Actually, those two are the same. I am going to say,” but then a lot of time has gone by and so Doppel avoidance.
HEDVIG: So, the idea is that you’re aware of false friends, so you are aware that embrazada and embarrassed don’t mean the same thing. Embrazada, I’m probably saying that all wrong, means pregnant and embarrassed means to feel social shame in a situation.
DANIEL: Yep, yep.
Hedvig. So, your brain goes, “Ooh, ooh, those two words are similar. Ooh, are we in a false friend scenario? Ooh, maybe don’t pick that word. Pick another word.”
DANIEL: Hold off, hold off, hold off.
HEDVIG: And that is mine and Daniel’s interpretation of Mark and Luis’s work on Doppel avoidance. So, in this experiment, is that what’s happening?
DANIEL: Well, let me see if I can find the word lists, because-
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, here we go. 103 nouns. Here we go. We’re in the supplemental material. Whoo-hoo.
HEDVIG: Yes, we love it in the supplemental material. It’s our favorite place. People always put all the good stuff there.
DANIEL: Not me. I only love reading abstracts. Oh, shit.
HEDVIG: No, no, no.
DANIEL: Okay, here we go.
HEDVIG: I think our listeners enjoy us finding out things at the same time as them.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: She says, not knowing if that’s true.
DANIEL: Okay, I have here the list. I have appendix A. No, there’s two predefined sets and a reserved set. And as I scan my eyes over the list, I am actually seeing that the words that are used are actually pretty different from English to Spanish. Like, chair is silla and shark is tiburón, and swing is columpio.
HEDVIG: Okay. There we go.
DANIEL: Whip is látigo. Yeah, you know what? I’m not actually seeing any here in this list that are really, really close. I’m not seeing any Doppels at all.
HEDVIG: Okay, good. Then, they cleared the Doppel avoidance confounder effect. Amazing.
DANIEL: Certainly did for me. Wow.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Good job.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay. Well, hey, we managed… Do you know what we just did? We managed to synthesise two pieces of work.
HEDVIG: And then, find out that they weren’t related. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: The problem didn’t exist. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Well, yeah. Anyway, It’s a good check. It’s a good check. We checked it.
DANIEL: It’s a good check. Another thing that came out of this was that the effect where learning new words seemed to kick out old words, that effect held up even if they didn’t take the final test that day, even if they were allowed to sleep on it, to maybe consolidate the Spanish a little bit. Didn’t matter. Gave them the chance to sleep on it, and it didn’t help.
HEDVIG: But they were tested against people who didn’t have to learn a new set of words. Right?
DANIEL: That’s right. Their speed, and their accuracy was compared against people who didn’t have to learn the Spanish.
HEDVIG: Mm-mm. Yeah. Interesting. That’s cool. I mean, people describe this effect. I haven’t personally experienced it knowingly, but a lot of things go on unconsciously. I’m not always monitoring what happens in my learning. So, maybe more of us are subject to this effect than we think.
DANIEL: And it does go to show that learning new languages is costly from a cognitive perspective.
HEDVIG: Yeah. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, but you’re right. We shouldn’t lie and say, “It’s super easy. You can just pick it up in an afternoon.” No, [DANIEL LAUGHS] it’s not. It’s work. It is work. Don’t pretend it’s not.
DANIEL: And our brains will try to prune that if we don’t need it.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Thanks, Diego, for that. Just to finish up, Listener C has emailed us about the Ojibwa word of the day on YouTube. Ojibwa is an indigenous language of North America of the Algonquian language family. The channel is run by Dr Anton Treuer. He’s a Professor of Ojibwa at Bemidji State University in Minnesota, USA.
HEDVIG: Ojibwe is also related to Cree, which is a language people sometimes have heard more about than Ojibwe. And now, I’m going to say, I think that… oh, God, I might get it wrong. Is Anishinaabemowin the word for Ojibwe language in Ojibwe? Let’s find out.
DANIEL: Cool. I love it.
HEDVIG: Does Hedwig identify Anishinaabemowin? Yes. Yes. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Yes. Anishinaabemowin? I’m probably pronouncing it wrong.
DANIEL: Congratulations. Nice going.
HEDVIG: Sorry, sorry. I don’t need to crash my cell phone. That is all I know about Ojibwe.
DANIEL: Well, you’re about to learn a lot more from these videos. These are all 26-second videos, and I’m just going to read the titles of some of the offerings. Here we go.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Breath that smells like crap.
HEDVIG: Ooh, good.
DANIEL: Do you want to know the word for that in Ojibwe?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: You can listen to it. Dingleberries. That’s another one.
HEDVIG: Wait, is that what I think it is?
DANIEL: It is what you think it is. It’s little particles of poop. In fact, you know what? A lot of the recent ones have to do with poop. They’re systematically going through…
HEDVIG: I think that’s good.
DANIEL: One’s breath smells like crap. Oh, eat something. That’s very good. Eat stinky things. Fart silently. Oh, yeah. Silent but deadly. So, there’s a lot of these here. This is pretty cool. I love it.
HEDVIG: I like it when people who make dictionaries in other language, documentation or learning, don’t just do the respectable things. Like, a couple of years ago, the Swedish sign language lexicon did a collaboration with the association for information about sexual health, and they did whole dictionary entries on cunnilingus.
DANIEL: Rimming.
HEDVIG: Condoms.
DANIEL: Yay.
HEDVIG: Birth control. Like, this kind of stuff.
DANIEL: That’s cool.
HEDVIG: And people are like, “Ooh, why is that in the…?” It’s like, well, it’s part of the language. Here you go. Stink your breath. Part of the language. Come on.
DANIEL: It’s all part of it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I love it. Can I hear any of them?
DANIEL: Oh, yeah, sure. Why not? Let’s do one. Let’s do fart silently.
HEDVIG: Yes. Nice.
VIDEO: Gimooji-boogidi, Gimooji-boogidi.
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: And on the screen, it says, Gimooji-boogidi=Fart Silently. And there’s your Ojibwe word of the day.
HEDVIG: Gimooji-boogidi.
DANIEL: Boogidi.
HEDVIG: Like it.
DANIEL: Now, you know.
HEDVIG: Now, I know.
DANIEL: So, C says the channel actually is a good way to start getting a feel for Ojibwe derivational morphology, which is the hardest part of the language for non-L1 speakers.
HEDVIG: Ah. Nice.
DANIEL: C, thanks so much for showing us that. And if you’ve got anything like that, we’d love to hear about it. So, send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com.
HEDVIG: And to be clear, it doesn’t have to have unusual lewd body part things in it, but if it does, please send it.
DANIEL: You said butt. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I said but.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to Related or Not. This is our favorite game.
HEDVIG: This is our favorite game.
DANIEL: We’ve got a theme song.
HEDVIG: Related or Not.
DANIEL: Ben’s not with us right now, so our friend Hugh has given us a theme song.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Using Ben’s voice.
HEDVIG: Thank you, Hugh.
DANIEL: So, I know Ben’s not here right now, but let’s…
HEDVIG: He’s with us in many ways.
DANIEL: This will make us sound like he is here with us. So, let’s play it.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME SONG PLAYS]
HEDVIG: Nice.
DANIEL: I think it’s very clever how they got Ben to harmonise with himself also.
HEDVIG: Hmm-mm.
DANIEL: It’s a cracking riff.
HEDVIG: Lovely.
DANIEL: Thanks, Hugh, for that. You ready, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: I’ve got four pairs of words here, and only one of the pairs is related. You have to guess which pair.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And I’ve randomised these.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. Number one, BOY and BOISTEROUS.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: You must admit that boys can be boisterous. Number two, TIRE, like you find on a car tire, and ATTIRE like when you get dressed. What kind of attire do you have?
HEDVIG: Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
DANIEL: Number three, RIGOR and RIGMAROLE. When you have to go through some rigmarole, it can be quite rigorous.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And number four.
HEDVIG: Oh, shit. Four.
DANIEL: SAND and SANDAL. So, the four of them. BOY and BOISTEROUS. TIRE and ATTIRE. RIGOR and RIGMAROLE. SAND and SANDAL. And one of these is related. The other three aren’t.
HEDVIG: Hmmm. Boy-boisterous, tire-attire, rigor-rigmarole, sand-sandal. So, I’m pretty sure that sandal has to do with vandal-sandals and the folkvandring thing. So, I’m going to discount that.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I don’t feel boy and boisterous. The vibes are off.
DANIEL: How so? Bad vibes. [WHISPERS] Bad vibes.
HEDVIG: This just feels like it’s so short, and there’s so much chance for randomness and such short things. The part that is similar, boy-boisterous. And then, I’m drawn to tire-attire. There is more things here. There is attiralj, which is accessories in Swedish, which I think is related as well. And I’m wondering-
DANIEL: You know, a tire could be an accessory.
HEDVIG: To a car, yes. That’s where I’m getting. But I feel like tire probably has something to do with floating, because tires are… when it’s inflated, because a wheel like a wagon, doesn’t have tires. A wagon has wheels.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Right. And the difference between a wheel and a tire has to do with the air inside of it. I would guess that there’s a rubber element and an air inside. That’s what makes a wheel different from a tire.
DANIEL: Could a tire possibly be an uninflated rubber thing?
HEDVIG: No. And I also even might think that car mechanics would maybe even say that the tire is just the rubber part and that the other part is the wheel.
DANIEL: That’s fair. I think you might be right there.
HEDVIG: And there’s nothing about rubber and inflatable that makes me think of a being belonging to something like an accessory. Okay. And then, there was rigor and rigmarole. So, rigor has to do with being stiff, like rigor mortis, rigid, etc. So, rigmarole, is it rigmarole, I have to go through a whole rigmarole to get married. I have to fill in a lot of paperwork. That would be a use of that. So, are those things stiff? Yeah. For me, it’s between rigmarole and rigor mortis, and tire and attire. Yeah. I think I’m going go with rigamarole and rigor mortis being related, but I don’t feel confident. This was a hard one.
DANIEL: This was tough.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: It was tire and attire.
HEDVIG: Fudge. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I felt I told you I felt attracted. I felt the attraction.
DANIEL: I was just willing you to go for that one. Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: All right, tell me.
DANIEL: By the way, it was Gordon on Patreon who sent us tire versus attire, and I couldn’t believe it. Basically, to attire means the “at” part is add toward, and the tire means order or things in a row or things are dressed up. So, when you are attired, you are put in order.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Tire is simply a shortened form of attire because you deck out an automobile with tires.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: But then, I wanted to find out about tyre, like we say in Australia and British countries, and tire. What’s the deal with the spelling? Turns out the tyre spelling was the original.
HEDVIG: Okay. Yeah, fair enough.
DANIEL: In the 1600s, everyone changed it to tire with an I.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: And then, the Americans took it away with them. And then in the 1800s, the British changed it back to tyre with a y. So, this is another one of those things that Americans didn’t innovate. Everyone did it. Americans took it away with them, and then the British changed it themselves. Okay, now the other three. Boisterous comes from a word meaning rough and coarse, used to be boisterous, possibly from bustos, which was a rough road. Boy, boy is a very uncertain etymology, but none of the proposed etymologies have anything to do with roughness or roads. Possibly a variant of babe. Possibly.
HEDVIG: Oh, like a piglet.
DANIEL: Well, not the 1995 movie about the piglet. No, but a baby.
HEDVIG: Sorry. Doesn’t that come from piglet?
DANIEL: I don’t think it does. Does it? Wait.
HEDVIG: What? Like…
DANIEL: I was thinking, Hedvig, you’ve clearly gone insane. This is a lot earlier than the movie. Babe. No, probably. Okay. Etymonline has it as probably something having to do with baby talk. Ba, ba, ba, ba. So, you talk about a bab-
HEDVIG: Okay, Etymonline.
DANIEL: -bab, ba-ba. Yep. And I think if I checked more sources, it would have the same thing.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Why don’t I? Let’s keep going. Rigor comes from an old French word meaning severity or strength or hardness. Rigmarole comes from a game that there used to be called ragman roll. And in this game, you’d have a long scroll, and on this scroll would be descriptions of people. You would unroll this roll, and whatever part of the scroll you got to was your description. It may have been a gambling game.
HEDVIG: Mm-mm. Okay.
DANIEL: Eventually, the meaning shifted to a long, tedious thing you had to do, and that all comes from ragman roll. And then, sand. Sand is just sand. But a sandal comes from a Latin word, sandalum, and that’s just a sandal. Doesn’t seem to have anything to do with sand, although sandals are well known for collecting lots of sand.
HEDVIG: Wait, wait, wait. What about my people migration Europe times thing?
DANIEL: What about it?
HEDVIG: Because vandal comes from the Vandals, which were a people.
DANIEL: Yes.
HEDVIG: So, do sandal come from the people, Sandal?
DANIEL: I am not finding any connection between sandals and vandals.
HEDVIG: Well, I am going to check Swedish Wikipedia.
DANIEL: Vandal is an eponym. It’s from the Germanic tribe we’re talking. We only see vandal around the 1600s. It was back-formed and put on them. Whereas sandals, a lot older, that one’s from old Latin.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: So, I’m afraid the coincidence is merely similarity. Let’s go on to our next one. And this one comes to us from Jenna via SpeakPipe. Let’s hear what Jenna has to ask us.
HEDVIG: Yes.
JENNA: As I’m recording this, it’s the day before Easter, and I was taking a walk this morning and almost got lost. And I was wondering if the words Easter and East are related.
HEDVIG: Oh.
DANIEL: There you have it. Easter and east. Poor Jenna getting lost on the walk, trying desperately to find east. I’ve had that problem. What do you think about east and Easter? Are they related or are they not?
HEDVIG: They are not because Easter has to do with Ishtar, which is ancient Mesopotamian goddess of fertility, I am pretty sure.
DANIEL: Okay, my guess. Here’s what I wrote. I have heard so many versions of this. It’s not Ishtar, like a lot of people say. [LAUGHS] I have seen so many graphics saying “Christian stole Easter. It’s all Ishtar.” And then, I’ve heard people say that’s not what that is.
HEDVIG: You know that it’s fertility stuff though.
DANIEL: It’s absolutely fertility stuff.
HEDVIG: Yes. Okay, we agree on that.
DANIEL: I said it might be Ēostre, who was also a goddess. It’s some goddess. It’s got to be some goddess. I said, I cannot remember the right answer, and I should. I think east is a likely candidate, so I said related. Okay, let’s see the answer. The answer is they are related. Easter comes from Proto-Germanic auštro, meaning dawn, possibly the name of a goddess. OED finds this a bit unlikely, but ultimately from east toward the sunrise.
HEDVIG: What the… what the… what the… [DANIEL LAUGHS] what?
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Well, that’s it for now. And I would just like to say thanks to everybody who’s contributing these. We are having fun with them.
HEDVIG: Yes, we are.
DANIEL: Keep sending them. If it’s been a while and I haven’t done yours, just send it again. That’s hello@becauselanguage.com. And thanks to Hugh S for our theme song. I think we might just stick with that for a little while.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s really nice. Thank you so much for doing that. I know what it’s like to record things and send them to people. It’s not the easiest. So, well done, and thank you for doing that.
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: I’m talking to Dr Ross Perlin, teacher of Linguistics at Columbia University, Cofounder of the Endangered Language Alliance, and author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. Ross, thanks for coming and hanging out with me today.
ROSS: Thanks, Daniel.
DANIEL: The book is subtitled The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. Is it a fight?
ROSS: I wish it was a walk in the park. It’s definitely something more like a fight. Maybe not hand-to-hand combat, but definitely an uphill battle. For especially the language activists and the speakers that I profile in the book that we work with at the Endangered Language Alliance, the pressures to speak a larger language, to shift languages, to give up your language, are immense, as I’m sure listeners know, and to actually feel those and to feel those in an urban context in a city like New York where, sure, on the one hand, there’s an incredible array of languages around. And to some extent, there’s a normalization of linguistic difference. But yeah, it’s an uphill battle.
I mean, never more so than when you’re revitalizing a language. As you know, I profile a language revivalist for Lenape, the original language of this land, of the New York area, to bring back a language that is at the brink, I mean, where you may not even have sufficient records of how the elders spoke. There might be some memories. But when everything around you is just swirling in the larger languages, all of the money, the policy, everything is pointing in the direction of the powerful language and in fact, the attitudes that you have internalized, that people have been sending in your direction, that your language is somehow not worthy or maybe even broken or somehow problematic or just a dialect, or if it doesn’t have writing, it’s not valuable, it’s not sophisticated, all of those things make it a fight, I think, in a lot of ways, whether it’s an internal mental one or maybe it’s not a violent fight, but it’s a real mental jujitsu.
DANIEL: Well, it looks like this fight is happening on lots of levels because, I mean, these speakers are fighting to keep their languages alive. But they’re also fighting as individuals for a place in the world, which means sometimes adopting English a lot of the time. I mean, somebody could speak a language, but then that language is competing with Tibetan, which in turn is competing with Mandarin, which in turn is competing with English. So, there’s just all kinds of currents going on here.
ROSS: Yeah, I mean, the most multilingual people in the world tend to be speakers of endangered languages. And they, in turn, are often the most marginalized people, the people that I’m profiling in the book. I mean, it’s a book that is both a linguistic history of New York, which is maybe the most linguistic university that has ever been. But it’s also about languages and cities more generally. And then, it’s a portrait of… it tells the story of the work of the Endangered Language Alliance through the stories of these six speakers.
And for the most part, we’re talking about immigration. We’re talking about a diaspora where people, as you say, who are coming to a new place and they’re struggling just to survive. They may be at the bottom of the social hierarchy. They may have to assimilate not just to speaking English for work, but actually to maybe Spanish or Nepali or Tibetan, one of the larger… whether it was the national language where they were coming from, and also the lingua franca of the neighborhood that they moved to in New York. Because part of what I sketch is how there is sort of an architecture to the linguistic geography, where there are microcosms of whole nations or world regions in all their linguistic diversity that might pop up in areas of Brooklyn and Queens, these hotbeds of linguistic diversity in the city. So, yeah, the pressure actually, on a speaker of Mixteco or Nahuatl coming from Mexico to Brooklyn is at first to speak Spanish with Dominican Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish speakers, and so on. So, yeah, the pressure is coming in many different directions.
I started writing the book also after many years of all this work. But what I think finally pushed me to do it now was COVID, where language could be a matter of life and death. And the epicenter of the pandemic was really… especially when it was hitting New York, it was hitting multilingual immigrant neighborhoods like famous Jackson Heights, Queens, which is square mile for square mile, about as linguistically diverse as any place I’ve ever seen. Those were getting hit hardest because precisely the people who I was profiling and talking to all this time were food delivery workers, essential workers who were keeping things functioning, who had to go out and work, who were living in overcrowded conditions. So, the fight was to stay alive.
DANIEL: And an illness that disproportionately hit the most linguistically experienced, the oldest members in the community as well.
ROSS: Exactly. I mean, many elders have passed during this time. There was a good side as well that people were reconnecting and rallying around language. There was all kinds of translation of public health materials, which we became involved in, and an unprecedented effort, I think, of linguists and communities to work together on that stuff, as well as what I understand was a boom in terms of remote classes and language revitalization activities that happened and is still ongoing. But at the same time, I mean, I think we haven’t even begun to mourn all those who were lost during this time. Yeah. As you say, it hit the elders too.
DANIEL: Yeah. You wrote in the book, “Now more than ever, languages are being hounded out of existence.” And I’ve been thinking about that a lot, and it makes me think of a question that we’d sometimes ask each other on Linguistics Twitter or whatever. Is language death… Sorry, I don’t know the terminology. We talk about sleeping languages. How do you talk about the terminology around languages? Endangered, dormant. What do you tend to say?
ROSS: It’s a good question. I think this has shifted. It varies from person to person, community to community. I think, for good reason, maybe people are talking less about terms like death and extinction and things that really have a heavy finality to them because there are all kinds of interesting things happening, I mean, with language revitalization possibilities of, yeah, this metaphor of a language sleeping and then being awakened is quite beautiful, I think.
Yeah. Some would say dormant. I think endangered, certainly, it’s in the name of the Endangered Language Alliance. It’s in the name of the book. I think endangerment… There’s also a metaphor there with what’s happening with biodiversity. So, we continue to speak about endangered languages. We speak about language loss but for me, it depends. Let the speakers in the communities use the terms they wish. I think there’s a burden on linguists to just look to those usages and ways of talking and not impose too much of their own discourse on this. But I think all the terms can work.
DANIEL: Well, let me use the term “language loss.” Is language loss always linked to oppression? Can you think of a time when speakers voluntarily abandon their language in favor of a different one? Could New York be one of those where economic pressures are working and it’s not directly linked to something like colonial…? I mean, it is linked to colonialism, but not directly. Or is all language death… Is it all language murder?
HEDVIG: I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. I think there’s a real spectrum of cases, and you do have communities that, yeah, where it’s a very clear case of colonialism and oppression, and those need to be highlighted and those impose a special responsibility. But then, you do have cases, and what you see in New York is a whole spectrum of cases. Of course, we tend to work with communities where there’s a strong impetus to maintain or revive the language, or at least there’s a group of people who want to do that.
But let’s say, if I think of the complexities of the world of Jewish languages, which is one set of projects that we’ve worked on, and that is very salient in New York, which is a Jewish diaspora capital, there’s a range of attitudes around the loss of different Jewish languages, and there’s a complexity to that as well. There might be large-scale willingness for people to no longer speak varieties of what’s been called Judeo Arabic, for instance, partly just the same way that there was, to some extent, with Yiddish partly because there’s been a total transplantation. People have left the original area. They often don’t have positive attitudes about the co-territorial language, whether it’s varieties of Arabic or varieties of German and so on. There were all kinds of different attitudes that then inform people being sort of willing to shift to a language that they might feel positive about.
Now, it could be that those attitudes came about because of some pretty tangled history that involved some pretty negative things. But I think you have to… yeah, you have to take the community where it is and there will be… Even within the world of Irish, for instance, which is a vibrant world here in New York, there are going to be some people who will feel strongly that Irish identity really has to be in the Irish language, and there will be others who will acknowledge and say that, sure, oppression was at maybe the root of the loss of Irish. But at this point, there is an Irish English, and Irish culture can continue in that.
DANIEL: I mean, English used to be different than what it is. Maybe it was once endangered, but we still have English. It’s way different than what it used to be, but we still call it English. We still think of it as English. We think of it as… at least, I think of it as my language. So, it changed, but that happens.
ROSS: Yeah. I mean, these things are very dynamic. They’re variable. Language names are an interesting look into this. I think we have the insistence on referring to English as a single, unitary thing, even though there have been attempts in the past to talk about the American language, for instance.
DANIEL: Englishes.
ROSS: Englishes, yeah. That makes a lot of sense as well. Whether you refer to Haitian Creole as Haitian Creole or just as Haitian, language names are such an interesting situation unto themselves. I mean, there’s obviously this split between the endonym and the exonym and inside name and an outside name. But then, there may be many inside names and those might change over time, reflecting different attitudes towards it. So, I think, we can allow for all this complexity and talk about it. For some communities, yeah, language may not be a huge focus, and there might generally be happiness with a shift. But by and large, at a global scale, the reasons why so much of this is happening really are connected to just very unequal structures.
DANIEL: Yeah. Let’s talk about New York for a second and why it turned out to be so linguistically diverse. You mention in the book that out of the 7,000 languages on earth, you’ve documented… or at least pointed to the existence, I was taking a look on the website, it’s languagemap.nyc and you’ve got 700 different languages around there. How did we get here?
ROSS: And counting. Yeah. I encourage all listeners to check out our language map. Yeah. And we’re sort of…
DANIEL: It is a treasure. I loved poking around there. It was so cool.
ROSS: Thanks. Yeah, I mean, this came out of the fact that really, the census, the US census, and I think this is true for censuses of other countries as well really does not capture all the linguistic diversity that’s going on, especially in cities. And then, when we think of most language maps as well, they color in these blocks of territory in different landmasses where they try to show where traditional territory is for a language. But how do you do that in a city? There are so many challenges around what can be block-to-block differences or several dozen languages in a single building. We don’t solve that challenge, but we try to gesture towards the complexity there.
As to why New York, well, I mean, the Endangered Language Alliance was founded in New York. I actually came in a couple of years later and became co-director, but I grew up in New York. I’d been working as a linguist doing my PhD research in Southwest China on Himalayan languages. I’m sure New York is a paradigm case, and that’s the focus of the book in many ways. But I think we look forward to seeing linguists working on this in the same way and maybe forming organizations. There’s some initial signs of this in London, Paris, Melbourne, Sydney, Johannesburg, Jakarta. And I think you would also find extraordinary things.
What I think is partly distinctive about New York is that it has been this immigration gateway for about 400 years now. We’re in the 400th anniversary of New York’s colonial founding as this kind of… not as one of the ordinary 13 English-speaking colonies, well, really 12 English speaking colonies that were established in the 17th century. But actually, as this Dutch commercial entrepot that was set up by the Dutch West India company that actually was never even really fully Dutch, never became fully English, has never been fully American. It really has been this multilingual port city from the very beginning after European settlers came to this Lenape archipelago. New York is actually an archipelago full of islands too.
So, that has been the history, and there’s just been wave after wave. And of course, it’s been sensitive to changes in immigration policy and so on. But by and large, this has been the historic role of the city, and it’s been deeply normalized at a level where something like close to 40% of all New Yorkers were born in another country. Half of all New Yorkers speak a language other than English at home. And those cities like Toronto and London are certainly approaching that, or Toronto may be even higher than that at this point. But New York, it’s been happening for longer now, I guess, for four centuries. It’s not that every language in the world is represented here, as we say. It’s maybe closer to something like 10%, and there are many that I’m sure we haven’t mapped and documented the presence of we don’t yet know are here, we’re still hearing about.
But it’s really the buildup of that history over time and then all the particular roots and stories which I try to illuminate that have brought particular peoples here who are often ethnolinguistic minorities who are disproportionately represented.
DANIEL: I want to talk about the Endangered Language Alliance, but first I want to get to this question from our listener, Diego, who asks, “Do any endangered languages have more speakers in New York than in their country or region of origin? Or, do any have a significant speaker percentage in New York? Also now in 2024, do you still come across new languages being spoken in New York?” Sounds like the last question, we could answer that. Yeah. There are still languages that you’re discovering over there.
ROSS: Yeah. I mean, even just with this book, Language City, coming out and some of the press around it, I heard from somebody the other day who said, “My language from Cameroon is not on your map, and there are 200 of us here.” And somebody else said, “Oh, this particular Italian village variety has a group of people in this suburb of New York who came in the 1950s.” We didn’t know about that. So, yeah, we’re still hearing about it. Or one individual who speaks a language from Bhutan, which we heard about that we didn’t know was here. And so, in some cases, it might be one individual or two individuals, which is still extraordinary. But yes, we’re still hearing about things. It’s also dynamic. There are new people coming all the time. Of course, there are also people leaving. It’s people moving. It’s just like the constant churn is both fascinating and frustrating.
And yes, there are languages here in this capital of diasporas that have more speakers and perhaps more of a future here than anywhere else. Certainly, the Jewish languages that I mentioned, this is very much the case. I mean, the extraordinary revival of Yiddish, which I talk about in the book and is being driven by Hasidic speakers is really nowhere more apparent than in Brooklyn, which is sort of the world headquarters for a number of the major Hasidic movements who have really brought the language back, even though most of its secular speakers are lost, and I have a chapter about this in the book.
Another example would be the Garifuna language, which I talk about a little bit. It’s an Afro indigenous language. There were enslaved Africans who, the story goes, escaped onto the island of St. Vincent in the Caribbean and formed a new society with speakers of Carib languages and Arakan languages that were there on St. Vincent. Were then expelled by the British to Central America and formed societies on the Caribbean coast of Honduras, Guatemala, Belize. And then, have been marginalized in those places and starting in the 20th century, came in large numbers to the Bronx and Brooklyn. And there are probably more Garifuna here than in any single place elsewhere.
Just in my neighborhood here in Queens is the World Center that I describe for the Gatshir people who are Germanic people of Slovenia, who had been there in this area of Slovenia since about the 14th century and basically fled entirely in a few years in the 1940s as a result of all the upheavals of World War II. And the World Center is also a bar and restaurant that is open to people. It’s a social club, but it reflects the fact that although some got people moved also to Germany and Austria at that time, a significant number came here to this part of New York. And this is probably where the language is struggling, for sure, but perhaps has the best chance or is still the most spoken.
So, those are just a few examples. But there are a number. I think if indigenous and minority languages and endangered languages are to have a future in the world, it has to be partly in cities, because everyone is coming to cities, and everyone is going into diaspora.
DANIEL: Yeah. Tell me about the work that you do at the Endangered Language Alliance, because you talk about this a lot in the book, but I just want to give our listeners a sense of the kind of work that you’re doing with speakers. There’s a lot of people who are working on this.
ROSS: We’re a small organization. We’ve been around since 2010, but a nonprofit organization right in the middle of Manhattan. I also teach linguistics. My co-director, who’s one of the founders, Daniel Kaufman, also teaches linguistics. But then, there’s also language activists, artists or language lovers, ordinary New Yorkers, students. I mean, it’s more of an extended family of now several hundred people or even more who’ve been involved in different ways since 2010.
And I think, just by… there are obviously, there are a few other linguistic or language organizations in different parts of the world. And I think it’s crucial to have something that’s a little bit outside of the academic world that is accessible to people. I mean, we just have so many people who are contacting us about their languages or wanting to do something about linguistic diversity, it runs the gamut. I mean, the government agencies as well, educators, artists, just to hang up a sign and say, “We’re here to talk about language in a very public way. And linguistically, diversity and languages in cities. This is not a remote issue that involves going to a distant island or mountain. This is something right here with your neighbors.”
So, we do a huge range of things kind of depending on what people bring to us and what we can with a very limited budget, unfortunately, and a limited permanent staff. But some of that is just being a space. We were lucky to have this well-located space right in the middle of all of this city. I mean, that’s why it was founded. It was this idea that there’s a unique opportunity for linguists and communities to work together in a long-term way that’s different from traditional fieldwork. Some of it is hosting classes and workshops in that space, having public events that bring awareness of linguistic diversity and bring languages onto the stage that aren’t usually heard from. Some of it is traditional language documentation work, recording languages where there is not much in the way of recordings, creating fieldworks projects like lexicons and grammars, and creating corpora of texts, publishing articles, children’s books, classes, advocacy. It really runs the gamut.
DANIEL: Wow. So, let’s say that you find somebody who speaks a minority language, and they want to work with you to revitalise it. What does that process look like? I know it’s going to be different depending on the needs of the community but let me just describe maybe a situation where there’s a community of speakers, like this one person is willing to be the person to work with you, but there’s also a population that’s game and there’s a need for it. How would you approach this? What stuff would you find yourself doing?
ROSS: There is a menu of options, I guess. Yeah. So, it does vary a lot. I think what we’ve done… and a lot of projects have been basically started exactly in the way you described. Somebody comes to us and, yeah, there’s some interest in the community, but that person is particularly fired up. We would sit down with them. It’s about a relationship over time and okay, “Well, let’s look at what exists already in terms of research.” And they may not… a lot of linguistic research is not exactly accessible or clear to ordinary people. And we might say, “Oh, look, did you know that there was this old dictionary in Russian from the 1930s? Should we digitize that?”
DANIEL: Oh, look, there’s ancient grammar that somebody wrote in the 1900s.
ROSS: Exactly. “Yeah, let’s see if it’s any good. Does it match up with what you guys are still speaking today? Is there something here that’s valuable? We could digitize this. We could try to circulate it. Should we build on it? Okay, well, maybe there exists a good recent dictionary, so that’s fine. Maybe there aren’t good new recordings that we can circulate on YouTube and Facebook and so on. Should we make a recording with you, do some oral histories? If you feel like that’s well covered or you don’t feel comfortable with that? Is it more about children’s books? Are you concerned about that? Do you want to host a class?”
And obviously, certain things depend on other ones. You can’t necessarily do a children’s book unless you have some orthography already. So, we might have that discussion. Can we help tweak that, or is that already established? Is it more about something that we can do here in a diaspora setting that sends a message back to the homeland? In some cases, the research and the project has to go between the two places.
So, I describe in the book, for a couple of cases, two languages in Nepal and Tajikistan, that we’ve worked on where we go back to those home regions with a speaker from New York who’s living in New York as part of the community here. And we go back there to do the field work that really has to be done in the home region and then also bring the results back to the community members there.
These things develop over a year. Sometimes, it’s like, well, we can’t do much without funding. Let’s say we really want to at least pay the speakers, or we have costs. So, Let’s apply for funding together. It’s all over the map. But yeah, we try to look at what people are interested in also what’s doable. Not everything is always doable in a setting like New York. So, we try to be practical too.
DANIEL: Yeah. And then you repeat that process 700 times. Yay.
ROSS: [LAUGHS] Yes. Well, I mean, the language map, yeah, shows over 700 languages at over 1,200 sites. The mapping project was a thing unto itself. In terms of real projects that we’ve done with speakers and languages, we have recordings in well over 100 languages that we happen to have worked on. But in some cases, that’s a couple of recordings with a speaker who just found us, wanted to do one thing, and then maybe there’s a few dozen languages or situations where we’ve really been doing in depth work. And then, some of the projects are more cross-cutting. Like, helping with the formation of an indigenous interpreters’ network or working with the Department of Health around creating messages in indigenous Latin American languages, especially kind of a half dozen languages that are more heavily represented here.
DANIEL: To that end, I’ve got a question from listener, aengryballs, who says, “I would like to know how you find speakers of endangered languages and how you convince them that these languages are valuable without seeming suspicious. I’ve met so many people who say that such and such local language they speak in the area they grew up in their home country is not a real language.” And this attitude is pretty common, isn’t it? Especially when there’s not standardisation or not a lot of written material.
ROSS: Yeah. Well, sometimes people find us, often people find us. But yeah, in some cases it’s through our networks or like the mapping efforts, we will find somebody and say, “Hey, would you like to work with us? What ideas do you have? You seem like a really engaged person. We’ve always been interested in this language, this situation.” And it’s true that sometimes, yeah, those attitudes or the idea I describe in the book with one of the languages that I’ve been doing the longest-term documentation on myself, this language Seke, was put in contact with one of the youngest speakers who’s here in Brooklyn, Rasmina. And at first, she was just like, “What? Somebody’s interested in my language? That doesn’t make sense.” They’ve never encountered this. [DANIEL LAUGHS]
So, you do have to explain what linguistics [LAUGHS] is all about and that every language is valuable. You have to do some of that work, which I think is valuable work for linguists to do anyway, of kind of undoing all the internalized attitudes that people will now have that only the larger languages are valuable. These other ones are on their way out. Part of it is, of course, that you yourself are interested in learning the language and that you try to… if you’re going to be working on it for a while, that you’re actually trying to learn this just as anybody would learn any language and pointing out the things that are particular and distinctive in the language and highlighting all the ways that it brings knowledge into the world and all that it holds.
I mean, we generally are finding that those attitudes are shifting, especially among younger people. The paradox is that the younger people may not necessarily have the language skills. And so then, it’s when you try to interview the elders, that is where you get into a trickier situation because their ideas about these things were formed 50, 60 years ago. But anyway, yeah, it’s definitely an issue.
DANIEL: And they’ve internalised all the bad vibes that people have put on them about their own language.
ROSS: Right.
DANIEL: This one comes from PharaohKatt. “How do people know what languages are more endangered? I’m guessing it’s census data. But also, that people who speak a minority language might also be less likely to accurately fill out a census because of language barriers, lack of accurately translated resources, interpreters.” I guess this is a question about the census versus your website and how do you get your language information?
ROSS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, the census really is totally inadequate when it comes to language beyond the largest few dozen. So-
DANIEL: How come?
ROSS: Oh, yeah. Well, partly for the reasons that were just mentioned there. I mean, multilingual people, are less likely to fill out the census for a variety of reasons. Immigrants who may have various fears around filling out the census. It depends on what languages the census is offered in. The way that the question about language is asked, at least on the US census. I know, for instance, the Canadian census is quite a bit better. But it’s like one question that is… the examples they give are other national languages. It’s like, “What language do you speak at home?” It doesn’t allow for multilingual input. You just have one language you can put in. They throw out the rest. It also has to do with the way that the data is tabulated and organized. It’s a total mess. I mean, it’s really… the census, of course, has the advantage of being something that has a lot of money behind it and lots of people fill out, but it really doesn’t say too much about language beyond the top few dozen.
So, this is what prompted us to do our own linguistic census. But obviously, we don’t have the reach of the Census Bureau, and it’s really more about gathering community estimates by talking to speakers and community leaders and thousands of conversations over like a decade. This is what went into languagemap.nyc.
The two datasets are both in there. There is a tab that has the census data and then the 700 plus languages you see with all the dots at all these different sites. That’s our data, which is all fully publicly available to download. Those dots are linked to significant sites, religious institutions and residential spots and restaurants and hometown associations and all those things. So, they’re both in there. And the census data, you can make interesting comparisons. The census data will be good for the biggest languages. But for the rest, yeah, ours is the only information that is available in terms of those languages in New York and in many cases in the US.
But more broadly in terms of endangerment, that’s another question. How do you know that they’re endangered? There are these… and we do reference Glottolog, Ethnologue, some of those major global databases which have these endangerment levels that they put which are useful. We don’t directly incorporate those, but we do put all of the codes and all the things that would link people to Glottalog and Ethnologue and so on in our language map.
Then in terms of endangerment, there’s many different ways of thinking about it. We again look to the speakers we’re working with, communities, the situations. I mean, all but the largest languages are endangered in New York terms. But then, we obviously are looking also at the languages that are endangered in global terms. And you see that the more you know about a community and especially about intergenerational transmission. But certainly, one can look at those, AES level in Glottolog or the EGIDS number in Ethnologue, it’s not a bad proxy in some cases.
DANIEL: Okay, let me take it to this question from listener, sim/e, who asks ‘One question I’d be really interested in hearing about is how much they worked with the actual communities on touchy stuff, like which endonym they want to be described with, which national flag they have attached to the language profiles and so on. But maybe that’s a bit technical. I’m just really interested in community-driven research, but with the amount of data they have, I imagine it could be quite challenging. Do you deal with the touchy issues, and did you hit any funny little areas that you weren’t expecting?’
HEDVIG: The touchy issues come up sometimes. Yeah. And we don’t avoid them, but maybe we don’t drive right to them. And there are certainly differences and divides in communities, different names, and we… Again, it probably there’s a difference between situations where we’re working in detail on a language overtime where you do have to face it. And we try to bring people together and try to be representative. With something like the language map where it is a large dataset and there are certain technical requirements that are baked into the project, we’re not double triple checking every, “Are you okay with using the flag for something?” I mean, those are just like literally flags of convenience maybe that are just helping people navigate the site.
It’s true that I think when you do a large-scale data project, especially where you’re incorporating other data sources and you’re using rubrics like we want people to be able to filter for all the languages of South Asia, we’re not necessarily going to go to every community and say, “Are you okay being grouped under South Asia?” We’re just using a United Nations rubric that says, these are the countries inside South Asia and where we know the major top-line stuff.
But yeah, the touchy issues are present, and I think you have to try to navigate them the best you can without… we try to avoid getting… I mean, there’s obviously a political nature to all of this work, but there can be big political issues right around an orthography choice. If we can do multiple options, we like to do multiple options because you’re not going to please everybody. But generally, we’re here just to help with language, basically. We don’t want to get too mired in all the issues. It’s a tricky balance.
And I would just say, I guess that there is a difference between the detailed long-term work where you’re working as sensitively as you can, and then the large-scale databases where it’s like, well, there were a lot of sensitivities and we detail them in a long paper that goes with the language map, which is linked to there and explains a lot of the choices. But you are also using some general categories too.
DANIEL: We’ll have a link to that on our website, becauselanguage.com. Let me just take it to this question from Diego, who asks, “Could or will this project expand to other areas with high concentrations of endangered multlingualism?” And I would add, if so, where would you go? Or, where would be a good candidate?
ROSS: There are signs that things are expanding. We really believe that this model of an urban language organization, which could be developed in so many different ways, there are many, many cities where it could flourish and I think do all kinds of positive things, both in terms of language documentation, but also just boosting urban linguistic diversity at the policy level, but also education and culture. We have a little branch in Toronto, which is another extraordinary immigrant metropolis here in North America. We’ve heard from various people in Los Angeles, Berlin, Paris, Nairobi, who are doing different levels of language mapping and organizing around similar ideas to the Endangered Language Alliance.
I still haven’t seen any book quite like Language City that tries to do a linguistic portrait of a city, but I would love to see that. And I think it would really work so well, especially places like London, Paris, Moscow, but also Johannesburg and Jakarta. And there are, of course, individual examples of great research with communities in different cities. I’ve seen papers on… I think it was on Melbourne and on Houston as well, where at least there was an initial attempt to parse some census data for more about linguistic diversity. So, I think there is increasing interest in this. And even in smaller cities, there’s been some really cool efforts in Manchester and Graz, different projects that have been run in those cities. And I’m sure there are others that I’m forgetting or don’t know about.
So, there’s a lot that could be done here. I think ideally though, it would be to have an organization or some kind of center or something. I haven’t seen academic institutions really willing to support this. And there’s still some, I think, a bit of a prejudice against language research in cities that’s not pure sociolinguistic research. That, “Oh, well, language documentation doesn’t really work well in cities because there’s too much mixing or it’s too much loss.” Well, that’s part of what’s interesting. I mean, yes, that’s true to an extent, but there’s also certain types of things that are preserved. All the mixed language mixing that’s going on, contact is fascinating and should be better studied. It’s really hard to study. So, I hope to see more of all this in the future.
And one other thing I wanted to say that those who are interested, I mean, all of the code for the language map is open source. It’s all up there. We created it with the idea that anybody should be able to do a language map for their city. It does take a little bit of technical knowledge because of the tools that are used. But it’s all there on GitHub and hopefully open-source public for anybody, and we totally welcome people just adapting it for their city.
DANIEL: That is so cool. And I was hoping that you were going to say that was possible. So, if you have the technical knowledge, you could put together your own language map, but without taking that big a project on, what else could people do? Obviously, read Language City by Ross Perlin. What else for the well-meaning language fan who’s listening to us and might want to help but not know what to do.
ROSS: I think, yeah, it starts with the languages that are around you, the communities that you’re connected to, where you are. And yeah, I could see that it might be tricky to start out, but I think there are a lot of things you can do. I mean, starting with opening your ears and trying to get a better sense of what’s around you. I think I’d like to see people leading more language walks or having more open discussions just with their neighbors about what the real mother tongue they speak is.
And, of course, not to do it intrusively or anything like that, but certainly to advocate for or be open to policies which are increasing in many cities about language access and better support for translation and interpretation, bilingual education, which is growing a lot in the US, with New York at the vanguard, it has all kinds of issues with it. But now there are public school programs here in 13 different languages, some of them quite small, but these are actual bilingual education programs happening in languages like Polish, Arabic, and Urdu that are happening in New York. There are those policies happening where you are supporting that, or, I don’t know, getting involved in that in some way.
So, I think, thinking of this as part of cities should be developing linguistic infrastructures, that’s one of the things I try to end the book with. Well, how can we make cities not just… as my co-director, Daniel Kaufman has said, not just graveyards, but greenhouses for languages, places actually where languages can flourish where there are positive attitudes. There’s an openness. Just as there is now, an openness to more different types of food in cities, which is great, a great start. And food is a good way into language. Can we get there for language? I mean, it’s similar with music and dance and culture, but language is even trickier. I mean, we are hosting events and doing things where we are trying to bring the poetries of these languages and the oral literatures to a wider audience. So, hopefully that storytelling, hopefully that can also happen in other places too. But we want people to just open their ears and to appreciate this as part of the wonder of human existence.
DANIEL: The feeling I’m getting is that… I’m getting four things out of this that people can do. They can talk to people, they can read up, they can donate, and they can vote. That’s pretty good.
ROSS: That’s a good start.
DANIEL: Good start.
ROSS: Yeah. And of course, they could also study a language. Many are doing that, but they could learn a language…
DANIEL: There we go.
ROSS: …not necessarily just through Duolingo, but through a community organization or, local situation.
DANIEL: That’s so good. Been talking to Ross Perlin, teacher of linguistics at Columbia University, co-founder of the Endangered Language Alliance, and author of Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. It’s available now from Grove Atlantic. Ross, thanks so much for hanging out with me and talking today.
ROSS: Thank you, Daniel.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: It’s Words of the Week. Parts of North America got to experience a solar eclipse recently.
HEDVIG: Yes. I have a funny thing about that, which is that I am interested in conspiracy theories, as you know. And the full solar eclipse pathway over North America covered several towns called Nineveh, which is funny because Nineveh used to be the capital of the Assyrian Empire and is mentioned in the Bible, but I think not as a positive. But you guys-
DANIEL: It’s Babylon.
HEDVIG: You guys still… No, it’s not. Nineveh and Babylon are different.
DANIEL: Is it possible that I am starting to forget my biblical education? This is a beautiful day.
HEDVIG: I think the land around Babylon was called Babylonia, but Nineveh is its own town.
DANIEL: You’re right. It’s an Assyrian city of Upper Mesopotamia.
HEDVIG: [GASPS] That’s what I said! This was the Assyrian capital for a while. It wasn’t originally, but then it got moved to being… [SINGS] I knew something about ancient Near East thing than someone who studied the Bible a lot more than me.
DANIEL: [SINGS] That Daniel didn’t know. Okay, yes, I’m seeing that there is an entire thing about, “Oh, every city in the US named Nineveh is going to get the solar eclipse passing over it.” So, are you giving some pushback, or what are you finding?
HEDVIG: Well, I just think there’s a lot of cities in America named after Bible places, including Bible places that weren’t positively mentioned in the Bible, like Nineveh. And I have a friend who has theory that you guys just went, “We’re going to call this place Babylon. And because that place is north of Babylon, that has to be Nineveh.” So, you just recreate the geography, which is fun. Anyway, it’s just a coincidence. There are lots of places in America called Nineveh in that area. [MAKES NONCOMMITTAL NOISES] That’s it. Don’t need to.
DANIEL: As we record this, the eclipse hasn’t happened yet, but we hope that you got to see it without any nasty clouds in the way. And we got a couple of eclipsey Words of the Week. One is UMBRAPHILE, suggested by scarequotes on our Discord.
HEDVIG: Nice. So, UMBRA means shadow?
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: And when there’s total eclipse, the earth is in shadow. So, an UMBRAPHILE is someone who likes shadows and maybe an eclipse chaser.
DANIEL: Exactly. Correct. An eclipse chaser. Another one suggested by Diego is the PURKINJE EFFECT, which I had never heard of.
DANIEL: Okay. -Nje is Spanish diminutive, right?
DANIEL: Well, in this case, no, it’s spelled nje, but it has the nya /ɲə/ sound.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Named after Jan Evangelista Purkinje.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: He discovered this effect in 1819 because he liked to take long walks in the morning. And in the morning, he noticed that the light was different.
HEDVIG: The light is different.
DANIEL: That the sky wasn’t really blue. It was a lavender purple colour in the morning.
HEDVIG: I thought that had to do with the angle of the sunlight. Is that true?
DANIEL: There’s something else going on with the Purkinje effect, especially in a solar eclipse, when it’s bright.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: And I’m getting this, by the way, from an article Diego pointed us to in Scientific American by Riis Williams. Link in the show notes for this episode becauselanguage.com. It explains that when it’s bright, we use the… okay, hang on. Rods or cones?
HEDVIG: Rods or cones. There’s three of them. Which one is it? Get it right.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] We use the cones because I always remember cones have colour. We use the cones in our eyes. They’re really good at seeing colour. And when it’s dark, we rely more on our rods. They don’t see colour as well. But they’re really good in dim light.
HEDVIG: This is why when you’re in a dark room and you’re trying to see things, you don’t perceive as much colour, and you can almost sometimes feel like you’re in a black and white movie. Even though you know that objects around you are vivid colours, you might not see them-
DANIEL: If the lights were on.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah. When the light is medium, we get a fusion of the two. We don’t get a lot of information from our red cones. We got red, green, and blue cones. This is very simplified.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: The information from the red cones is lost, but the green and blue cones are working just fine. And the result is a lovely greenish-blue-cyan-lavender in the sky during an eclipse. And this is known as the Purkinje effect.
HEDVIG: And he discovered that while… he thought about that when he was out walking his dog.
DANIEL: I don’t know if there was a dog involved, but he certainly liked the mornings.
HEDVIG: I don’t.
DANIEL: It’s a nice thing to be able to walk around in the morning.
HEDVIG: Can I experience this also…? I feel like a lot of people who like mornings, and I don’t remember if you’re included, Daniel, or not, but I’m going to pretend that you are, I feel like a lot of people who like mornings love to be like, “Ooh, it’s so nice. No one is out and about. And the light is different, and blah, blah, blah, blah.” And I’m like, “How many of those things are also true with sunset?”
DANIEL: Good point.
HEDVIG: Like, I think a lot of them.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Can’t argue with that.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And have you ever heard anyone be like, well, I guess people talk about how much they like sunsets, but not those…
DANIEL: Are you saying that morning people are annoying because…
HEDVIG: No, they’re not. I mean, some of them are. The ones who don’t have the capacity for theory of mind and to understand that other people might experience things differently, they’re annoying. But they’re annoying because they don’t have theory of mind and empathy. They’re not technically annoying because they’re morning people. I have to say.
DANIEL: Correct answer. All people are annoying. Next one, yes, this one was suggested by Heddewyn. LOOKSMAXXING.
HEDVIG: Did you say Hedwin?
DANIEL: No, I said Heddewyn, who is one of our pals on Discord and who likes us.
HEDVIG: I feel like me and this person should have a special connection.
DANIEL: I think so too.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: The word is looksmaxxing. And it’s fun because it uses the maxing combining form like the one you gave us long ago, slowmaxxing.
HEDVIG: Slowmaxxing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looksmaxxing. I know what it is, and it’s related to mewing.
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: First of all, looksmaxxing is when you try and max out your conventional attractiveness is roughly the description. Right?
DANIEL: Nothing wrong with that.
HEDVIG: Right. You can do that. Some people believe that instead of just putting on makeup and doing your hair and having nice clothes, another way you could looksmaxx is by trying to change your bone structure or trying to change your muscles. Some of those are more likely than others. You are going to have a hard time changing your bone structure, but maybe you could tone some facial muscles.
DANIEL: Now, we’re into a weird incel territory because they seem obsessed with things like chin length. “Women aren’t attracted to me because they’re these heartless bitches who only care about bone structure.”
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: So, this is the difference between softmaxxing and hardmaxxing. So now, we’re describing hardmaxxing.
HEDVIG: Okay, I didn’t know there was hard and softmaxxing, but that makes sense. What’s funny about it is that like a lot of the things that these men seem to say that women want are often things that men think that women want. And I, in my bubble at least, have met few women who think of it as an important thing. Maybe that’s because I haven’t met enough women. That’s entirely plausible. They seem to strive after things that men perceive as beautiful. They’re aligning with the male gaze.
DANIEL: Yes. And maybe you have good relationships with women and some of these guys don’t. And so, they’re not really certain about what women are really into.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay.
DANIEL: It seems like there’s a lot of unrealistic expectations surrounding beauty and desirability that plague a lot of people.
HEDVIG: And it’s really hard.
DANIEL: It’s hard. It’s just… Mm.
HEDVIG: I think people shouldn’t underestimate how difficult it is to find and keep love and maintain relationships and things. It’s not easy work. Certainly not for everyone.
DANIEL: I think about this all the time.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Next one. Also suggested by scarequotes, quality escape. Do you have any guesses as to what this is if you got a chance to read it?
HEDVIG: So, when you try and optimise something and you reduce the quality, like Boeing trying to optimise their business side and then reducing the quality of their planes.
DANIEL: This does involve Boeing. And it is about the event in January when the side of a plane blew out. The door-plug or the fuselage plug flew off and there was a hole in the side of the aircraft. You had to make an emergency landing.
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: The CEO of Boeing, Mr Dave Calhoun, said, “We’re going to want to know what broke down in our gauntlet of inspections, what broke down in the original work that allowed for that escape to happen.” And by a quality escape… I’m reading, by the way, from this article by Julia Reinstein in The Independent, “By a quality escape, Mr Calhoun said he was referring to anything that could potentially contribute to an accident.” So, it’s a quality escape. Something got past you in the quality checking process.
HEDVIG: Okay. I can recommend, by the way, watching John Oliver’s episode about the Boeing stuff because he actually ends up explaining what’s happening to that company in an understandable way. Basically, they’ve been asked to save money and earn more money, and that has had consequences for their quality escapes.
DANIEL: You mean it’s an example of enshittification? Yet another one?
HEDVIG: I think all these have different causes behind them. Though some of them are just like perpetual growth and money saving problems and locking people in. Like, if you have a monopoly, like Google Chrome or something, or Google in general, you can afford to be shitty in some areas because people are locked in.
DANIEL: I’m going to be trying the new search engine, Kagi.
HEDVIG: Oh, new search engine. Tell me more.
DANIEL: I don’t know anything about it. You have to pay like $10 a month. You have to subscribe. But people are saying, including Cory Doctorow, former guest, that it doesn’t give you all the sales results and all the crappy results that you don’t want.
HEDVIG: Nice. Okay. Well, I would love to know how that goes.
DANIEL: Thank you. And thanks to scarequotes. Finally, one that I noticed, Mach Jesus.
HEDVIG: A mock Jesus, okay. All right. Is it just like a fake pretend Jesus, or is it someone who’s intentionally parodying it?
DANIEL: How about if I let you know that this is not mock, as in M-O-C-K?
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: But instead M-A-C-H.
HEDVIG: M-A-
DANIEL: Mach, traveling at the speed of Mach Jesus.
ROSS: Is it Mac as in McDonald’s? What are you saying?
DANIEL: No[LAUGHS].
HEDVIG: I’m very bad with letters. You know this, Daniel.
DANIEL: Sorry. Okay, so you know how a plane, when it’s really fast, can go at Mach 1 or maybe Mach 2?
HEDVIG: No. I have never heard of this.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. This is a way to describe how many times faster than the speed of sound you are going. It’s in honor of Austrian physicist, Ernst Mach, and it is the ratio of the speed or flow of an object to the speed of sound.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: So, when you’re traveling at the speed of sound, you are traveling at Mach 1. That’s the Mach number. Twice the speed of sound, Mach 2.
HEDVIG: Oh. I had never heard of this before.
DANIEL: Hey there.
HEDVIG: If other listeners have also not heard of this, please write to Daniel so I feel less shit.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I’m going to get so many bad emails.
HEDVIG: There’s a scientific measurement thing.
DANIEL: It’s a measurements thing.
HEDVIG: Okay. All right. And Jesus is a crucified Hebrew poet that died maybe 2,000 years ago.
DANIEL: I think we could describe him as a first century rabbi.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: That would work.
HEDVIG: He didn’t finish rabbi school, surely.
DANIEL: Yeah, he dropped out. This may be another one of those things that I’ve forgotten. Anyway, I’ll check that.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Mach Jesus isn’t a fixed speed. Perhaps, it’s the speed at which Jesus takes the wheel, because even Jesus is alarmed by your speed. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: I noticed this in a tweet by Teslaloosa on Twittex, who pointed out an enormous spoiler on some car and said, “When you’re driving your bumper-less vape Altima at Mach Jesus down the interstate, you’re going to want some downforce.”
HEDVIG: Downforce.
DANIEL: That’s what a spoiler does, you know? Pushes your car down so that you don’t lift off like an airplane wing.
HEDVIG: What are the words you’re using? I’m, I’m… What are… What are you saying? What are the things coming out of your mouth?
DANIEL: Shall I give you a picture of a spoiler on the back of a car?
HEDVIG: A spoiler is something that my husband hates. So, whenever I watch a movie before him, I don’t tell him how it ends.
DANIEL: Okay. This is different.
HEDVIG: Okay. I’m willing to learn.
DANIEL: I appreciate you, Hedvig. You are great. Here, I’ll share my screen.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
DANIEL: These things are all spoilers.
HEDVIG: Aha. Okay. I can describe to the podcast listeners. It’s a thing at the back of a car on top of the maybe where you open the boot and it does something to air direction. If you think of like a very small but low-budget racer car, it’ll have one of those at the back. Looks a bit like a wing. Yeah, those are my thoughts.
DANIEL: They are different things but yes. Although I’m seeing here wings versus spoilers, where the top thing is the wing and the little lip is a spoiler, but we just call them all spoilers nowadays. You’ve seen these, Hedvig, surely.
HEDVIG: I have seen them. Yes, yes, yes. I did not know they were called that.
DANIEL: Some ridiculous ones. So, that’s what you need when you’re traveling at Mach Jesus. By the way, if I talked about Jesus handles on a car, does that mean anything?
HEDVIG: I’m not American or Christian.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You know how you get tossed around in the backseat when somebody hangs a Ralph a little too fast?
HEDVIG: Hangs a Ralph? Probably has to do with a turn.
DANIEL: Yep. Somebody turns too fast, and you’re thrown against the side. So, then you grab one of those handles. It’s got those handles at the top.
HEDVIG: Above the door.
DANIEL: Above the door.
HEDVIG: Yes. I know those handles.
DANIEL: Some people in my acquaintance used to call them Jesus handles because you’re turning and you go, “Jesus!”, and you grab the handle.
HEDVIG: Ah, okay.
DANIEL: They are Jesus handles.
HEDVIG: I am a big fan of the Jesus! I like it.
DANIEL: I’m not. It was always forbidden to me as a youth. And after I stopped believing in Jesus, I guess I just was never interested in taking it up like that. Giving it, giving it any airtime. But anyway, UMBRAPHILE, PURKINJE EFFECT, LOOKSMAXXING, QUALITY ESCAPE and MACH JESUS, our Words of the Week. Thanks to Ross Perlin. Thanks to all our listeners who gave us questions for Ross and ideas for the show. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words. And thanks to you patrons for keeping us going.
Oh, and Hedvig, thank you so much for being with me on this show. This has been a lot of fun.
HEDVIG: Shh… All the… Get away from me.
DANIEL: I always look forward to your input.
HEDVIG: Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. We make this show because we like it, and we like to hang out on weekends. But we also appreciate that other people like to hear our conversations and the content we talk about. And we want to keep doing this show. But as much as we like it, we also require some input from people who listen. And there are a couple of ways you can support us if you like this show. If you don’t, you can hate-support us. If you just like to hate-listen to us, you can support us. And then, we’ll keep making content, and you can keep having that agitation feeling if you like that.
Anyway, jokes aside, you can tell a friend about us. This is the number one way that people learn about new things. The other day, someone tried to recommend a movie to me by saying it was critically acclaimed. And I was like, “I’m sorry, that’s very nice, but I only care about what people around me like, kind of. So, did you like it?” “Yes.” “Then, I will watch it.” Tell a friend about us, or leave us a review. I can recommend Podchaser. It’s a great place to leave reviews that isn’t logged in, like Apple or Spotify or something like that. You can also follow us on most of the socials, we exist and in those places, we have the same username. It’s becauselangpod. So, becauselangpod is our username in all the places. You can send us ideas or comments via email. We have a lovely email, that’s hello@becauselanguage.com. You can send us your voice as well, like the lovely… who did that today?
DANIEL: It was Jenna.
HEDVIG: Jenna did it today. Thank you so much. And you can send us thoughts or new words or Related or Not items if you like, or news items. We have a SpeakPipe on our website which allows you to easily do that. You can also just use your phone, record a voice memo, and then attach that to an email and send that to hello@becauseanguage.com. That audio will also get to us. Our website is becauselanguage.com.
DANIEL: And another thing you can do is support us by becoming a patron. Your support means that regular episodes are free for everybody. It means that we can get transcripts from SpeechDocs transcribing all of our words. And it also means that you get bonuses. Depending on your level, you could get mailouts, shoutouts, live episodes, bonus episodes. All of our patrons get Discord access and our yearly mail out. You could even get shoutouts like this one.
And this is the list of our patrons at the supporter level. We’ve got… buckle up, by the way because this is getting to be a pretty long list. Termy, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, Lyssa, Elías, gramaryen, Larry, Rene, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Nikoli, Keith, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Diego, Ariaflame, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, aengryballs, Tadhg, Luis, Raina, Tony, WolfDog [HOWLS], Molly Dee, J0HNTR0Y, and sæ̃m.
And thanks also to our newest patrons at the friend level, Joey and Sean. And at the listener level, James and Reecy with a yearly membership because Reecy knows-
HEDVIG: Smart.
DANIEL: -we’re in this for the long haul. Also, unleashy, Tim, and Jordan joined up as free members. Free members? What is this? We don’t know. It’s a Patreon thing. You can do it.
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: Yeah, you’ll get the free stuff, occasional free stuff on Patreon.
HEDVIG: Oh, oh. I did not know.
DANIEL: We do it. So, a huge thanks to all of our patrons. Thank you so much for keeping us going. Our theme music was… do you want to do the last bit?
HEDVIG: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is also performing with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Now I’ve got to know. Hedvig, what have you been sewing all this time?
HEDVIG: Mending.
DANIEL: Mending.
HEDVIG: This is a shirt that I stole from my older sister when I was around 12 years old. And I have liked wearing it since then, and it has acquired new holes every now and then. So, I need to mend it.
DANIEL: Oh, good on ya.
HEDVIG: Yeah, well, I mean, you mend clothes. That’s how the world works.
DANIEL: You’re mendmaxxing.
HEDVIG: I don’t like all this stuff about making mending unusual, praiseworthy activity. I’m actually against… What’s it called? Visible mending.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: I think. I think you mend and that’s how the world works.
DANIEL: I am too. I think. Yep. That’s okay. So, normalise mending. That’s what we’re trying to do here.
HEDVIG: I think it is normal. I don’t think it needs to be normalised. I am also not particularly good at mending, and I realise that when fabric wears very thin and then I push needles through it, I actually make holes.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: And so, you’ve got to be careful with mending so that you don’t actually make it worse. I think that happened a little bit today. We’ll see.
DANIEL: That makes sense. Well, I’m enjoying you mending because the way that you were positioned, it made your mouth closer to the microphone, and that made the sound better. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] So, I was very careful not to say anything. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: So, that I would start sabotaging you.
DANIEL: I didn’t want you to move.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]