Aboriginal English has been around a long while, but linguists have not taken the opportunity to really listen to the voices of Aboriginal people.
Two researchers are changing that. They’re gathering stories to find out what Aboriginal English is like, and how it’s changing. Daniel sits down with them for a wicked long yarn on this episode of Because Language.
Dr Celeste Rodriguez Louro receives funding through an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DE170100493).
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Decolonising sociolinguistic research – Language on the Move
https://www.languageonthemove.com/decolonising-sociolinguistic-research/
Interview with Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodriguez Louro | Take some time to learn about Aboriginal English – Mornings – ABC Radio
https://www.abc.net.au/radio/newcastle/programs/mornings/learn-a-bit-of-aboriginal-english/12392010
10 ways Aboriginal Australians made English their own
https://theconversation.com/10-ways-aboriginal-australians-made-english-their-own-128219
Helpful Aboriginal English word lists
(PDF) Ballardong Noongar Waangkiny
http://www.wheatbeltnrm.org.au/sites/default/files/knowledge_hub/documents/Nyungar%20Dictionary%20-%20Final%20-%20Website.pdf
Nyoongar language from the south west region of Western Australia
https://www.noongarculture.org.au/language/
(PDF) Illustrated Dictionary of the South-West Aboriginal Language
http://boomerangandspear.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Illustrated-Dictionary.pdf
(PDF) Noongar Dictionary
https://d1y4ma8ribhabl.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Noongar-Dictionary-Second-Edition.pdf
Transcript
HEDVIG: I wonder if you can figure out what I’ve done with the Zoom setup. I’ve done something unusual.
DANIEL: Are you suspending it from the roof of your blanket fort.
HEDVIG: Why did you say that?? Why was that your first guess?
DANIEL: Because I can see inside your mind. I know how you think.
HEDVIG: [DISCONTENTED NOISES] But it’s such a smart idea.
DANIEL: It’s a good idea.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And it’s just stopped spinning around.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Stopped twirling.
HEDVIG: Because before it was spinning around, which does all kinds of things to the direction.
DANIEL: Ohh, Hedvig is panning.
HEDVIG: oooOOooOoh
DANIEL: OOoooOoooOoo [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
[INTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley, and with me is whippersnapper and young rapscallion, Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Oh, I love being called young! I’m in my thirties now, so I love it. I’m Hedvig. Yes. I’m here.
DANIEL: Are you a rapscallion, or are you a lovable scamp?
HEDVIG: Ooo, I don’t think I’m a lovable scamp, I don’t think I pull enough pranks on the dean or my neighbour or whatever it is.
DANIEL: No impish monkeyshines?
HEDVIG: No, no, no, no. What was the other option?
DANIEL: Uh, rapscallion. No wait, young wastrel. That’s what you could be. Let’s say wastrel for now.
HEDVIG: Oh, I don’t know what those things are. Okay.
DANIEL: There’s a whole vocabulary around this, isn’t there?
HEDVIG: Is wastrel like a kestrel?
DANIEL: [PAUSE] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly!
HEDVIG: So it’s a kind of bird.
DANIEL: [LONGER PAUSE] Yeah, sure. Let’s just say… let’s just say that it is for the purpose of this conversation.
HEDVIG: Yeah, okay. Hello, Daniel. I’m very glad to be here. I’m very excited to be here with you and with all of our listeners and recording this show today.
DANIEL: Me, too. Now, our last episode was a bonus episode, where we talked about the struggle over Wugs that has taken up a lot of interest and attention in linguistics recently. And our next episode is going to be a Mailbag Episode, and that’s a bonus episode, too. So you’re going to want to make sure that you become a patron on Patreon, so that you can hear those episodes just as soon as they come out. And if you’ve got a question for our Mailbag, that’s hello@becauselanguage.com. And of course, as always, our Patreon page is patreon.com/becauselangpod. You know, we’ve been doing a series on decolonising linguistics.
HEDVIG: We have.
DANIEL: We had one with Dr Hannah Gibson a while ago about grammar. We’re going to be doing more of these as we go. I’ve been wanting to do one about Aboriginal English.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s a very good topic. And I like it when we when we get a bit, you know, Australian.
DANIEL: Yes, indeed. Aboriginal English is, of course, a variety of English that is spoken by Aboriginal people in Australia. But I wonder if you can tell me what some of these words mean. Are you ready?
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: If I say thiat something is DARDY, what is it? What does it mean?
HEDVIG: DARDY? Oh I don’t know.
DANIEL: It’s very expensive, it’s very poor quality, or it’s very cool?
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m going to guess that it’s expensive.
DANIEL: It’s… very cool. Sorry.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: How about this one: MOORDITJ. What does MOORDITJ mean?
HEDVIG: Moorditj? Moorditj? I don’t think it means mortgage.
DANIEL: Nope.
HEDVIG: I think that the -itj, I think this is a loanword from an Australian Indigenous language.
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
HEDVIG: Which means that I have very low chance of getting it. But let’s go.
DANIEL: It is Noongar. But does it mean… does it mean solid? Does it mean hard? Or does it mean strong?
HEDVIG: Strong.
DANIEL: Actually, it’s all three, [LAUGHTER] and when someone says and someone says something is MOORDITJ, they actually mean: it is the best, is really good, it’s really cool. Kind of like DARDY.
HEDVIG: Ooh, okay. When I was in high school, for some reason there was a long time when the popular youth slang for something being good was to say that it was “stable”.
DANIEL: Yeah. Yeah, I get that. There could be many things. I mean, whatever word gets picked up and used for GOOD could be lots of things. It could even be an opposite thing like WICKED you know. But yeah. But that’s a whole semantic area that could be picked up and used for super good.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Super cool.
DANIEL: There was one that was an Indigenous Australian word of the week. It was Wadjela. Do you remember what that one was?
HEDVIG: WADJELA. We talked about that one.
DANIEL: Mm hmm.
HEDVIG: Oh no! My head is all full of German now!
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] And this is one of those that’s a loanword from English. So when I say what it is, it’s going to sound like the English words for this thing.
HEDVIG: Say it again?
DANIEL: WADJELA. For example: I am a wadjela.
HEDVIG: A spokesperson?
DANIEL: Good guess, good guess. It comes from the English words “white fella”. It’s a white fella.
HEDVIG: Ah, yes, sorry, yes.
DANIEL: That’s all right. It was many episodes ago. And finally, what is it… what does it mean to YARN?
HEDVIG: Oh, to YARN? Well, it’s what we do a lot.
DANIEL: Yes, we do. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It’s just shooting the shit. It’s to tell a story.
DANIEL: Yeah!
HEDVIG: A good story.
DANIEL: Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. An Aboriginal form of storytelling. Yarning. The reason I bring up these words is because these are words that all came up in a great discussion I had with two fantastic researchers. The first one is Glenys Collard, and she is legendary in the field of Noongar linguistics and Noongar education. For decades, she’s been working on creating teaching programs for Noongar with Patsy Konigsberg and Ian Malcolm. She also worked with my supervisor, Alan Dench. One of the things that she works on is Two-Tracks Education, which is a way of education that’s super good, that values both Standardised English and also the language that students bring with them to the class.
HEDVIG: Ah, we’ve discussed this before, about this approach being used in schools and some people being upset, and some people being like: that seems like a good idea.
DANIEL: That’s it. That’s it. Now, Glenys Collard has been working with another researcher, a sociolinguist, and this is Celeste Rodríguez Louro of the University of Western Australia. These two have been working together to gather stories, and I’ve been to a presentation of theirs on some of their preliminary work, including quotative BE LIKE, one of my favourites, quotative BE LIKE.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Love it.
DANIEL: I was like all…
HEDVIG: I was like: Ste, you have to get me another blanket for my blanket fort!
DANIEL: And Ste was like: Oh, what does she want now?
HEDVIG: No, he actually came in and was like: Hi, darling. What is it you need me for?
DANIEL: He’s a keeper. You need to hang on to that guy. And also he knows about bees, so, you know, it’s great.
HEDVIG: Yeah. These are things he can do. Runs errands for me when I’m in my blanket fort and knows about bees. But it is true.
DANIEL: So I got the chance to sit down and have a bit of a yarn with these two.
HEDVIG: Lovely.
DANIEL: Talk about their research. So one thing I want to say about this interview before we get started: We know that people in different cultures sometimes structure information in different ways.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, this interview gave me a chance to experience this in a very real way. And now you, dear listener, get to experience this, too. So I hope that you’ll take the opportunity to really listen. And I think you’ll find it as satisfying as I did.
HEDVIG: Cool, I’m intrigued! [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay, so here’s my interview with Glenys Collard and Dr Celeste Rodríguez Louro.
DANIEL: We’re talking with Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodríguez Louro. Thanks so much for making the time to chat today.
CELESTE: Thank you, Daniel.
GLENYS: No worries.
DANIEL: You’re studying Aboriginal English. And I guess the first thing that I want to ask, and I think it’s a question you get a lot: What is Aboriginal English?
GLENYS: For me, it’s who I am. It’s… the language I was born into, the language I grew up with. To be more specific, Noongar English in just, in localising it. But it’s… Aboriginal English is English that we use. We use English words, but they have a very different meaning. And so people think they’re in the conversation, but there’s a whole other conversation happening around everything. So it’s not quite what people think it is. And it’s not a trick. It’s sometimes the only… the only way you can communicate. And when that’s the only way people actually don’t know, doctors don’t know it, and they wonder why you sit there. The doctor’s still waiting for them to ask what it was they wanted to know.
DANIEL: I think it’s really interesting how you’re starting not with: Oh, words like DEADLY or things like that, or: You know, there’s… got these different sounds in it or something. You started with identity, because that’s what it’s about for you.
GLENYS: Right. It’s who we are.
CELESTE: But also it’s all the layers and the genres and, you know, the socio-historical context as well. So it’s not just a collection of features, is it?
GLENYS: Oh, no.
CELESTE: Not just, you know, words or sounds or, you know, anything that stands out as different from what we’re used to. It’s… there’s so much more in there as well, that is related to identity.
GLENYS: Yes. It’s… some of it’s historical. I remember when the word WICKED came up, you know, and there was the Black Ebonics debate in America. Or you know, our mob must be: no no, I had to go and look that up, and go: no, I don’t think so. No, it isn’t, Ian, I know it’s not… And I’ve got to go through New Norcia stuff from my grandmother who was taken there, a Kimberley woman. And her sisters that were taken from the Kimberley and taken to Moore River Settlement. And they always got: “You, wicked, wicked evil children.” So when you’re being taught negative, negative, negative, you turn a negative into a positive. So the… it was good because this Black Ebonics debate was going around that Aboriginal people are copying: da da da da. You know, it’s been here forever. My mum knows it, I know my nan used to know it. So historically, you can follow that line of where it came in and why.
DANIEL: I want to just follow that a little bit, because we know that Aboriginal people have had their language, have been denied access to their language, had it taken away. Is Aboriginal English a response to that? Because their language wasn’t available, they used Aboriginal English? Or do you think this is something that would have happened anyway, because that’s what language does?
GLENYS: It’s what language does. It evolved. I did the first language recording for the Noongar language. So I used to listen to these oldies talk and talk and talk and talk. And I’d come here and sit with Alan [Dench] and I’d say, I did all these interviews, and I’d typed them all out. And Alan would go: Aboriginal English, Aboriginal English, Noongar, Noongar, Noongar… Aboriginal English, Aboriginal Eng… and I’d be going “No no! Oh! But that’s a wicked story, I got to keep that, Alan!” “No, we’re doing Noongar and we’re pulling out the Noongar.” And I’d be going: “Ohh! But that’s still real, Alan!” “No, but that’s called Aboriginal English, we’re doing Noongar language.”
DANIEL: Right.
GLENYS: So that’s when I personally became aware of: Oh, that’s what I speak, and that’s what I know! And that’s real important to me. Yeah, it was really good. I got taught that through Alan, when he was… Dr Alan Dench, the linguist who supported the recording of seeing how much Noongar was around, so whether to keep…
CELESTE: Yeah, so this Aboriginal English, obviously you could talk about Aboriginal Englishes if you wanted as well, you want to, as well.
DANIEL: It’s not just one thing.
CELESTE: But this particular variety that that that you worked on, Glenys, for so long as well. And in reference to Alan’s comments, they are very, you know… they’re very deeply rooted in Noongar culture. And, you know, there’s a lot of Noongar language in the Aboriginal English. So, for example, when we were out in the field last year and we were at a medical center in Perth City and I was using the loo and the sign right up there was yorga, yorgas. And I said to her: yorgas? What’s yorgas? And she said, Glenys said, well, it’s Noongar for women. So they were using the Noongar. So there are things in…
GLENYS: For “woman’s”.
CELESTE: For “woman’s”, exactly. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Right.
CELESTE: Because you’re translating it into… Exactly. So, there’s a lot of, that’s an interesting question as well: Are they… are there regional differences in Aboriginal English? And yeah, of course there have to be, because there are different influences from the different Indigenous languages. And in this case, we’ve got Noongar and English. So Alan was kind of dissecting, linguistically, what’s this code from what’s that code?
GLENYS: Yeah.
CELESTE: But for you, maybe… so, in terms of identity and who you are, that was all equally worthwhile, you know? There’s no, so the kinds of judgements that we make as to, you know, is this English…
GLENYS: He was really good, but no, I was just…
CELESTE: Well, he was just doing what linguists do.
GLENYS: He was doing what his job was. And you know, he taught me the orthography, so that was really good. He taught me the Aboriginal languages orthography, which was really good, because I thought, yeah, when I went over to South Australia, I’d see all these Noongar stories, but as the years go by, I can now go: But Noongars never wrote that. Because the story lines are not right. The way we talk. I often say: I’m hearing the voices. You can’t hear the voices. If you can’t hear the voices, then you can’t address any issue. And a lot of people can’t hear our voices if… because they’re expecting, whatever they’re expecting us. I go into my doctors and just sit, because I just go: you think you know everything, you’re the doctor, you tell me! That’s in my head. And my wadjela mate Patsy says, “You didn’t say a thing!” And I said, “So? Why didn’t you, then? I didn’t want to talk to him! He knows I have to go there. I didn’t want to talk to him.” I didn’t even look at him! I didn’t want to look at him. And I’m an old grandmother, great grandmother, they’re still having these. And she said, “I feel a bit embarrassed in there”. And I said, “What for? Don’t get shame for me! Embarrass yourself! You go in and yarn with him.” So whatever her… I embarrassed her because I didn’t want to yarn to my doctor, because he didn’t want to yarn to me.
CELESTE: So yeah, there are different expectations. And unspoken rules of interaction, and things that are also potentially different as well in…
GLENYS: Yeah, because I heard, I suppose I was… I thought I had… I thought I had a really moorditj… I did… private health or something, because I had a doctor that would talk for two hours on the phone: Oh, I’ll come straight around, Glenys. Can you drive out and see me? Or whatever. And, but he never said… he would always say “So what’s been happening, Glenys?” So he picked up… he picked up that “What’s been happening?” and then we could have a yarn. And by that yarn, he would work out whatever’s happening. So he told me later. He’s retired now, and I said, you got to come back! I need you, if no one else does! But it’s really funny because otherwise, what else was I going to say to the doctor? They said I have to come and see the doctor. And did I have much to say? No. You’re the doctor. Tell me.
DANIEL: I want to focus on the differences of interaction a little bit later. But one thing that you said about how Dr Dench was sort of interested in focusing on the Noongar and ignoring the Aboriginal English for that project.
GLENYS: That project. And he was lecturing. He would do this as another on top of….
DANIEL: It seems like in Australia we focus a lot of linguistic effort on Aboriginal languages. Let’s study that. And not enough even…
CELESTE: Ancestral ones.
GLENYS: Yes.
DANIEL: But Aboriginal English, it seems to me, hasn’t been studied as much. Would that be right?
GLENYS: That’s what I think. Me, because that’s… because it is my identity. Noongars never got to have a Kriol. Noongars never got to do anything. That’s because of our lands got so occupied and taken up. The Noongar people just kept getting pushed more and more and more away. But…
DANIEL: I feel like that getting pushed away is happening with the study of Aboriginal English, too. Like it’s getting pushed.
GLENYS: Oh, yeah. And I’m pulling it back, back, back. You know why? Because that’s why we have these things called Closing the Gap [a set of benchmarks for Aboriginal health and education]. And the achievements will never be met until people understand that the clientele group of Closing the Gap, the majority of the clientele of Aboriginal English speakers are not educated Standard Australian English speakers.
CELESTE: Yeah. I think just to go back to your question, Daniel, I think with ancestral Aboriginal languages, because there is such an urgency, in the sense that a lot of them are so highly endangered, where you may have two or three or four speakers left, there’s always been that kind of narrative around: We need the money or we need the attention now. But Aboriginal English, if you think about it, is spoken by approximately 80% of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia. And so if you think about it, and if you think about the fact that for a lot of people, it’s about surviving and trying to make it through the day, and have they got the time to think about whether they want to reawaken their ancestral language? Of course, there’s a lot of value in it, but there’s also the more pragmatic side of things, of: a lot of people are struggling, and the way that they communicate every day is in Aboriginal English. And so a very… there’s so many interesting questions. But, you know, what are the ways that they are communicating and culturally, how are things changing? What’s kept from the traditional, from the ancestral culture, even if the linguistic system is different? You know, if that ancestral language, say Noongar language is no longer spoken fully, what’s been retained traditionally, say, in the yarning that Glenys was telling you about?
We’re finding very interestingly, in our quotatives kind of focus that a lot of what is encoded through quotatives, which are… quotatives are little frames that are used, can be verbs, for instance, that are used to introduce, say, in storytelling, what someone said, or what someone thought, or even a sound or gesture. So what we’re finding is that most of what’s encoded through these frames, quotative frames, is actually speech. It’s this hearing the voices. There’s very little thought that is encoded. It’s all about the voices. And a lot of the times in the very fine-grained analysis of narratives, narrative progression, things that move the narrative, the story forward is actually encoded as speech. So it’s as though these voices are actually the way that potentially people who speak Aboriginal English make sense of their day-to-day reality. And how is it different from, say, mainstream Australian English or other varieties of Inner Circle — the sort of native speaking varieties — of English? Well, there’s a lot of thought encoding in those varieties. Does it come from psychoanalysis, or does it come from the fact that these are literary, you know, more literacy-based, written text-based cultures where we spend a lot of time reading and kind of thinking more internally or silently? So there’s so much more to it than just the question of: is this ancestral, or is this a new variety? At the end of the day, it shouldn’t really matter, right, because these are Indigenous communities that have the identity that we were talking about, but also the need to be heard and to be, you know, to be… not necessarily researched… I don’t know that the Indigenous communities are so keen to be researched even more, like that’s another question.
DANIEL: Doesn’t sound very pleasant.
CELESTE: Should we… should we… should we be doing it?
GLENYS: It’s the word. I think it’s the word.
CELESTE: It’s the word, and also…
GLENYS: It’s the word and also knowing about… because everyone wants to name everything Noongar. And, fine. Do it. But you know what? The yarns are still Aboriginal English and the layers. The layers. And I can… Some of our mob will just take it for the yes or no. Some… when you have a mixed marriage, maybe a non-Aboriginal parent or something like that in your family. Like, I said to Celeste, I don’t have, I never had wadjela grandparents, my mum and dad aren’t wadjelas. I never grew up with wadjelas. I only grew up with blackfellas, ourselves, so I’ve only been around… So what excites me, and what is old pop is telling me? He’s telling me that he’s real important. Even though there’s, you know, there’s very little [Aboriginal] language actually in it, it’s more that’s Aboriginal English, which we didn’t get. The linguists didn’t get a chance somehow to develop a type of Kriol, because of the movement and pushing our people out of the areas.
DANIEL: Tell me about how you got to work together. How did you get the idea for this project and how did you meet up?
CELESTE: I met Glenys in 2011. I had just arrived here and I was just, I guess, curious about Aboriginal English. And then Ian Malcolm and Patsy Konigsberg, who were both very generous colleagues, put us in touch. And I think Glenys helped one of my students understand some issues to do with language and the law. Someone was writing a paper for me based on language and the law. Rachel, I think her name was, if I remember correctly. You helped her and just sat with her and yarned basically for hours. And she recorded you, and then she was blown away, basically. I remember the student being blown away and I thought: okay, well, this this is a woman that I would feel honoured to be able to work with. And then down the track, I was lucky enough to get this funding for this ARC-funded project, DECRA project that we are working on now. And so this is only the beginning of so much more to come. I don’t know what your version of that story is, but that’s how I remember it.
GLENYS: So it’s yeah, it’s pretty much.
DANIEL: This word keeps coming up. Yarning.
GLENYS: Yarning.
DANIEL: Telling stories. You’ve been listening to a lot of stories.
GLENYS: Yeah, of course. Yarning. Stories you can make up in a book, and then they stop, and they can be stagnant a bit. Yarning is real. This is my interpretation of yarning. You yarn, you sit around that fire, you learn everything about everything around that fire, from this big to this big [MOVES HAND FROM CHILD HEIGHT TO ADULT HEIGHT]. Those yarns, and the yarns are told and shared at different levels. For the different ages, obviously, so you can exclude when you want to, or you include within our group itself. Which is quite interesting, because I don’t think you can do that with Noongar language. Once it’s been learned, it’s the words. Aboriginal English is real dynamic, it’s more….
CELESTE: Well, it’s people’s native variety, you would have that proficiency.
GLENYS: It’s so… yeah. Somebody put it on, something on “Noongar be like” and put “Cruel memes.” And I said: Yeah? And I’ve got about 15 lines underneath with CRUEL, and someone put Noongar BE LIKE, this is on the Facebook thing because I’m going, CRUEL doesn’t just mean that. Because… and our teachers, you know, when they say: Oh, yeah, we all know there’s DEADLY and WICKED and… But our kids never… you never talk about death using the word DEADLY. We don’t. We don’t say that’s…
CELESTE: …a deadly snake.
DANIEL: If you’ve got a deadly spider, what would that spider be? Would it be a CHEEKY spider?
GLENYS: Oh, yeah. This is a real cheeky one, and you gotta be careful. Yeah, that’s a real cheeky one, see that’s danger. That’s the danger. So when they say it’s deadly and that, it’s not got the death. So we have all these…
DANIEL: But what’s CRUEL?
GLENYS: CRUEL?
DANIEL: Yeah. I know what CRUEL means to me, it means…
GLENYS: It’s pretty much, you know, it’s quite similar. It’s: Ah, we just had a cruel big feed down there! [LAUGHTER]
CELESTE: A GREAT, right? A great? It’s like DEADLY.
GLENYS: Yeah, it was great.
CELESTE: It was hungry?
DANIEL: Terribly.
GLENYS: It’s… yeah. And the emphasis and the context is always: You can’t… there’s not… I can’t give you a one definition because it’s within…. That’s why the yarning is so crucial that you know what’s before and after to put it in that context, to make sure you’ve got it in the right context. And I’ve done it…
CELESTE: The way the way I see it, sorry to interrupt. The way I see it from a linguistic point of view, is that yarning is very clearly based on just orality, right? And so if you are telling a story and you know that you’re going to be seeing these people in one hour, in two hours tomorrow, you’re not going to rush to kind of conclude your story, as you would do if you’re writing an essay or a book whereby you’ve got a page, which is the final page. It could continue forevermore, right? You could teach it to younger people. You could recycle it from older people. You could add to it. And I think that is extremely interesting because it kind of defies the way that we’ve been brainwashed, in my view — we, as in non-Indigenous people, from literate sort of societies where the written word counts for so much — we’ve been brainwashed to think that… maybe our thinking has been influenced by all these reading and writing that we do, whereby if you’re from a more oral culture where the stories kind of pile up on one… into one another.
And, you know, there’s a very interesting book by Michael Nunn about how we can use these stories, not necessarily Noongar stories, but Indigenous stories from around the world to try and figure out what was happening when, say, the ices were melting and the oceans were rising. Like, all that data basically was in the stories, right? And people needed to have incredible memories to remember the detail, factual detail, to be able to then pass that on to the next generation and the next generation and so on and so forth. So I think, you know, it also relates very interestingly to epistemicity, and how you come about, you know, how you know things and why, and who told you, who was allowed to tell you, who was allowed to hear the story, who didn’t, who wasn’t allowed.
So I think there’s just… so when we say yarning, which you may define as an Indigenous cultural form of storytelling and conversation, that is one definition. But the reality is that there’s so many layers to it because it’s very context dependent that I think thinking about it in terms of orality, and then when you teach people about Aboriginal English — say, the teachers that you and Patsy Konigsberg have been teaching for 30 years in the Two-Tracks, Tracks to Two-Way Learning, you know, they teach these amazing workshops to teachers: What is Aboriginal English and what’s special about it — and yarning takes quite a lot of precedence in that in that workshop, from what I’ve seen. And it’s just making them think differently about language, that it’s not written, dictionary or grammar based. You know, there’s something else which we know… we should know about that, too. We do oral storytelling, too. But I think the fact we’ve got the written word, you know, it takes so much prec… it just organises the way you think differently and potentially how you tell a story. That’s interesting too.
DANIEL: But that’s… the doctor that worked for you, that’s what the doctor did, right? And the doctor that didn’t really work for you didn’t do that.
CELESTE: And there’s a whole thing called clinical yarning that has come up, where doctors are teaching their medical students — you know, people training to become doctors — to use what’s called clinical yarning. The problem with that is that we have no empirical… there’s no way to empirically test whether what we are calling… what’s special about this clinical yarning, what’s special about yarning, which we can then extrapolate, you know, and use in a clinical setting, because a clinical setting is very time-poor. You know, people have to quickly get a diagnosis. And so there are… and other constraints, you know, people not being actually Indigenous, but pretending that they are, or pretending that they know what it is. So, yeah, it’s… there’s a lot of work to be done. That’s a take-home message from that.
GLENYS: Yeah, and I could say, if Daughter was sitting here who’s a nurse, I could say: “Hungry man. E’s got cruel mial/meeyal [EYES], unna?” And so you’re mixing in… I’m saying, Oh, this man — you [INDICATES DANIEL] — he’s got those blue eyes, because her man’s got the blue eyes, but her dad’s got the blue eyes, too. So you’ve got this HUNGRY and CRUEL, these words are in there. It’s got nothing to do with food. You’re not hungry at all. It’s you, the person, you look a lot like that nice sort of smart-looking fellow there. And then someone say, “Yeah, baal djuripiny cruel for him!” So you get these little bits and our language word, purely to really cut people out, but you’ve already cut them out anyway. But our mob don’t know that. [LAUGHS] They don’t know that… You don’t know what you don’t know.
DANIEL: Could you walk me through those sentences again? Because I’m just… I really want to break that down. The first time… so… what was that again?
GLENYS: [LEANS OVER TO CELESTE] Hungry man there… I’m pretending Celeste is Black now…
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] Yeah, okay, cool cool.
CELESTE: You can pretend away!
DANIEL: Hungry man there…
GLENYS: Hungry man there. But I don’t have to point. I don’t have to look. So, “Oh… Celeste… hungry man, ‘e was sitting there, and they mial/meeyal, like Vorn’s [A PERSON’S NAME], you know, saying the birds… little fella, little birdy. Oh… they’s wicked, they’s deadly, but he’s moorditj too.” So you’ve got this… it’s a bit hard to…
CELESTE: MOORDITJ…
DANIEL: DEADLY, MOORDITJ…
CELESTE: MOORDITJ, which is…
DANIEL: I noticed, I caught UNNA as well, at the end there too.
GLENYS: Yeah, UNNA is…
CELESTE: Utterance-final tag.
DANIEL: Yep!
CELESTE: It’s like a confirmational sort of, are we on the same page?
GLENYS: Like, you reckon?
DANIEL: You reckon?
GLENYS: Because people will say it’s a confirmation, but it’s not a confirmation. It’s a: Are we agreeing UNNA?
DANIEL: It’s a check.
GLENYS: Yeah, it’s more of a check. It’s got written down next to it as a confirmation. But within the context of what you’re saying, it can be: Unna, he was there. Did you see baal [HIM] nidja [HERE]? No, hungry man come. Oh, and hungry man could be his dad. Baal right there, mum. That means he’s standing right here. So I’m not going to turn around because we’ve been talking about you, and you’re right there!
DANIEL: Yeah.
Glenys: So I’m not going to turn around now, cause: “Ah, that’s cruel shame, unna?” “Nooo! You reckon? Do you reckon he knew?” “I don’t know, he was laughing.” “At who? At you or me? Because if he was laughing, he was laughing at what?” So then we don’t know, but then he doesn’t really know because he would have been goin’ “So, you really think I’m attractive, or…?” DJURIPIN is like: you really like someone, or happy. So it’s got all these… Noongar, the words, DJIRIP-DJIRIP is HAPPY-HAPPY, but it also can be like… We have these other Noongar words that aren’t used much, like MARDONG [LUSTFUL] that I don’t hear Noongars use that much. That’s when you’re… KOORT [HEART] MARDONG DJURIPIN. That’s when you want to be a partner of that person. But do you… what I’m trying to say to you now is, what I’ve been working out is that Noongar can’t talk the depths of that anymore. A lot of that has not been kept in the language. It’s not been found in the language. I can go back because I learnt it, and I can say these words. And I said to my sister-in-law who passed away over a year ago, and she was coming up nearly 70: “Ayy sister, look at baal there”. Oh, that was ALEK, that there — because you’re watching TV, you’re doing five things at the same time — “Yeah, heyy girl, too alek, unna?” We never use this word ALEK anymore. And that is like, the best, the deadly, all these words. That was the Noongar word. No one uses it. It’s been left back there somewhere in the dark, in the past. So there’s… Aboriginal English has held on to a lot of things, that I think language…
Celeste: It’s always changing. It’s changing and people get older and younger.
Glenys: And we haven’t been able to update our traditional languages. That will be interesting the day that happens to move forward. We can keep calling houses and buildings MIA-MIAS, but I think we have to be a bit more… You know, when the horse came over, our mob named it NGORT, because that’s what it sounded like, it made that noise. And when they gave them a deck of cards, when you shuffle them: YABLE-YABLE-YABLE. YABLE-YABLE-YABLE. That’s how we knew… that’s the sound it made. So we could… the people made the cards the name YABLE. Sugar? Well, we had gum, that was sweet, NGUNYUNG. So we could adapt to the Noongar words. But now we’ve run out of all of that. But Aboriginal English just keeps rolling.
CELESTE: And I think this is a, that’s a really good point. So when we wrote, when we put together this application for this grant that we were successful in obtaining, that was one of the main sort of motifs of that grant, that Aboriginal English is changing. And we don’t know how. Because we keep… we keep ignoring it in favour of ancestral languages, which are obviously very interesting and very important research. We can do it all! It doesn’t mean that we should not do one thing to do another. But the problem is that the more we… the less we… the less time and effort we put into understanding how it’s changing, this is another missed opportunity. Because language will always change. There’s nothing we can do, it is inevitable, as you know and listeners know as well. And so that’s just… that’s not something we can do. But we can shift our mindset around what agendas in academia, or more generally in society are of interest. And I think if you’ve got most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people speaking Aboriginal English, a variety of Aboriginal English, which, by the way, could be lighter or heavier, could be more acrolectal, more basilectal, so lighter, heavier. If you’ve got a lighter variety, you know, superficially it may sound more like mainstream Australian English. And people may think: oh, that’s just wrong English.
DANIEL: Not very good English.
CELESTE: You know, it’s wrong English, which is wrong, by the way, to say that. We should not say that because it’s a different variety of English. And then the further away it moves from mainstream Australian English, it may even sound like Kriol in some parts of Australia. So it gets even more difficult for people who don’t speak that variety to understand what’s going on. So there’s so much that needs to be done, not just in terms of the kinds of lighter varieties of Aboriginal English that we are working on.
But also, the other thing I really think we need to say is that, in working on projects that relate to anything Indigenous, we need to think about doing it with Indigenous people. I know that this is not easy because unfortunately, institutionally, racism has been… it’s just so entrenched that Aboriginal people are relatively, you know, relative to non-Aboriginal people, we’ve got very few people that get to do PhDs and that kind of, you know, sort of more specific type of research. And so we need to find creative ways to partner up with communities and Indigenous linguists and language workers, and really have that two-way conversation. Because there’s something that the non-Indigenous linguist in this case can bring… or researcher can bring into the conversation that will only make sense if you put it in the context of what the Indigenous researcher will bring to the table. So I think that’s really important as well. So it’s not just: oh, it’s urgent to save or reawaken this language, or document this writing. It needs to be done ethically and it needs to be done in a way that we feel is also creating opportunities for community, because at the end of the day, that’s very out of whack as well.
GLENYS: And it’s out of whack for me, as I said. Our people, when new things came, new words evolved. And we’ve got a Noongar language that can cater for a lot of things. I can have a conversation enough. But it’s not enough. We’re not we haven’t produced new words. We haven’t got a body to sit down, where Aboriginal English just rolls along. Because I’ve been lucky enough to work right around the state and even Eastern states on this. And you know, I don’t know all these fellas, and I meet them all, and we all talk Aboriginal English, the common point. So when something’s going on happening, oh, we don’t know what’s happening in our classroom. All right. But I’m also talking to the Aboriginal workers. And so then I sort of go: Okay, so why do the wadjelas think that? Because I’ve been doing this a long time now. Why do they think these fellows are translators? How do they think they know what the wadjela really asked them to say? Because I have to make sure I clarify myself over and over. Like not necessarily for Celeste. I just said: Oh, Koori??? [Aboriginal person]. Celeste said, “We’ll go out?” “Yeah, let’s go. When you’re ready, we’re ready.” And it was really good because Celeste was okay to believe in me because I said in my head, I need to take Celeste to some other places and away from where the typical places that research gets done.
DANIEL: Let me focus on going to different places, because I feel like you’ve both gone to different places in the course of this research. Celeste, you can’t understand everything that you hear.
CELESTE: No, no.
DANIEL: And Glenys, you might be, you know, expanding outside of your comfort zone in some ways. What’s this been like for you both?
CELESTE: I just… yeah, well, that’s a great question. Well, for me right now, it just feels like — maybe we’re hearing this too much in the media lately — but it really is a journey. It’s a journey of, well, basically just working with a community that I had never worked before, but not doing it… the way we did it, I think was quite special, as well. So as a sociolinguist, my protocol was that I would come up, and I came up with a list of questions, which was a sociolinguistic interview. I talk to people, to colleagues, to say, okay, what kinds of things did you use for Kriol and for this and that? And, you know, there were culturally sensitive questions that one could ask. And I had those and I was going to share them with Glenys. So I came to it as, okay, I’ll run these past Glenys, and then I’ll go off and do what my original plan was. But in meeting with Glenys and discussing with Glenys, it was clear that that was not going to work. We were not going to be able to use a sociolinguistic interview. That was going to be shame for these people. It was going to make people feel like they were being put on the spot. It was the wrong thing to do interactionally. And so I just basically, at that point early last year, at the very beginning of fieldwork, let Glenys lead. And so I kind of drove us whatever we needed to go. And Glenys was the queen of fieldwork, the absolute queen of fieldwork, it was so incredible to see.
So for me, it’s not just that the stories in and of themselves are layered and complex, and it will take me decades to kind of get my head around what’s really in there. And then the question arises as to: do I… am I entitled to this sort of treasure trove. Like am I, as a as a non-Indigenous non-Noongar person, this is an honour. So, you know, there’s a whole lot of kind of respect that goes with having this collection. You know, this is, I feel very privileged. But in the research, you know, the journey that I’m describing, just to see how Glenys was recruiting people, if you want to call it that, just… and how open people were to share with us all sorts of stories, which, to be honest, in my… I’m not… I don’t see myself as white, but in my white fragility, in my non-Indigenous fragility, someone who grew up privileged, you know, that’s what I came to realise yesterday, that anyone with education and a roof on their heads and food on the table, on the table every day, that is privilege. So that was the first realisation. The second realisation was how generous people were and how they just opened up and told us all sorts of very heart-wrenching stories about death in custody, you know, young people committing suicide. And I don’t wish to say that this is all that people spoke about. But to be honest, these things came up a lot. And I asked Glenys: why are these people opening up about being stolen? A lot of Stolen Generation people we talked to and even if…
GLENYS: And not only that, kids were taken.
CELESTE: Yeah, but also women… there were a couple of older women who had gone through it, remember? Without mentioning names, but people that spoke to and then and then the children of that generation…
GLENYS: The young ones
CELESTE: And the very young ones and the racism that they experienced. And I asked Glenys, why is everyone so open? Because I… you know, I’m not Noongar or Indigenous. I sound like I’m not from here. Maybe that helped. I don’t know. But these people were very open. And so Glenys said, well, no one’s ever listened to them before. And so this is very interesting because there’s also… there’s like a silencing, you know, like a very entrenched silencing of people. And I think not paying attention to Aboriginal English is a very perverse way of silencing the people who are here today and who are, who need to… I don’t know that people need to know about Aboriginal English the way that we do it in academia, like read papers that we write. Probably that’s not of importance, but the trickle effects of these things, can we apply these things to education like Glenys and Patsy have been doing for so long? And Ian. Can we in any way work with a clinical yarning mob to try and find some more empirical grounding, you know, from linguists kind of informing the analysis of more interactional data? So what can we do that may bring about some change? And I think that’s part of the journey for me as well, that it’s not just research for research sake and for my own growth and my ego, to kind of feel like I’ve done something amazing in academia, like in the ivory tower. But seeing these people and listening to their stories, I felt like a drive almost to maybe try and do something, potentially, I’m not saying that we will, but, you know, at least have the intention of doing something different. It was very… it was a huge reality check.
It also kind of made me live in this country, in this Noongar country differently. It made me… you know, as a migrant — this is interesting as well — we took Andre… my partner came with me to the first recording session, which was with Glenys’ parents, who are both in their late eighties. It was very interesting just to sit down with them. It was felt like an honour. And Andre said to me, to me, this was a welcome to country. This means more than the citizenship that we got. You know, the paper we got. This was an actual welcome. So just to be able… to even just to hear all the stories that that were shared, I feel like that was, as a person, you know, on a very human level, very kind of mobilising, very changing. So extremely enriching experience. That’s how I would describe what I went through, especially last year, but also this year in a different context yeah? With covid and working at a distance.
GLENYS: Yeah, it’s very real. And I understand, you know, that our mob have to get educated. But there’s education and there’s education. But the people who speak Aboriginal English are less likely to have had a lot of schooling in their life. But there was all of this… some of the speakers were talking about: “Yeah, actually I’ll have a yarn because you know, I’m sick of these wadjelas just keep telling me how I’ve got to rear my kids up. And I’ve got grandkids now. They took my own babies off me. How they can keep doing this?” I’ve worked in DCP [Department of Child Protection] and that years ago, and you know what, it is so true that the gap between Aboriginal English and the so-called Standard English, and even the pub talk is nothing, nowhere near what Aboriginal English is. People go: “But they keep waffling on, Glenys.” Yeah, well, I waffle on too. But if you don’t listen, then you’re going to miss the most important part. So you just have to sit. Because you’re asking the questions. And the questions are coming, but they don’t come in the way you think they’re coming. So you have to sit and… because it doesn’t fit in just a yes no.
DANIEL: Then let me ask, just to finish up. That’s, what does the wider public need to know about Aboriginal English? You have a chance here to correct some misconceptions. What do you want to say?
GLENYS: It’s real and it’s alive, it’s living, it’s a language. And people need to know that we’re using it around them all the time, whether they know it or don’t know it. We share it, we try and share as much as we… we share to the point where if we, like I said, if we want to exclude for our personal reasons, we’ve been excluded all our lives for that. Do you know that? Wadjelas will say, “we’ll just go over here” and even as an adult, “we’ll just go over here” and it’s like: That’s them doing that wadjela talk. That’s even now! Doctors do it to you, teachers do it to you. What do you think I am? I’m older than you. You’re only a little girl, teacher, but they need to talk to the white person over there out of ear, and it’s really interesting. Because we just say it. We say it, and then people either get offended or don’t like it. No, you’re not listening because you didn’t hear it and you aren’t asking either about it.
CELESTE: So I think a take home message would be, listen as much as you can. Aboriginal English is an indigenised variety of English, so it’s not anyone’s English. So I think it’s important for people not to feel very territorial about English. English is a global language, as we know, already, spoken by more non-native speakers than native speakers. That tells you a lot about the story of English. And of course, it goes hand in hand with colonisation and dispossession and all the problems, you know, that colonisation brought about. But at the end of the day today, Aboriginal English is the one way that Indigenous people communicate, do identity, get stuff done day to day. And I think we need to be aware of it as a different variety that is not to be compared all the time to mainstream Australian English. Let’s enjoy it and just kind of appreciate it for what it is.
And let’s try to continue to learn, without expecting for Aboriginal people to teach us, though, because that’s the thing. We have to be careful that we don’t want another exhibit on, you know, another power move where, again, we’re putting them in a situation where they need to teach us. They’ll share as much as they want to. And in my experience, the communities that we’ve worked with are extremely generous. I’ve actually never seen such generous people. So I know that people will want to. But I think if you work with, if you’re working in collaboration, in partnership with an Indigenous person who can show you the way, at least you know that you’re not completely crashing the party. You know, at least you’re coming in with someone who knows the rules of the game, because it is a game and there are rules. So I think we need to just be respectful. That’s it.
DANIEL: Glenys Collard and Celeste Rodríguez Louro. Thank you for taking the time to chat today.
CELESTE: Thank you.
GLENYS: No worries. [LAUGHTER] That was a wicked long yarn!
DANIEL: There’s a lot there.
HEDVIG: That was amazing. In the end, I heard I remember when who said it, but someone said, oh, that was a good, good, long yarn.
DANIEL: That was a wicked long yarn!
HEDVIG: But I didn’t think it was long enough! [LAUGHTER] She clearly just got into her stride when actually when you started saying, so in conclusion…!
DANIEL: It was a master class, wasn’t it? And it was just great to see the contributions and the interplay between, you know, Celeste, the experienced linguist, and then Glenys, the experienced field worker, the one who’s been steeped in Aboriginal culture for the entirety of her life, who comes with so much knowledge of that, and to see the respect between them and the way they work together and play off of each other’s strengths.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. I thought that was really cool. But Glenys had been involved in sort of research on Aboriginal ancestral languages, on Noongar before, correct?
DANIEL: That’s right. She was working on that with Alan Dench.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So she’s been involved in these sort of like white academic spaces of working on Indigenous languages for a long time.
DANIEL: Decades.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah. What a treasure trove of experience and knowledge.
DANIEL: The message that I wanted… that came to me through all of this, and the reason I’m glad I took the approach I did for this interview was, are we hearing Aboriginal voices? Are we hearing the voices of the people who are giving us information? If you don’t just step back and listen, you’re going to miss it. You’ll be that doctor, right? The doctor who, Glenys shows up. The doctor doesn’t want to yarn. She doesn’t want to yarn. The doctor goes away without getting the information that they want. Or you can be the doctor who sits down and has a yarn, and through the process…
HEDVIG: And honestly, that’s what I would wish and I’m not an Australian Indigenous person, but I’ve been trying to go to doctors here and they have very short amount of time. And I’m like: So I’m feeling this way and this and I have a little bit of pain over here. And they’re like: You’re essentially fine, you’re fine, you’re fine. We did a blood test on you and you’re fine, goodbye! And I’m like: okay, goodbye!
DANIEL: And you miss it. I think maybe everybody needs that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think everyone needs to sit back and listen. I think podcasts actually are great spaces for these kinds of conversations. I don’t know about you guys, but I imagine that some of our listeners, when they put on our show or put on similar podcasts, they go in it for the long haul. They’re doing the dishes or something, and they’re happy for there to be some bit of lull or something. It doesn’t need to be like a network??? with, like action every four seconds. They’re happy to let things rest a bit and let them mature. And yeah, a lot of these, like, more long form discussions, are really useful to have specifically on podcasts, I think.
DANIEL: But the information structure, you know, was way different than I expected, even though I knew that culturally there’s a thing where you might start at the end and then come back around to the beginning. And I just found that it all came together very satisfyingly. And I really liked that.
HEDVIG: And you guys talked about a lot of interesting things. I thought it was very interesting you talked about the sort of focus on ancestral Indigenous languages and the focus on Aboriginal Englishes and how Glenys was saying that some ancestral languages are sort of not getting new words for new things, so they’re becoming in a sense — she didn’t use those words, I’ll use it — less useful to people because, yeah…
DANIEL: Very important.
HEDVIG: It is very important.
DANIEL: But not as useful. Hmm, I got that too.
HEDVIG: Yeah. They can’t talk about the things that concern them on an everyday basis and that Australian Aboriginal English is the language or the languages that people use for those things.
DANIEL: And you know, as linguists, we lament the loss of traditional languages and we hope that people in the community will take them up. But… which is absolutely not our call, which is totally up to them, because language for them means what it means for them. But if I said, gee, I really hope that people will keep Noongar going, well, an Aboriginal person might say, “That’s great, but we do have Aboriginal English, which is a language that we use and which actually contains a lot of Noongar itself. So really, we’re doing okay.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. And I found it very interesting the way they were talking as well about how to do research and how to do research with people and not sort of at people. Which is really hard to do.
DANIEL: Which we haven’t always been good at doing.
HEDVIG: We haven’t always been good at doing. And it is really hard, and a lot of the research paradigms we have set up are not apt to doing that, honestly. Like they’re not created that way. And we’ve learnt a lot of things from doing research the way we have for decades. So it’s hard to switch to doing it in another way. And that’s why projects like this one are very interesting, as they’re showing us new methodologies for how to how to gather data and how to work with people. I think before I came to Australia, I was already aware from linguistics, like, friends in Europe, that working with Indigenous communities in Australia was more… what’s the word… that communities put more demands on researchers. That there were recordings that not everyone was allowed to listen to, that there were words that not everyone was allowed to learn. That there were names that you wouldn’t use. There were recordings of people who had passed away that you weren’t allowed to use. And I remember as a European before I came to Australia thinking, oh, wow, that’s so different from how field work and linguistics is done almost everywhere else.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: And now, having been in Australia for a while, I sort of think that it’s a shining beacon of like how, it is, it is… A lot of those things are like how we should work with people, how we should, what’s the word? Arghh, now I only get the word in Swedish in my head. [LAUGHTER] How we should, how we should enact and take care of the trust that people place in us, I think is the word I’m looking for.
DANIEL: Well, that was a very… it was a very good experience for me. And so I’d just like to thank Glenys Collard and Dr Celeste Rodríguez Louro, for giving us the time to have a bit of a yarn.
[OUTRO MUSIC]
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[PAUSE]
HEDVIG: Orange juice. Juice of the gods, isn’t it?
DANIEL: I have not had that for a really long time, because my young daughters were overly fond of it and it’s a little bit sugary. So it is a pleasure that must be denied all of us, until they do not love it so much.
HEDVIG: Wow. They have — which I know they also have in Australia — there’s this new trendy thing where you can get freshly squeezed orange juice in the supermarket.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: You go up to a machine and it has a bunch of oranges in it and there’s no human involved, which I love.
DANIEL: They have those at our local Ikea.
HEDVIG: Oh really?
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: Like, that you can buy the machine, or that you can use?
DANIEL: Uh, you can use it. I think it would be a bit expensive to buy.
HEDVIG: You know that juice-like substance you can buy in America that’s called, like, Tang?
DANIEL: Yeah, I have memories of Tang, although my parents never liked me to have it. They were against pleasure.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve had Tang. Well, look at look at you, what are you doing to your children?
DANIEL: I’m not giving them Tang. I’m just simply denying them orange juice.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I suppose you’re right. I suppose the Puritan yet lives within me still.