We all have an accent — or several! And we use them to communicate things about us, and highlight aspects of our identity. So what’s going on with the accents we hear? Are we losing some accents, or are they just changing? Dr Valerie Fridland is the author of Why We Talk Funny, and she joins us for this episode.
Timestamps
- Start: 0:00
- Intros: 0:30
- News: 6:25
- Related or Not: 17:59
- Interview with Valerie Fridland: 36:53
- Words of the Week: 1:50:34
- The Reads: 2:21:21
- Outtakes: 2:26:14
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This time we are ordering names by how different the letters in your name are from everyone else’s. Higher scores are more similar. The algorithm goes letter by letter, adding how many times that letter appears in the big bag of letters which is everyone’s name gathered up together. Then divided by letters in the name.
- Rene: 34.75
- Amanita: 34.00
- Nasrin: 33.50
- Elías: 32.60
- Joanna: 32.50
- Daniel is here: 31.83
- Ariaflame: 31.56
- Amir: 31.50
- Helen: 31.40
- Ayesha: 30.83
- Fiona: 30.20
- gramaryen: 29.67
- Stan: 29.50
- Colleen: 29.29
- Ignacio: 29.29
- Canny Archer: 29.27
- Larry: 29.20
- Nigel: 29.20
- Steele: 29.17
- Martha: 28.83
- Rachel: 28.50
- Nikoli: 28.33
- Rosemary: 28.12
- Aldo: 28.00
- Mignon: 27.67
- Sam: 27.67
- Laura D: 27.17
- Rach: 27.00
- Amy: 26.67
- Manú: 26.25
- Lyssa: 26.00
- Meredith: 25.88
- Molly Dee: 25.50
- Diego: 25.20
- PharaohKatt: 25.18
- Tony: 25.00
- Ben is here: 25.00
- Rodger: 24.83
- Iztin: 24.80
- Sonic Snejhog: 24.75
- O Tim: 24.75
- LordMortis: 24.60
- Linguistic Chaos: 24.47
- Chris L: 24.33
- John Mac: 24.00
- Sydney: 23.83
- Kevin: 23.80
- Keith: 23.80
- Whitney: 23.71
- Kristofer: 23.67
- James C: 23.33
- J0HNTR0Y: 23.12
- Andy from Logophilius: 23.00
- Faux Frenchie: 23.00
- Andy B: 22.60
- Xekri: 22.40
- Luis: 22.25
- Kathy: 21.80
- John K: 20.20
- Hedvig is here: 20.00
- Wolfdog: 16.86
- Lucy: 16.25
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Become a Patron!Show notes
@mixedlinguist Why does it sound weird to call him “Bad Bunny” with all those consonants? Crash course in syllable structure differences between (Puerto Rican) Spanish and English! Start listening to Benito right now! #linguistics h/t @Kat ♬ original sound – Nicole Holliday
Bad Bunny Makes Grammys History as First Spanish-Language Album of the Year Winner
https://variety.com/2026/music/news/bad-bunny-grammys-winner-spanish-album-of-the-year-1236642481/
Bad Bunny’s Style Evolution: From 2017 to Now
https://www.billboard.com/photos/bad-bunny-style-evolution-1235672315/1-bad-bunny-style-2017-premios-juventud-billboard-1240/
Google backs African push to reclaim AI language data
https://restofworld.org/2026/google-waxal-african-languages-ai-sovereignty/
Lost in translation – How Africa is trying to close the AI language gap
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crkzgkkpx0lo
Inside an AI start-up’s plan to scan and dispose of millions of books
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2026/01/27/anthropic-ai-scan-destroy-books/
A machine that scans book pages at the rate of 2,500 per hour. | Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlysatisfying/comments/1ju2265/a_machine_that_scans_book_pages_at_the_rate_of/
Why We Talk Funny by Valerie Fridland
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/744046/why-we-talk-funny-by-valerie-fridland/
Valerie M. Fridland: Books
https://www.valeriefridland.com/book-coming-soon
[$$] ‘One of the commonest faults of even well-bred people’? Attitudes towards Post-vocalic /r/-absence, /h/-dropping and /h/-insertion in 19th-Century English Grammars
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.21832/9781800416154-003/pdf?licenseType=restricted&srsltid=AfmBOoqepibJdkaCYe0nldTTWUU4pd6OHeJitDab72uFR7T8Ygs8gMyU
In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing
https://www.thecut.com/article/brooding-friction-maxxing-new-years-2026-resolution.html
No, AI isn’t homogenizing your thoughts– frictionless design is
https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/no-ai-isnt-homogenizing-your-thoughts-frictionless-design-is-526870233927
Social cohesion and social connection | Austraian Institute of Health and Welfare
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/social-cohesion-and-social-connection
Police given additional powers as NSW premier calls for calm during Israeli presidential visit
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-07/chris-minns-calls-for-calm-president-herzog-visit/106317374
Social Cohesion Enforced by 3,000 Police With Pepper Spray | The Shovel [satire]
https://theshovel.com.au/2026/02/10/social-cohesion-enforced-by-3000-police-with-pepper-spray/
Chris Minns flags further crackdown on protests in central Sydney
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jan/26/chris-minns-nsw-protests-crackdown-sydney-ntwnfb
Trump 2.0 as ‘Dual State’? | Verfassungsblog
https://verfassungsblog.de/trump-2-0-as-dual-state/
America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State | The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trump-executive-order-lawlessness-constitutional-crisis/682112/
Minneapolis is becoming a dual state
https://unherd.com/2026/01/minneapolis-is-becoming-a-dual-state/
Your friends are still acting like everything is normal in America. What do you do? | Vox
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/476702/minnesota-minneapolis-ice-ethics-how-to-help
The Epstein Class: They Are the Elites They Pretend to Hate | Copunterpunch
https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/02/20/the-epstein-class-they-are-the-elites-they-pretend-to-hate/
Pinker, Epstein, Soldier, Spy
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/07/17/steven-pinkers-aid-jeffrey-epsteins-legal-defense-renews-criticism-increasingly
‘Dark woke’: what it means and how it might help Democrats
https://theweek.com/politics/dark-woke-explained-help-democrats
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: What do we call it? Usually… don’t put your tail in your water. Sorry.
BEN: I don’t think we call it that. No.
DANIEL: It’s always the orange cat, isn’t it? It’s always the orange cat.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, my co-host, my cohort? Only one letter different, Ben Ainslie. Hey, Ben. How’s it going?
BEN: Hello, everybody. Happy 2026. Sorry I wasn’t here last week. It’s so good to see you all.
DANIEL: You too. Welcome back for another year.
BEN: I’m looking forward to it.
DANIEL: Good. I was thinking about how I’m good at some daily word games, but I’m weirdly bad at other daily word games.
BEN: What do you suck at?
DANIEL: I’m good at Gisnep and I suck at Shuffalo.
BEN: You caught that, didn’t you, Hedvig? You saw what happened there. I said, “What did you suck at?” And he immediately went, “I’m good at…” That’s not at all what… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I’m leading with the good thing. That’s right.
HEDVIG: Also, what do you suck at? And the answer somehow contained jizz.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m just saying.
BEN: What an own goal. Oh, dear.
DANIEL: A Kermit squinchy face. I’m giving you Kermit squinchy face right now.
BEN: Yeah, fair enough.
DANIEL: So, Ben, let me ask you, is there a game or a sort of skill that you’re weirdly bad at, even though you’re good at maybe other nearby things?
BEN: Let’s see. Spelling the word BUREAU.
DANIEL: Oh, well, that one’s easy. We talked about that one a long time ago.
BEN: No. No, It’s not easy. It’s not easy. It’s not.
DANIEL: Have you forgotten my mnemonic?
BEN: Much like… yes, I have, obviously. But much like search not being a solved problem, my brain’s capacity to spell BUREAU, not a solved problem.
DANIEL: Oh, my god.
BEN: RHYTHM. RHYTHM is the other one.
HEDVIG: RHYTHM. RHYTHM is kind of fun. BUREAU is really hard to spell. And I would like to also propose that, like, I think my spell checkers are somehow getting worse.
BEN: Yeah. [LAUGHS] What do you mean? You don’t know that I’m trying to spell BUREAU when I tap B and then a random assortment of vowels and an R somewhere in there.
HEDVIG: I go like B-E-A-R-O-U-X. And I’m like…
BEN: Like Bordeaux! [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I’m like some… What could I? And I put -CRATIC at the end. I’m like, “What do you think? What do you think?”
DANIEL: Here’s what you do. Okay, so imagine that you’re so frustrated with trying to spell this word that you just get up on the desk and you take a huge wee all over that desk. There’s now UREA all over that BUREAU. The word BUREAU has UREA right in the middle of it.
HEDVIG: This might actually help.
DANIEL: Go ahead, Hedvig.
BEN: What I think is crazy here is that Daniel thinks this is helpful.
DANIEL: Go ahead, spell BUREAU.
HEDVIG: So, do you think it’s B-U-R-E-A… O?
DANIEL: And then, finish off with… [BEN LAUGHS] Well, okay…
HEDVIG: Because it would be BUREAO.
DANIEL: You have to finish up… In that case, finish up, the last letter is a U. So, just remember that you’ve got UREA all over the desk, and U.
HEDVIG: Is there no E?
DANIEL: There is. It’s in UREA. So, it’s B-UREA-U.
HEDVIG: Oh, sorry yeah.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Anyway, this was not supposed to be this bigger digression. How about I give you an alt, Daniel? A different answer. I occasionally find Connections bafflingly hard. Like, sometimes, I absolutely smash it. And then every now and then, with Connections, I’m just like, I see no system here. There is only random hapstance.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Very good. Okay. Thank you. And linguist and co-host, Hedvig Skirgård. Hedvig, same question. Is there anything you’re weirdly bad at?
HEDVIG: Ooh, there’s a cooking thing. I get very scared by fire and very hot oil.
BEN: You are not alone in this. This is oft-spoken about. Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s a scary thing.
HEDVIG: But also, me and my husband are in our middle age. Like, we like cheese fondue.
DANIEL: Oh.
HEDVIG: So, there’s always like, “I’ll exit the kitchen while you figure out the fire, because I am not.” And if I were to try it, I would be so anxious that I would mess it up. Does that count as something you’re bad at? I’m scared of it.
DANIEL: Fire handling. Nope. That’s fine. That’s great.
BEN: If it helps you, Hedvig, I don’t know if you’ve watched The Bear, but Ayo Edebiri, when she was training for The Bear in an interview, was like, “The thing I had to learn was to not fry things by being like [CRINGING ONOMATOPOEIA]”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Well, what’s coming up on today’s show? We’re always fascinated by accent here on Because Language. Why we have them, why we switch them, and what we’re trying to perform in our lives by using accents. So, for this episode, we’re having a chat with linguist and author Valerie Fridland. She’s got a new book out called Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents, and we’re asking her all our accent questions that’s going to be fun.
BEN: I don’t have an accent though. So, what do people like me do?
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Well, there are ways that you can get one. Like, for example…
BEN: [LAUGHS] You’re going to buy one at the accent store.
DANIEL: No, just find a person who doesn’t look like you and imitate them.
BEN: Right, right.
HEDVIG: That always goes over well.
BEN: I Single-White-Female someone. Got it.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Do that! [SOTTO VOCE] Do not do that. Do not do that to anyone. Very bad idea.
BEN: That was not a documentary text.
DANIEL: Hey, thanks to all our patrons for all the ideas you bring us. We’ve been taking all of them and funneling them into the show. Some of you have been with us for years, so we’re really thankful to have you. If you’d like to become a patron and join us, have chats, why don’t you? We are patreon.com/becauselangpod. We’ll see you there.
BEN: Sorry, I should segue somehow. I don’t know how. That was a great spruik, Daniel, now onto the news!
DANIEL: Oh, god. That was a great segue, Ben. Let’s do some news now. This one was suggested by Diego on our Discord. We just toss stories around and this was one that I kind of liked. It was about Bad Bunny.
BEN: Excuse me, flag on the play. Say it properly.
DANIEL: [IN A PUERTO RICAN ACCENT] Ba-Bunny.
BEN: [IN A PUERTO RICAN ACCENT] Ba-Bunny.
DANIEL: [STILL IN A PUERTO RICAN ACCENT] Ba-Bunny. Yes. And Nicole Holliday on TikTok has done an excellent job of explaining why Puerto Rican speakers say it that way. So, I guess you could say Bad Bunny or you could say [IN A PUERTO RICAN ACCENT] Ba-Bunny. But you know what? I loved having a Spanish-speaking artist perform at the Super Bowl. I actually watched a little bit of it, it was pretty cool.
HEDVIG: I think that the fact that people are amazed is showing a little bit of a low bar. But maybe that’s just me. [DANIEL and BEN AGREE] But that’s okay. Also, TikTok is full of Europeans making fun of Americans for being so proud when Eurovision has a lot of different languages. But as we know, because we’ve talked to some Eurovision experts, Eurovision is also becoming more and more English. So, maybe not so much gloating.
BEN: Mm.
DANIEL: Yeah, maybe. On the other hand, we have been subjected to a massive freakout on the part of Americans who have a hard time with other languages or other people being represented in media or in fact even existing at all. So, do you ignore them? Maybe. Do you enjoy it when they suffer? Yes.
HEDVIG: They made some sort of alternative show. I don’t know. I also don’t know why… The Super Bowl is a commercial enterprise. It’s not state-run. It’s not run for the good of a charity or something. They want people to tune into the show, and they want people to talk about it. And they made a calculated decision that having Bad Bunny on as a halftime show would get them the most eyeballs, which seemed to be true because it was very high viewer numbers, I think. It’s just a business decision, right?
DANIEL: At the same time, it was quality entertainment. And this is evidenced by the story that Diego pointed us to because Ba-Bunny has won a Grammy for his album, Debí Tirar Más Fotos. And it’s the first time that a Spanish-language album has done so. Very cool.
HEDVIG: Oh, is it the first time that a Spanish language…
BEN: Wait, the first time ever that it’s won a Grammy? A Spanish-language album?
DANIEL: The first time that a Spanish-language album has won Album of the Year, which is a major…
BEN: Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough.
HEDVIG: There might be songs that have won Song of the Year.
BEN: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, that can happen.
HEDVIG: I don’t know.
DANIEL: Although I can’t think of any right now because I don’t follow the Grammys that closely.
BEN: Well, yeah, second only to the Super Bowl, to be honest. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Okay, true. So, Bad Bunny, for his part, said in English, “I want to dedicate this award to all the people that had to leave their homeland, their country, to follow their dreams.” That’s interesting. That weaves in a few different narratives about immigration and the American dream, That just calls echoes of that for me.
BEN: Can I do the thing? Can I be a bit old and irrelevant? When did [IN A PUERTO RICAN ACCENT] Ba-Bunny start being a famous human that people knew about?
DANIEL: Hmm.
BEN: Because I will be honest, I had never once heard of this person before the molehill mountain of: [IN AN OLD PERSON VOICE] “There’s a Spanish-language halftime show.”
HEDVIG: Spanish speakers around me were playing it at parties from, I would say middle of last year, and there would be some songs.
BEN: Okay, so it’s still super fresh.
HEDVIG: And I was like, “Oh, this is cool.” But that’s when it reached me. I don’t think that’s when he got famous [LAUGHS] unless fame is defined by what Hedvig knows, which… [LAUGHS]
BEN: Well, I mean…
DANIEL: You’re pretty cool. You’re the coolest of us.
BEN: …she’s got fingers on the pulse, folks.
DANIEL: I just happened to see a retrospective of him in the last 10 years and how he has looked different through those years. And so, he has been going for quite a while. He’s not just out of the blue, even though he’s crashed into a lot of our consciousness.
BEN: I asked that 100% from the perspective of, “How is Ben irrelevant in a new and interesting way today?” [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Same. Good on him. And it’s good to hear something different, some different language once in a while.
HEDVIG: And consider this also your semi-annual reminder that Puerto Rico is a part of the United States and so are many other places that don’t usually get put on a map like…
BEN: Or voting rights or representation. Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, that was the hilarious part. People saying, “Hey, why can’t we have a good American artist?” Yay. Guess what? Puerto Rico.
BEN: Great news, guys. I’m going to blow your mind.
DANIEL: So now, you like it, right? Right?
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: No? What’s up with that? Okay. Let’s go on to a story about AI and boy, oh, boy, I’ve been having some bad stories lately. You want to hear a bad story? Or you want to hear a good story?
BEN: Wait, what is the story that you’re going to tell the audience? I want to hear that story.
DANIEL: Okay. The good story is about low-resource languages. This is a constant challenge in AI. If your language has a smaller number of speakers or doesn’t have a lot of data, you might not have access to tech tools in your language, which you might think fine, or you might think, “Ah, that’s too bad.” But it does contribute to a kind of digital inequality where language tech brings benefits to a lot of people, but not to everyone equally.
So, into this, Google has launched, now, I’m not sure exactly how to say it. It looks like Waxal, W-A-X-A-L. It’s a Wolof word. It’s a word in the Wolof language. So, I could look this up. The word for speaking, Waxal. This is a dataset for 21 African languages. Some of the languages are Yoruba and Hausa, Acholi and many others. It’s a way to bootstrap resources for low-resource languages. But what I noticed about this was the dataset is not going to be owned by Google. They won’t have ownership of it.
BEN: Mm, that’s interesting.
DANIEL: Instead, the ownership is going to be by the African partners who put the data together.
BEN: Is this new? Like, do things not normally work this way in linguistic thingies?
DANIEL: What’s your experience, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Most of the large language models that have come out in the last couple of years have seemed to have been built on, like, “We’ll just digitise all the books we find and not even care about copyright, even less about acknowledging ownership.” So, that’s relatively common.
But Google and Microsoft as well have done various initiatives in the last, I would say, eight years or something, trying to do good things for lower-resource languages. I remember when I was at University of Sydney, there were some Microsoft people who were building corpora for Indigenous languages of Australia, for example. I don’t know what exactly has happened with all those efforts, but this seems to be in that… In lack of a better word, it seems like Google and Microsoft want to do some things that make them look… What’s that word when millionaires are like…
BEN: Virtuous?
DANIEL: Philanthropic?
HEDVIG: Philanthropic is the word I’m looking for. And so, they partner with these universities and… I don’t really know. I like to be cynical. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know what’s in it for Google. Maybe the ownership is by these African institutions, but like Google will have a special use case…
BEN: I mean, it could be the case that this could be one of those instances where someone at a very large organisation had a passion project and it kind of slipped past the goalie, for lack of a better phrase, right? And they…
HEDVIG: But it’s been a couple of these over the years, Ben. It’s been a little bit consistent, not large projects, but I’ve seen it pop up here and there. Maybe we should do like a special episode trying to tease it apart because I don’t… No idea what it’s doing.
DANIEL: There’s got to be somebody in there who cares and who’s standing up for the community and saying, “Okay, we’re doing this, but it’s really important that we make sure they have ownership and that it benefits the community,” that kind of thing. There must be somebody on side.
HEDVIG: Yeah. As this news story that we found from restoftheworld.com, they also point out that Microsoft recently launched something called Paza, which has benchmarking tools for 39 African languages. So, they’re both sort of doing research work on smaller languages. And yeah, it’s interesting.
DANIEL: I think it’s really important.
HEDVIG: It is. It is.
DANIEL: And I always feel a bit uneasy about issues of language tech and language ownership. Companies aren’t always good about this. I just read a story, we’ll have this in our show notes. Anthropic has been scanning millions of books but destroying them in the process so that they could make Claude.
BEN: Oh, god.
DANIEL: There’s a memo that came out where they say, “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan…” that’s destructively “…scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” So, what they do is they take the books, they slice off the spines, run the pages through high-speed scanners or just pirate them using libgen. Argh.
HEDVIG: So, Google Books scanned a lot of things. I don’t know how destructive that process was. I have torn the back of a book once and scanned it, but that was after the librarians told me that, A, I could do it and, B, they would put the back on again after. [BEN LAUGHS] I was like, “I’d like to scan this book of yours.” And they were like, “Great, no one has checked that out in ages. We’d love if more people had access to it. Can you give us a PDF?” And I was like, “It’d be much easier if I could cut off the back.” And they were like, “Sure, we can glue it back together.” So, you can actually scan books and put them back together. You don’t need to pulp them.
BEN: But I think the point was they wanted to destroy this corpora so that no one could know what they’d used. Is that…?
HEDVIG: Is that it?
BEN: That was the vibe I was getting.
DANIEL: No, I think it was…
HEDVIG: But that’s not how that would work.
DANIEL: …so that it would just be really quick. You just run the pages through a super-fast scanner. I’ve seen how Google has done it with a… It’s got a cradle for the book that looks like this and then there are things that turn the pages and it’s pretty fast, but it’s non-destructive. Hey, we should also mention there’s the African Next Voices project, which is for 18 different African languages. And that one, there’s a link from the BBC.
HEDVIG: Africanvoices.io, I’m on it now as well, supported by the Gates Foundation.
DANIEL: Well, that’s interesting. Okay.
HEDVIG: So, that’s the… Yeah. Look, we should probably look into more of this because it looks good and it looks good that there’s resources and stuff being built for lower-resource languages. Unfortunately, I think all three of us just don’t always fully trust Google, Microsoft and Gates to do great things, but maybe it’s a baby-bathwater situation that like…
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: A broken clock is right twice a day.
HEDVIG: …from the face of it. Yeah, speaking of philanthropic. Yeah.
DANIEL: This stuff is so fraught. Oh, my gosh. Okay, well that’s an idea for a future show. We’ll see what we can do. Well, that’s the news. And now, it’s time for a game of Related or Not. Let’s have our theme song this time by David.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME BY DAVID]
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] That sounded like soft jungle with Daleks or something.
BEN: No, it’s Liquid DnB all the way.
DANIEL: Love it so much. Thanks, David. Our first one comes from Allison, who says, “Dear Hedvig, et al.”
HEDVIG: This is going to be bad.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Lead author on the podcast. I love it.
DANIEL: Are you Ed and I’m Al, or is it the opposite, Ben?
BEN: I’d have to imagine I’m Al with the Ainslie going on. That’s my thought on it.
DANIEL: Well, that’s okay. I like to be Ed.
BEN: And you can be Ed tu, Brute.
DANIEL: I’ve always wanted to be an ampersand.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: Allison says, “I have a Related or Not triplet.”
BEN: Ooh, triplet.
DANIEL: GRIM, GRIME and CRIME. [COLLECTIVE OOHS] GRIM, GRIME, and CRIME. “Related, a pair related and an odd one out, or all unrelated? Sincerely, Allison.”
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: I mean, they are kind of the same. How old do you think these words are in English? What kind of history are we talking about?
BEN: Well, Brothers Grimm is at least, what, 250 years old, and they’re using their last name as a play on words for things that are grim, I’m assuming, so…
DANIEL: I don’t think that was a play on words at all. I just thought it was… I thought I made that joke.
HEDVIG: I think that’s just their names, I think.
DANIEL: Oh.
BEN: Well, but that’s… Hold on that’s like Seinfeld and having a fucking librarian called Mr Bookman or something, like what’s going on there.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Mr Librarian?
BEN: Or do we just get grim… Do we just get grim from their name?
DANIEL: I bet we don’t.
HEDVIG: I don’t think we…
DANIEL: Okay, that sounds like…
BEN: Hang on a second. You mean to stare me in the fucking eye and say there were two dudes with the last name that just happened to be Grimm? This is as lame as Tolkien doing Mount Fucking Doom. I’m sorry. Like, it’s low-hanging fruit, is what I’m saying.
DANIEL: Okay, well, maybe I’ll go first for this one. I don’t think any. Although I am giving GRIM and GRIME the old side-eye, but I don’t think they’re…
BEN: Squinty face.
DANIEL: But I don’t think they’re related.
BEN: I intuitively… like, I had one of those gut moments. And I also was like, I reckon it’s none, but now I’m gaming it. Now, I’m playing internal strategy. I’m Sun-Tzu-Art-of-Warring it. Yeah, no, I am. It’s happening.
DANIEL: Don’t do it. Don’t do it.
BEN: It’s happening. I am. I’m doing it because no one would bring this to us with three words, right? Three totally unrelated words. So, I think that there is a connection between GRIME and CRIME. Okay.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Outside chance. I’m going to get more water. You go.
HEDVIG: I’m going to use my cheat card of other languages. So, I think GRIM, as in the adjective like a grim story, is related to Scandinavian grym, which is cruel. And I’m going to… I think, actually, it might be GRIM and CRIME.
BEN: Oh, we’ve got a spread.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay.
HEDVIG: Because, well, /k/ and /g/ are, by the way, super similar sounds…
DANIEL: They’re the same sound.
HEDVIG: …so it’s not crazy.
DANIEL: Do we have a /k/ to /g/ thing going on in Germanic? Or /g/ to /k/?
HEDVIG: It should.
BEN: Gattaca? Great film!
DANIEL: Not that film.
HEDVIG: It’s just voicing. Right? Like…
DANIEL: Yeah, but is that attested in any other words?
HEDVIG: This is where my neighbour, who’s a proper historical linguist, should be here and be like, “Hedvig, you’re being dumb.” So, to me, as not like a deep historical linguist, I kind of assume that all consonant pairs that are voiced/devoiced have a tendency to come across.
DANIEL: Are plausible. Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: Maybe that’s wrong, but…
DANIEL: Well, I’m sticking with my nothing’s related. Okay. Here’s the answer. None. They’re not. They’re not related.
HEDVIG: Oh, fuck off, Allison! Sorry, sorry, sorry!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] So, GRIM, you’re absolutely correct, Hedvig. It is linked to Old English grym, meaning cruel or fierce, goes back to a Proto-Germanic root reconstructed as *grimma-. GRIME, for its part, only pops up in the 1500s, unhelpfully listed in many etymological dictionaries as “of uncertain origin”, possibly from an alternation of Middle English grim, dirt or filth. But it’s been reconstructed in Proto-Germanic to a different word, *grim-, to smear, because grime is something that’s smeared all over you.
HEDVIG: Yeah, right.
DANIEL: And then, CRIME didn’t come to us via Germanic at all. It’s an Old French word, crimne, meaning crime or sin of some kind.
HEDVIG: I did feel… Because it’s criminal, right? And things that are all, I suspect, of Romance origin.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. And you wouldn’t say that something dirty is griminal or something that is really like scary, “Ooh, that’s almost griminal.” Nope. Doesn’t seem to happen. So, none there. Thanks, Allison, for that one. You’re the best.
BEN: I, by the way, just looked up the Brothers Grimm, and as far as I can tell, it really is just like an accidental coincidence, and I find that monstrously unsatisfying. Like, on a deep, visceral level, I hate that they did not change their name to Grimm for what it was they did, that upsets me.
HEDVIG: Maybe it’s nominative determinism, whatever it’s called.
BEN: Oh, okay.
HEDVIG: When you have a name and then that’s associated with something, and suddenly in your life…
DANIEL: It’s like a magnet. But then also, like confirmation bias. Like, if they’d been called Story or Tale or Prince or any of a hundred things, we would say, “Ooh, look at that. That’s so appropriate.”
BEN: I disagree.
DANIEL: And now, we’ve got one from Elliott.
ELLIOTT: Hello, this is Elliott once more, to fulfill some of your SpeakPipe needs, I have a Related or Not in which it’s a homonym with three different definitions. So, I’m wondering if any of those definitions are related. So, the word is wake, W-A-K-E. The first definition for WAKE is to wake up in the morning, to get up, to be awake.
BEN: To awaken.
ELLIOTT: The second definition for WAKE is a trail left by a boat or ship in the water. It leaves a wake behind. The third definition being in regard to a funerary ceremony, which is after somebody passes, we attend their WAKE. Are any of them related? If so, how? If none of them are, why not? [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Why not?
BEN: Why not?
DANIEL: Why not indeed?
BEN: That’s a Related or Not after my heart, where if these are unrelated, bloody explain. A bit like with the Brothers Grimm, like, just fucking what’s going on here?
HEDVIG: Yeah. There are no things as coincidences. Interesting, interesting.
DANIEL: Okay. I’ve got my answer.
HEDVIG: I like this a lot, Elliott. Thank you.
DANIEL: Gotta watch out for Elliott, by the way, Gotta watch out for Elliott.
BEN: Given us some curveballs, hasn’t he?
DANIEL: Or they.
BEN: Sorry. True. [DANIEL LAUGHS] I think.
DANIEL: Ben sounds like he’s on the verge of an answer.
BEN: Well, I have a feeling there’s going to be an odd one out. And my thinking is awaken got shortened to WAKE, and that’s the odd one out. And that the funerary, right?
HEDVIG: Funereal.
DANIEL: Or funerary.
BEN: Funerary, the death one and the shippy toot-toot one are related. And this is a super fucking longbow to draw, but like the thing that comes after.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting. Yes. Yes. All right, good. I can go next. I think that the funerary ceremony is related to waking up. You would watch to make sure they were truly dead and they weren’t going to awaken, at least that would be part of it. The boat trail is a little harder. I think that might also be related. You’ve awakened something, you’ve dredged the water and you’ve slurped on this boat channel and now that’s the WAKE, there you go.
BEN: Interesting.
DANIEL: Might be an older meaning to rouse or something like that. So, I’m saying all related.
BEN: Ooh.
HEDVIG: I don’t think they’re all related.
BEN: You’re going none?
HEDVIG: No, I think wake up and the funeral and I want to ask in English, can you “wake over something”? Like a mother hen is waking over her chicks?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Sounds weird.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: We don’t do that.
HEDVIG: Because… But you can say “watching over”, right?
BEN: You can wake something up. Is that what you mean? Are you using it in the same sense? Like a mother will wake up…
HEDVIG: No, like watch over.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: That’s what I thought. You’re watch over something. You don’t wake up or something?
HEDVIG: Yeah. No, so in Swedish, the funeral thing is generally when you stay up, like when you are awake for a long time to do a thing. So, there’s like a tradition of like staying up all night on the longest night to make sure that none of the devils do anything bad. And that’s a wake.
DANIEL: Good idea.
HEDVIG: So, that’s clearly being awake for a long time and waking up. The trail of the boat, I think, is going to be one of those weird out-of-left field Scots uncertain origin, like, we don’t know what’s going on.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Poor Scots just getting thrown under the boat in this instance.
HEDVIG: I’m just saying, weird things occur.
DANIEL: It’s an underboat.
HEDVIG: That’s me. So, wake up and funeral. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. And, Ben, you said that the boat wake and the funerial wake are together, but waking up is not. And I said they were all related. And we’re all wrong.
BEN: What?
DANIEL: We’re all wrong.
HEDVIG: What?
DANIEL: The answer is ain’t none of them related.
BEN: No. All these absolute rat bastard listeners.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] So, here’s the story. To wake up, that wake comes from two different words that grew together in Old English. But they’re two Old English words that grew together by the time Middle English was going around. So, *wacan, to become awake, and then wacian to be or remain awake. Two different words.
BEN: That sounds…
DANIEL: They sound like one word but they’re attested differently. The funeral WAKE comes from Old English, wacu, which is, yes, Hedwig, to watch. Something like that, related to watch, okay. Whereas the boat WAKE, only since the 1500s, looks like a German or a Dutch word just meaning hole in the ice which, Hedvig, do you have any reflexes from that one?
HEDVIG: Oh, shit. I knew that.
DANIEL: What is it?
HEDVIG: It’s just like when you cut a hole in the ice and you go down as like a dip, that’s a vak.
DANIEL: A vak.
HEDVIG: In Swedish, it’s a vak. I don’t know what it is in German, but…
DANIEL: There you have it. It’s exactly the same, so.
HEDVIG: Oh, so you’re kind of making a hole into the water when you go with a boat? Okay.
DANIEL: I guess so. A channel, a hole.
BEN: Yeah. Presumably when there was a little bit of ice or ice stuff in the water, you would be able to see very clearly the trail of the boat as it passed through kind of thing.
DANIEL: There we go.
HEDVIG: Sure.
DANIEL: And now, last one from Wolf, who is neither big nor bad.
HEDVIG: Okay, well, Ben, just before we hear what our third potentially untrustworthy listener said, let’s just both register that Allison and Elliott both offered us situations where nothing was related.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, either it’s the same or it’s like all of them or some shit.
BEN: Is this the start of our John Wick arc? Is this how it begins? Instead of like our puppy getting killed, it’s just three unrelated’s in a row and we just like… at the end of this, we just get up out of the frame and just like you can see me in the background just pulling weapons out of a freaking drawer.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.
DANIEL: They were never okay after this. I’m just watching your priors update.
BEN: Okay, here we go.
DANIEL: Wolf says, “Here’s a Related or Not that’s been floating around in my head for a while. Chinese words often get loaned into other languages of the area, and you can generally recognise them because their syllable structure is subtly different from that of those other languages’ native words tending to follow the one-syllable-per-morpheme character word thing that Chinese has going for it. And so, my question is, are LO MEIN in Chinese — a kind of noodle dish — and RAMEN in Japanese — also a kind of noodle dish — related? If so, how related are they? Are they the same combination of two morphemes? Does only half of each of those words originate from the same Chinese character, and if so, which one? Or are they completely unrelated, despite sounding a bit similar to our Anglophone ears? Thanks for all the podding, Wolf.”
Okay, so we got four choices here. Totally related, both syllables. None of them related, both syllables. First syllable related. Second syllable related. You’ve got four picks there. I guess it’s my turn.
HEDVIG: Yeah, you go.
DANIEL: We are way outside my area of expertise here, but it seems like syllables are potentially really ambiguous. There’s only so many of them, and they could mean so many different things. And yet, we did find that there’s a lot of cultural crossover, like with YEN and YUAN, they’re the same thing. So, I could see the MEIN and -MEN being related, but I’m still going to say not related, that’s my pick.
BEN: Okay, I’m going next. I think that all four syllables are related, and this is my logic. When I was traveling the Japanese archipelago, many of our walking tour guides and stuff all kind of had the same line they would trot out, which was basically like… And I want to be really clear, this is Japanese people saying this about their homeland. They would say, “There is no real Japanese culture. It’s all just stuff we stole from China.” So, I’m going to take that at face value. I’m going to believe all of my Japanese tour guides and I’m going to say they just ganked some root that Lo Mein also had, because I can kind of see ra- and la being similar, right? And I can see mein and -men, or -maan and -men and all that kind of thing. So, I’m thinking, shoot from the hip, baby. It’s all of it. All of it’s the same.
DANIEL: It’s all the same. Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’m on the same train as Ben. I think it’s all related. L’s and R’s are quite similar acoustically. You can see them shift. Just like Daniel said earlier, we have YUAN and YEN. So, just introducing a second syllable like that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not related. And the Sinosphere, like cultural sphere was and is very large. Just like there’s like an Indosphere that affected like Thailand and stuff, there’s also a Sinosphere that historically has affected all of its neighboring countries, including Japan, which is where we mostly associate ramen with. Does either one of you know about mie goreng? Because that was my follow-up question. Because I definitely think the GORENG is not, but the MIE might just make things worse now.
BEN: Goreng just means fry, obviously.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: And so, you’ve got nasi goreng and other gorengs that you can avail oneself of.
HEDVIG: And isn’t mie goreng fried noodles?
BEN: Yeah. So, you’re thinking MIE, RA-, and LO are…
HEDVIG: No, I’m thinking -MEN…
BEN: I don’t know; MIE seems like a stretch.
HEDVIG: …and LO MEIN is MIE.
DANIEL: Now, you’re making it worse. [BEN LAUGHS] Okay, so we have two votes for everything related. I’m saying none of us related and we’re all wrong. One of the syllables, but only one is related, which one?
BEN: Oh, it must be the first one then.
DANIEL: Do you think LO and RA-, or is it MEIN and -MEN?
BEN: I would have said yeah, LA and RA… Sorry, LO and RA-.
DANIEL: I would have said MEIN.
HEDVIG: Oh, MEIN and MEI are the ones that are related.
DANIEL: So, Wolf says: half related. The MEIN part of LO MEIN and the -MEN part of RAMEN are the same Chinese morpheme character word, miàn in Mandarin. But LO MEIN comes from liāomiàn in Mandarin. Sorry about the pronunciation. Mixed noodles. Whereas RAMEN comes from LĀ MIÀN in Mandarin. Pulled noodles.
BEN: Oh, that feels like a cheat.
DANIEL: Feels bad, doesn’t it?
BEN: It was so close.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: But it feels close to our dirty Anglophone ears, I think, right? There’s a tonal thing probably at work here and to a person from the Sinosphere, they’d be like, “Oh, utterly different words.” And we’re just like, “What?”
DANIEL: But at least this time, it wasn’t none of them related, so we can put the weapons down. Thanks to Allison, Elliott, and Wolf for those. And thanks to David for theme song. If you’d like to contribute a Related or Not or a jingle, we would love it. Just send it to hello@becauselanguage.com or hit us up on the Discord.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
DANIEL: We’re here with Dr Valerie Fridland, Professor of Linguistics at University of Nevada, Reno, writes about language for Psychology Today, author of Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English. And most recently, the author of Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. Valerie, thanks for coming on the show today.
VALERIE: Absolutely. I’m thrilled to be here.
DANIEL: It’s a fun read. Let’s go around the table. What accent are you using right now in this interview and what others do you have access to? Shall I start? Maybe I’ll start.
VALERIE: Do it. Yes, do it.
DANIEL: I was born in Spokane, Washington. So, I began life speaking with the US Pacific Northwest accent. But now I live in Perth, where I’m getting a lot of contact with people who speak Western Australian English. And so, what that means is that I’ve lost my cot-caught merger. And I no longer have my Mary-marry-merry merger. Well, I kind of do, but that’s just me.
VALERIE: I was going to say those sound very similar, but losing a merger is pretty impressive. That’s a pretty impressive feat.
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you. People say I don’t play along.
VALERIE: Not everybody can do that.
DANIEL: I know. It was completely automatic. That’s the thing. It was completely automatic. I did not not have any sort of… I noticed it pop up in my conversation. All right, Hedvig, let’s bring you in.
HEDVIG: Hello, I’m Hedvig. I’m a co-host of the show. And people who listen to this show have heard me speak a lot with a lot of different people and might have noticed that I do tend to chameleon. So, English is not my first language, and I believe that gives me a right to do whatever I want because people seem to understand me. Some very astute linguists will sometimes… Because random people will be like, “Oh, vaguely American,” but some astute linguists will be like, “Mm, she doesn’t conjugate her verbs correctly.” And actually, before we talked, Valerie was commenting on my /θ/’s, and being like, “That doesn’t… Something’s a little bit off.” So, it takes an astute person to notice that this is actually second language English heavily influenced by American, but I’ll be whatever you want me to be, baby.
DANIEL: That’s the way. That’s human.
VALERIE: I’m also a little bit of a linguistic complexity. Although aren’t we all, I think? But I was born actually in Madison, Wisconsin, but lived there for just a couple months. So, I don’t think had a lot of input from the Wisconsin accent. And then, my parents, who were both native French speakers, moved to Memphis, Tennessee, for work. So, I grew up… My formative young years were in Memphis, surrounded by a Southern accent. And I did sound more Southern when I was younger. I never was one of the sort of more stereotypical, very, very Southern sounding, partially because by the time I was born, that had started to atrophy, which I think we’ll talk a little bit about. But also, I think because my parents were not from the area, so our social network tended to be other transplants, and that had an influence.
But then, I moved to Michigan for graduate school and got to be indoctrinated into the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, where bags sound like baygs. And so, I picked up a few traits there and lost my tendency to say honey to everybody because that got me in trouble a lot of times. In the South, you can say honey to everybody, no one takes it the wrong way. But in the North, I was getting a lot of dates [LAUGHS] when I would call people honey.
And then, I ended up on the West Coast. I’m out west now. And so, they have a nice thing going on. it used to be called the California vowel shift is now the elsewhere shift or the low back vowel merger shift, of which you have lost, Daniel. And so, I’m surrounded by Westernites who, instead of saying bag, say baag. So, I’m kind of a mutt. I think I’m a linguistic mutt. I’m not sure what I sound like anymore, but it’s a compilation of all that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think you sound… If I may be so bold, you sound like it would be hard for me to place exactly where. I would not put you at any of the extremes. I would be like, “She’s definitely American.” I would not put you in Canada. But then, I would be like very hard pressed… like, I don’t know, put you in Illinois? I don’t know. Also, we’ll discover during this episode. I don’t fully. I don’t know that much about American dialects, except for the very obvious and what I’ve learned from this book.
VALERIE: Well, that’s all going to change in the next hour. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: There we go. Well, that is an interesting sort of way of phrasing it because we have a lot of attitudes about accent. We sometimes say, “Oh, I don’t have an accent,” which we know is BS, everybody’s got an accent. But also, we sometimes pride ourselves if we don’t feel like we’re from a place. We feel, “I’m a voice from nowhere. I’m ideology free,” which is also impossible. Isn’t that right?
VALERIE: You know, I think we see it both ways. Some people are really proud to have an accent. Accent is identity and so a lot of people want to lay claim to an identity that’s important to them, and accents help them do that. I actually was on a show the other day where everybody was from New York, and they were all so happy to say MARY, MARRY, and MERRY for me differently, because in Long Island, that’s an area you find that. And it was part of… Their whole shtick was, “We are New Yorkers and we can show that by the way we talk.” And so, there’s certainly places and people that really, really want to have those local accents because that’s powerful and meaningful to them.
And then, I think a lot of people also want to be accent free. We see that in… When you look at second language learners trying to learn English, the whole… A lot of them have this goal of being accent free, which is also a sad thing because accents are identity, and why would you not want to keep that part of your identity?
So, I think our drive to have no accent is also a fallacy because you will always have an accent. The difference is between a noticeable one that people can place and a non-noticeable one, meaning that the features are not easy to place. That doesn’t mean you don’t have an accent. And anytime you travel outside your country of origin, people notice your accent and therefore you have one.
But yes, I do think that a lot of us have this kind of ideology of no accent. And actually, Kara Becker who’s at a university in Oregon, for a collected volume on research that I did a few years ago, she and her students did a study where they did a test with their students where they were trying to measure people that thought there was no accent in Oregon. So, they would actually ask them, “What do you think the Oregon accent is?” And so, then they grouped people by those that said there was an accent, there was a distinct Oregon Pacific Northwest sound. And then, those that were like, “Oh, Oregon doesn’t have an accent. We sound like everybody else. This is where we don’t have an accent.”
And she actually found the people that had the ideology of no accent actually participated less in the local vowel changes that were affecting Oregon speech. So, their belief in what people sounded like actually affected their participation in local networks versus non-local networks. So, it affected the choices they made in the accent they had. Not that they didn’t have an accent, but they chose an accent maybe more oriented on that sort of outside the local community than inside of it. So, there’s a lot of really fascinating stuff that happens with just our beliefs about what we sound like.
HEDVIG: Well, if we think about language communities as a big, interconnected network, and you talk about this as well in your book, like innovations spread and people get separated. And if an innovation spread and you don’t have a tight connection to that part of the network, that innovation might not come to you. So, if you grow up in Oregon and you just are not engaging with those part of the community or engaging more with the ones that are conforming more to the national norm, you might not hear what is particular about Oregon, because no one around you really is talking like that. And even if you live in a geographically the same place, you could not interact with people. So, do these people have a point in that the way they particularly were speaking was less Oregon?
VALERIE: They had a point in the sense that they adhered to their own ideology and the way that they spoke. So, they did not get attracted to local features. I think it’s highly unlikely that people living in the same community, especially young speakers at a university, would not have exposure to each other’s speech. So, it’s very, very doubtful that they didn’t have exposure to Oregon vowels, to the low back vowel merger, very unlikely.
In the same way that in the South where I grew up, there was a big mixing where you had African American Southern English and then some more standard Southern English and non-standard Southern English that was more predominant among white speakers. It wasn’t that you didn’t have exposure. It’s that where your orientation, affiliation, and your social meaning and identity kind of drove your use of variance. So, I think what’s more likely in Oregon is that the social meaning attached to those innovations was not relevant to the people that had an ideology of no accent, and that’s what kept them from picking it up.
Because we’re all surrounded by innovation all the time. What keeps us from picking it up is that we don’t get the meaning of it. We don’t feel empathy with what it’s expressing, and it doesn’t mean it’s the same thing for everybody. So, there can be a feature that has a certain meaning in it in the originating group, and then as that feature moves out of that originating group, it’s not the same meaning as the people that used it in the originating group, but it has taken on another valuable social meaning that drives its use in a new group. And that’s really how we see innovation spread, is that they morph in social importance in ways that different people with different identity structures find them useful.
So, I actually think that’s really it. What they believed drove what was important to them, and what was important to them drove the attraction to local variants or not. So, I think it’s a little more complex than just not hearing it. I think that’s true. Like, if you live in one country and maybe there are innovations in another country, yes, you’re not exposed to it. But when you’re in the same community, especially going to school, you’ve had exposure to that kind of variant.
HEDVIG: Maybe I’m just… I’ve been living outside of my country for a long time, and a lot of people I know are like highly educated immigrants and tend to… Actually, there is separation. So, for me also, as a socially anxious person, I could be like, I could go to university and not talk to a lot of people that, [LAUGHTER] but not everyone is like me.
VALERIE: But we’re talking about what kind of the things you picked up in young life. So, most innovative variants or things that come to us when we’re younger. But absolutely, I think as adults, we get siloed a lot more and there is a good chance we’re not exposed to things. Although social media and your use of it might mediate that. But the formative years for accent are your youthful ones. And then, it’s really hard not to be exposed to the local environment. Although I do think, we’re seeing more and more interactions on social media, on the internet, on Twitch or whatever these kind of internet-driven interactions are and that can have an effect in making people less available for local innovation because they’re spending so much time in a social network that’s not in their local community.
DANIEL: Yeah. And you know what? I, as a person who I’m living in a country that I didn’t grow up in, I would happily sort of take on more of the accent if I were able to. And I think maybe because of age, I’m not able to. But also, I feel like some people are just really good at accents. Some people, no matter what age they are, could just slip in. Have you noticed anything like that or am I barking up the wrong tree?
VALERIE: No, no, you’re right. There are a few people that are really good at accents, but they are few and far between. So, the majority of us are not great at adult acquisition of another accent. That doesn’t mean we’re not great at adult acquisition of a language and being fluent in that language. I think there’s two different things at work here. But this idea that a goal is accent-free speech for any adult learning a second language, it’s a really unachievable goal for most people because we simply are not designed really to acquire the accent of a different language as adults. It’s our brains, our mouths, we’re wired differently. Also, our lives are a little more complicated in terms of what we need to do versus being a baby who just needs to be fed. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Valerie, this is mine and Ben’s and maybe also Daniel’s language acquisition theory, which is that babies don’t have mortgages, full-time jobs and grocery shopping.
VALERIE: Or yeah, annoying children that want things from them at all times. There is absolutely… Okay, so just stepping back to sort of address Daniel’s issue because I think… or question because I think it ties in with yours. There have been a few studies on people that are really, really good at sounding native, like at acquiring languages. And there do seem to be some differences. So, people that are really good at vocal mimicry so that they can kind of exactly imitate something with their voices, we’ve all seen comedians that can do this right where they’re really good at doing other people’s voices or sounds. I’m not. Like, you asked me to bark like a dog, I will never actually sound like that dog or make the kookaburra sound, and I sound like a fool. But some people are really good at that, and some people are also really good at imitating accents well.
So, the people that seem to have that ear and that ability to mimic also seem to be very, very good at languages. Also, those with a lot of sort of inherent musical aptitude also seem to do better at acquiring languages more in a more native-like fashion.
And finally, when we look at fMRI studies of brains of people that are particularly good at languages, they have found they seem to process language in a slightly different spot than those that are fluent but not native like.
But there was also a study that looked at 24 English native speakers who had learned German, were fluent to German and were living in Germany, going to graduate school there. And then, they had judges listen to them to see how many could determine that they were native or non-native. Of the 24, only one was mistaken for native German speaker. So, we’re talking about out of 24 people who lived there, work there, were fluent in the language, obviously had a lot of motivation to learn the language and be fluent, only one actually didn’t sound like they were American.
So, I think we have to keep in perspective that we’re talking about if 4 out of every 100, that’s not a very big percentage of people that can actually be native like. So, I think that now we’re shifting towards Hedvig’s observation that when you’re a baby, you don’t have a lot else to do. When you’re a baby, people are feeding you and cleaning your diaper, and all you’re doing is paying attention to the world around you. Now, that doesn’t mean there’s a lot of stuff you’re not doing, because you have to get your visual field.
HEDVIG: Got to put your foot in your mouth,
VALERIE: Got to chew on some stuff, right?
DANIEL: There’s dog food out there.
VALERIE: You’ve got to drool all that stuff, all that. You got to barf a lot, spit up on people’s shoulder, and cry. So, there’s a lot going on, but you are really able to attend to certain tasks. And you do see babies particularly interested in attending to certain tasks over others. So, they’re not working on feeding themselves. They’re really working on figuring out the sounds of their language.
And so, I do think that there is a lot at play in the difference between the way children acquire language and adults do. And some of it is cognitive plasticity. Our brains are different when we’re children. And there does seem to be a little bit more neuroplasticity that children are able to apply to various things.
But also, I think focus is a big one there too. They can put all their energy towards this one thing, so they are acquiring it much more rapidly. And then, here’s the other trick. They have nothing else to interfere. I’m not talking about mortgages and kids. That too, but they don’t have a system that’s competing with the system. And I think that is the biggest thing, is that they have… They’re a blank slate. Okay, that’s debatable in linguistic circuits, how blank. But I’m using it sort of to just mean that they don’t have another language system in play.
DANIEL: There’s no transfer. Yeah.
VALERIE: So, there’s no fighting between systems. There’s no confusion. Their mouths are also not programmed into doing certain sounds. So, for all these reasons, it is super unlikely as an adult to not have traces of your native language, no matter what you do.
HEDVIG: But I really like what you were saying earlier that… And also, because you could hear that and say, “Well, I should give up learning Hungarian. I’m never going to fit in,” which if what you wanted to do was pass entirely as a native speaker, maybe that is not going to be achievable if you start learning at 27. That mileage might vary and you might be special. But as someone, like, my husband is learning Swedish and he has an English accent and he will probably be there for at least a very, very long time. And I don’t think he should give up. I think it’s still worthwhile. And I also hear people on Swedish news speaking with American or British or Turkish or other accents in Swedish and more Swedish people are getting used to this. I don’t know, I think it’s easy to take that message and think, “Well, it’s not… I should just give up.” And I just don’t think it’s… Yeah, I don’t know, we should be kinder, and it’s nice.
VALERIE: I think… I mean, the trick is not giving up. The trick is accepting that if you do have remnants of who you were before, that’s a really positive and wonderful thing, and it shouldn’t be a negative one. And I think we kind of have this idea, especially in the second language acquisition circles, that you have to sound native to have cultural fit. And I think that’s absolutely not true that to culturally fit in doesn’t mean you have to sound like everybody else. Because none of us, even when we’re from that place, sound like anybody else. That doesn’t mean we’re not culturally adept and aren’t able to fit into that culture and I think that’s what we need to let go of, this idea that your accent will keep you from fitting in that culture.
There are things like prosody and intonation that really are probably more impactful on giving an impression of cultural fit than the accent itself. And so, if people really want to work on things that make them sort of seem culturally savvy, they can work on their intonation patterns and their stress patterns and prosody, which are things that are sort of over and above the sounds of a language and the grammar of a language, because that actually does seem to really impact how native speakers think people kind of get what the gist of things are or get what the conversational flow is like. And those things are accessible if you do some shadowing and work on those.
So, I think there are two things that work here. This sort of ideology of what it is to be a native speaker, that means you’re really in that… You fit in that culture, which I actually think is the wrong ideology. I think what we really need to do is this ideology that you can absolutely fit in and function as a non-native speaker. And giving up your identity isn’t the answer to getting a new one. You can have both. You don’t need to choose. And that’s sort of the message, part of the book where I talk about non-native speech. I mean, the book’s a lot about American accents, but I also talk about second language accents. And I think we stress the wrong thing when we are trying to acquire another language.
DANIEL: Well, that makes me feel a little bit better. I’ve been very aware of how we use language and especially accent to perform identity. But the way that I talk is sort of a look at where I’ve been and that’s a great thing. Going back to babies for a second, you mentioned in the book that parents use different accents at different ages, and I just found that really surprising. Could you tell us about that?
VALERIE: Sure. Not necessarily different accents, but different aspects of their dominant accent is sort of what I’m talking about. There have been a number of studies on infant-directed speech and child-directed speech, which is sort of the fancy linguist way of talking about how we talk to babies and how we talk to children. And anybody who’s had a child or met one probably has changed their voice when they’re talking to it. We see this with parents, particularly where they do the goobily, goobily kind of stuff to their children. They have a baby and they’re like, “Hi, baby.” And they get this really high pitched, kind of exaggerated intonation, sing-songy kind of drivel that they speak to babies. And we also talk to toddlers differently than we talk to adults.
So, there are people that have studied, “Well, how are we talking differently to babies just from adult speech?” But there’s also some researchers that have looked at, “Well, how do we talk differently depending on the age of the child and why might we be changing it up?” And so, what we find is when adults talk to infants, particularly mothers, most of the research has been done on mothers because that is just historically who spends the most time with children and infants. So, most of the research has been done on mothers. And what they find is that mothers do definitely change their voices when they’re talking and their accents and the types of features they use when they’re talking to infants compared to when they’re talking to other adults.
And that can be sometimes the adults would be the interviewer that had the baby and the mom in the same room, and she would record the whole interaction. She would notice features in terms of how the mom was talking to her and then notice how she talked to the baby. It also is the case sometimes where people had recorders in their homes and the recorders would pick up different types of conversations where the parents were having conversations with other adults in their community. So, they were using a lot of local features that were important there. A lot of this research was done in parts of Britain that had more, really well-known local accents, like the Geordie accent in Tyneside.
And then, they would also get them saying things directly to their child or their infant and they would see, “Oh my goodness, look at that. They really radically redo their speech when they’re talking to their child versus when they’re talking to these adults.” And in all cases what they found were mothers tended… Specifically mothers, mothers really tended to change up their speech to infants to use sort of hyperarticulate and more standard form. So, what mothers seem to model very, very early on to young, young children, infant level children was sort of the sort of prominent models of speech so that they were using more standard forms than they did to an adult speech and also extending their articulation of those things and kind of intensifying them, which sort of makes sense if you’re thinking you’re modeling sounds for your infant.
So, here’s a baby laying there looking at the world. And the first thing they have to figure out is not how I’m going to ask my mom for the bottle, but what sounds am I going to use? I have to figure out the sounds of my language before I can ask for anything in that language. So, they’re working on sounds. And so, a mother then is kind of, without even being conscious of it, working on helping that child understand individual sounds.
And in order to do that, because when we speak in connected sentences, we’re really rapidly transitioning from one sound to the other. And a lot of times, that changes each individual sound because it’s smushed between these other ones. But if you elongate it and you hyperarticulate, it kind of makes it more obvious for that child what sound is being said. So, they saw elongated vowels for one thing. But they also saw that voicing contrast. So, the difference between like a T and a D or a K and a G is just the vocal fold vibration. That they were also overdoing the vocalization, the voicing contrast also probably just to sort of model to their kids, “This is a sound,” and “This is a sound.” And, “Look, wow, this is another sound.”
But then, as those kids aged up from like two to four, they switched it up to use a more local variant. So, what they seem to do is go, okay, now you have the system. Now, let’s learn the social system. And so, we find this really interesting dynamic shift in the way that moms particularly modeled speech to their young children versus their toddler children versus adult friends. So, it’s a really cool area of study.
HEDVIG: That’s very interesting. I hadn’t heard of that before. I mean, I am familiar sort of what you were talking about something like, “This is an apple,” or like when you like… That was an extreme version, but something like that.
VALERIE: Right. I don’t know. I’ve heard some parrots that do sound just like that. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It was interesting what you said about local variety because one another… Besides me and Ben’s theory about kids don’t have anything better to do, we also have another long running theme throughout many of our episodes and shows. Now, let’s see if Daniel can guess it.
DANIEL: No, I’m not. I’m not right there with you. Go ahead.
HEDVIG: Okay. About access to standard and prestige varieties. So, you talk about this in the book as well. Like, thinking of someone as stupid because of the way their accent or dialect or in general how they articulate themselves is not a very accurate or kind thing to do. However, we know that when people are out on the labour market or when they are talking to people, they are likely to be judged by the way they’re speaking.
So, some people make an argument that schools have a responsibility to not say that certain dialects or certain accents are worse, but to give everyone a chance to learn the variety that is considered the least troublesome. And it sounds almost like these mothers are sort of modeling that kind of ideology by avoiding the more regional varieties early on to give… And I’m wondering because that sounds… I’m wondering how generalised that is because it doesn’t sound like a thing everyone would be doing.
VALERIE: Well, we found it… I mean, it’s interesting. It’s been found in sort of disparate locations now. It’s been found in studies mostly with English, although there was a study in with Chinese children that they showed hyperarticulation also to those children that decreased as those children aged. So, I actually think it’s fairly general. But I think what they’re modeling is actually the opposite of what you’re saying. They’re using the more standard forms or the more fully sort of modeled forms, fully articulated forms. Because a lot of times when we speak colloquially, you might shorten things, you make say them quicker.
HEDVIG: Okay.
VALERIE: That’s what they’re doing in very young children. And then, they actually go the opposite where they use more local forms when those kids are a little older. So, they’re actually de-standardizing their speech rather than ramping up on the standards when those kids age up. So, I really think the first stage, and this does seem to be the general consensus in the literature, that in that first year, mothers are hyperarticulating, not because they’re trying to teach their children standard language. And it may not even be standard in the way that we’re thinking of standard hyperarticulate speech.
HEDVIG: When you’re unpacking it like this, it doesn’t sound like it’s standard. Yeah. It sounds like it’s just articulating more of the phonemes distinctly…
VALERIE: Exactly, and that’s the model.
HEDVIG: …whatever variety you are speaking.
VALERIE: And then if they… But we do see it towards the standards. So, there was another study done in Memphis, Tennessee, not by me, but a different researcher named Julie Roberts. And she studied moms and their children interacting with the researcher, which was herself. And she was looking at I-monophthongization, which is something that’s very prominent in Southern speech. So, that’s like TIE /ta/, BYE /ba/, HI /ha/, FIRE /faːɹ/. There’s a fire /faːɹ/. There’s a fire /faːɹ/ down there. That’s called I-monophthongization. And it’s a very, very prominent feature of Southern speech. And it’s something that also is kind of stereotyped as being a Southern feature, like, “Bye /ba/ now. Bye-bye now.” If people are imitating Southerners, they often will imitate I-monophthongization without knowing the fancy name for it. So, it’s not a standard feature, but it’s very prevalent in Southern speech.
And what she found is that mothers used more of the canonical I forms, which means the more traditional standard, fully articulated I when they were talking to their babies than when they were talking to the interviewer. So, they actually were shifting from what would be considered more canonical or standard when they were talking to their young infants. But I think that just happens to be where it’s lining up with the hyperarticulate form. Does that make sense?
So, what we find is mothers actually vary in how when people do I-monophthongization. It’s not that they don’t ever have the full I, it’s that depending on the voicing of the consonant that follows. It’s a very complex… it’s kind of complex rule. They either shorten the glide off the vowel or they leave it on. So, they do have it. It’s just depending on what the voicing of the following vowel is. So, if it’s a voiceless consonant, they tend to have more of the glide. If it’s voiced, they don’t. So, they’re doing the alternation in their own speech. So, they have access to it. So, they kind of know what the pattern of the full vowel is and they’re just hyperarticulating the full vowel to a child. And it just happens that it actually lines up with what tends to often be the case in standard English, which is more hyperarticulate vowels. So, what you want to make of that in terms of whether they’re aiming actually for the standard, which I think is unlikely, or just the fuller form, whatever it is, what they’re doing is modeling the sound for that infant.
But then, in all these studies, they found that between ages two and four, what moms say to their children varies more away from that hyperarticulation to use more local variants and also to be different depending on whether the child is male or female. And they tend to use more standard forms with girls and less standard forms with boys. Then, it’s modeling the social meaning of those forms. And the final really fascinating part of this puzzle is on the few times that men wandered into the picture in these recordings, which it was mainly mothers, but they did have some dads that would come in here and there and talk, when they talk to their children, they didn’t change their speech.
DANIEL: That’s what I thought. [LAUGHS]
VALERIE: And so, what’s interesting is what does that model? That also models social meaning. It models that men do different things, that boys do different things than girls, and that boys use less standard variants because they didn’t go more towards the standard as the mothers did. And that sort of between mothers using more standard forms with their young children and fathers not changing up their speech but staying at the less standard usage levels with all children, what that models is that there’s a gendered meaning behind these variants at a very young age to children, which sort of sets us up to understand, well, why do women and men sometimes use language differently in the sort of general finding that women tend to speak more standardly than men? Well, it’s because it’s been modeled to us since we were very little children. So, there’s a lot of fascinating work. There’s so much fascinating work with kids.
And then, of course, it’s funny when you have kids as a linguist, how you are super hyperaware of how you’re talking to them, and my god, it’s awful.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god, yeah. Every linguist who becomes a parent becomes a menace.
VALERIE: Don’t have children if you’re a linguist. That’s all I want to say.
DANIEL: Having children as a linguist is great. It’s fascinating. Yeah. Vernacular norms have connotations of masculinity and toughness, and that’s all being modeled rather unconsciously, or at least some of that’s going below the surface of awareness. Mm.
VALERIE: Absolutely. I don’t think parents are thinking, “Oh, this is a boy. I’m going to talk differently to him.” I mean, I didn’t think that way and I probably… You realize it’d be interesting to have measured your own speech because you don’t know what you’re doing. Maybe that’s what we should do, is have a bunch of… It’s too late for me, my kids are not babies anymore, but maybe future linguists, record yourself. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Yeah, I was modeling their speech. No.
HEDVIG: Yeah, don’t record the baby, record yourself.
VALERIE: Exactly.
DANIEL: Hedvig and I did a bit on the Southern accent, the US Southern accent a while ago, and it was, is the US Southern accent disappearing? It was one of those episodes with just you and me, Hedvig. Ben wasn’t in this one. But what’s your take, Valerie? Are we losing accents, or is it just that what we consider to be the US Southern accent is changing and always has been?
VALERIE: Yes and no. I mean, there’s two sides to the answer to that question. The Southern accent is absolutely, in urban areas, becoming less salient as a distinct regional accent. But that’s been happening for a long time. And one of my big fights in graduate school was I grew up in the South, and I knew that even though I had an unusual background and that kind of explained why I had less Southern features, perhaps. But my Southern friends that were from Memphis didn’t sound really, really Southern. Most of them didn’t really sound that Southern.
And they sound… I mean, there were things they said certainly like I-monophthongization, absolutely, you could hear in a subtle way in their speech. But this sort of sing-songy drawl that people talked about, and even the vowel changes like saying SAID as /seɪ jəd/, those things were just not prominent in my French speech. And so, when I went to graduate school, my dissertation was on the changing shape of Southern vowels because my dissertation director was like, “Nah, they still speak that way. Of course, they do. They all sound like that Southern stereotype.” And I was like, “Yeah, I really don’t think so. Not in urban areas. In rural areas, perhaps, where there’s a different ideology at work, but not in the urban areas.” And so, part of my dissertation was what is happening in the South?
And my generation actually, which is Generation X, was really the first generation in which we see a movement away from traditional regional accent features. And that’s not just in the South. That’s actually everywhere. Where we start to see it at the level of Generation X, where social demographic and economic changes come into play that started orienting people away from their local communities and more sort of pan-regionally. And then of course, you get the internet and social media with Gen Z and Gen Alpha and even the Millennials, and that really sort of speeds up that process.
But I would argue it’s not that accents are dying. It’s that regional American accents are dying. And that’s a little different. They’re not dying. They’re changing shape in terms of what they mean, the social meaning. Remember at the beginning we talked about how it just depends on what that social meaning is? Well, I think what it is, is the social meaning of regional accents as being local is changing.
But what we find in some really interesting recent research is that for the Southern variety, particularly, a lot of it has to do with conservative versus liberal ideology. So, within the South, the people that sound most Southern are ones that tend to be very conservative-leaning politically and ideologically. And if we ask them what they would vote for and the kinds of issues that are important to them, what we see is they tend to be conservative-leaning ideologies.
Those that have sort of retrenched and are not doing the Southern vowel features, even though they are Southern, tend to be ones that are urban, young and liberal. So here, you have the same city with some people sounding Southern, some people not. That doesn’t mean the non-sounding Southern people aren’t Southern. But what it means is that the Southern accent means isn’t, “I’m from here,” now, it’s “Here’s what I believe.”
And we find actually a similar thing with Northern vowels too, that people that tend to use more Northern cities shifted vowels or sort of the /bæg/-/beɪg/ kind of vowel that I was talking about before, like Michigan vowels. If you listen to any kind of spoofs on Saturday Night Live or anything, a lot of times or “The Bears,” that kind of accent that they had, I think they had a skit on Saturday Night Live called like the Super Friends.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah.
VALERIE: Or Super Fans. Not Super Friends.
DANIEL: [US NORTHERN ACCENT] The Super Fans. That’s right.
VALERIE: Those features, those are actually associated now… if you play that for people and ask them to say what they think the ideology politically of the speaker is, they tend to hear them as more liberal leaning.
So, we see this really interesting shift in kind of what accent features associated with regional accents at one time actually mean now and it’s less region and more ideology, more sort of whether you’re rural or urban, whether you’re conservative or liberal. So, I think what we want to say instead is not accents are dying, but they’re being repurposed so that some of their traditional associations of only being about region are now really about belief systems in those regions.
So, I’m not saying that Northerners are going to start sounding Southern because they’re conservative. But in the South, what a regional accent means has changed. And then, we’re finding it decreasing in urban areas particularly, which tend to have more liberal ideologies for one thing, but also because of the impact, substantial impact of the way social media has reshaped the way we interact with each other and the way we interact with locals versus non-locals, it has continued the atrophy of these highly regionalized forms.
DANIEL: Okay. Okay.
HEDVIG: I thought it was interesting what you said earlier. You said that sometimes a way of speaking or word choice or something can carry a social meaning that changes over time and that changes in and outside the group. So, something that could have a certain signifier within the group or sort of have a mild signifier from outside of the group. So, an extreme case would be like a stronger Southern accent being associated with like rural and more conservative ideology. There might be like a sort of tendency within that community, but the perception outside of it is like, “Oh, they’re a monolith and everyone is exactly like this.”
VALERIE: Absolutely.
HEDVIG: So, that can make it really hard because… this is a very America-centered episode, but that’s okay because that’s what we’re talking about. But I imagine that there is diversity within communities as well. So, I don’t think everyone in the South who lives in rural community votes for the Republicans, though maybe many of them do. And it could be kind of challenging if that gets tied to your identity. And at some point, maybe I could see someone being like, “Well, I don’t want to be perceived that way. So, maybe I’ll figure out a different way of presenting myself,” which is not very nice for that person.
VALERIE: Well, I think a lot of times that happens even in teenager years, which is when sort of social identity and social meaning about language really gets formed. And when I was saying that our accents are maybe more about rural and urban, that’s not necessarily the same thing as conservative or liberal, but there is a very big difference a lot of times in the type of orientation that people have. When they are rural and planning to stay in that community, they’re much more vested in the local community than we find people in urban areas where there’s a lot of more migration. A lot of people don’t have deep roots. People are less oriented…
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was going to say this as well.
VALERIE: So, that’s kind of the probably more important division between rural and urban. It is also true that in the United States at this moment, rural areas do tend to have a different political ideology. A lot of that’s because of the economic circumstances, farming or different types of activities that happen to populate rural versus urban areas. But there’s also just a bigger sense of rootedness in rural areas. And there has historically always been. And rootedness is what drives accent. And so, I think the bigger argument here is where there’s more rootedness, there’s tends to be more accent shared features. And in urban areas, what we’re seeing is less and less rootedness.
And part of it is the economic and demographic changes that have happened over the last 50 years. But also, part of it is this rise in this new way of interacting that has also made us orient away from our local communities to this screen that we’re interacting with in intimate and colloquial ways that television just didn’t do for us before so that it’s a new way of interacting. So, I think there’s a lot at work there. Again, fascinating, different tangents to pull out on that.
DANIEL: Yeah. And we’ve sometimes said, “Oh, television doesn’t have that much impact on someone’s accent.” People have asked me, “Is television straining out other accents so that we’re all uniform?” And I’m like, “Well, no, what I’ve seen is, sociolinguists say we don’t want to talk like the people on TV. We want to talk like the people next door.” But gosh, online varieties, online accents, even ludolects, the games that we play, like the Fortnite accent or the TikTok accent, this is a level of interactivity that really could shift things, that media really could be having an influence that television really didn’t.
VALERIE: Right. It has changed who’s living next door. I think that’s really the thing. We’re not knocking on doors. We’re knocking on computer screens and the people opening those doors are a totally different accent variety than maybe we get from our neighbors. And so, that’s sort of, I think what has really shifted, is the communities that we’re deeply embedded in are no longer the local communities. They’re local to us in a different kind of locality.
So, they’re localized by the activities that we’re bonded through. So, gaming is a perfect example. We’re localized by sort of the voice that we want to hear. So, a lot of times people curate their social media based on their own belief system. And so, they’re going to have these echo chambers kind of that they create of that. And then, that exacerbates sort of language use to be similar because they’re listening to each other over and over again. So yes, I think what we’re hearing is just who’s next door is changing in this new world.
Television has never been a door you could knock on. I mean, you don’t have conversations with your television. Well, unless you’re my husband yelling at his sports team. “Go Seahawks,” that’s all I’m going to say. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Very nice. Very nice.
HEDVIG: I mean, you don’t say that like TV… I don’t think that I would have spoken this way if The Simpsons wasn’t on twice in the afternoon every day during my high school years. I’m serious. Like, I think because in Europe generally a lot of schools want you to speak with a British variety, and most of us don’t come out sounding like that.
DANIEL: Well, input is input. So naturally, that’s going to be something that happens. But if that is then countered by loads of other input in that language, then I’m not going to sound like The Simpsons. It’s just that you picked up on what was available.
VALERIE: There’s also a difference between the conscious shadowing that you’re talking about. So, I’ve heard from a lot of speakers of English as a second language that they learn their accent from TV. This is something I have heard many times that non-native speakers have told me. This is a different kind of language learning process than what we’re talking about, which is sort of the natural evolving accents that come out of our mouths as teenagers, as we’re sort of learning the local system. And so, I think that’s what’s really fundamentally shifted. But I do agree with you that we can… I mean, if you ask sort of how non-native speakers a lot of times can improve their fluency by actually shadowing tasks, by taking things on TV and like modeling that intonation pattern or modeling that speech, it’s not that you can’t learn things that way, but it’s not interactive and in a way that actually tends to be very conducive to shared social meaning, which is really important to accents.
HEDVIG: I don’t think you’re wrong. I just…
DANIEL: No, I’m not saying you’re wrong either.
HEDVIG: I just suspect that, like… No, but I just suspect that you as native English speakers maybe are underestimating it. You’re saying like, “Ooh, there’s no effect of the TV.” And I’m just like, “I don’t think I would be that affected, and you guys not at all affected,” That sounds implausible.
VALERIE: And I do think there is an effect. There have been studies… There are studies that have looked at the influence of television on accents, and most of them have found… not no effect, but limited effect. What it tends to be limited to are things that are already in the environment of whatever speaker they’re reaching that then is intensified by that television show.
And so, there was a really interesting study done in Glasgow for people that watched the EastEnders, I think is the name of the show which is based in London. So, the EastEnders is London accents. And I think it’s like a… I’ve never actually seen the show, but I think it’s kind of like a working class…
HEDVIG: Oh, you should watch it. You should watch it.
VALERIE: I have to now, that’s sort of a working-class London variety. What they found is that people in Glasgow that reported much higher viewing of that show had more of those sort of cockney features in their own speech. And so, the argument was, “Well, look, they watch a lot more of this show…” Sort of they are really into this show and this seems to come out not just in their speech, they also sort of had more of that sort of street style. They tended to wear certain clothes that also represented it. So, they’re sort of having a stylistic influence from this television show they’re watching.
But the argument that the researcher made was that it’s probably because those features are actually also found in Glasgow’s speech. All the features that they saw these people picking up and using more of were ones that are underlyingly already in the speech of this community. And what that show did is highlighted it, made it cooler and kind of intensified their use of it. So, it was a pattern they were already familiar with that then television helped model more rather than introducing something new. And I think the difference is that actually with social media you might get this sort of interactiveness, the social meaning, the social networking that really came can cause some innovations in speech that really fundamentally can reshape speech in a way that television can’t. So, I think it’s not that I’m not saying television didn’t have an impact, it’s that it’s a moderate impact compared to social media. So, yes, I agree with you. Some things can come through on the TV.
DANIEL: For native speakers. For native speakers. If we’re talking about people who are learners, that could be different.
VALERIE: And that’s a second… That’s a different kind of learning strategy. So, I think that’s a more conscious learning strategy and that’s different.
DANIEL: And now, it’s time for lightning round. And are you ready to take on some specific sounds and talk about them?
VALERIE: Let’s do it.
DANIEL: All right. The most common question I get ever, ever is about the word “impordant.” Why are people saying important with a D? And I don’t even… You can fill in the blanks. For Western Australians, it might be a D. For other people, it might be a glottal stop, impo-tant. For other people, it might be something else.
VALERIE: Oh, some people just delete it. So, I’m Southern, so important would be right what I would say. But yes, you sometimes get “impordant”, which isn’t native to me. So, I don’t quite say it with the flow, but it really has to do with the kind of amount of stress we put on different syllables. And whenever you have connected sounds together, they influence each other. So, it changes subtly the way that you pronounce a certain sound. And then also, the more consonants you have at the end of a syllable, the more likely that some of them are going to drop off or weaken, meaning they have sort of less articulation in your mouth because you’re having to jam all these sounds together in rapid speech.
So then, you take away stress. You have this alternating stress pattern in a multisyllabic word like important or impor-tant. You actually have this sort of stress pattern where you have a stressed and unstressed syllable. And so, you’re alternating stress. You’re putting sounds together. You’re jamming a bunch of consonants in there. But the tendency is to weaken one of the sounds and usually the T because of the way T is articulated and because it’s the second consonant in a cluster and it’s at the end of a stressed syllable, at the beginning of an unstressed syllable. And so, it just causes it to naturally weaken, which can come in various forms. It can either be glottalized because T sounds are often glottalized. If you remove the articulation from the mouth part of a T articulation, often where you get the sort of slight indicator of a consonant is with the glottis, so it becomes a glottal stop. Or it can be a T that’s pronounced a little less hard and more glottalized. So, it’s a glottalized T. Or it can be flapped where the tongue just kind of slaps against that alveolar ridge and comes like a D. Or you can just get rid of it all together. So, these are your options as a speaker in those context when you’re not using hyperarticulate speech, which most of us aren’t when we’re talking in casual conversation. And so, the natural tendency of that sound is to either get glottalized, get flapped or get deleted in those contexts. That was a long answer for a short question.
HEDVIG: And importantly…
DANIEL and VALERIE: Impordantly.
HEDVIG: …they’re not contrasting words that they could be confused with, should you choose to do these things.
DANIEL: Yes.
VALERIE: Well, that’s usually when it happens when we don’t… It creates confusion.
HEDVIG: Also, as soon as you get… You’ve got the I, you got the M, you’re pretty far into the word IMPORTANT once we’re talking about these distinctions here, people can figure it out. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They’ve already guessed that’s the word.
VALERIE: They’ve done studies where they take out sounds of words but they play them for listeners. And listeners can often not even realize the sounds are gone. Because we’re so good at matching that in a word like IMPORTANT, which is often… Now, you have me doing “impordant”, which is often a word that we might use in high frequency. And it has a very sort of significantly multiple syllabic clue to what it is. We probably wouldn’t even be able to say someone dropped a sound or changed the sound in most casual speech because it’s kind of programmed into our head and we fill in the blank.
Kind of like when you’re reading. You’re reading a text and maybe there’s a word missing… as the writer, students do this all the time. As they go back and read it, they’re kind of skimming it. And so, they don’t even… They just fill in those missing words that might be missing, like the A that sometimes they forgot to put in their paper. So, eyes might see it, because I’m not used to, I’m like, “Oh, this is the first time I’ve seen that and there’s an A missing.” But their brain is already churning that same thing and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, it’s fine.” Same thing with hearing a word like IMPORTANT whether you say the D or the T. We don’t even need that information. We’re really good. You could cut out half that word and we still know what you’re talking about.
DANIEL: No penalty for doing so. Okay, next one. H’s: they drop in, they drop out. In Australia, we say HERBAL. In America, it’s “ERBAL”. HONEST, HOTEL, HOUR, HISTORIC. These have all, at various times in English history had H’s or not. Sometimes, H dropping is the prestige variety. Sometimes, H inclusion is the prestige variety. What’s the deal with H?
VALERIE: H is a weird and lovely sound and it’s had a really interesting history. Yes, in America, we say “ERBAL”. And actually, I might… It’s funny because I’m always like, “What do we say?” [LAUGHS] Like, do we say herbal or erbal? Because we have so many weird H things. But historically, [DANIEL MOUTHS: Istorically.] H’s were something that in the 19th century were really on the mouths and minds of many Southern British as being kind of crass if you drop them. And so, what happened is that inspired a lot of the H’s to be reinserted where they sort of historically had been there at one time, way, way, way ago, but had been dropped. But then, to sound fancy, people put them back in. And “erbal” is one of those words.
So, we have words like HOUR, and we have words like HONOR. And if you look at how they’re spelled, there’s an H. But if we look at how they’re pronounced, there’s no H. And that’s because historically, at one point, there was an H there, but many years ago it got…
DANIEL: [MOUTHS] Istorically.
VALERIE: Yeah, historically that it got dropped. [LAUGHS] And so HERBAL is one of those that has an H. You can see it in writing. That’s sort of a historical remnant. And it really depended on what was the prestige variant at a particular time in a particular dialect.
And so, people say it or they don’t, depending on how fancy they think it needs to be. Americans are less tied to their H’s. In fact, words like which and witch historically also had a H that was used in one and not in the other, and that actually distinguished them, but they dropped off. And in fact, Noah Webster talked about how it was a bad thing that we were doing this. But where’s that H now? No one sees it. So, Americans are less tied to their H’s. But certainly H dropping is something that I think is really prominent in the British psyche as being a kind of vulgar or less prestigious form and that’s why I think in some places they have herbal rather than herbal, because it was actually put back in after it hadn’t been pronounced for a couple of centuries to be prestigious.
DANIEL: And is it just a weird little sound that it’s back in the glottis. You could do it, you could not do it. It wouldn’t make much difference either way, maybe sometimes, is that…?
VALERIE: H’s actually come from a really fascinating Old English history where a lot of them were different sounds that weaken. So, H is like the ultimate weak sound. So, remember when we were talking about the T weakening or becoming less articulated in the mouth? Well, H is kind of the ultimate what’s… If we’re going to weaken a sound or not articulate in the mouth, the glottis can make a puff of air, and that’s kind of as weak a sound as you can possibly make. So, a lot of them were sort of like fricatives, velar or glottal fricatives in Old English. So, German still has some velar fricatives that English doesn’t have. Well, a lot of what was in Old English, a velar fricative weakened to an H depending on where it was in the word.
And so, H’s are actually really a fascinating kind of whole genre of sounds in terms of why they tend to become H or delete over time. So, a lot of times, we start from a much harder consonant and then it weakens to an H. And then eventually, the ultimate weakening is not doing an H but just getting rid of it altogether. And so, it’s just where on that path you are. Some of us are all the way over, “Who needs them?” And then, others are like, “Argh, we still have LACH,” where we still want the full articulation.
HEDVIG: Well, H’s are interesting from a historical linguistics perspective because across language families, like you say, there’s a lot of things that can weaken to and hate. It’s like the last stop before disappearing as a sound in a word. So, it actually means that there are lots of different sounds that can “turn” into a H over time. So, if you’re a historical linguist and you see an H, you can be like, “Well, there are many things that this sound could have been before, [LAUGHS] and you can use different clues and stuff to figure out which one of those it could be.” But yeah, it is sort of the last pit stop before disappearance, oblivion.
DANIEL: Could have been a K, could have been an S.
VALERIE: I know. So, I don’t know why poor H’s get a lot of hate. There’s another H. They’re such fascinating linguistic creatures, but one actually just really fun sort of way to think about how H is a sound usually that came from another sound is when you think of hearts. The word HEART itself has a H, heart. But where does it come from? But we have a cardiac arrest. Well, CARDIAC is actually from the same root that HEART was from when HEART used to have a K sound and then it weakened to an H sound. So, here are words that actually seem like they have nothing in common, but it’s because of the weakening of a harder sound early in time that has become what we inherited as an H in English.
DANIEL: That’s right. There was a K to H thing. I’m thinking of centum and hundred. Same, same deal.
VALERIE: Yes, yes. Or CANNABIS and HEMP, actually.
DANIEL: Oh, really? Oh, my gosh!
VALERIE: All sorts of fun.
DANIEL: We’re playing Related or Not.
VALERIE: I think it was circuitous, but yes, essentially.
DANIEL: Hedvig, have we done the thing where we talk about L going missing, like SAL-MON and SALMON? TALK and TALK.
HEDVIG: Maybe, we’ve done a lot of episodes, Daniel, for a long time. L is also strange, buddy. You know, L and R and there’s a bunch of them that in a lot of languages are not phonemically distinct.
VALERIE: Right. Or they’re the same sound. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. There’s a lot of historical linguist information that they have in their brains. I’ve recently… Not recently, but I have a new friend who’s a historical linguist and she has this stuff in her brain and I try and extract it sometimes, but they have a lot of these rules formulated like S to H, L to R, or R to L or like something there…
DANIEL: Or just disappearing.
HEDVIG: Devoicing like D to T might be more common than voicing in certain contexts, blah, blah, blah. And some of them, there’s one linguist, Martin Kümmel, who’s written a book, like, written up a bunch of these for Indo European, but it would be interesting to see more sort of cross-linguistic and more samples to see which of these changes are actually more common than others. Which reminds me, I know some people who said they were going to digitise that book and I don’t know if they have, and I’m going to poke them with an email.
DANIEL: There you go. So, Valerie, what about…?
VALERIE: I do this about once a year.
DANIEL: What about L? Why do we see CALM and CALM things like that? Is it because it’s just a very weak sound?
VALERIE: Yeah, because a lot of times… Actually, my parents, as non-native English speakers, would always say, “We’re going to have sal-mon for dinner. Sal-mon for dinner.” My friends would always be like, “What’s sal-mon?” instead of SALMON. Because they read it sort of… They had learned it as adult speakers and sort of were like, “Well, there is an L there.” I’m having consonant… Really, my R’s just don’t want to come out.
So, it’s interesting because what we find is in English, back in the 15th century, you would have had an L. You would have pronounced the L. But L’s and R’s are sounds that are also prone to weakening. So, the same process that happens to H often happens to R’s and L’s and especially when they’re articulated in rapid speech with other sounds around them. And so, we find that what sounds in addition to H tend to disappear over time? R’s and L’s. And so, what happened with SALMON? Same process that happens with H. Eventually, sometimes certain speakers will start to naturally kind of weaken those sounds, meaning that’s sort of just a natural process that happens when we speak. And then, there’s probably some social meaning behind the people that were doing it. So, in the 15th century, the cool kids were dropping Ls, and then it became what everybody did. So, it just sort of becomes more and more widespread and every generation subsequent till it becomes the way to do it.
And so, the other example, with is R-lessness in British English and Southern British English, much like L, you find R’s weaken over time. Well, in America, we still say R, R’s post vocalically, but in Southern British English, in certain prestige dialects, that R has weakened and disappeared. And R’s and L’s often do the same thing.
And so, if we look at African American English, what do we find? L’s sometimes disappear. So, you might HEP him instead of HELP him. But it’s exactly the same process. So, it is a very common tendency for L to weaken over time to the point of even being fully deleted or vocalized. So often, it becomes more vowel like first. So, it’ll be HELP / HEP, where it has more of an off glide, where the L has actually vocalized or CO — call me — where it almost becomes like a W sound and then it will just be deleted altogether. So, it’s just a weakening process that’s very common in language.
DANIEL: Happening in Australia too. People talk about BRAZIL /bɹazɪw/.
VALERIE: Exactly. You hear it in a lot of accents. And when you see something like that, this tendency that a lot of sort of unrelated accents have, what that tells you is not, “Oh, look, those speakers are dropping their consonants. Aren’t they dumb?” Which unfortunately, is what people sometimes think. Instead, it’s actually, “Huh. There’s probably a universal process at work here that is set up to make that thing happen over time.” And that’s really what the answer is. It’s actually a universal process, some fundamental underlying tendency of language that if we leave language to do its thing, that it’ll happen. It’ll kind of move towards that as a matter of efficiency. So, what it really means is these are very efficient accents rather than dumb ones.
DANIEL: Nice. Hedvig, you got one?
HEDVIG: No, I think we’ve covered a lot of different things. Are we still in the lightning round?
DANIEL: I think we’re still in the lightning round. I’ll do one more. Since you talk about things that are happening across the English-speaking world, what about S retraction, like saying STREET as “shtreet”?
VALERIE: This one’s a great one because I definitely get a lot of questions about it. I think you had asked me actually at one point. Somehow, we got distracted, which happens a lot when we talk about language, [LAUGHTER] about like what’s one of the most common questions. And I actually have had that question asked. I get emails from random people sometimes, like, wanting me to just be the language guru and tell them why things happen in language,” which if only I had that power.
But S retraction I can actually handle. So, what we find is people sometimes say STREET and STRING or words with an S-T-R cluster more like “shtreet” and “shtrings”, where people notice. People that don’t do it kind of notice that S has turned more /ʃ/ like. And we find that actually becoming more prevalent among younger speakers, particularly in some urban areas. Not just in American English, but also, we find it in British English varieties as well where it’s been studied.
And what it seems to be is a co-articulatory tendency, meaning just when you’re saying sounds together, they somehow influence each other. And the R sound often has a little curling of the tongue behind the alveolar ridge when you pronounce it. And when you say sounds in this cluster together, you have to say them superfast to get them to come out in time to have connected conversations. So, what you’re doing is kind of getting sort of an anticipatory positioning of the tongue as you’re making the S sound. And you’re just slightly tipping that tongue back as you’re saying the S sound, and a slightly backer tongue when you pronounce an S sound turns out as sha.
So, it’s really just being efficient in positioning our tongue that for some speakers seems to just come out a little bit early and make their S a little more sha like, and that’s how it’s perceived. You hear it more like sha than sa. So, shtring, where the tongue is actually just moved back a little bit.
And so, the thing is, all of these are tendencies we tend to have operating on us at all times. What happens is at some point in time, someone… A group that’s saying it gets some social meaning attached to it that then makes it more attractive to be picked up not as a co-articulatory tendency, but as a social tendency. And that’s why we really notice it now, is because this co-articulatory tendency that started it off has become a socially important one to some group of speakers and that’s where we really see things that we notice as accents.
DANIEL: And now, we’re back to performing our identity, just like we always do.
HEDVIG: And also, you’re evoking this sense that I think comes naturally to a lot of linguists, but not always laypeople, which is this idea of underlying distinct phonemes that get realised in speech next to other phonemes and then influence each other or get shortened or various things. So, Hockett has this metaphor — I think it’s Hockett — of Easter eggs on a conveyor belt. Do you know which one I mean?
DANIEL: I have not heard this one.
VALERIE: No. Me neither.
HEDVIG: Well, it’s the idea that in our heads, we have a pure S and a pure T and whatever that has a canonical, perfect, platonical form, sort of. So, there’s an S that’s like at the exact right place in the mouth that everyone agrees is like, what an S is. And that’s likened to the little Easter egg. And then, you put the Easter egg on a conveyor belt, which is what happens when you take that idea from your head and you try to realise it through your articulator channel. And, oh, no, there’s a T coming up afterwards, and everything happens. And then, on the conveyor belt, someone takes a hammer and smashes all the Easter eggs.
And then, the person on the other end has a series of eggshells with different colours of patterns and are trying to be like, “Well, I heard a bit of a fricative something. So, maybe they were going for an S.” So, this is the idea that they have to decode on the other end what the pure form was.
I know that there are some linguists who don’t really subscribe to this dichotomy, that it’s not that clear cut or that it’s in fact not like that at all. But it reminds me of what you were saying earlier about the hyperarticulated mothers as well. So, there’s this idea that, like, they have this pure form in their head, and they want to give their kids the best shot by producing it like that all the time and all the context. So, they are avoiding maybe this coarticulation and things that would make it more colloquial in favour of these more distinctly produced phonemes. Which is not how people later talk, but maybe is advantageous to children acquisition, I don’t know. Children learn language… [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They’re maniacs.
HEDVIG: You can also like basically don’t talk to them and they kind of learn themselves.
DANIEL: You can’t stop them.
VALERIE: When I’m teaching phonemes and allophones, which is sort of what you’re referring to in the fancy language of linguists in class, what I usually talk about is how we… When we go eat dinner, think about how you go eat dinner. You go sit at a table, there’s all these different pots with things. So, you might have… I always use the analogy of Thanksgiving dinner, but maybe that’s not relevant outside of America with our Thanksgiving. So, you have your turkey, and then you have your mashed potatoes, and you have your green bean casserole and your gravy. And so, they’re all separate and clear and everything’s beautiful and nice in its little container.
But then, what you do is you slap that crap on your plate and it merges together and you can still tell what it is, but it just isn’t nearly as clean and pristine as when they were in their separate pots. And then, you have your cranberry sauce too, we don’t want to forget that. But what I tell the students is it makes more sense that if you put your mashed potatoes by your cranberry sauce, that they will merge. Then if you have your mashed potatoes and your green beans casserole on different sides of the plate, they’re not going touch each other. So, sounds are really most like the things that are directly adjacent to and that they kind of take on parts of what the food next door is like. And that’s how I explain it, because they seem to get that and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, that makes sense. My mashed potatoes are always merging in with my cranberry sauce.”
So, when you think of it that way, why would sounds not do the same thing? Because they’re next to each other and you have to say them really fast. Yes, that’s sort of the idea I’m talking about, is that we never speak in sounds individually. We always speak in sounds together. I doubt that mothers have this image of like, “Oh, I’m going to say a single vowel to my children so they get it.” I think more it’s that they are just like, “I’m going to say things slower and easier for my child to learn and a byproduct of that is that they just hyperarticulate their speech and hit those targets a little more.”
HEDVIG: And also, the targets are further from each other because if you’re speaking slower, you’re actually… Your mashed potatoes and your cranberries are actually more…
VALERIE: You’re putting them further apart on the plate. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: They’re further apart on the plate. Yeah. They have less of a chance.
DANIEL: Got it.
VALERIE: Exactly.
DANIEL: Valerie, what are you hoping that people will do as a result of reading Why We Talk Funny?
VALERIE: You know, I think the underlying message is there are two parts to it. The one is, I love sociolinguistics and this sort of this idea of how our language has become over time and place in space and millennia, more and more about who we are in addition to transmitting information. We tend to always think like, “Oh, language is just about informational transfer.” Well, it is, but it’s also information transfer at so many different levels that you don’t think about that. I just love the idea of sharing what I have learned as a linguist that I find fascinating with an audience. So, there’s just sort of the “let’s learn about ourselves” part of it.
But I think the bigger message of this book is if we look at how accents have developed over time, which is really what the book goes from ancient history to modern tongues. What we see is the same patterns over and over and over again. And they may change on the surface in terms of what they sound like, but they’re the same fundamental drive of humans to have identity, efficiency and communication maximize for the people that they love and care about. And maybe the message we should take away from that is, why focus on the difference which are relatively superficial? Let’s focus on the similarity that makes us all part of this community of human language speakers that drives us to do things the same way over and over again. And if we can focus on that, maybe we can actually start talking to each other rather than about each other. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Very good. The book is Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind our Accents. It’s available now from Viking. We’re talking to the author, Dr Valerie Fridland. Valerie, thanks for coming on the show and talking with us today.
VALERIE: Absolutely. I mean, we had all sorts of fun conversations. It was a blast.
DANIEL: Before I let you go, where are you online so people can find you?
VALERIE: I can be found at either… I do a monthly blog for Psychology Today called Language in the Wild. So, if you want sort of more little stories about language, that’s where you can find me. But if you want to find me and communicate with me or learn more about my work, you can just go to valeriefridland.com.
DANIEL: Thanks, Valerie. This has been great.
[MUSIC]
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: It’s time for Words of the Week. And you know how usually I try to avoid the American political stuff because we get a…
BEN: [LAUGHS] You don’t. You absolutely don’t try and avoid it.
HEDVIG: He tries.
DANIEL: Well, there’s only so much you can avoid. I do try.
BEN: I think what you try and do is not have every single thing be of that nature. I will give you that.
DANIEL: Well, this time, every single thing IS of that nature because we’re having a political shit fit.
HEDVIG: I have one that I nominated in our channel that didn’t make it into the run sheet that I might just push through.
DANIEL: Well, Hedvig, do you want to start us off then with yours?
HEDVIG: Yeah. Okay. So, I heard about… you know about the MAXXING productive suffix thing.
BEN: Like LOOKSMAXXING or whatever. Yeah.
HEDVIG: LOOKSMAXXING. MIN-MAXING is probably the origin, which sort of just means to do something a lot or to optimise for something. And some of this comes from horrible sites of the internet where you’re trying to trick women. So, like, LOOKSMAXXING is the idea of making yourself look physically attractive and thereby lure women to liking you.
BEN: Bamboozle them into liking you. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Which is also funny because looking a bit nice is also just a normal part of courtship. I don’t know how that’s like tricking, but it is tricking because you have a horrible personality.
DANIEL: And then, you’re like, “Gotcha. Ha-ha-ha.”
HEDVIG: Exactly.
BEN: And then I rip the mask off!
HEDVIG: The only way it can be a trick is if it’s on the expense of something else. So, you look good, but you’re a horrible person. Then, you’re… I don’t even know if I would call… Anyway, I heard FRICTION-MAXXING.
BEN: FRICTION-MAXXING.
HEDVIG: Do you guys want to guess what friction-maxxing is?
BEN: Okay. Friction-maxxing.
DANIEL: Oh, no, I do know what this is.
BEN: Okay, well, then let me guess, because that’s no fun.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: I think I know.
HEDVIG: It’s got nothing to do with toxic masculinity, maybe is a good clue.
BEN: Can I exclude sexual connotations from this?
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: Okay. And now, I’m playing Guess Who of semantics. [LAUGHS] Does it have a mustache? FRICTION MAXING. Where do we want friction? Oh, is it something to do with malicious compliance? People who are looking for ways to bog things down or make things tricky.
DANIEL: Oh, actually, I think he’s close.
HEDVIG: He’s close, actually, but he’s not bang on.
BEN: Okay, lay it on me then.
DANIEL: Then, maybe I’ll try. We don’t want things to be easy because then we get really mentally lazy. So, you’re trying to make things a little bit hard for yourself in ways that are interesting just so that you stay lean, you stay mentally alert.
HEDVIG: It’s this idea that in modern life, a lot of us, especially probably people are a bit on the nerdy or internet side, have sort of removed a lot of friction from our lives. So, only order via apps, supposedly there are people who book haircut appointments where you don’t talk to the hairstylist, which I can understand the point for and I can see the use, but the idea is that sometimes this can go overboard for people who are doing it, not… Who might not strictly “need” it.
BEN: Can I offer a parallel that I’ve heard of before from the world of game design, like video game design. Many game designers talk about the fact that part of their job is to make sure that they deliberately prevent players from optimising the fun out of gaming. So, it is a known thing that if you give players the tools to properly optimise things, they will almost always break the game for themselves and they will optimise their way out of an actually fulfilling and enjoyable and engaging experience. And it sounds like you’re just describing exactly the same thing, but like in life, basically. If we optimise absolutely everything, we will have a very smooth and efficient experience, but we will also have one that’s largely devoid of meaningful human contact and connection.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And also devoid of maybe growth, a little bit of challenges can… I’ve heard this from some people who are teaching. So, I don’t know if this is a generational problem or it’s just that I know people who are teaching now and they’re complaining about the youth.
BEN: Which no teaching generation has ever done before. [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Exactly. So, I have a feeling that people have always complained about the youth. But one complaint is that people want to learn things instantly without doing effort. And we also saw this in a study recently, wasn’t there, where people were asked to look up some facts and they could either talk to a large language model or they could search it the traditional way and they found that they called it actually friction. So, when you search and you look up different articles and read and synthesise the knowledge yourself, that’s a little bit more challenging and a little bit more effort, but you also remembered facts better.
BEN: I explained this to students that I teach. So, part of my job is to teach kids how to edit videos. And as anyone who is ever engaged in any video editing software knows, there is a certain amount of complexity to certain software packages that you cannot actually optimise. You can’t make complex things like that. It’s like if you’re… I don’t know. 3D modeling is another fantastic example of a software environment that you cannot render truly intuitive and simple. Like, someone’s just going to have to sit you down and teach you a bunch of complex things to remember. And boy, oh, boy, do kids hate that? [LAUGHS] They really… Because they’ve spent their lives on CapCut and other spaces and places that are like, “Hey, do you want us to make this like super-duper easy for you?” So, yes, 100%. This is really interesting. I’m really glad you brought this up. I like FRICTION-MAXXING.
DANIEL: This is something that has been mentioned in connection with large language models as well. The reason why they seem so weird sometimes is because they’re frictionless. They offer frictionless conversation. If you push back, they’d be like, “You’re absolutely right. I need to rethink this.” So, I want to throw in one that wasn’t on the run sheet either and that was…
HEDVIG: Whoo! All going crazy.
DANIEL: …SKILL ISSUE. How many times you’ve heard that recently?
BEN: This is a skill issue.
HEDVIG: I used it in a presentation recently because I was giving a presentation about academic collaborations, which can be quite difficult and about cognitive biases that could be at play that could make group work difficult. And I quoted Jean-Paul Sartre when he says, like “Hell is other people.” And then, I have a little pop up that says, like, “Maybe that’s just a skill issue on his part.” [BEN LAUGHS] Like, maybe he’s just not good at talking to other people.
DANIEL: Maybe yes, that’s what it means. It means maybe you’re just not good at that thing. Like, I saw someone say “You can’t fuck somebody into loving you.” And the response was “Skill issue,” [LAUGHTER] which I loved. Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s horrible. I hate that.
BEN: That’s such a sick fucking burn. Like, straight up, that is like, apply cold water to the area for 20 to 30 minutes.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, let’s get into our actual run sheet. SOCIAL COHESION. Social cohesion is really, really important. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says, “Social cohesion is a multidimensional concept, referring to social connectedness, the glue that connects members of a society, solidarity and trust amongst individuals within and across communities and organisations and within society at large.” So, it’s like public trust. And that’s really important.
BEN: The belief that we’re in it together and we can do things and we can change things and we can make things better.
HEDVIG: So, the word SOLIDARITY is not good enough for what reason? It might not include trust?
DANIEL: Solidarity.
BEN: No, no, no. I think solidarity does, certainly in my mind, does have subtly different connotations. First of all, solidarity is more general. So, it’s an adjective that you can apply to anything. Whereas social cohesion has an inherent civic valence. Whereas solidarity, you can be in solidarity for a person who’s grieving the loss of their son, but you can’t be in social cohesion with a person who’s grieving the loss of their son, if that makes sense.
DANIEL: They’re both like, “We’re in this together.” But solidarity is like, “I’m not going through your experience, but I’m going to do something to remind myself that you’re in that situation,” which is kind of…
BEN: I would argue, Hedvig, for your edification, that if this person had said social solidarity or civic solidarity, then I would be right there with you, that is 100% the same thing.
HEDVIG: We’re all in agreement that they’re close to each other.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: They’re close. They’re close. So, one person who thinks that social cohesion is really important is New South Wales Premier, Chris Minns, who has often mentioned social cohesion. So, when he invited the President of Israel, Isaac Herzog, [BEN GROANS] a few weeks ago, and people asked, “Should we maybe invite people who don’t do genocides?” His response was, “It’s really important that there’s no clashes or violence on the streets in Sydney.” But then, the New South Wales police got to do some police brutality as a treat. It’s another contribution of mine, doing something AS A TREAT. You get…
HEDVIG: What has happened?
BEN: I’ll say, Hedvig doesn’t live here anymore, Daniel. So, this probably hasn’t made her news.
DANIEL: Well, we better… Many of us have seen the videos, but, Ben, what did you see?
BEN: So, the president of Israel, when he visited, was met with significant civil opposition, in my opinion, of an entirely lawful and appropriate level. Because for those who aren’t aware, this is a person who regularly is like signing the sides of bombs before they get launched into Gaza. This is a person… This is not just a random member of the Israeli sort of regime. This is one of their most hardline polemicist sort of entities within the current already very conservative regime. I think it’s not unfair to say this is the Pauline Hanson or the like the Cory Bernardi of Israel at the current sort of moment. So, lots of people were like: Fuck that guy and the horse he rode in on.
And the police did some really, really heavy-handed and violent sort of arrests and stuff, presumably because of the sort of lingering taste in their mouth from the Bondi shooting and just the sense that like, “We’ve got to stamp this out,” kind of vibe, I guess. But it was not good. It was bad. It was very bad.
DANIEL: That was it. There was kettling protesters, there was punching nonviolent demonstrators, there was dragging away people, Muslims engaged in prayer. So, that means that SOCIAL COHESION is the latest term to get dragged into the fog of this conflict. For Minns, it seems to mean don’t resist police when they repeatedly beat you, which is some real America style shit.
BEN: And it’s worth noting for our Australian listeners and maybe for our international listeners as well, Australian police actually have some of the most breathtakingly broad powers of arrest of anywhere in the world. Like, we are sort of awash… maybe, Hedvig, a little bit less so because she’s really punk rock, but most people are awash in like American media and this idea of like, you have rights and stuff like that. And the Australian police are a pretty incredible example. Like, you can’t in a lot of ways say to the Australian police, “I don’t want to talk to you,” or, “I don’t want to do that,” because they’ll just be like, “That’s fine, I’ll arrest you now because I can.” Like, they need extraordinarily low levels of justification or like belief or anything.
So, yeah, we sort of live in this like really lovely sense of like, “Yeah, Australia’s just really chill, man.” But our police, if you happen to be the sort of person who is on the wrong side of the eye of an unhappy police officer, your day can get very bad very quickly.
DANIEL: This kind of takes us to our next Word of the Week. We sometimes look around and wonder if everything is lurching from crisis to crisis as it seems. And I’m kind of speaking for Americans here and if the US Government is coming apart, then how come we’re going around every day like things are just kind of weirdly normal? The answer is that we’re in something called a DUAL STATE, which is our next Word of the Week.
BEN: DUAL STATE. Oh, I like it.
DANIEL: DUAL STATE. Is this on anyone’s radar or is it just me? Because I’ve been noticing it.
HEDVIG: Is it just cognitive dissonance? Is this not that?
DANIEL: No.
BEN: No, I think this is a different concept from what I’m intuiting. Can I take a stab, Daniel?
DANIEL: Go ahead.
BEN: So, this is something that I am thinking about in relation to Australian society more and more because we’ve got a different kind of dual state developing here than in America, in my opinion, but I might have the wrong of it. So, let’s see. A DUAL STATE basically just means there are essentially two entirely or nearly entirely differentiated states, as in like nation states that people are occupying simultaneously.
HEDVIG: Oh, I see. Is it like saying that you perceive yourself as being a second class citizen in your own country?
BEN: Yeah. Or if you like just the idea that like there’s two Americas and you can live in the wealthy and privileged one or you can be with everyone else and if you’re with everyone else, it’s a fucking bad time.
DANIEL: You’re hitting the right sort of area.
BEN: I’m not all the way there?
DANIEL: We’re not all the way there. Let me explain it this way. The Trump government can’t crush everybody all the time and doesn’t actually have to. Instead, what you got is Government A and Government B. In Government A, which is sometimes called the normative state, you go to work, you pay your taxes, you obey traffic laws. But then, in the shadows, there’s Government B, which is known as the prerogative state according to Ernst Fraenkel, who described the Nazi government this way. In Government B, that’s the one that builds concentration camps, carries out the brutality, strips you of rights, and you may not know which one you’re in at any given time. So, Alex Pretti and Renée Good, who were murdered by ICE in Minnesota, they were operating in Government A, the one with laws, until government B decided to assert itself and murder them.
And lots of corporate leaders, media companies and even universities gave Trump a lot of money so that they could operate in Government A. But Government B never really goes away, and you can’t control where it goes. There’s an article by Aziz Huq in the Atlantic link in the show notes. He says, this way you get to have, “A capitalist economy governed by stable laws, while at the same time establishing a domain of lawlessness and state violence in order to realise its terrible vision of ethnonationalism.” So, that’s the dual state.
BEN: Mm.
HEDVIG: I think this is a little bit linked to what conspiracy theories on the right call the deep state.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but this the…
HEDVIG: Which is actually like…
BEN: …the inverse version of this, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Interesting.
HEDVIG: So, in that worldview, the deep state is like the version of the government that is perennial and immortal and actually running the… It’s like the character in X Files that they talk to sometimes. It’s like the behind the scenes.
BEN: The Smoking Man. Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: And if they would just get out of the way, then Trump could get whatever he wanted. Darn it.
HEDVIG: Yes. But also, the deep state in practice might just also be like the Constitution and regulation and like good professional bureaucratic practice.
BEN: Yeah, which slows things down and makes things harder. And regulation is like red tape and all that kind of stuff.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: But that can be good.
HEDVIG: I’m not saying that this dual state is exactly that, but it sounds like a little bit getting at a similar thing except, yeah, Bizzarro World.
DANIEL: The mirror image. Yeah. Okay. So, it’s really weird if you’re in a dual state, because how can you obey laws if you don’t know which set of laws is going to apply to you at any moment? I suppose the answer is you just do nothing and just hope that Government B never comes for you. But you can’t control that. So, having a nation of laws that are agreed upon and the laws have to be the same for everybody is really important. How do we get there? I don’t know.
BEN: Was that our last one or have we got another?
DANIEL: Oh, no, we’re just getting started.
BEN: Oh, Jesus, Daniel, how many are there?
DANIEL: EPSTEIN CLASS. The EPSTEIN CLASS. Yep. Here we go. I think the Epstein stuff has kind of broken me. I think.
BEN: Okay, I want to throw a test balloon out there. This is about as close as to conspiracy theory engagement as I think I get. I’m starting to suspect that the reality of Jeffrey Epstein as a pedophile and a sex trafficker has now gotten to the point where nearly every single stakeholder in this scenario has lost sight of the fact that there was victims and that sort of thing. And it is a borderline psyop to go after people of power.
Now, I don’t think necessarily unjustly. Like, it sounds like there are certainly people who have done bad things, but it’s evergreenness in the news cycle for a breathtakingly long fucking period of time doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t understand. Like, the Royal Commission into fucking institutional sexual abuse in the Catholic Church didn’t go for this long. Like, what is this?
DANIEL: Is that a reflection of how absolutely nothing has happened except to a few people not in the USA and that we want something to happen?
HEDVIG: Well, I think the likeness of Benjamin to the Catholic cases is quite apt because people find it much more exciting to talk about Trump and Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker or whatever than they find it exciting to talk about some priests they’ve never met. Unfortunately, the perennial message in the news cycle is driven both by that, that people find them more tantalising. And I agree with you, like the focus on them is sort of becoming like its own thing where you’re, “Oh, they’re trying to implicate this person,” or something, and forgetting the idea of actual victims.
BEN: Yeah, it’s like it’s become like a Baader-Meinhof thing. Like, it’s its own self-propelling thing now or whatever. I don’t know. It seems to exist separate to other similar sort of crimes that I’ve seen in the past in like the public sphere. I don’t know, am I wrong? Like, Watergate didn’t look like this.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. It’s also that it took such a long time, that the files weren’t released for such a long time and that it really worked its way into these conspiracy places and that those conspiracy places have taken over so much of our regular space.
BEN: Well, look, fuck. It certainly didn’t help that there was a bunch of conspiracy theories before any of this came out about the Clintons like running a pedophile ring and then an actual fucking pedophile ring like that came to light. And Jesus, when that happened, I was like, “Oh, god, here we go.”
HEDVIG: But it was really hard to handle that as well because a lot of the people who wanted to talk about the Clinton conspiracy rings wanted that to be the Clintons and didn’t want that to be Trump, right?
BEN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: And they’re pretty fucking silent now.
HEDVIG: Well, I listen too much to conspiracy journalism coverage. They’re not that silenced, but they are doing Jedi mind tricks, some of them, to like flip it around that. Like, he was infiltrating them and that like do-do-do-do-do. And it’s like, oh god.
BEN: Okay, okay.
DANIEL: Let’s be careful here. We’re not imputing criminal wrongdoing to everybody who connected with Jeffrey Epstein or hung out with Jeffrey Epstein. But we do have photos and emails from linguists who were our intellectual thought leaders, like Steven Pinker, Noam Chomsky, in the physics domain, Lawrence Krauss. And they wanted stuff from him. Richard Dawkins. In some cases, they wanted money. In some cases, they wanted influence. And in some, like with Noam Chomsky, they wanted to help him rehabilitate his image. Steven Pinker, for his part, gave assistance to Epstein in the light of his arrest. He says now that he regrets those efforts. Nevertheless, there he is on the plane.
Some years ago, I signed the LSA Open Letter, and this was the one that said, “Hey, LSA, Steven Pinker’s not really a good person to have on your list of media experts. Do you think we should take him off?” Boy, oh, boy. Then lots of influential linguists and thinkers jumped in and signed on to something called the Harper’s Letter, which said that we were doing the wrong thing, that it was… How could you possibly cancel this man? This is bad for free speech, etc.
And lots of them turned out to be members of the Epstein class, Chomsky, Pinker, Krauss. They were in connection with a literal pedophilic cabal, even after Epstein’s conviction. And then, they had the temerity to lecture us about the discourse and how Woke was the worst thing to happen to universities, how terrible the MeToo movement was. But in fact, what they really believed was they believed two things. Number one, that no powerful person should ever have any accountability for anything they do or say. And number two, that if you write words for a living, you should never have to find a new job because the world owes you that attention, and the attention must continue.
HEDVIG: Also, I must say that the original letter suggesting something bad about Steven Pinker said he shouldn’t be the media contact person for the LSA, which is like not losing… I don’t know. It’s not…
DANIEL: It’s very mild.
HEDVIG: I actually think it’s relatively mild, but I don’t know how big we should interpret all the connections. Yeah.
DANIEL: No, I agree. There’s a lot that needs to come out.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if the people who critique that letter then think that no powerful person should ever be punished, that sounds a bit like going a bit too far, but it’s all a complicated mess.
DANIEL: I’m just going by the things that some of those people have written since, that’s all.
HEDVIG: Right. No, it’s all a complicated mess. And I think in particular, the inclusion of Noam Chomsky in these files have really rattled a lot of linguists and also political activists who see him as a role model. And it’s just a great reminder in general of avoiding hero worship, I think.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don’t meet your heroes. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: You can actually believe in Chomsky’s theories of generative grammar or follow his political ideology and not worship the person and be this caught up in it. So, that’s maybe a good lesson for all of us that if you think of someone who you really look up to, yeah, just try and divorce a little bit of that attachment, maybe.
DANIEL: Yeah. Because then, you see the photo of Noam Chomsky yikking it up with Steve Bannon, having a great time and, wow, that’s a bit of a disconnect. Maybe we should just stop giving men hero worship. How about that? How about just new leaders?
HEDVIG: I think everyone except maybe Adele Goldberg. I’m still so chuffed I’ve met her and she seemed really nice. [LAUGHTER]
BEN: No one should meet their heroes except for a few of my heroes who are really awesome.
DANIEL: Well, I sleep very well knowing the side I’m on. I’m not on the Epstein side. I’m not a member of the Epstein class. Finally, DARK WOKE or WOKE 2.0.
BEN: DARK WOKE or WOKE 2… Oh, I’m not going to like this, I can tell.
DANIEL: You’re going to love it.
BEN: No.
HEDVIG: I know that the weird eugenicist couple want to do like pronatalism, but LGBT friendly. Is it that?
DANIEL: No. No, it’s not.
BEN: I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess that the… Okay, yeah, here’s my guess. The most self-congratulatory, masturbatory applique I’ve ever heard was the intellectual dark web. That name that they gave themselves, like the Sam Harris’s and all that mob of like, [IN A DEEP VOICE] “Guys. We’re the only ones telling it like it is,” like these supposedly big thinkers who were being really provocative and stuff like in Sam Harris’ case being like, “Actually, guys, I do believe in abortion,” [LAUGHS DERISIVELY] or something fucking random like that.
I’m guessing that this is either the Left’s attempt to do something similar, to be like… Because I’m basing this on what you said, WOKE 2.0. Like, this is woke, but not like the woke you’ve seen before. Now we’re like really, really woke. Before, we liked Israel and stuff, but now we don’t even do that.
DANIEL: You got it. So, here’s the explanation. DARK WOKE is when you tell the truth about race and oppression in a very woke way, but also, you don’t give a fuck. Theara Coleman in The Week…
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s BreadTube.
DANIEL: It could be BreadTube. Is BreadTube’s that really in your face sort of, “I am just going to say this and I don’t care what anybody thinks”?
HEDVIG: Mm.
DANIEL: I’m going to be really crass and I’m going to be appealing.
HEDVIG: Yes, that is BreadTube.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: BreadTube is very focused on class, which I think…
DANIEL: Okay, well, this isn’t necessarily that way, but here’s a description from Theara Coleman in The Week. “Party insiders say that Democratic politicians have been encouraged to embrace a new form of combative rhetoric aimed at winning back voters who have responded to President Donald Trump’s ‘no holds barred version’ of politics. This is an attempt to step outside the bounds of the political correctness that Republicans have accused Democrats of establishing. It’s an affect that requires being crass but discerning, rude but only to a point.” I think that Woke 2.0 is going to be great fun.
BEN: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Isn’t this what’s his face Newsome is trying to do but like…
DANIEL: That’s it. That’s it. I think that he is maybe not a great person, maybe he’s not a great candidate. But by jingo, he despises MAGA and he will bring the fight to them and he’ll be ready to punish anyone. So, I tell you what, I will vote for anybody who demands accountability for crimes.
BEN: I think given the current state of affairs, people are very, very hungry for this, to see fire in the Left. I think there is a danger like if we look at Paul Keating in Australia in the 1990s, you can own [CHUCKLES] goal your way out of office. So, it’s like now it is absolutely called for but I don’t think it should become an established pillar of left operational philosophy. It is a break glass in case of emergency situation which when we should, god forbid, there ever come a time where a slightly more civil form of political discourse could possibly return. Fuck, could we, please? That would be amazing.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Can we just speedrun this part? How about that?
BEN: But let’s not just bed horrendous acrimony into all political discourse is sort of what my potentially naive and optimistic wish would be. And I want to be clear, this is not the same as middlemanning or whatever or centrism.
DANIEL: Tone policing.
BEN: Yeah. I don’t mean [IN A WHINY VOICE] we should all just get along, why is everyone so angry all the time? There’re really valid things to be angry about, I get that. But if we could get back to a place where one could wrestle with tricky things and still be at least somewhat civil in our…
HEDVIG: You mean Mamdani?
BEN: Yes, exactly. I do mean Mamdani.
HEDVIG: Mamdani is an example of someone who’s very outspoken about things and very practically oriented, but who isn’t doing reverse MAGA, it seems like.
BEN: Yeah. And he’s not going low and he’s still operating from a place of kind of positivity and hope and that sort of stuff.
HEDVIG: Yeah, he’s not doing laser eye Joe Biden memes or something. Yeah. Yeah.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: We need a multiplicity of approaches. Speaking of Joe Biden, this is where the dark part came from. Dark Brandon, where he became quite successful at doing things and so taking on the Dark Brandon persona. So, I think that’s where dark comes.
HEDVIG: No, no, no. Dark Brandon, I think, was a bad idea. It’s just playing silly games with people on 4chan and you’re not going to win because that’s not the arena where the people you want to convince are and you look dumb in front of… No, no, no.
BEN: Also, you can never win with those guys ever.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Maybe not.
HEDVIG: Also, it encourages like what was being called like BlueAnon, which is… Or Liberal QAnon or something where it’s like you just encourage conspiracy theories and weird game theory talk and like, no, no.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Anyway.
DANIEL: Extremism devours itself. Okay, I’ll take that in mind. So, FRICTION-MAXXING, SKILL ISSUE, SOCIAL COHESION, DUAL STATE, EPSTEIN CLASS and DARK WOKE: our Words of the Week. Hey, we got a bit of a correction. Kelly Wright informed us that Blake Zimmer, remember talking about him? The WOTY kid?
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: We said that he was a student at Cornell. He’s not. He’s a student at Carnegie Mellon. [BEN LAUGHS] Because Language regrets the error, even though no one cares except those East Coast Ivy League types. We’d like to give a big thanks to… [LAUGHTER] A big thanks to Valerie Fridland. A big thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words, and you fantastic patrons. Thanks for keeping the show going.
HEDVIG: Yes, indeed. If you like our show and you think that we should keep on doing it, you can follow us. We are becauselanguage.com on Bluesky And @becauselangpod about everywhere else. You can also send us ideas, news, or words for topics you think we should cover, or for words of the week or for Related or Not items. You can also send us, like Elliott did earlier in this episode, a SpeakPipe, which you can find on our website, becauselanguage.com, where you can send your beautiful little voice to us if you’d like. Or you can just send a straightforward email. That email address is hello@becauselanguage.com. A great way to spread knowledge about our podcast if you think that we’re doing a fun thing that other people might enjoy is to tell a friend about us or write a review. And I think we tend to recommend podchaser.com for reviews because then you’re not locked into Apple or another thing like that.
DANIEL: You can also become a patron. You do get stuff depending on your level. There’s the merch drop that has just happened. There’s bonus episodes, shoutouts, Discord access, which is probably the most fun of all. We get your support, which helps us to pay the bills and put time into the show to make it super good. I’d like to give a shoutout to our patrons at the Supporter level. And this time, I wanted to read the supporters’ names in order of how different their name was to everybody else’s name.
BEN: What?
HEDVIG: Oh, so you take all the names and then you, for example, count all the letters, probably. And for example, the letter E or A is probably quite common. So, if you have like a name like, I don’t know, Rene, you my score as more common, is that it?
DANIEL: That is precisely the case.
BEN: Oh, well done. Impressive.
DANIEL: So, I decided to do a histogram and see what came up. The actual histogram was, here are the most common letters, A, E, N, I, R, O. And then down the bottom, you’ve got J, P, X, W, B, V and Z. All right, so here are the names. I’m going to start with the names that are the most like everybody else. At the top of the list was Rene.
HEDVIG: Oh, fuck, I didn’t see that.
DANIEL: Hedvig, are you a genius?
HEDVIG: No, I just know that E is common.
DANIEL: Well, then you’re a genius. Rene, Amanita, Nasrin, Elías, Joanna, I’m right here at this score. Oh, and by the way you do divide by the number of letters in the name so that you don’t privilege long names or short names. Ariaflame, Amir, Helen, Ayesha, Fiona, that’s the 30s and up. Now, we’re down to… We’re getting less common, your name is not like other names so much. Gramaryen, Stan, Colleen, Ignacio, Canny Archer, Larry, Nigel, Steele, Martha, Rachel, Nikoli, Rosemary. Hi, Rosemary. Aldo, Mignon, Sam, Laura D, Rach, Amy, Manú, Lyssa, Meredith, Molly Dee, Diego, PharaohKatt, Tony, Ben, Rodger, Iztin, Sonic Snejhog, O Tim.
DANIEL and BEN: LordMortis.
DANIEL: Linguistic Chaos, Chris L, John Mac. Now we’re getting down to the really uncommon named. Sydney, who has two Y’s so that’s pretty uncommon. Kevin, Keith, Whitney, Kristofer, James C, J0HNTR0Y, Andy from Logophilius. Faux Frenchie, Basically anybody with an X, Andy B, Xekri, Luis, Kathy, John K. Hedvig, you’re here. Wolfdog, and Lucy. Where was Ben? Oh, you were back up there with Tony. I missed you.
BEN: Oh, I was up above. But I’ve got to be honest, I’m really surprised I fell as uncommon as I did. I would have thought Ben would be super high up there. The E and the N?
DANIEL: The E and the N, yes, but I think what was happening was, it was B.
BEN: B was just waiting me out. Hedvig! How low?
DANIEL: That only gave you two points. You were one of only two B’s.
BEN: Bronze medal of Oddness!
DANIEL: Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: And remember, this is divided by number of letters. So, being long like Andy from Logophilius doesn’t help you that much. But also, this is commonness in this set, right?
BEN: Oh, true, true.
HEDVIG: So, it’s out of these names, not out of all words in English or something.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: And your own name was in the set, so I didn’t exclude you from analysis one by one. By the way, thanks to our latest free patrons, Flossie, Harry and Leon. A big thank you to all of our patrons.
BEN: Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We will catch you next time. Because Language.
IN UNISON: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Thanks, everybody.
[BOOP]
BEN: By the way, anyone who is listening to the show, if you hear a bunch of loud thumping music in the background, where I live is across the road from a large space that gets rented out for, amongst other things, festivals. And it’s Lunar New Year.
DANIEL: It’s Happy Lunar New Year for everybody…
HEDVIG: Yeah, the fire horse.
DANIEL: …who celebrates.
BEN: It sounds like there’s quite a few fire horses across the road from my house right now. So, if you hear that in the background, that is what is happening. Apologies for the extraneous noise.
DANIEL: Did you say fire horses? It is the year of the horse.
BEN: That’s what I mean.
HEDVIG: It’s a fire horse.
BEN: Yeah. I feel like I can hear fire horses across the road.
DANIEL: Not fire hoses.
HEDVIG: There’s the animals and then there’s the elements, and they are two different circles.
BEN: I think Daniel was trying to make a funny dad joke.
DANIEL: No, no, this is great. I’m learning. Thank you. I just didn’t know about fire horses. Does that imply the existence of water horses and air horses?
BEN: Well, the water horse is the selkie. Isn’t that what the… No, what’s the mythical beast?
HEDVIG: No, selkie is a seal that’s a human.
BEN: Oh, there’s a horse one as well. I’ve forgotten what it is.
HEDVIG: There’s a nix that’s in water, that drowns women, that turns into a horse.
BEN: Of course, all of the deep nerds and losers who are listening to the show would know that the fire horse is, of course, Epona from Pokémon.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay.
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