How does it feel to be isolated from a language and a culture that could have been yours? There are many paths to language loss, but there are also many ways back. Language revitalisation is now happening for communities and individuals. We’re talking about it with journalist and lingToker Sophia Smith Galer, author of How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words.
Timestamps
00:00 Start
00:34 Intros: How are you “going”?
05:54 News: A font that can poison data for GenAI
13:51 News: A lost Golden Age of language in the Holocene
27:33 News: New language support for Netflix, Disney+
33:59 Related or Not: Theme from Gordon
34:37 Related or Not: ramshackle
41:39 Related or Not: nap
48:57 Related or Not: adder, deer, natter, otter, hydra
54:12 Chat with Sophia Smith Galer: Her language background
01:00:31 The pain of separation from one’s own language
01:05:01 Attacks on multicuturalism
01:07:34 Is all language death language murder?
01:09:41 The role of parents in language transmission
01:16:52 Factors influencing language survival
01:26:50 Will GenAI help or harm minority languages?
01:35:33 Challenging monoglossic language ideology
01:40:36 Sophia encourages linguistic curiosity
01:43:11 Responding to a review: Is it okay if languages die?
01:53:21 Word of the Week: slop zombie
01:55:29 Word of the Week: eternity leave
01:56:24 Word of the Week: spherical bastard
01:58:10 Word of the Week: the butter’s penthouse
02:01:47 Word of the Week: Jimothy
02:04:42 Comments: Ingressive speech
02:08:33 The Reads
02:15:40 Outtakes: Hedvig’s plant
Listen to this episode
Video
@becauselangpod Fantastic chat with @sophiasmithgaler, author of "How to Kill a Language". There are many paths to language endangerment, but also many paths to language revival. https://becauselanguage.com/143-how-to-kill-a-language/ @penguinrandomhouse ♬ original sound – Because Language
@becauselangpod In which we respond to THAT review of Sophia Smith Galer's book "How to Kill a Language". Ben has a solarpunk vision of language revitalisation that — to be honest — feckin rules. Full episode: https://becauselanguage.com/143-how-to-kill-a-language/ @sophiasmithgaler @penguinrandomhouse ♬ original sound – Because Language
Patreon supporters
Thanks to all our patrons! Here are our patrons at the Supporter level.
Which endangered language is closest to your name? Sorted by Levenshtein distance. Data is from:
Endangered languages: the full list | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/apr/15/language-extinct-endangered
| Patron name | Language | Speakers | Status | Edit distance |
| Rene | Dene | 8,195 | Vulnerable | 1 |
| Kevin | Krevin | 0 | Extinct | 1 |
| Stan | Svan | 80,000 | Definitely endangered | 1 |
| Kathy | Kathu | 5,000 | Definitely endangered | 1 |
| Rach | Sach | 1,000 | Definitely endangered | 1 |
| Amir | Amis | 30,000 | Vulnerable | 1 |
| Laura | Laua | 1 | Critically endangered | 1 |
| Aldo | Aluo | 20,000 | Definitely endangered | 1 |
| Helen | Helong | 9,000 | Severely endangered | 2 |
| Lyssa | Bussa | 6,624 | Vulnerable | 2 |
| Larry | Lari | 80,000 | Definitely endangered | 2 |
| Nigel | Jirel | 4,919 | Definitely endangered | 2 |
| Nasrin | Narim | 3,623 | Definitely endangered | 2 |
| Joanna | Hoanya | 0 | Extinct | 2 |
| Nikoli | Nihali | 2,000 | Critically endangered | 2 |
| Keith | Keiga | 6,072 | Severely endangered | 2 |
| Ayesha | Yanesha | 8,000 | Severely endangered | 2 |
| Manú | Mang (China and Viet Nam) | 2,300 | Definitely endangered | 2 |
| Fiona | Kona | 2,000 | Severely endangered | 2 |
| Luis | Kui | 916,222 | Vulnerable | 2 |
| Tony | Mon | 800,000 | Vulnerable | 2 |
| James | Amis | 30,000 | Vulnerable | 2 |
| Amy | Mam | 7,977 | Severely endangered | 2 |
| Lucy | Lude | 3,000 | Severely endangered | 2 |
| Xekri | Mehri | 100,000 | Definitely endangered | 2 |
| Lance | Lauje | 32,000 | Vulnerable | 2 |
| Becky | Beeke | 1,000 | Severely endangered | 2 |
| Sydney | Stoney | 2,765 | Vulnerable | 2 |
| Martha | Mara | 22,000 | Definitely endangered | 2 |
| Daryl | Dari (possibly Iranian Dari) | 15,000 | Definitely endangered | 2 |
| Ben | Mon | 800,000 | Vulnerable | 2 |
| Daniel | Danisi | 220 | Critically endangered | 2 |
| Amanita | Santa | 360,000 | Vulnerable | 3 |
| Chris L | Chairel | 0 | Extinct | 3 |
| Andy B | Adyge | 300,000 | Vulnerable | 3 |
| Steele | Gyele | 4,280 | Definitely endangered | 3 |
| Diego | Mizo | 529,000 | Vulnerable | 3 |
| Rodger | Rongpo | 8,000 | Vulnerable | 3 |
| Colleen | Moklen | 6,000 | Definitely endangered | 3 |
| O Tim | Kati | 18,700 | Definitely endangered | 3 |
| John K | Jone | 24,000 | Definitely endangered | 3 |
| Mignon | Mon | 800,000 | Vulnerable | 3 |
| Heather | Meithei | 1,250,000 | Vulnerable | 3 |
| Hedvig | Helong | 9,000 | Severely endangered | 3 |
| Whitney | Meithei | 1,250,000 | Vulnerable | 4 |
| Elías | Erzya | 400,000 | Definitely endangered | 4 |
| gramaryen | Kamarian | 10 | Critically endangered | 4 |
| LordMortis | Lorkoti | 0 | Extinct | 4 |
| Kristofer | Kristang | 2,150 | Severely endangered | 4 |
| Meredith | Xerente | 2,569 | Severely endangered | 4 |
| Ignacio | Guajiro | 318,500 | Vulnerable | 4 |
| Wolfdog | Bodo | 900,000 | Vulnerable | 4 |
| sæ̃m | Somm | 80 | Definitely endangered | 4 |
| Yevaud | Newar | 825,458 | Definitely endangered | 4 |
| Rosemary | Romani | 4,858 | Vulnerable | 4 |
| Ariaflame | Apinaje | 1,500 | Vulnerable | 5 |
| Molly Dee | Moklen | 6,000 | Definitely endangered | 5 |
| J0HNTR0Y | Juhur | 3,016 | Definitely endangered | 5 |
| PharaohKatt | Piaroa | 11,000 | Vulnerable | 6 |
| Canny Archer | Panare | 3,000 | Vulnerable | 7 |
| Sonic Snejhog | Singpho | 5,000 | Definitely endangered | 8 |
| Faux Frenchie | Eastern Cham | 50,000 | Definitely endangered | 8 |
| Linguistic Chaos | Ligurian | 1,000,000 | Definitely endangered | 10 |
| Andy from Logophilius | Aromanian | 500,000 | Definitely endangered | 16 |
And our newest patrons:
- Hello to our newest Supporter: Heather (an upgrade from the Listener level!)
- At the Listener level: David H
- And our newest free patrons: Kristopher L, Generation Apocalypse, Jane L, Veatriki M, and m.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Type designers have created a free font that “poisons” AI
https://www.creativebloq.com/design/fonts-typography/type-designers-have-created-a-free-font-that-poisons-ai
[Explainer] The lost golden age of language diversity | MPI
https://www.mpg.de/26871018/the-lost-golden-age-of-language-diversity
[Journal article $$] The rise and fall of language diversity through the Holocene | Science
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx4343
Humanity spoke thousands of languages at the dawn of farming — now many of them are lost | Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-02279-w
Netflix and ASL Company SignUp Media Are Making Hundreds of Hours of Kids Programming More Accessible
https://www.indiewire.com/news/breaking-news/netflix-partners-asl-signup-media-200-hours-kids-content-1235205564/
Disney+ Expands to 58 Languages, Introduces Six New User Interface Languages and Right-to-Left Capabilities
https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/news/disney-plus-expands-languages-right-to-left-interface/
How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance and the Race to Save Our Words by Sophia Smith Galer
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/789811/how-to-kill-a-language-by-sophia-smith-galer/
Learning another language appears to slow brain ageing, scientists say
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/jul/06/learning-another-language-appears-to-slow-brain-ageing-scientists-say
Speaking another language could slow ageing in the brain | FENS News
https://www.fens.org/news-activities/news/speaking-another-language-could-slow-ageing-in-the-brain
Global predictors of language endangerment and the future of linguistic diversity | Nature Ecology & Evolution
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01604-y
[Public version] What is the future of the world’s linguistic diversity?
https://communities.springernature.com/posts/what-is-the-future-of-the-world-s-linguistic-diversity
Drivers of language loss | Nature Ecology & Evolution
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01621-x
Mozilla Expands Volunteer-led Push for Inclusive AI in Taiwanese Indigenous Languages
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/mozilla-expands-volunteer-led-push-for-inclusive-ai-in-taiwanese-indigenous-languages/
Consentful Tech Project
https://alliedmedia.org/projects/consentful-tech-project
Polish to be the most effective language for prompting AI, new study reveals
https://www.euronews.com/next/2025/11/01/polish-to-be-the-most-effective-language-for-prompting-ai-new-study-reveals
FEMA sent ‘unintelligible’ disaster relief information to Alaska Native people impacted by Typhoon Merbok
https://alaskapublic.org/2023/01/09/lost-in-translation-fema-sent-unintelligible-disaster-relief-application-information-to-alaska-natives-impacted-by-typhoon-merbok/
[$$] Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die | New Yorker
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/27/how-to-kill-a-language-sophia-smith-galer-book-review
A Response to “Sometimes It’s O.K. to Let a Language Die” | Endangered Language Project
https://www.endangeredlanguages.com/story/response-sometimes-its-ok-let-language-die
@sophiasmithgaler It look over three years of my life, god knows how many interviews, about three months abroad and nine international trips to write How To Kill A Language. There is both hope and sadness in this book, but most importantly, it’s got the voices of people who are living through this, and the peer-reviewed research that has been done to begin quantifying and qualifying the damage of linguistic erasure. I am grateful to everyone who’s giving this book even a second of their time.
Rise of the ‘slop zombies’ | Machine Society
https://www.machinesociety.ai/p/rise-of-the-slop-zombies
Why Mitch McConnell Isn’t Giving Up His Senate Seat
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/31/us/why-mitch-mcconnell-isnt-giving-up-his-senate-seat.html
Swiss scientist Fritz Zwicky coined the term "dark matter," which is impressive; but he also coined the term "spherical bastard" to describe people who are bastards no matter which way you look at them, and I think that should be celebrated more.Zwicky, Fritz (1898-1974) | Wolfram Research
https://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Zwicky.html
What’s The Point Of The Butter Container In The Refrigerator Door?
https://www.wgbh.org/lifestyle/2019-06-11/whats-the-point-of-the-butter-container-in-the-refrigerator-door
Meet ‘Jimothy,’ Seattle’s internet-famous raccoon
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/meet-jimothy-seattles-internet-famous-raccoon/
Jimothy the Raccoon | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jimothy-the-raccoon
Jimothy (raccoon) | Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimothy_(raccoon)
The Inhaled Affirmative- Organic Pilsner | Big Spruce Brewing
https://bigspruce.ca/_products/the-inhaled-affirmative-organic-pilsner-473ml
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Sharing, sharing, sharing. Sharing.
HEDVIG: My cats are fighting outside of my door, by the way. It sounded like a wrestling takedown, like thump.
BEN: Yes. I love it.
HEDVIG: I hope they’re okay. [CHUCKLES]
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. First up, it’s linguist and researcher Hedvig Skirgård.
Hi, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: Hi. How you doing?
DANIEL: How you keepin’?
HEDVIG: How am I keeping? Oh. G… good.
DANIEL: Yeah. Keeping. Like butter in the fridge, that thing.
HEDVIG: All right.
BEN: Oh. Bad analogy, Daniel.
HEDVIG: I’ve heard how you going, how you doing? I haven’t heard how you keeping, but I can work it out, what it means. Yeah, good, good.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: How are you? How are you doing?
DANIEL: I’m going to ask you then your favourite expression in English when you’re asking how someone is doing. Do you have a favourite?
HEDVIG: I think “going”. How you going. How you going.
DANIEL: How you going. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I know I haven’t been introduced yet, but what I like about “how you going” is it gives people the ultimate response of like, “It’s going.”
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s a good deflection.
BEN: It’s a completely non-committal, like, “This could be good or bad. I recognise you just want to say hello and move along. [CHUCKLES] So, let’s just keep it simple.”
DANIEL: “This is a phatic utterance. I don’t want to actually know.” Now that we’re introducing him. It’s friend and smart person, Ben Ainslie. Ben, same question. Your favourite expression for how are things happening? You strike me as a “how is it hanging” guy.
BEN: Favourite not in terms of used, but favourite just in terms of like I’ve got an affection for it. I love the South African “howzit”.
DANIEL: Howzit.
BEN: Howzit. Yeah, there’s just a great little… It’s just nice and compact and it’s punchy. I love it.
DANIEL: Has that ever been an Australian expression?
BEN: No. No, that’s definitely Saffer territory through and through.
DANIEL: Okay. I should like “How you traveling” better than I do. I avoid “How’s it hanging”. That’s just… no one needs to go there. But I think my favourite is probably: “How are you?” with a look of concern.
BEN: Oh god. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Why?
BEN: Yeah. Hold on. Before you give your answer, Daniel, can I posit a possible answer…
DANIEL: Go ahead.
BEN: …for you to chew upon?
HEDVIG: None of your business.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: No, I’m going to put out there that this might be a strange little fossil of behaviour from Daniel’s Mormon days.
DANIEL: Oh, you think everything’s a fossil, a behaviour from my Mormon days.
BEN: I don’t think everything is, but I definitely think Scientology-style behaviour is.
DANIEL: Do you know what? You’re probably right, though. I think maybe everything [BEN LAUGHS] is a Mormon hangover. I’m going to blame every deficiency in my character on that for the foreseeable future. Thank you.
BEN: Oh, no. [CHUCKLES] This has gone the wrong direction.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: You got, like, a Mormon card. [???]
DANIEL: Well, we like talking about language endangerment on Because… No, we don’t. We don’t like talking about language endangerment at all. It shouldn’t be happening. It’s an unfortunate tragedy. People are losing languages. We’re losing linguistic diversity, but we do like talking to people.
BEN: But we will talk about it.
DANIEL: We do [CHUCKLES] and we’re going to. We do like talking to people who know stuff, and we were very pleased to make the acquaintance of journalist and lingtoker Sophia Smith Galer. She’s written a book, How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. It’s about her experience with her heritage language, dialët, which is a language of Italy. But she’s also traveled around the world talking to people who are working to promote their heritage languages. We had a chat with Sophia, and that’s coming up on this episode.
BEN: Sounds very exciting.
HEDVIG: She was great. I mean, she does video journalism professionally. So, [LAUGHS] she’s good at it.
DANIEL: A quick programming note to our patrons. Our next episode is going to be a live episode. All patrons, even free ones, can attend. You’ll get to listen in, you get to ask questions, say things at inappropriate times, play Related or Not. It’ll be a lot of fun.
So, if you are a patron at any level, check the Discord or check Patreon for when and where and how you can get there. And if you’re not a patron, then go ahead and sign up. It’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: Speaking of patrons, we’ve got some newies, some freshies.
DANIEL: Okay. Who are they? Please, please tell me.
BEN: No. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I was asking you, Daniel I was trying to do a lead in for you, but I can answer my own question. Turns out we do.
DANIEL: Excellent.
BEN: So, hello to our newest Supporter, Heather, who has upgraded from the Listener level. Go you, girl.
DANIEL: Thank you. Thank you.
BEN: At the Listener level, we’ve got David H. And our newest free patrons who are cordially invited to the live episode, Kristopher L, Generation Apocalypse. Love that name. Jane L, Veatriki M and simply m. Now, there is an M with an emboldened full stop after the M, Daniel. Is that part of the name or is that a mere typography mistake in the run sheet?
DANIEL: Nice catch, Ben. The bolding of the full stop is intentional, because it actually forms part of the name.
BEN: Okay. So, I’m going to refer to them as M stop. I don’t know if they want that to be in that way, but that’s how I’m going to do it.
DANIEL: I feel like you could do it with intonation. You could just be like, “Mmm!”
BEN: M pregnant pause. Now that we have heralded our newest acolytes and journeymen into the fold, what’s going on in the world of linguistics, Daniello?
DANIEL: Well, this one was suggested by tygertronia. Is anybody aware of Nightshade? A programme called Nightshade?
HEDVIG: Programme?
BEN: No. I merely know the actual nightshade family of plants.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Me, too.
DANIEL: Some of the tastiest plants and the most dangerous plants you’ll ever have.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: So delicious, so dangerous.
DANIEL: They are. Nightshade is a way of taking images that show one thing to you and then poisoning them, so that a computer will think they actually show something else.
BEN: Oh, okay. That’s interesting.
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s a bit similar to what… You remember when protesters in Hong Kong were drawing funny lines on their faces to fool facial recognition? It’s a bit like that.
BEN: Yes. So there’s a whole field of clothes as well, I think. Clothes can be enlisted in this effort. But I also think another connection here is the arms race that various apps do to try and protect… So, the Snapchats of the world that have destructible messages.
There’s a kind of arms race to make sure that you can’t get around screenshotting things that are supposed to disappear forever. So, there’s things that when you screenshot, it’ll show up as black or entirely white or something like that. So, I imagine there’s probably a slight software connection to that sort of technology as well.
DANIEL: There is. So, this is about a typeface called ShieldFont. And this is a way that you can poison data by making it look one way to a human and another way to a computer, just like with Nightshade and images.
BEN: Love the use of POISON as the adjective there. Great.
HEDVIG: It should be. Yeah. It’s perfectly potent.
DANIEL: [CROSSTALK] Yeah. tygertronia has pointed us to creativebloq.com. There’s going to be a link in the show notes. According to creativebloq.com, this uses OpenType. Now, as a type designer, I could tell you a little bit about OpenType.
BEN: Oh no.
DANIEL: No, here we go.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It took a while for Ben to realise this is a typography story.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You really slipped one past the keeper on this. I haven’t complained in the entire 60-second lead up. Sorry, sorry.
DANIEL: Took a while. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Please, Daniel, tell us the typographic nature of… What was it called again?
DANIEL: ShieldFont.
BEN: ShieldFont.
DANIEL: OpenType usually allows you to define the way that letters should look. So, if I type a C and then I type an H, most fonts will just give you a C and then an H next to each other. But OpenType allows you to change them automatically into a fancy C-H character, a special character.
BEN: Oh, I see.
DANIEL: You can even define your own.
HEDVIG: ‘Cause you guys like the kerning shit, right?
DANIEL: It could be kerning, but also when I write the letters D, E, R by hand like in the word under the D, the E and the R connect in a cool way that I actually quite like. And if I were using OpenType to do my handwriting, I could combine those so they would just every time that someone types those three characters, it would put in the cool looking one. That’s what OpenType does. Or, you can define five different types of the letter A, so that if you do a handwriting font, they won’t all look the same.
BEN: So, OpenType is almost like a meta font that can be applied to other fonts that will adjust the kerning and clump characters and that thing? Or, OpenType is actually a font character style as well?
DANIEL: No, OpenType isn’t really a font. OpenType is a system for controlling how fonts show themselves.
BEN: I get you. I get you.
DANIEL: So, the way this works is it allows the typeface to show a word on the screen for you to read, but it will automatically change that word to something else in the HTML code, which is what bots are usually using to scrape for data.
BEN: Now, I’m guessing it doesn’t do so in a consistent fashion. Otherwise, that would just be the most hackable thing in the world.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was going to say, how are the…
BEN: It’s was like every E equals a P or whatever.
HEDVIG: You know like in sci fi shows, there’s always something like, “Ooh, we have to set the vibration to the shield to this frequency to get through the enemy.” But then, the enemy 10 seconds later adjust their shield vibrations and you’re fucked.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yeah, what Ben said.
DANIEL: It doesn’t do it letter by letter. It does it on the word level. According to the article on creativebloq.com, it changes select words in the HTML to alter sentences original meaning, but keeps them grammatically coherent. So, they’re more likely to pass AI quality filters. So, instead of having the word BRIDGE…
BEN: [LAUGHS] That’s fun.
DANIEL: …you’d have something that would work in that sentence, but is about the same length or… Yeah.
BEN: So, I feel like I need to explain my laugh. I just want to do the resident non-linguist thing of over-explaining. So, just in case you guys, anyone listening missed it, this is deliberately changing what appears in the HTML, which is to say what the AI-scraping people are going to be reading. And it makes sure that the stuff that does make it to what the AI reads is still legible enough to pose as language. But it’s not, it is garbage, and that’s the poison aspect of this.
Because if it was just blocking it off, these quality filters would just go, “Don’t use this.” And that doesn’t poison anything. I don’t get poisoned if I choose not to eat the berry. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Whereas these ones is like, “Here, have this delicious, nutritious looking berry! [SINISTER VOICE] Loaded with poison.”
DANIEL: Now your data is junk.
BEN: Yes.
DANIEL: So, the creators say, “ShieldFont is not an anti-AI project.” This is founders Isaque Seneda and Gabriel Abrucio, “We’re simply against the idea that publishing is the same as consenting. We saw how existing opt-out protocols such as robots.txt were being routinely bypassed, so we wanted to create one that could enforce itself. The answer was to turn the content itself into the opt-out.” That’s pretty cool.
BEN: As a trio, do we agree that it’s not anti-AI when they have [CHUCKLES] labeled it as like “Poison [DANIEL LAUGHS] for AI” That sounds pretty anti- to me.
HEDVIG: I think they’re trying to say you don’t need to be like an AI vegan. You can just be like I would prefer this content to be opted out, per se, which I would also describe as a [BEN LAUGHS] type of anti-AI. Why not?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Maybe.
BEN: I just love it. “We have made AI poison! No, no, like that’s not to say anti-AI.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Well, think of it this way. Think of it as like you’re in a world where there are witches. And some of them are nice and some of them are bad and you’re presenting the poison berry to some of them. You could frame it that way if you wanted.
DANIEL: Am I poisoning the good witches then? That doesn’t sound very good.
BEN: If I may, Hedvig, to continue your metaphor, I think the argument there would be, well, the good witches wouldn’t just be eating random berries.
HEDVIG: Right. Yeah, metaphor… We shouldn’t be presenting it. This is the thing. We live in a little house and we have a little garden. We’re growing berries and we’re trying to stop the witch crows from eating them. Right?
DANIEL: There are witch crows. Okay.
HEDVIG: They’re coming to our door and eating them.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: We’re not presenting the berry. Don’t tap out now.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Now we’re including familiars. This is a whole thing now.
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
DANIEL: I’m with you.
HEDVIG: Lettuce and snails. Is that better?
[PAUSE]
BEN: No. Let’s… no, it’s getting worse.
DANIEL: No. You’re fine. It’s me.
BEN: We’re drifting further from the point.
DANIEL: This is a me problem. I accept this.
HEDVIG: I think lettuce and snail was the peak. Yeah, anyway, all right.
DANIEL: Anyway, this seems to work for now, but the arms race continues. Thanks, tygertronia, for that story.
Our next story is about language diversity long ago. Right now we have maybe 7,500 languages. 7,000 Languages spoken on Earth and counting down, unfortunately. But we would like to know how many languages there were a really, really long time ago. Like, maybe 12,000 years ago. Ben, what’s your guess? Would there be more languages than today, or less languages than today?
BEN: I mean…
HEDVIG: And what would you use to find it out? Because I’m really interested. Because I know what this paper is about and I’m very curious what tools Ben is going to pick up.
DANIEL: Yeah, you’ve been following this for a while, Hedvig.
BEN: Okay. So, thing number one: much fewer people globally, so that you would think that would trend number of languages down. However, thing number two: much, much greater levels of isolation of populations in this time. So, if you’re one valley over, there might as well be an entirely different cohort of humans to you, given how rugged some terrain might be or deserts or whatever, blah, blah, blah. Even a fucking river can be a huge barrier.
So, I’m going to say the isolation outweighs the lower population and that there would have been more languages, putting aside the: what’s the difference between a language and a dialect, and all that stuff.
DANIEL: Thank you. We were going to get there eventually. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, in terms of how you would go about finding it out, be the doctor from Doctor Who and get in a TARDIS. Fucking, I don’t know. I still to this day, despite two very smart linguists who I know extremely well — separate to you guys obviously — trying to explain it to me.
I don’t understand how historical linguistics works or forensic linguistics or any of that stuff. You guys have tried really hard to try and explain that to me, and I’ve basically finished by smiling and nodding so that you don’t have to [DANIEL LAUGHS] keep going. So, this one is one of those ones where I’m just like, “This seems like magic.”
DANIEL: Yeah. I would have thought lots of languages, after all, people weren’t doing colonialisms on a massive scale. You would get neighbouring tribes wiping out each other, maybe. We think of language loss as modern, but I would have thought more.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that the thing that Ben said about the lower population is really key. You need to have people to speak a language. There’s some minimal threshold if you have, I don’t know, 10 people. You probably can’t sustain yourself isolated from other populations due to just like incest, etc.
So, there’s got to be some lower threshold of how small your group can be and how much contact you have with other people. Because you could be really small, then have a lot of contact, and then it could maybe work out. So, smaller populations should lead to overall fewer distinct populations. However, if you’re enough isolated… Yeah, exactly, what… So, we wouldn’t expect that 10,000 or 12,000 years ago we would have a huge language, I don’t know, German with millions of speakers. Because how would those million of speakers connect over all these areas and homogenise? That just…
DANIEL: There were only seven million people in the entire world at the time anyway, or… if that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, [CHUCKLES] exactly. Exactly. I think it’s really important to realise how much our population has grown, not only with the recent 200, 300 years of better labour delivery, better antibiotics, doctors, washing hands,…
BEN: Nutrition.
HEDVIG: …nutrition, etc., We have massively boomed the population, but we also boomed it a while ago as well with the onset of agriculture and urbanisation and stuff. So, when we’re talking 12,000 plus years, the population is a lot smaller. Daniel, how small is it?
DANIEL: Back then, we’re talking about something like four and a half million to seven million.
BEN: Considering we had coloni… uh, “colonised”, sorry. Considering we had spread to every corner of the Earth sans Antarctica…
HEDVIG: That’s impressive.
BEN: Even with that, you would think we would have had more. I think that goes to show how resource intensive humans are as an animal, as mammalian species upon the Earth. We extract a lot, even just in a traditional or hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Yeah, I’m surprised. I figured there would be more than that, even all the way back then.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, there have been three main ideas about what the language profile has looked like in history. There was the Megadiverse Paleolithic hypothesis. Like, there were a lot of languages 12,000 years ago, and it’s been shrinking ever since. That’s number one.
The Pre-Modern Equilibrium Hypothesis, like it’s all been about the same until colonialism happened and then it’s diminished. And the third one, which brings us to some new work by friends of ours, Damián Blasi, Marcus Hamilton, Russell Gray, and Claire Bowern, some of whom have been on the show before, published in Science. They support a hypothesis called Demographic Boost.
And the story here is that you start off 12,000 years ago, people speaking maybe the same number of languages we see today. And then, you’ve got the dawn of agriculture, more reliable food supply, technological advance, and that helped an explosion of humans and language diversity, leading to what they call a Linguistic Golden Age. Maybe 3,000 years ago, maybe even a thousand years ago, there might have been like tens of thousands of languages, not just the 7,000 that we see today.
And then, from the abstract, I’m quoting, “Multinational empires spread along with their languages, pathogens, and cultures.” In other words, language diversity started waning even before European colonialism. That’s the idea.
HEDVIG: Right. So, it’s that European colonialism is the one of the last iterations of these kinds of expansions, probably one of the most effective and brutal, but that previous large empires have also had a negative impact on language diversity. So, the true peak is, it’s like yeah, you get agriculture, you can have many, many more people, you get a large population boom, you get more languages, but then also you start developing into higher states and you get these colonialism and nation states empires that start eradicating diversity. So, yeah, the order of elements makes sense to me.
BEN: So, it’s almost like a bell curve. We had a resting amount and then we went up because population went up, but we still had all of the limitations that make there to be a lot of languages. Like, we didn’t reduce the ability to travel or anything, we just had more food, basically. So, we did more sexing and more bébes, but we were all still in micro communities, so we had heaps of languages and then a whole bunch of people were like, “Mm, conquering people. That sounds pretty great.”
HEDVIG: Well, it’s not a bell curve because it’s not symmetrical. It’s very, very shifted. If time goes from left to right, it’s very much shifted to the right.
BEN: Yeah. Okay. And then, it just falls off a cliff at the end. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: So, if I understand correctly, they arrived at this by running lots and lots of simulations and seeing what kind of scenarios played out over and over again. Like, we don’t know how many languages there were, but we do know about how many people they were.
So, one input was, take your total population and divide the number of people in a group. So, maybe seven million people, divide by about 800 — because that’s about how many people you’d have in one of the groups back then — and you get the number of languages-ish. And what else are we talking about?
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, it’s those kinds of assumptions. So, all science proceeds on making assumptions and then testing out what would happen if those assumptions were true and seeing if something holds or what the picture would be. So, in this case, they’ve made certain assumptions on population group size and then take in information about the population growth, and used other assumptions and priors to rein in what the results could be.
So, if someone were to say, “Oh no, I don’t think that’s the correct assumption about the group size.” You would have to re… They run some variations, I believe. But you would still have to rerun things. So, yeah, I think the assumptions make sense. I think that’s about what I would expect as well.
DANIEL: Do you see any problems, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Well, it is a computer calculation of what we think it could have been. We’re not Doctor Who like Ben brought up at the top of this story. We can’t travel back. So, these are assumptions, a couple of valid assumptions and some good statistics and… a order of elements that I think make sense, but it’s not… We didn’t time travel, [CHUCKLES] so we have to always hedge our results and say, “This is like a decent guess.”
One of the important conclusions from this piece of work is, so we have about 7,000 languages today. That’s not an evenly sampled 7,000 from all of the much more than 7,000 that existed before. Regardless, if we think it’s something like 20,000 or they have some estimates that go up to over 60,000 languages at this golden age period. It means that there’s probably some bias in which languages exist today. It could be a genealogical bias. So, languages in certain language families were more likely to survive, maybe because if they were tied to some of these more conquering groups, or it could be other kinds of biases.
So, I knew that this paper was coming out for a while. I have had some of my colleagues talk about it, but I didn’t know that many of the details. And now I’ve actually last week been like, “Oh, what does that mean for my research? Because [CHUCKLES] if the 7,000 languages I have to sample from now are biased, what kind of conclusions should I be making from that?” So, that’s the thoughts that are sitting with me.
DANIEL: Are there just huge chunks of possible things that have been eradicated and that’s why we’re not seeing them?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Damián Blasi, one of the authors says — I’m quoting — “The languages we see today are the survivors of massive and highly selective historical bottleneck. A linguistic feature may be common, not because it is inherently superior but because it happened to be carried by populations that expanded. Extinction may have shaped linguistic diversity much more profoundly than we previously appreciated.”
BEN: Which is not indistinguishable from evolutionary biology. Part of Darwin’s argument is the fittest and the best genes will carry on, but then there’s also this other side…
DANIEL: Also, there’s random chance.
HEDVIG: Random…
BEN: Sometimes… sometimes alllll the ones but this one die! And then off you go!
HEDVIG: And we should also say perhaps that the kind of work that Damian is alluding to there, I believe, if I can hop in and try and read his mind, is that sometimes linguists like to say things like, “Oh, maybe some things are a little bit easier for people to process.” Like, certain word orders or certain grammatical patterns or certain sound combinations are a little bit easier. So, over time, even if you had one of the slightly more difficult combinations of things, you’d expect people to naturally drift to this slightly easier one given enough time and enough people.
Every now and then, someone in the population will come up with an innovation that is a little bit more difficult and has some other advantage and it could pop up. But then, over time, everyone would sort of… there’s a gravity well of some cognitive ease, efficiency of production, something like that. There’s a lot of work in linguistics on this. These kinds of things could be easier for all kinds of reasons. So, they could be easier for the hearer to process, they could be easier for the speaker to produce, they could be easier to cognitively store in your mind, all lots of different things. And they can also be contradictory. Some things could be easier for the speaker and harder for the hearer. So, it’s not like one is always better for everything.
But if we want to research things like that, if we want to understand our human language capacity and how humans work, we have the languages that we have presently to study. And if something is very common in them, we might think, “Oh, maybe that is because it has some advantage somehow.” But if we have this bottleneck where some things just survived because they happen to be spoken by conquering people, then…
DANIEL: Oh no.
HEDVIG: …that’s not an inherent [CHUCKLES] language advantage feature, just to be spoken by someone who’s powerful.
DANIEL: Then we can’t make those assumptions anymore about like, “Oh, it’s ease of articulation or ease of comprehension or cognitive ease or something like that.” We have to say, “Oh. Yes, but also.”
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, tricky.
DANIEL: This seems like important work.
HEDVIG: It is important work, and it’s also work that engages with endangerment and what kind of window is disappearing. It is also quite complex work and I’m looking forward slash… There’s going to be a couple of weeks, I think, of people interrogating this work and finding different approaches and maybe saying, “Oh no, they should have done this and that instead…” Because it is also getting a lot of attention and it’s very interesting to a lot of people. So, we might do a follow up.
DANIEL: Sounds good to me. In the meantime, here’s our last news story suggested by Diego. It’s a couple of things that are happening in the world of TV and accessibility. IndieWire report that Netflix is creating a bunch of content in American Sign Language, so that if you’re watching a Netflix show, you can see somebody signing right along with you.
The partnership is with a company called SignUp Media. The interesting thing about this is it works as a Chrome browser extension. So, it’s not just sitting there in the frame. You can move the sign language interpreter to wherever you want. Maybe one day, you’ll even be able to change the color of the background, if that’s easier for you. 200 hours, and that’s a lot.
BEN: One of the things that I imagine is very challenging about trying to implement this, is we don’t have a very good way of incorporating a secondary video feed into video either on television, online, anywhere. For the longest, longest time, I’m talking like many decades, there has been some sort of metadata style functionality built into nearly all broadcast television, and then later as we move to the internet or even just for DVDs and that sort of thing.
Closed captioning and text-based work is A, easier. But B, has been supported for the longest time. And so, for a long time now, if you wanted to create a new standard or codec or whatever it happened to be, you had to build in text support to the way you would encode video content. There is no good mechanism to also encode a second… Look, someone might be listening right now and jumping up and down in their chair and be like, “Shut up, Ainslie, you fucking idiot. There is this great thing and you just don’t know about it because you’re a dummy dum-dum.”
But at least in terms of any widespread usage, the main fix… If you want to watch Auslan supported content, say on a smart TV, when you press play, you’ve got to choose a separate video with a little bracket next to its title that says like Auslan Interpreter, or something like that. Because they will just load an entirely separate video with what we would have once called hard coded subtitles. Meaning, it’s not a separate metadata entity. It is just literally a different video feed with the subtitles burnt in. But instead of being subtitles, it’s a little window somewhere with a person doing the sign interpretation.
So, this is an interesting fix in the sense that you can just lay it over on whichever device. The fact that it’s a Chrome extension gives me pause, because that means TVs are out, straight out of the gate. So, only a device that is actively running a web browser is going to be able to provide this functionality.
The other thing that gives me pause is something that I’ve been thinking about a little more often recently, is this lost media or dead media reality. So, this company is making all of this wonderful supportive content for different shows. But there’s no mechanism to ensure that this stays with the shows or if this company ends up going belly up or something like that that it all just disappears.
HEDVIG: The benefit of sometimes when I’m looking for subtitles, sometimes when they are burned in, hard coded in, I can find… Like they’re there. [LAUGHS] They’re there.
BEN: Definitely. I would say that I know many a video editor who probably just had a full body shudder to hear you say that, Hedvig, because like hard coded subs are like…
HEDVIG: Of course.
BEN: …anathema to most people who make media. What we would want, I imagine, is some system, much like the current subtitle system, where there’s just huge repositories where this content can just be left so that when I’m sailing the high seas and looking for a particular obscure video… I can go to one of these repositories and not only find subtitles for it, which I currently do, but I could also find like little video files.
And then even better would be a very well supported media player ecosystem, where just like I can right click on a video and go play this subtitle file, please. I could also right click and say, “Please put a window in a window and have my little Auslan interpretation playing wherever I like,” which is exactly the functionality by the way it sounds like this Chrome plugin provides. But just the kind of thing that you would find in every media player application and on every television and that sort of stuff. That’s the dream. If we could get there, that would be wonderful.
HEDVIG: Well, so, what Ben is describing, is that like there’s this .srt files that you can usually find on lots of different places. When you open a video of any format in the beautiful program VLC, which is the only way to watch videos on a computer, you can just attach the subtitle file and you can change the font and you can move it back and forwards and you can do all these things. And if there was something like that for another video…
It just occurred to me that formatting would also be useful for video commentary. So, I’m a big fan of The Lord of the Rings with hearing the writers cast talk over it.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I’m at the level of watching that show now that I know what they’re going to say. Yeah.
BEN: Oh, my. [LAUGHS] It’s one thing to be able to quote the entire extended edition from beginning to end. But if you can quote the commentary, that’s a level of nerdery even I squint my eyes at. Like, that’s that’s a strong odor!
DANIEL: It’s fun.
HEDVIG: It’s just really good and cozy and great. But that kind of content is becoming really popular. Ben and I are on TikTok, and you know how many people there are who overlay their own little face over a video and then points and then give comments. So, people love that for various reasons. I think a form like that would be really helpful.
DANIEL: The other piece of news is that Disney+ is rolling out support for 17 additional languages. That brings us up to 58, including right to left support for languages like Arabic and Hebrew.
HEDVIG: They didn’t have that before? Arabic?
DANIEL: They’ve had an original interface, but it’s now a new and better one. So, representation matters, more people being able to enjoy stuff is good. Thanks, Diego. And that’s the news.
DANIEL: Well, now it’s time for Related or Not.
BEN: All righty.
DANIEL: This theme comes to us from Gordon.
[RELATED OR NOT THEME]
DANIEL: Thanks, Gordon. We always love that one. You can send us your Related or Not theme songs as well.
BEN: So cute.
DANIEL: Well, this one is one from me. I was driving through the countryside with my dear daughter in the backseat, and we passed an old dilapidated house, looks like it was about to fall down, and I said “It looked like a ramshackle house.”
She’d never heard the word RAMSHACKLE before, so I was trying to explain it. But I thought RAMSHACKLE: does it have anything to do with rams, anything to do with shacks? Both or neither? RAMSHACKLE.
HEDVIG: Shackles.
BEN: Yeah, I feel like the most obvious one there was SHACKLE.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay. Well, we can do that if you want to, but you know what? Let’s…
BEN: No, no, no, no.
DANIEL: Okay. In that case, is it a lot of shacks because of the frequentative -LE ending? So, anyway, RAMS, SHACKS, both or neither?
BEN: Okay. Interesting. RAMSHACKLE. I mean, it’s sounding English as fuck, isn’t it? It’s got that bumbling, tumbling sort of…
DANIEL: One of those funny old words like BAMBOOZLE.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Well, I like to call your attention to the fact that you can ram into something, and then they fall apart and they become a ruin of what they were before. I watched a movie yesterday where someone drove into a wall and that wall was in less good condition afterwards.
BEN: This just in: things fall over.
DANIEL: Didn’t improve the wall, did it? No. [CHUCKLES]
BEN: Things fall over when you run into them.
HEDVIG: I don’t know if the word RAM into something is related to the animal RAM, which is a kind of sheep, like a ram, like a male sheep.
DANIEL: I reckon it does. Don’t they bang on each other a lot?
BEN: Surely. Yeah. Surely, we got one name from the other name.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but which order, right?
BEN: I’m going to say animal husbandry older than breaking down castle walls.
DANIEL: You never know.
BEN: I know this isn’t the true thing because you would have included it as an option if it was. But my brain, if I was being honest about how I interpreted this, I actually don’t think it has to do with housing and houses at all. I think it is something that we have since started applying to houses. And if I had to identify a lineage, I would have, my very favourite, pointed to the age of sail and some messy line locker or shackle storage or something like that.
If your station or your area was shit, a bosun or something might be like, “Arr, it’s looking ramshackle, like it’s all over the place.” So, that’s where I would have thought something like that. And then later on, anything that was messy or ill-kempt got that name.
DANIEL: I’ll believe anything that Ben says in a pirate voice.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I think we should also think about the fact that it’s a RAMSHACKLED house, right? It’s not a ramshackle.
DANIEL: Oh no, it is a ramshackle house. Not RAMSHACKLED.
BEN: Yeah, I’ve only heard of it not with the -ED. I’ve never heard of it with an -ED.
HEDVIG: What?
BEN: Ever.
DANIEL: Yep.
HEDVIG: WHAT‽‽‽
DANIEL: Never heard it with an -ED. No D.
HEDVIG: Is that one not the words you’re saying all the time? Oh my god, I am… [???]
DANIEL: No, that is not. No, RAMSHACKLE house. Which is a funny sort of adjective, isn’t it?
HEDVIG: You’re saying ramshackle house.
DANIEL: Yes, I am. No D.
HEDVIG: News to me, I have been hallucinating an -ED all the time.
BEN: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Wow! New Mandela effect has dropped.
BEN: There you go. And Daniel and I have two distinct accents as well. So, it’s not like you’ve just caught a stray from Aussie or something like that. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Well, I say neither. I think it’s just coincidence, because the word… I’m sure that the parts of the word are super old, but I think putting them no earlier than the 1800s.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: I’m going to draw my superpower of knowing other languages. So, in Swedish, a ramshackle house would be a ruckel. And that sounds a bit similar. There’s other words that mean HOUSE that have the /s/. Isn’t there like… what do you call a small house that you store your wea… tools in? Shed? Can you also call it a…
BEN: Shack.
HEDVIG: Shack! There we go. Ramshack. Shack, shack. It’s related to that shack. It’s not related to the things you have around your wrists.
DANIEL: Okay, we’ve got a vote for SHACK, we’ve got a vote for neither, that’s me. And Ben, you’re voting…?
BEN: I’m actually voting SHACKLE, which is wild.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
BEN: I’m voting for something you didn’t even give me the option for, which is almost a guaranteed L, but here we are.
DANIEL: Yep. Okay. Turns out the winner was me. It probably has more to do with the word that means going through a house, stealing everything, and leaving a big mess. What are you doing when you do that? You are?
BEN: Ram raiding?
HEDVIG: Rummaging.
BEN: Rummaging?
DANIEL: No. Ran…
BEN: Ransacking!
DANIEL: Ransacking.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: This is Old Norse rannsaka. Rann means house, Old Norse rann.
HEDVIG: Oh, is that what it means?
DANIEL: Yes. [CHUCKLES] And the SACK comes from an old Norse word sœkja, meaning seek. You’re going through the house looking for things. It’s a house seek. A house search.
BEN: Okay, so interesting, our use of the word SACK, like to sack a city, actually literally, its lineage is to look or to search.
DANIEL: Well, that’s the surprising part. So, when you SACK a city, you really are just taking all their stuff and putting it into your sack. But the SACK in RANSACK, that one comes from seek or search. So, that’s how SACK and RANSACK are not related.
HEDVIG: This is what happens when we record early in the morning and I’m just not smart. So, in Swedish, you can say that you can RANSACK yourself, which is to really deeply reflect and think about the reasons why you’re doing something. Rannsaka sig själv.
BEN: Whoa. That’s crazy.
DANIEL: Wow. That’s interesting! Not an English thing at all.
BEN: Yeah. Not at all.
HEDVIG: What would you say to really deeply delve into yourself and ask like why am I doing things I’m doing?
BEN: We would say deep dive.
DANIEL: To introspect.
HEDVIG: Doesn’t have that same like…
BEN: No, RANSACK has an almost violent.
HEDVIG: …cohesive.
BEN: Like, you are engaging in reflection so deep and so fundamental that like the process is going to hurt. That’s what it sounds like to me.
DANIEL: It ruins you. [LAUGHS] You’re wrecked.
HEDVIG: No, no, because RANSACK, it doesn’t mean to hurt. It can also mean to search thoroughly.
DANIEL: Okay. Yeah, in English it would.
BEN: In English, my sense…
HEDVIG: No. Right.
BEN: Back me up or disagree, Daniel. But to RANSACK means you are searching to such a thorough degree that you’re damaging.
DANIEL: Yeah, you’re wrecking the place.
HEDVIG: But I don’t think the Scandi languages have necessarily the brutal aspect. I think it can also be searched thoroughly.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: In English, the word was once “ransackle”, and after that “ranshackle”, and finally RAMSHACKLE. So, it picked up sounds as it went. All right, now, one from O Tim.
BEN: O Tim.
O TIM: Hi, everyone. This is O Tim. I can’t tell you how thoroughly I enjoy the show and the banter. Hedvig and Daniel, you two are simply awesome. And Ben, I have a particularly soft spot for you.
I have a Related or Not for you all. Cat’s NAP and dog NAP. And what about all this pet hair in the NAP of my clothing? Feel free to ignore stone KNAPPING and NAPPIES. Thanks, and looking forward to hearing from you all.
DANIEL: Okay. So, let’s just clarify. So, we’re talking about cat NAP as in sleeping like a cat, that kind of nap. We’re talking about NAP as in stealing, like when you’re dog napping… some dog. And then the NAP in your clothing.
BEN: Or kidnapping. I think it was very strange that… Thank you, by the way, O Tim. You were so complimentary for me. And the first thing I’m going to do is offer a slight critique. Why DOG NAP instead of KIDNAP? I feel like KIDNAP is the one. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: And I approve.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: As the non-childed member of the… [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I want to be O Tim’s favourite.
DANIEL: Oh, okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Sorry. I just love that you immediately like sibling energy, so strong, just like “Take him down.”
DANIEL: What if somebody’s child free but also dog free? They’re… both groups exist.
BEN: Such as Hedvig, for example?
DANIEL: Yeah, say. Well, let’s see. And then, there’s the third one, NAP, which is the nap in your clothing. For example, velvet has a nap and you run your hand over it one way and it looks a certain way, you rearrange the nap and it goes the other way.
BEN: To the sensory joy of spectrum and non-spectrum people the world over.
DANIEL: Who doesn’t love a good nap?
HEDVIG: When your clothing does that thing over time where it develops little buds.
BEN: We say PILLS in English. Or, pilling.
HEDVIG: PILLS. Okay. Pilling. Right. I wasn’t sure if that was also napping. Okay.
BEN: No, different. Separate.
HEDVIG: Okay. Cat NAP, NAP a dog, and a NAP in your clothing.
DANIEL: NAP sleeping, NAP stealing, and NAP clothing.
HEDVIG: They’re all quite short. Like, NAP is a short word. So, that always sets up the tingles. It’s so short, lots of things could have evolved into it.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Sorry.
DANIEL: That’s it.
BEN: I want to fight you now because you started with that energy and I just want to be like, “Well this just in guys, one PhD down and she can tell us NAP is a short word.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: But see, it goes both ways because lots of things could converge on it. But it could, once made, diverge into lots of things, because it’s so small and useful and neat. I’m going with all unrelated. I think that it was possible for lots of things to sound that way.
BEN: I am going to say that to take form of NAP such as kidnap, or if you like cat or dog nap… Or, no, I can’t say cat nap because that doesn’t make any sense, because we’re using NAP to sleep.
DANIEL: Confusing.
BEN: Sorry. Dog nap or whatever. I think to steal and the nap of a fabric are going to be related. And I think it’s going to do with the fact that when you nick things, you have a little sack that you put them in. And perhaps you want the sack that is like really soft, so that the things don’t clink or clunk and you can make off with your stolen goods readily.
DANIEL: SACK comes up again. That’s interesting.
BEN: But I think to sleep, that one’s going to be… I reckon exactly as Dr Skirgård alluded to because of it being very short. It’s an unrelated thing that ended up being similar because short things can… There’s not much variation possible when things are short. I should be a doctor of linguistics.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Basically, you’re there.
DANIEL: Sleep is on its own. Okay.
HEDVIG: I’m going to go exactly anti-Ben as might expect. So, I think that you nap dogs and children and people. When you kidnap, you specifically don’t take things that aren’t animate. Right? You don’t kidnap a pram or a car, unless if you were to say, “I kidnapped your car,” it would mean that I think that you have a very particular relationship to your car.
BEN: Oh right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s so important that it’s animate to you.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, you only kidnap things that are animate. When you have an animate object, they need to sleep. So, when you kidnap or dognap or something, that thing will have to sleep at some point.
I think there’s something about putting them to sleep when you’re taking them or having their care of them for a long time in which they will sleep. So, I think catnap and napping a dog are related. And the napping clothes, I think, I don’t know. I think that’s unrelated.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, the answer is: they ain’t none of them related.
BEN: Fuck you, Daniel. Sincerely, from the bottom of my heart.
HEDVIG: Our joint enemy, Ben, is Tim.
BEN: No. No, no, no. Tim, don’t listen to Hedvig, all right? Listen, I just want to say directly to you, Tim. Thanks, man. I really appreciate it. [CHUCKLES] She’s crazy. What are you going to do?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay. Well, I had a bit of an advantage because I already knew that NAP, the stealing kind wasn’t NAP. It was NAB. You’re not napping a child. You’re nabbing a child, probably.
Okay. But then NAP the sleeping kind comes from Old English hnappian, to doze or to slumber. “A word of unknown origin,” says the Online Etymology Dictionary, although Norwegian does have napp, to sleep, who knows why? The nap of a clothing comes from nappe, Old French nappe, a tablecloth and this is where we get a nap-kin. It’s a small cloth.
BEN: Yeah.
DANIEL: And I will just say that the knapping, when you’re knocking pieces of stone off and you’re doing knapping like that, probably imitative.
BEN: Oh, okay. Onomatopoeic.
DANIEL: Yep. And NAPPIES, a little cloth, a little nappy. I’m just going to mention something from Gordon, who sent me this quite a while ago. “Nap, napkin, and apron, they all come from the same Latin word mappa. Meaning cloth.” So, the NAP, the fabric goes back to MAP, because maps were made on cloth.
BEN: That makes sense.
DANIEL: A napkin is a small nap, and an APRON used to be, ah, this was so good, NAPRON. Napron.
BEN: Oh really?
DANIEL: It was a napron. And then over time, we re-bracketed to an apron, but it’s just a small cloth. So, there’s all kinds of connections going on there. Thank you, O Tim. And thank you, Gordon, for sending us your words. All right, Hedvig, this one’s yours. One of your lunchtime recollections after a few drinks.
HEDVIG: Lunchtime. Sorry, this was a lunchtime at work. I’m trying to get my colleagues to submit things, and I just got to bring it up so I have all of them. All right, so, I barely remember and I think Ste actually nominated these, so Ben, it is ADDER, the snake…
DANIEL: Got it.
HEDVIG: DEER, the hoofed animal. NATTER, as in to natter on. OTTER, as in the very cute animal in the water. And HYDRA, as in one of the beasts that Hercules has to slay.
BEN: The fuck?
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] HYDRA? That was like…
BEN: There was a bit of a stretch from ADDER to DEER. I was like, “Okay, I can see it.” And then like everything, it’s like you were going like, “1, 2, 3, 7, seal.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: That HYDRA came out of nowhere!
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: It’s a weird collection.
BEN: So, we’ve got ADDER, the snake. DEER, the hoofed animal native to taiga forests. What was the…?
DANIEL: NATTER on and on.
HEDVIG: Natter, to natter on.
BEN: Yep. NATTER, OTTER, and HYDRA. Okay.
DANIEL: Okay. Now I am going to make this a little easier, because when there’s five words. It’s awfully tricky. This one is going to be a game of Spot the Pair.
BEN: Okay. Meaning there is a pair of related words here.
DANIEL: And the other three are not related to any other word in the group. They’re all on their own except for two. There’s a pair. Can you spot the pair? Remember, we might have to go back pretty far to link this pair.
BEN: I’ve got an intuitive guess and I’ve got to be honest. So far on today’s show, that hasn’t gone very well for me.
DANIEL: Hang on.
BEN: Fucking in for a penny, in for a pound, I say. OTTER and NATTER related.
DANIEL: Oh. You mean because of the little noise they make?
BEN: Yeah, because otters are such… To observe otters in the wild is to see such a thoroughly industrious creature. They’re busy. They’re doing stuff all the time. And yes, they do make heaps of noise as well. I think they actually have one of the most substantial caloric loads of many mammals because they’re in cold water and they move real quick and they’ve got to eat, I think, like a third of their body weight in flesh every single day or something like that. So, they’re just doing stuff all the time.
And nattering, like nattering on is, at least to my ears, has a really strong sense of an annoying amount of talking. Like, when people natter… It can be said affectionately, but at a fundamental level, there is a clear valence to me of just like if someone is nattering, most people would like them to shut up.
DANIEL: I bet NATTER is collocated with QUIT and not with CONTINUE.
BEN: Yeah, exactly. So, OTTER and NATTER would be my intuitive guesses. I can’t wait to be wrong.
DANIEL: Okay. Hedvig, you?
HEDVIG: I know [CHUCKLES] I poisoned myself. I don’t think know how to unpoison myself, because I was thinking like what did I think before I knew. And if I would have thought… Well, so now I’m going to say something. So, I think if I would have thought what I thought before, I would have probably thought DEER and ADDER, because they sound like they go back to a word meaning animal, and they’re both animals.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. I thought it was OTTER and HYDRA, because they of the water connection. That’s what I thought. Okay, the real answer, it’s not ADDER. Interesting thing about ADDER: used to be a NADDER. Remember the thing I was saying about a NAPRON and it changed to an APRON? It’s that. It’s rebracketing again and I’d forgotten about it. DEER: on its own. It is just a basic word for an animal. I believe in German it’s still tier, which means any animal. Okay, the pair are OTTER… and HYDRA!
BEN: Fuck you. God damn it. God damn it.
DANIEL: Perfect score for Daniel this time.
BEN: God damn this whole goddamn game to hell. I like Word of the Week now. You know what I don’t like? Fucking Related or Not. That’s what I don’t like.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: They both go back to Proto-Indo-European root *wed- (1), meaning water or wet things. Natter is just imitative. Natter, natter, natter. So, there you go. Lots of fun. Thanks, Hedvig. I look forward to more of your lunchtime meditations.
HEDVIG: Ben, so, what’s happened is that I’ve bashed Daniel a few times for not taking my suggestions, and now he feels bad.
BEN: Good. Guilt is a phenomenal coercive technique. There’s entire religions based on it.
DANIEL: I just try now to find them. And if they’re good, I’ll include them. But not if they’re not, and then this was good.
HEDVIG: This is very annoying of me to do. Yeah, anyway.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We’re here with journalist and lingtoker, Sophia Smith Galer. Sophia is the author of How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. Sophia, thanks so much for coming and talking with us today.
SOPHIA: Thank you for having me. Hello.
DANIEL: Hello. So, your book talks about your own language background. And it’s very personal and I enjoyed reading that very much. For those who haven’t read the book, would you mind just giving us a quick summary of what’s your language background and where you’re at that way?
SOPHIA: Sure. So, I fell in love with languages long before I ever became a journalist. And I studied languages at university. I did Spanish and Arabic. I think in hindsight, part of the reason why I chose those languages was because I always felt like I’d lost out on a chance with Italian. I am half Italian, half English, and grew up so many grandchildren of immigrants, speaking only the language of the new country and not the old one.
And in my late 20s, a lot of things were going on, including my Nonna was getting increasingly frail and ill and she was entering her 90s. I started thinking like, “How did I learn Spanish and Arabic?” But there’s still the language that got away.
As I started building a intimacy and knowledge base with Italian properly, for the first time in my life, I realised: Hang on a second, the language I heard every day growing up, the language that Mum spoke to Nonna in on the phone, or when I went around Nonna’s house, as I did all the time, and heard them nattering away. That wasn’t Italian.
I know that they sometimes called it dialët, but I had assumed that was a dialect of Italian. And the book tells the story of what I discovered, how it was not the case that was Italian, it was in fact a different Italian language, and learning about language endangerment and linguicide, which is where languages are threatened, suppressed and erased. So, the book covers my journey, going around the world, learning the different reasons behind why a language may disappear.
HEDVIG: Very cool. And isn’t Italy one of those cases where it’s like… I think a lot of Europeans don’t know that it was relatively recently made into a modern nation state and there’s a large amount of variety, both Italian dialects and other italic languages in Italy. I think often from the outside, people are just like, “Italy, Italian.” It’s just one homogenous big unit, but that’s not the case, right?
SOPHIA: Yes. And in Italy, if you go through the Italian school system, of course you learn about it. In Italy, there are museums for it, it’s called the Risorgimento, The Unification of Italy. But outside of Italy, it’s not well known. Certainly, as a product of the British education system, I can assure you, none of us get taught about it. And if you ask someone what do they speak in Italy, you’ll be told Italian.
And because the country unified in 1861, that’s not so long ago. At the time of unification, very few people in the country were able to speak in what we would call today standard Italian. And even fewer could read and write in it. So, it really is a young standard language in that respect. And for the last century, there’s been really healthy lively diglossia in Italy, where there are lots of people who they would have at school learnt how to write and speak standard Italian. But at home, they would have spoken the local language.
In some places, yes, this could have been slight variations on standard Italian. In other places, it was totally different languages. And in the context of the valley that my Nonna and my Nonno came from, in Piacenza, that was a variety of Emilian, which is a Gallo-Italic language in the north.
DANIEL: I think there are a lot of languages like that as well, where they’ve just put together something or they’ve chosen the high-status version of the language that was going around at the time, and that’s what it was. Is that what you know, Hedvig?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I think that’s true for a lot more European countries than people imagine. It’s certainly true [CHUCKLES] outside of Europe, for sure. I think there’s a lot of sort of like… I often think of nation states and countries as basically beaming in an 1800s innovation, where people are like, “We have to have one school, one country, one currency, one radio broadcast, etc.” And then, you get this leveling out of everything else, you get destruction of what would have been continua.
You can see this between Netherlands and Germany, for example, where probably there was a chain of mutual intelligibility and then as the nation states, form that gets cut in twain. I think it’s true in a lot of places. I find the Italian case quite interesting, just because it’s not as well known. I only knew about it because I took Latin in school and our teacher told us this stuff, but I think it’s very unknown. People think of Italy as like a monolith very often.
SOPHIA: It’s the case with Spanish. And in Spain today, if someone said to you, “Do you speak Spanish?” they may not say, “¿Hablas español?” They may say “¿Hablas castellano?” And Castellano is Castilian, because Castile, that’s the area where there was all the great early literature and political power that was at the center of what would become the modern nation state of Spain. It was happening there. So, it’s definitely common.
Even English, I understand, is the… Once upon a time English was so many different dialects across modern day England. I’m pretty sure it was more of the southern Saxon dialects that won out in the end.
DANIEL: One thing that comes through in the book is, and other people have told us about this as well, the sense of disconnection that they feel from their heritage language and the pain that causes. I’d just like to read a bit. In the book, you say that your language learning is “a work in progress that brings me simultaneous pleasure and pain, reminding me of what I belong to and what I will forever be somewhat alien to.” That hits pretty hard, and a bunch of people have pointed that out to us. Do you have any advice for people who are in that situation where they feel like they’re looking at their home language through glass, as it were?
SOPHIA: I think that understanding the historical context and the political context of why the language may have been lost for me has been incredibly helpful. It helped me not only realise none of this was my fault. It helped me understand it wasn’t my parents’ fault, it wasn’t my mum’s fault. And that was so many of us.
I can see it on social media when I’m engaging with people in comment sections, so many people blame their parents for not passing a language down. And one of the big arguments that I make in the book is that languages work in community and it is as much grassroots support as institutional infrastructure that keeps a language alive.
So, even just to compare two different scenarios, when my mum was a young woman and a child even, and when a lot more of the London-Italian community were centered in a particular space, it was someone’s parent who very, very cheaply and affordably ran Italian lessons. So, this was a community off their own back, doing their best to keep the language alive. What’s now happened with our community, we’re now the next generation along, everyone is far more spread out. Of course, we’re not going to have that same community support, and in which case it does beg the question, who steps in there.
Is it all incumbent on this diasporic community that frankly is used to often only relying on themselves or does the Italian state have a role? Does the British state have a role? Does the British state see any responsibility in keeping migrant languages, emigrant languages alive, as resources that can benefit everyone here? Does the Italian state benefit from all of the Italo-discendente, all of the descendants of Italian heritage, many of us, including myself, who still have citizenship there. Do they benefit from us being able to speak Italian?
In my head, it’s quite an easy win-win-win. But obviously in the political landscape of today, where foreign languages are described as exactly that: foreign languages. They are alien, they are conceived of as problems, as opposed to resources. As I go into the book, there are so many different reasons, so many different complications that arise out of maintaining heritage languages.
HEDVIG: And it’s often politicised as well, right? You mentioned a bit, I think… Didn’t we hear, was it last year there was in Poland, the Polish government stopped supporting German heritage language education, for example, which seemed only like an international politics ploy and nothing care or not care necessarily for those communities. It’s just being used as like a tool on the worldwide international stage where…
Yeah. It’s not like running these kinds of classes or support is free but relatively cheap. [LAUGHS] We’re not talking a lot of monetary investments in a lot of these, I think, as well. So, pulling them away is mainly a symbolic act.
SOPHIA: And also, the creation of teacher jobs. Sorry, when has that ever been a bad thing? There’s that as well.
DANIEL: Multiculturalism is under attack all over the places. People sometimes see languages as subversive forces. Recently in Australia, didn’t we Hedvig on a recent episode, talk about a push that far right parties were having toward monoculturalism. And I said, “We need to be loud in our support of multiculturalism.”
HEDVIG: Oh, my god. Pauline Hanson. [GROAN]
DANIEL: But I don’t know if being loud is enough. Yeah, that one.
HEDVIG: Well, bringing it back to the UK to Sophia’s context, there was also the discussion about election material in different languages. So, if there are speakers of, for example, I don’t know, Punjabi in Britain, should the Labour Party, Green Party, Tories, whatever, issue flyers in Punjabi talking about their politics and people are like, “That’s a huge debate.” It’s sort of…
SOPHIA: It’s so easy to just…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
SOPHIA: That story was really interesting, because it was a motion that conservative politicians here attempted to add to a live piece of legislation that was going through Parliament, an attempt to ban the use of foreign languages in election campaign materials.
I found out about the story, because quite a lot of more right-wing leaning press was covering this. And obviously, with my language journalist hat on, read it and thought, “That doesn’t sound good. Also, pretty sure, there’s some human rights mechanisms that would not allow this to happen.”
I had a quizzical response to it, and so I wanted to follow it as it developed. It was debated at committee stage and immediately pooh-poohed by all of the other politicians involved who were debating it. All of them said, “No, we don’t want to do this.” And it didn’t make it past committee stage.
Basically, no one reported on that happening. So, what happened was there was a lot of media reporting about: let’s ban foreign language election campaigns. And then, when at committee stage, it was very… I say this because it’s like remarkable for British politics, but in quite, a calm and neat and tidy manner. The politicians who proposed it were told accurately like, “This won’t fly. No, we’re not doing this.” That didn’t get reported on in the same way.
DANIEL: I’ve asked this question to a lot of people who are active in the language maintenance space. And the question is, “Is all language death language murder? Or do some people really choose to move away from their heritage language?” A lot of people are like, “Yep, it’s all language murder.” But some people are like, “It’s not murder, but it is colonialism all the way down.” But the response that I’m feeling from you is, “Well, it’s complicated. There are some complicated things about raising a child and being in a community and political context, and it’s complicated.” What’s your answer to that?
SOPHIA: I think that probably summarises most stories I’ve investigated ever. And the answer is, “Well, it’s nuanced.” [DANIEL LAUGHS] I always want to invite nuance into the room because often conversations are too polarised one way or the other, and that’s not an accurate reflection of what’s going on.
I think when it comes to linguicide, certainly Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, who coined the term, looked at it as overt and covert. So, overt linguicide would qualify as, here’s a law that bans you from speaking your mother tongue. Covert linguicide would describe some of the lesser means that you were just suggesting. So, if a family…
Well, it’s often the case that a family doesn’t make a decision to stop speaking a language. It’s not like one day, there’s a discussion around the kitchen table and mum says, “Right, we are not speaking this language anymore.” It’s more often the case that these implicit pressures and attitudes which do come from higher powers end up influencing people to make to make linguistic decisions that were not necessarily their choice if preferred. The cruelty of linguicide is that there are communities who feel like they’ve been robbed of a language in a change that they themselves did not author.
DANIEL: And sometimes the child is a participant in this as well. A lot of parents are like, “Oh no, my child is rejecting the heritage language. How do I make them?” So, that’s another factor, the kid gets a vote. So, do you have an idea as to how you would set things up in the home for optimal learning or in the community? What have you learned?
SOPHIA: Well, when it comes to parent-child transmission, I’m not the expert to speak to about that for obvious reasons and that’s not what I looked at necessarily for the book. In the first chapter, when I interviewed someone who has done loads of interesting work on it, Malvina, she describes how challenging it is. So, I just want to repeat that, yes, obviously the parents play a huge role in the language planning of their family, but equally, it’s the systems beyond those parents that also make a real impact on the child’s future language portfolio.
HEDVIG: What do you think about an issue that we’ve discussed before when it comes to global language endangerment, where sometimes it seems like… Like you were saying about new words in people’s context, there’s a general attitude in a lot of places in the world that some languages are better than others and their language is not good, not nice and some people are just like, “Well, I want my children to have the best setup possible, so I am intentionally not going to speak my native language to them.” So, obviously that is like an institutional problem and not an individual problem.
But at some level also, even if you have an attitude that your language is worthwhile and is good, some people might also try and make a financial calculation that like, “The university in my country teaches in English. I want my child to go to university and have a better job than I have.” And coupled with the idea that people think that multilingualism is harmful or not good, etc., parents might make the decision, “Well, in that case, I’ll just want my kid to have the best.” What do you say? The best starting position, so I should just speak English to them.
And in those cases, I feel like it can become a bit… Maybe patronising is not the right word, but people make decisions that they think are the best for them in their lives and their children and sometimes just some people feel like… I feel like so I just want to come in with a hammer and be like “Bonk, you’re bad. You shouldn’t do that.” And that feels not very nice.
DANIEL: Can’t do it. Can’t do it.
SOPHIA: So, two things on that. The first is that no one should ever be denied the opportunity to learn a global lingua franca that’s going to give them every opportunity and access in the world. Why should that education be subtractive and not additive? So, why should that education demand that you don’t also get to learn your regional language? Why can it not be the case that you learn both those languages?
I mean, just this week, there’s been loads of news coverage about a new study that’s found that speaking more than one language slows aging. Cognitive decline. It’s another finding that backs up loads of similar findings. We already knew this, but it’s in the news agenda this week again. The study found, not only does it slow aging, but with every additional language that you learn, it appears to be the case that aging has slowed even more.
Now, with all scientific research, we’re still yet to learn about why. Why is this the case? Is it more the case that people who speak three or four languages also have something going on in their particular context or lifestyle that means? So, there are all these interesting things that we still need to probe out of this. But if we take it on face value that speaking more than one language slows aging and improves us all in abating cognitive decline. Oh my goodness, why have we got so many education systems that are at best trying to squeeze you into monolingual or maybe bilingual? Clearly, there are so many benefits associated with being multilingual.
And then, I also wanted to bring up the chapter that I did on Kichwa, which I think that is certainly the chapter where I go into the situation that you were just describing and the solution from the Kichwa language activist Marta, who I interviewed in that chapter. She is trying to meet parents and mothers, especially not when their child is already nine years old and they’re at school and she’s trying to desperately campaign for, “Please speak Kichwa to your child. Don’t let it disappear.”
Instead, she’s trying to reach parents… like mothers when they are pregnant. She’s trying to reach mothers before the baby is born to give value to the language so that the mother may also associate the language with value prior to the baby being born and raise the child with a positive attitude around the language. There aren’t so many places doing that. When I was looking at all of the different solutions that speaker communities around the world are coming up with to try and revive and reclaim languages that are disappearing where they live, which are important to them, literally going to a child before it’s out of the belly, I thought was really unique.
We hear a lot in language revitalisation spaces about language nests, which are like nurseries that children get put into preschool. They were pioneered mainly in Aotearoa in New Zealand. But you’ve got these little children who are speaking te reo Māori with elders who still speak it, and they’re learning it before they even enter the school system. So, there are loads of mechanisms to revalorise a language before it has a chance to be diminished. But then, of course, you have the situation, as you were saying, where it comes a bit too late.
HEDVIG: Well, that gets me back to a thing I think we’ve talked about several times on this show, which is that, I think sometimes linguists, we… I don’t want to say fail the rest of the world, but there’s some very basic things you learn quite early on when you start studying languages, which is that all languages are equal, valid forms of expression, and multilingualism is not harmful, in fact, maybe even good.
And those two things, if we can communicate those well and get those ideas to permeate through society, would do so much good, I think. And I think sometimes we get lost in, I don’t know, more complex arguments still. Because those things are not obvious to everyone. Like you say, even if you speak a language, if you don’t value it or if you don’t see it as valuable to your child, it’s going to be very hard. Maybe it’s still going to work out, but it’s going to be very hard.
DANIEL: Some language groups go through unbelievable language oppression. I was thinking of your chapter on Kurdish, where there were at least four different vectors of attack for the language. And their language can survive. And then, there are other languages where they don’t seem to face such insurmountable barriers, but the language seems to be disappearing anyway. What’s the factor here? What do you think is the main thing that ensures the success of a language?
SOPHIA: There was a study that came out a couple of years ago that identified that two of the most powerful variables in predicting the future of a community’s language were… or the ability of them to keep their language. It was the building of roads and the raising of socioeconomic status, i.e., the minute a community gets a bunch of roads that connect them to the wider world and therefore wider opportunity.
My reading of that was you introduce a language hierarchy. You introduce a system in which, “Hey, to flourish in the wider world, these are the languages that you need to speak and these are the languages that we don’t care about. These are the languages that aren’t going to get you a job.” They are the languages that are going to keep you connected to where you’re from if that’s important to you. They are the languages who are going to help you be a custodian of your heritage. They may well get you a job, actually. It’s just not in the way that somewhere else is implying. So, I could completely…
When I read that study and I saw that line about the roads, I thought, this makes so much sense. And it even makes sense thinking about where I had to go to for my book. So, I realised at the end of all these research trips that I made… I did multiple trips over the course of two years, and for the majority of the chapters, I went there physically. I only didn’t go to a place where there were security concerns. But in all the places I went to, I realised I was either going to the middle of nowhere or I was going deep into an archive. So, it was like these were the last places that these languages, in many cases, could be found.
The place that I went to in Oman, for example, there weren’t any roads there. So, no wonder it has survived all this time. And the roads have been built since the 1970s at this unprecedented rate. So, those are two very powerful variables.
HEDVIG: Not to be… brag, I think that’s a 2021 paper, Global Predictors of Language Endangerment, and I’m a co-author on that paper.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: And I heard you say road density, and I was like, “I think I know what that’s about!”
SOPHIA: Yeah, [DANIEL LAUGHS] that’s awesome. But for people listening, can you please read out the full title, so that people can… You absolutely have nerdy listeners who will want to read it after listening to us. So, please tell us what the title is.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, so, it’s a paper that came out in 2021. It’s called Global predictors of language endangerment and the future of linguistic diversity. And it was written by a number of authors: Lindell Bromham, Russell Dinnage, me, Andrew Ritchie, Marcel Cardillo, Felicity Meakins, Simon Greenhill, and Xia Hua. A lot of them are people from the Australian National University, and we had the great pleasure of publishing this open access in Nature, Ecology and Evolution. So, anyone can read it.
And because it’s like a multidisciplinary author team and a bunch of biologists, for example, it’s… I like to think that increases the readability, because we have to explain things also to each other within the author team, but it’s still a sciency paper. So, yeah.
SOPHIA: It’s really important to mention that, because slightly tangential, but not too tangential, this week I was reading a really interesting post on LinkedIn. And it was a linguist complaining about a gross misreporting of something to do with linguistics and AI. as I was reading this linguist explain it, I was just thinking to myself, “Well, of course, it’s been misreported. This is the most complicated explanation of a thing like I have ever read.”
Of course, people are going to misreport it, whether it’s general laypeople, whether it’s journalists. If they’re journalists without an academic or linguistic background, they’re not going to make head or tail of what you just said. You can be very annoyed that people have misunderstood it, but sorry, you didn’t make it clear.
HEDVIG: It does happen. Another great thing when you write papers for these big general science journals is that often your own university and different journalists will sometimes reach out and write a plain language summary together with you. I believe we did this for this one. But it’s quite nice because when you write in smaller journals, there’s not often that press coverage. So, when you write these kinds, there’s also people reach out and check that they’ve understood, which is cool.
DANIEL: But we’ll be sure to slap up a link to the easy version and the real version. But is there anything we missed? We got road density. What else was there in there, Hedvig? We have one of the authors here with us today!
SOPHIA: Yeah.
HEDVIG: No, I don’t know. There’s a lot of things. Road density, I think, is the one that stuck out the most to me. There’re also things like schooling. So, formal schooling is associated with more endangerment. These are all things. It’s coming on to what Sophia said about prestige and contact with a language and these formal contact. It’s not necessarily just contact with a different language. It’s like the particular ways you’re in contact. But I don’t know how much I want to talk about this paper now, because I want to talk more about Sophia’s book.
DANIEL: Well, then in that case, let me throw in something that Sophia wrote. This is from the book. And maybe Sophia, you could comment. You write, “A language’s health is unequivocally tied to the tolerance and encouragement of multiculturalism.” Tell me more about that. That was interesting.
SOPHIA: Going back to what we were talking about earlier in how the concept of a modern standard language is tied to the modern nation state, where it was far more convenient to build quite singular identities, which demanded doing one thing: speaking one language. That’s not really how language works. That’s not how people work.
Languages defy borders. They defy a lot of the human made systems, despite languages also being human made. Languages really do take on a life of their own. There’s this quote, isn’t there? It’s attributed to W. H. Auden, but it’s something like the measure of a country’s… This isn’t verbatim. This is me destroying it. But the quote is something like, “The measure of a country’s unity is how much diversity it can withstand and hold.” I’ve always found that a really fascinating concept.
I certainly think, just as an example here in London, it is part of our identity as Londoners, in my opinion, that we are multicultural. It is part of London’s identity that in one neighborhood over a hundred languages can be spoken. And that’s something that I am proud of as a Londoner. In many other places, that’s not the value that is ascribed to multilingualism. Instead, it’s seen as against social cohesion that there may be all of these communities speaking their own language, not assimilating, etc., etc. So, I think it feeds into that.
DANIEL: Can we just put that argument to bed? Speaking the same language does not cause social cohesion. [LAUGHS] And having multiple languages doesn’t necessarily cause social fracture. Hedvig, as you’ve said before, I don’t need to speak to everybody and understand them in order to form a community with them. That’s not what it’s about. It’s about my commitment to working together however we can.
HEDVIG: Yeah. It’s funny… How do you say? I think about this sometimes with the US and with Australia, or how do you say… countries that have derived from the colonial era versus older European cities and nations, how they tackle multiculturalism. Because there’s one part, for example, of the US that’s very much like, “Oh, we’re a melting pot. We’re the mosaic. That’s the point of the US that we’re all a little bit different.” You see it even in conservative circles sometimes being touted.
But then at the same time, you also have people being like, “No, the US needs to all be Christian and white and do things exactly this way.” And yeah, it seems like people take very different lessons from history and politicise it in different ways. Yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know what causes it.
DANIEL: Sophia, you mentioned AI a little while ago. That was something that I’ve been thinking about as well. Will generative AI, the tools that we have for natural language processing, are they going to help minority languages or harm them? I hear people say, “This could be used to make teaching materials to absorb a corpus of text and make materials and translation tools.” And then, other people argue, “Nah, AI is not going to save us.” What’s your view?
SOPHIA: Well, most recently when I was trying to test… in tech, you call it red teaming when you’re deliberately trying to find flaws. I was red teaming ChatGPT who suggested that my Nonna’s language… I didn’t tell it was my Nonna’s language, but suggested with the input I gave it that I was describing a conlang and not a real language.
What you said is true. I have seen some endangered language organisations put out statements on how they refuse to use generative AI. I have seen activists in other places pitching solutions, ideas, new tools that they’ve developed that do use generative AI. So, from communities themselves, we’re seeing quite different reactions.
In Ghana, the Wikipedia language activists who I interviewed were very excited and eager about helping a local company make AI translation tools for their language, because they perceive such an immense need for it that for them it only felt like a good thing to get involved with. In other parts of the world, you see fears over the resources surrounding data centers trump everything.
You then also have interesting projects. So, I was really interested in this project before they got in touch with me, and I did a brand partnership with them about it. So, I’m just disclosing that for transparency sake. But you also have solutions coming out now like Mozilla, who’ve done this initiative where communities can upload data to a big bank. And if anyone wants to license that data, they go beep-beep-boop. They get the data and they pay the community and the community get all the profit.
So, another big fear that’s emerged from this space, is that communities’ data can be scraped off the internet, used without their consent, and then they don’t even get any of the money that they deserve back. It’s very good to see Mozilla coming up with solutions that look like, “Hang on, how can we find a way that communities can keep hold of the data and license it under their terms?” They won’t be the only ones. I’m sure there’ll be plenty others like them in the future.
In my experience, I am someone from more the journalism side, I’m involved in a lot of journalism innovation projects, many of which are increasingly AI enabled. You have to start having very serious conversations around what has always been called in tech as responsible tech design. You only really figure out and can do responsible tech design if you have some literacy in it and awareness around it.
So, this would have been true pre-AI and is more true and more serious after AI that anything that is designed using it needs to be developed extremely responsibly and ethically. And there are plenty of people who do argue that there’s no such thing. I’m not in that bracket, but I don’t think I’m too far away from it either. Anything I do that uses AI I think so carefully about.
DANIEL: Maybe a shoutout to the Consentful Tech Project, which is also a way of making sure that data is used in accordance with the wishes of the people who own it.
HEDVIG: I wonder how this is interacting with… like you were talking about minority language resources. Because I have a friend who works at Google in the language team and he once told me that Google wanted to really beat Apple in how many languages were listed for the translating tool. So, as long as they could get certain languages up to a certain level so they could get more numbers, so they have more numbers than Apple, like, “We have a longer dropdown menu of languages than Apple.” That’s a really incentive from people.
You see some projects sometimes from like Microsoft and Google and Apple extending language tech resources to minority languages as a sort of, I guess, it’s partially self-interest but also it looks like partially… What’s that word called? Philanthropy? Like, it can look good to do these things. I wonder now how many of these language models are going to be actually… Yeah, I’m just interested in how they are going to extend to smaller languages and what kind of errors they will make because the more different languages from English, probably the less good they’ll be at generating material, I guess.
SOPHIA: Even for language processing, there are plenty of arguments that English is not the best language for it, which is really interesting because of how tokenisation works. So, I remember reading one project that identified Polish was better than English because of how the language is constructed. Yeah, so, we should not assume that English would be the best language for this. It’s simply the best resource to do it in.
I remember when I interviewed the Ghanaian tech developer who was making this translation tool, he said he needed a terabyte of data, well over a million words. Well over a million words for a language that’s not traditionally written down. There are huge challenges that loads of minority languages need to move through in order to get a language model working that actually works.
He even said when he first built it that all the language… I can’t remember which Ghanaian language this was regarding, because there are loads. There are over 80 in Ghana. But he was referring to one Ghanaian language that has loads and loads of speakers. And he said that when he first made the tool, it sounded super biblical. And that’s because the main written text that has informed the training data was a Bible. And then, you’re like, “Oh, that’s weird. Why was it a Bible?”
And it’s because in so many places that were colonised, some of the earliest written texts that we have in a language is from some Christian missionaries who came over and wanted to learn the language, to make a Bible out of it, and then evangelise everyone.
HEDVIG: And that’s still the case. I mean, some institutional linguistics which produces a lot of linguistics resources, their sister organisation is Wycliffe Bible Translations and their whole thing and a lot of Christian missionary organisations whole thing is bringing the word of the Lord to as many groups as possible in their own language. I think they call it like the heart language of the person.
There’s even within corpus based linguistic typology. So, cross comparison, the Bible is still one of the most commonly used parallel texts you can have. So, there’s a lot of research that’s just like, “We looked at 500 languages with the New Testament and compared how they use perfective aspect or whatever else linguistics question you’re interested in.”
Daniel, didn’t we also have that news story? Was it up in Alaska? There was a company that had promised they could do automatic translation into North American Indigenous languages. I think it was for a weather event, and it was trained on the Bible, and it just produced, not gibberish, I think, but like gibberish mixed with Bible.
SOPHIA: Oh my god. Can you imagine…
HEDVIG: Yeah. Exactly.
SOPHIA: You get a text about a storm and it sounds like Noah’s Ark…
DANIEL: Watch out for pestilence.
SOPHIA: …point two. Yeah. Yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Blood and fire raining from the skies. So, watch out. Stay safe. We may have answered this question from Yevaud, but Yevaud asks, this is someone from our Discord, one of our listeners, “How does standard monoglossic language ideology fit into language death?” I think we could say it does. “And are there solutions to linguicide, particularly of regional varieties that don’t necessitate the deconstruction of standard language?” I think the standard language ideology or the monolingual ideology really is a killer. I think that needs to be overturned.
SOPHIA: Yes. I’ve also just been reminded of on my book tour, the first date that I did, when I did the questions at the end, someone put their hand up and they said, “Yeah. So, with all this stuff about language killing, what about English?” And I was like, “What about English?” And then he said, “Well, English is in decline. English is being killed.”
There are lots of individuals who come to my body of work and me and other friends of mine in the language journalism or educational space with really prescriptivist attitudes, not knowing that linguists… I think any linguist I’ve interviewed pretty much is far more from the descriptivist school of this is how languages work and it’s not my job to tell you how it should or shouldn’t work. But yes, prescriptivism is certainly the product of monoglossia, what that listener was describing.
In the book, each chapter was very carefully selected. So, I picked languages on the basis of how well I hoped they would let me laser focus on one particular means with which a language could be disappearing, but the other criteria that they had to satisfy included, is there a really interesting solution that the community has developed that I can hopefully shed light on it and amplify as part of this?
I did not want the book to be entirely doom and gloom, even though it’s about some very sad subjects. And that’s been the most rewarding thing, reading the reviews of the book because you know, once an author finishes a book and it goes out into the ether, it’s not mine anymore. It’s now this product that gets to mean something different to different people.
One of the reviewers said that the book held great curiosity about language, which in and of itself is hope. And I was like: That’s cool. I wish I’d written that, but I didn’t, but this dude did, and I thought that was great. And so, there are loads of solutions that have absolutely nothing to do with language standardisation, as it were.
And in fact, even myself getting to know my mum and Nonna’s language, the last thing that I check myself on actually is pedantic, pure, have I got something 100% correct. Same thing as part of my learning Italian. I’m not in a school, as in, I’m not going to school doing an exam in this. I can if I want to. But part of my repairing this fracture with a language is building a connection to it that needn’t be policed, really.
Of course, I want to be as accurate as possible with what I’m doing and I want to improve, but allowing an openness around it, allowing myself to talk to my mum where we can code, switch, and translanguage, that’s actually far more useful to me than thinking, “I must only say these things and they must be exactly correct and conform to this grammar.” For me, that’s not the spirit and joy of language.
HEDVIG: I’ve heard similar things said about Indigenous language centers and revitalisation in Australia, where there’s a lot of languages, where there is quite little known and quite a big loss of speakers to the degree that people are pulling together what the language might have sounded like, but there’s so few people that to consult, so you have to construct it. And I’ve heard that in some of those spaces, sometimes people argue about correctness, but the truth is that in those cases where there’s been such a loss, what you create in that community next maybe isn’t going to be exactly the way it was spoken 100, 200 years ago. Maybe for some people, that really matters, but I suspect that having something left and something to connect to maybe matters more than it being exactly the thing that came before.
SOPHIA: 100%.
DANIEL: There are lots of our listeners who are English monolinguals. They don’t have a heritage language background. Others of us do. We might know a minority language, or we might wish that we knew the minority language that we could have grown up with. What do you hope that listeners to this podcast will do? Obviously, read How to Kill a Language, because it’s great. Is there anything else that you wish?
SOPHIA: I think particularly thinking about people who are monolingual… This describes my dad who when I was 17 and told him, “I want to go study languages,” said to me “Why?” I’ve completely changed his mind on that. He not only sees the value in language learning. He hopefully has recognised the value and great resource and skill that my mum has always had being trilingual.
I would just hope that anyone who speaks one language has a bit of curiosity about why they speak one language, and whether they want to pursue learning other languages or not. I hope they recognise when they do meet people who speak more than one or who are on their English learning journey and are not yet fluent that they just have some curiosity and patience for it as opposed to anything else.
DANIEL: The book is How to Kill a Language: Power, Resistance, and the Race to Save Our Words. It’s available now from Penguin Random House. We’re talking to the author, Sophia Smith Galer. Sophia, how can people find what you’re doing?
SOPHIA: I’m chronically online. I am everywhere. If there’s a platform, I’m on it. But if you want the video content that I make… So, I make video explainers every week on language and languages and you can find those @sophiasgaler on Instagram.
HEDVIG: You also appear in my TikTok feed, I believe.
SOPHIA: Yes, I’m also constantly on TikTok, @sophiasmithgaler. I promise you, if there’s a platform, I’m probably there somewhere.
DANIEL: Well, now you’re here. So, thanks very much for coming onto this platform and walking us through your book and having a chat. This has been real fun.
SOPHIA: Thank you so much for having me. Bye.
DANIEL: In the days since we had this chat with Sophia, somebody reviewed the book How to Kill a Language. It’s Nikhil Krishnan in the New Yorker. He’s a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Cambridge with the review of Sophia’s book. The review is called Sometimes it’s Okay to Let a Language Die.
BEN: That just reeks of SEO, doesn’t it?
DANIEL: I have seen people try to make this case every once in a while, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it expressed just as nakedly as this. I’m going to read a few quotes from Krishnan’s New Yorker review. Let’s just get some reactions.
The first paragraph: “How sad should we be when a language dies? Consider the case — call it callous or simply tough minded — for saying: Not at all. A language, when it comes down to it, is a means of communication. When too few people are using it to communicate, it has stopped doing its principal job and it may as well be allowed to die. It is of course a tragedy when languages are killed, especially when they are killed out of malice or bigotry. But death by natural causes, well, that’s just how things go.”
BEN: Wah. Big oof. Big oof.
HEDVIG: I think the author is not really considering what would be natural causes and what would be…
BEN: Yeah, I was going to say exactly the same thing. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: …sort of oppression. I think it’s a bit of a unnecessarily callous way of thinking about things. We do have languages that have been dormant and that have then been reawakened again. So, just going down to zero native speakers isn’t necessarily the end. And also, I think it just severely underestimates what language and culture can mean to people beyond as a functional, utilitarian means of communication, like they were saying. I think it means much more to people.
We’re scrabbling over scraps. Like funding some language centers and some community groups, it’s not that expensive. If you think of what most countries like Australia and the US spend money on. What are we saving? I don’t get it. Like in terms of money almost. It sounds like that’s the argument.
BEN: Yeah. Let’s say we accept Krishnan’s argument and we just go, “Yeah, cool, agreed.” What would we get out of that? What material benefit as a society are we now suddenly realising if we go, “Okay, we all agree that some languages can just be left to die. Cool.” A few fewer books get written and in the scheme of things, a tiny, insignificant, infinitesimally small amount of money, when you look at like the GDPs of countries and stuff, isn’t spent on that, but would be spent on something else anyway. I don’t know.
DANIEL: It’s a rounding error.
BEN: First of all, Hedvig did a great job of saying literally everything as I was listening to what you said, Daniel, I was like: Well, there’s issue number one, issue number two, issue number three. [LAUGHS] You don’t see it very often, or at least I don’t see it very often because I’m not high-brow enough, I guess. But this just strikes me as the very fancy-pantsy, well-educated version of ragebaiting.
There’s no substance here. This is a thing that exists to piss a whole bunch of people off and make a whole bunch of noise so that more eyeballs see this particular thing. I don’t know this guy. I don’t even particularly hate this guy. Like, working in publishing of any kind would just be the worst right now. I’m sure as you’re fighting for space in the attention economy, you got to use all the dirty tricks under the sun and blah, blah, blah etc. So, I don’t think this guy is like a true villain, but I feel very comfortable in saying there’s zero fucking substance to what this person is putting out in the world.
DANIEL: I was going to say some of the same things. Language is primarily a means of communication. Wrong. It’s a means of communication AND it’s a way of expressing identity AND it’s a measure of the health of a community.
Okay, another paragraph. “Even if we grant Smith Galer the premise that language death is always a terrible thing, it doesn’t follow that we ought to do everything in our power to stop it… Even where the death of a language would be acknowledged as a tragedy, what we should do, what costs we should be willing to bear in trying to stop it must remain an open question.”
HEDVIG: We’re not talking that much… Yeah, if we want to talk about saving money in an economy, I think there are other places to stop about saving first.
BEN: Data centers? We could stop building fucking hundreds of billions of dollars of those, for instance.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We had enough money when it came to killing those languages.
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Finally, “In acknowledging that not all languages can or should be rescued, we do not love the dying languages less. In a world where resources are scarce and values conflict, it may be the only way to love them wisely.” Don’t you see?
HEDVIG: Yeah, this is some euthanasia-is-kind thing, but for languages.
DANIEL: To really love them, we have to let them go.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I think the Endangered Languages Project wrote a really nice text article about this and also talking about agency of communities wanting to continue speaking and that perspective. And also, Sophia Smith Galer herself did a video commenting a bit on this. Again, putting the focus back on the issues of the books and about the people she’s spoken to and their perspectives. Yeah, I don’t know, I think I don’t know how much I want to think about what this man wrote.
DANIEL: She did do a TikTok response. She decided not to address the review directly, saying she went to different countries on her own dime, talked to people who have been directly affected by language endangerment. And if you read How to Kill a Language, you can find out about them. She didn’t, for example, sit in a room — maybe in the philosophy department of Cambridge — and write a book review for the New Yorker, calling it: Sometimes It’s Okay to Let a Language Die.
BEN: If I’m my most generous self, which is not a version of me that I’m necessarily particularly skilled at being, I would love to know if… Let’s take this at face value and assume this person isn’t simply ragebaiting for a moment. My question would be — and it doesn’t sound like it is addressed in the article that they wrote, the review that they wrote. My question would be: what life experience have you had as an individual where you have seen these resources being to your mind, wasted, that could be better spent on other things? Because I really struggle to imagine… But I’m not necessarily the most imaginative person in the world. I don’t have infinity experiences.
So, that’s what I would want to ask this person is: what’s fueling your gripe here, for lack of a better phrase? But then, and even if this person did have a good answer for that, my rebuttal to whatever they would say is like, I often think about the world in sci-fi ways because I’m a tragic nerd and my brain goes like, “What’s the most beautiful solarpunk manifestation of this thing?” And in this particular instance, as we have already seen with many language revitalisation efforts around the world… And you’ve already touched on this. It’s not just that.
When a language revitalisation effort is happening well in a community, it is a multifactorial, intersectional effort which also brings together community. It has facets of younger and older generations commingling when they might not have been before, that it will form a part of a thing, a much bigger thing and a much more beautiful thing that can be instrumental in the lazarusing of a people who have been badly fucked over by colonialism or capitalism or corporate environmental destruction and all of these other things.
And yeah, this guy’s argument be like, “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t do that.” My brain is like, “Uh, wrong. The solarpunk version of the world I’m thinking of fucking rules and you’re an idiot. Shut up.”
HEDVIG: I mean, I can imagine a scenario where you can say something like, “Oh, what if we only have 100 money and we can either spend it on food and housing or language classes?”
BEN: [CHUCKLES] A situation that has never occurred ever.
HEDVIG: That’s the thing. And also, the person who’s giving you a hundred money is spending 2,000 money on, I don’t know, a war overseas or something. So, just think a little bit, maybe broader about the kinds of fight and context we’re in. And also, I think sometimes language…
We often talk about language endangerment in itself, but I think like you guys are alluding to, it’s also like interlinked with general community health and wellbeing. There’re so many more things to a community than just language. But it just so happens that when you spend time on language teaching, you often end up also talking about culture and ways of doing things and knowledge production and other things. I don’t want to use Trojan horse. That’s wrong. [CHUCKLES] It links to all the other things naturally.
BEN: It is a beautiful thread in a tapestry of cultural revitalisation.
DANIEL: That’s it. This isn’t just about language. It’s about culture, and whether we as a society are making sure that everyone gets what they need. That doesn’t just include language. It includes healthcare. It includes addressing socioeconomic inequality. It involves a public shift away from defending the powerful and toward making sure that everybody has support in ways they need and some of that’s going to be language.
All right. Well, we’ll have a link to all those materials on the show notes for this episode. But thanks once again to Sophia Smith Galer for having a chat.
DANIEL: And now, it’s Words of the Week.
BEN: Woo-hoo.
DANIEL: Ben’s favourite segment. This one comes from Andy from Logophilius via email. Andy says, “Caught this link in my feed today and I hope SLOP ZOMBIE catches on. It’s both fun to say and evocative.” Slop zombie.
Andy points us to an article on Machine Society. It’s called Rise of the Slop Zombies. And here’s a quote. “Imposter mode, whereby somebody who is actually qualified feels unqualified has been replaced by slop zombie imposter mode, whereby someone actually unqualified feels overqualified.
“Slop zombies feel that way because they mistake chatbot flattery and sycophancy for earned praise, and also because of the delusion that AI output is their own work.” So, a slop zombie feels like a coworker sitting next to you, but something else is causing something in their mind.
HEDVIG: Okay. Thank you for the explanation because that’s not the first thought. I thought it was just someone who creates mindless content on the interwebs.
BEN: I was thinking that it was an alternative to my favourite slur of SLOPPER, so something you specifically target towards a person who just uses way too much AI for everything.
HEDVIG: But this gets onto the idea that they’re also sycophantically deluding themselves and have a false sense of their own self-worth or capabilities maybe rather not the self-worth. Yes, SLOP is really converging as the word for these things.
BEN: Yeah, SLOP is sticky.
HEDVIG: Did you guys see that LinkedIn? Supposedly, I saw some people resharing has introduced like when you can report content, there is one button that: Looks like AI slop.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Looks like slop. It sounds like no matter how this author has described the term, it’s going to go to somebody who creates AI slop, being a slop zombie. It’s going to be what we’re all thinking. Anyway, thank you, Andy, for that term. Let’s go on to the world of US politics. Yay. I guess.
BEN: Yay.
DANIEL: Kentucky senator and odious person Mitch McConnell disappeared for a really long time, fueling speculation that he was dead and that his death was being kept under wraps because if it were known, it would like trigger a special election to replace him. An election that Republicans wouldn’t win. Photos came out: See, there’s McConnell perfectly healthy. And in response, people posted AI video of him doing some breakdancing. [CHUCKLES] I think this is an acceptable use of AI slop.
The current status is that he is alive, but he is recovering. But people in the interim were asking, “If he’s not dead, then why is he able to be absent from his Senate duties for so long? Why don’t other people get that kind of leave?” What kind of leave? Well, this gave rise to the joke that Mitch McConnell is on ETERNITY LEAVE.
BEN: Okay. Okay.
DANIEL: Traveling on from there, this is SPHERICAL BASTARD. Take a guess, Ben, what would a spherical bastard be?
BEN: I’m just trying to think of what villainous entity is a ball?
HEDVIG: Kirby.
BEN: Yeah. Yeah, but Kirby’s beloved, like Meta Knight, I guess, because I’ve been playing some Smash against my son, and he spams Meta Knight and he fucking wrecks my shit and I hate it. So, I would call Meta Knight a spherical bastard. But I don’t want to go body shaming and I can’t think of anyone rotund enough to be that spherical. So, it’s got to be something else if something from film and television or something from pop culture. I’m lost on this one.
DANIEL: I thought it was spherical cows. When physicists are modeling the world, they sometimes joke, “Imagine a spherical cow.” That is to say, not a real cow, but one that is like some Platonic ideal that’s easy to model. But anyway, let me get to the quote. Saw this one on BlueSky.
“Swiss scientist Fritz Zwicky coined the term ‘dark matter’, which is impressive; but he also coined the term ‘spherical bastard’ to describe people who are bastards no matter which way you look at them.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] I like that very much.
DANIEL: He died in 1975. He was a professor of astronomy at Caltech. He was the first to consider gravitational lensing by extragalactic objects. There you go. So, SPHERICAL BASTARD.
BEN: Yeah, that’s a fun one. That’s an incredibly physicist burn, though, isn’t it? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: It is. The BUTTER’S PENTHOUSE. What would that be? Hedvig, do you know, the BUTTER’S PENTHOUSE?
HEDVIG: Butters is the character in South Park.
DANIEL: Nope.
BEN: I don’t think that’s it though.
DANIEL: Butter, apostrophe S.
BEN: Also, it’s got the definite article before it.
DANIEL: The butter’s penthouse.
HEDVIG: What is a butter? I mean, it’s something you put on bread.
DANIEL: It’s the butter. It’s just butter.
BEN: Oh, hang on. Is this a weird thing for the maple syrup you put on top of the knob of butter on pancakes or something?
DANIEL: Good guess.
HEDVIG: Is it like the cream of the crop?
DANIEL: Okay. You open your fridge.
BEN: Oh, the little… Yeah, okay.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s got a door, a clear plastic door…
BEN: Yeah, why? Why does it have a door?
DANIEL: …that you can open. That’s the butter’s penthouse.
HEDVIG: I don’t have a door.
BEN: Okay, I know exactly what Daniel means. I do, however, think that this might be a slightly archaic fridge design, possibly. Like more contemporaneous fridges don’t have the little flap that you open and close specifically for the butter, which let’s just quickly go nonfunctional. Would we all agree? The butter is already contained in some way, shape or form? It’s either wrapped in foily paper or it’s in a tub or something like that.
HEDVIG: Did you know that some Australians like to keep the butter just out on the counter?
BEN: Yeah, I do.
DANIEL: Weird. You mean like in the plastic container?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Why do you think butter dishes exist? Like, what function do you think that thing serves to fulfill?
HEDVIG: What temperature do you think Australia’s usually in?
DANIEL: I have a butter dish.
BEN: Yeah. Okay. Not in summer, obviously. But right now, in my unheated house in winter? Butter out, baby. [DANIEL LAUGHS] Butter is in the party! Butter’s not in its penthouse, butter’s on the streets!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay. So, here’s why it exists. And this is from a quick glance around to see what I could find. It’s to keep the other foods from stinking up your butter in the fridge. Butter has lots of fat, and that absorbs odors from elsewhere in the fridge.
BEN: I feel really dumb now because that actually, when you think about it, makes a lot of sense.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But Ben, you feel really dumb, but how often do you have this problem that your butter takes on smells because it happens very rarely?
BEN: Freezer is where I find such taste and smell transference to be the most pernicious.
HEDVIG: What temperature is your freezer at?
BEN: No, no, no. As in, like…
DANIEL: Yeah, but if you leave the nuggets in there… you leave the nuggets in there and then you take them out after 12 weeks, and it tastes like freezer. I had to chuck ’em.
BEN: No, I’m talking mostly about ice. I cook with a risky palette… I’m putting a lot of spices, a lot of stuff in my food, and I store a lot of food in frozen form. So, it’s not that rare that I might get the ice tray out of the freezer and crack it into my drink, and I’d be like, “Mm. Lots of garlic from something that’s been in my freezer that’s really garlicky,” for instance.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, so, that’s one. The second possibility is it’s up high, so it’s warmer up there because he rises. And also the door, that little door keeps all of that cold air out. Like, if I stick a cup of milk in the fridge unguarded, it freezes a little bit. We don’t want butter to freeze. So, what this does is it keeps the butter just that little bit warmer for spreadability and it doesn’t get all nasty and cold.
So, internet personality Mike Ginn coined this in an old meme, “I call this part of the fridge the butter’s penthouse.” And finally, from James and tygertronia — this might be the name of the year — Jimothy. Is anyone aware of Jimothy or heard the name Jimothy?
HEDVIG: I’m aware of Jedward and I’m going to assume that Jimothy is a similar thing. That is a combination of two men’s name.
BEN: I know the answer to this one. This is one of those things that has got so much traction online that even if you mostly don’t want to know, like this is one of those online movements or issues where I was like, “This isn’t very interesting to me, despite being about a cute animal.” So, that’s normally squarely within Ben’s wheelhouse. This time, I was just like, “Whatever.” But even still, I can roughly sketch out what this is.
DANIEL: I’m going to ignore this until I need to know about it. That’s what I thought.
BEN: Yeah. But even still, even with that mindset, I can still sketch out this story because of the process of non-consensual osmosis of culture.
DANIEL: Come on, Ben. Tell us what you’ve absorbed.
BEN: Jimothy is the name or was is a name that was given to a young raccoon, an adolescent raccoon, which suffers from a condition… I don’t know if what its official name is, but it’s like short spine syndrome essentially. So, this raccoon is a real… It looks like AI. it looks like a made-up thing. It looks like you would take a picture of a raccoon and cut the whole middle section out of it, like behind the front legs and in front of the back legs and then just squish what you have left together.
Like, you cut the middle out of a hot dog and only the two hot dog ends are now connected. And that’s what Jimothy looks like. He looks like a tiny made-up spherical raccoon. Boy, howdy, this little unfortunately like freak of nature looking thing. It’s got a lot of pluck. Jimothy’s going for it. He’s reaching for life.
DANIEL: Inspiration for us all. He’s a raccoon in Ballard, which is a suburb of Seattle, Washington, USA. I think we’ve got a couple of listeners who are not far from Jimothy territory.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: He hit the big time in July 2026. Been posted in various ways. Residents have known about Jimothy for a little while, but Seattle resident Kiana Hall posted a video on Instagram. She referred to him as Jimothy later saying, “He just looked like a Jimothy to me.” Sometimes you just look like a Jimothy. Yep.
BEN: There you go.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: So, thanks James and tygertronia. So, SLOP ZOMBIE, ETERNITY LEAVE, SPHERICAL BASTARD, the BUTTER’S PENTHOUSE, and JIMOTHY: our Words of the Week. Let’s get to some comments.
People had a lot of comments about [BREATHING IN] ingressive speech. Ingressive speech. [INGRESSIVELY] I can’t believe how many people wanted to talk to us about ingressive speech.
So, John via email says, “Hello. Having just listened to the most recent EP. I wanted to mention a couple of things with some Scots relevance, my expertise and my joy to share it. Firstly, you mentioned POKE in pocket, etc. This is the Scots word for a bag. And indeed, POKET is our word for POCKET.
Additionally, pulmonary ingressives are all over the place in Britain and Ireland including the Doric variety of Scots. Like the name Niall/Njáll (Neil), there’s some debate as to who started it, Celts or Old Norse speakers, but at least in Northern Europe, it’s strongly correlated with former Old Norse speaker occupation and Celtic speaking or until recently, Celtic speaking areas in the UK and also in Normandy in France. Cheers, John.”
BEN: Thank you, John.
DANIEL: Tyler also had a bit of a comment.
BEN: So many more people using SpeakPipe. This is so great.
DANIEL: I love it.
TYLER: Hello, Because language. I was just listening to your most recent episode about the… Gosh, what you call it? I already forget. Ingressive speech. [LAUGHS] Out here I’ve only heard it referred to as the inhaled affirmative. I live in Nova Scotia, Canada. It’s very, very common here too. So much so that there is a local beer that is called the Inhaled Affirmative, and there’s T-shirts for tourists. I believe it’s spelled… What is it? Yeah, Y-H-H-H-E-A, maybe. [LAUGHS]
Also, Stephen King, who’s from Maine, I know in some of his books with his characters from Maine, at least in one of them I can remember as a kid, the character does that and I believe he writes it A-Y-U-P, which is also interesting. How do you spell an inhaled affirmative? Good question. [LAUGHS]
Anyways, so, I agree with Hedvig. I don’t think it’s quite as unique as people think. Not just because it’s also regional out here, but I’m from South Central, Manitoba. I have an aunt who was born and raised in rural Manitoba. She does it all the time, and I never even noticed it until I moved out here and people pointed it out, went back to visit and was like, ‘Hey, look at that. You do that too.’ [LAUGHS] So, yeah, there you go. I just thought I’d share those thoughts. And if you want a T-shirt, let me know. I’ll send you some.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh yeah.
BEN: Daniel wants a T-shirt.
HEDVIG: I would love. I would love a T-shirt.
DANIEL: Down with that. Thanks, Tyler. It’s not… Hedvig, you’re vindicated. It’s not that uncommon. It seems to be all over the place.
HEDVIG: Well, not to be an annoying person, but I have a suspicion that some of these that we’ve heard about now like Scots and Celtic area and Manitoba and Nova Scotia. They could actually all be related. Like that could be Nordic immigration, recent and ancient. I think it occurs outside of that as well. I’m not sure, I’m not saying for sure. I know that Manitoba has at least a significant, I think, former Icelandic population. I might be wrong there. Tyler, correct me if I’m wrong.
DANIEL: Thanks, Tyler. Finally, from Colin on Patreon, “Many languages have ingressive consonants, particularly in West Africa. Also whey-faced” — one of our Shakespearean insults — “Whey-faced is pale or cowardly.” Thank you, Colin.
Okay, lots of good comments there. Thanks also to our guest Sophia Smith Galer. Thanks to everybody who gave us news, words, and Related or Nots. Thanks to SpeechDocs for transcribing all the words, and thanks to you great patrons for keeping us going.
HEDVIG: Because Language lovers, we would like you to do a few things for us. We love that you love the show or hate the show as I always say. You can engage with us in various places. We are becauselanguage.com on BlueSky, and becauselangpod just about everywhere else.
We’ve been putting up a lot of short little videos on TikTok. So, if you want to see our little faces and get better at distinguishing Daniel and Ben, I don’t know if that’s a problem for you, but in case you want to know who’s who, you could look at the videos and then you can map the voices. I’d like to think that you can distinguish me. Maybe I’m just full of myself.
You can also send us ideas like a lot of listeners have done for this episode via SpeakPipe. So, how that works is you can go to our website becauselanguage.com. And then, I think is on the right part of the webpage, there’s a little button and then you can send us a little audio. You can also contact us over old-fashioned email, it is hello@becauselanguage.com.
And if you like the show, it’s always nice to hear from you and you can write a review on Podchaser or iTunes or other places where people leave podcast reviews. Also in your podcast app, there’s usually a way of reviewing things and we’ll try and see them. And yeah, if you like the show and you want to spread the good word, why don’t you tell a friend about it?
BEN: You can also become a patron. I like to think that becoming a free patron is the gateway drug of becoming a patron. And who doesn’t love a good gateway drug. So, you can just become a free patron of the show. And who knows, maybe later you become a different patron. You get free stuff depending on your level, you get live shows, bonus episodes, mailouts, shoutouts, and Discord access. We get your support, which helps us keep the show running, keeps us in supplies and software, keep the regular shows free for everybody. And we also, if you are a patron of a certain level, we order your names in wild and wacky ways. This week, Daniel, how are we ordering the readout names?
DANIEL: I think Hedvig will already know what we’re looking at here, because I pasted the entire table into the run sheet.
HEDVIG: Wait, have you… Ah, I see, I see, I see.
BEN: Oh, I think I can discern what this is myself.
DANIEL: Not too hard.
HEDVIG: Okay. What he’s done is taken language names, I think, from glossalog.org.
DANIEL: I used a list from the Guardian, because it was probably not as accurate, but it was easy to find.
HEDVIG: Fair enough.
DANIEL: It comes from UNESCO data.
HEDVIG: Oh, then it’s probably UNESCO Atlas of World Atlases… of Languages in Danger. And then, you’ve taken the names and then found the language name that is the most similar. So, for example, at the top here we have Rene, which is similar to the language called Dene, D-E-N-E. And then he’s taking in the speaker numbers and also the, what’s called, the language endangerment status, which goes from…
DANIEL: Extinct, on up to… invulnerable?
HEDVIG: And why don’t we do search and replace EXTINCT with DORMANT.
DANIEL: Yes, please. Thank you. But that’s the idea.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s really cool. So, basically, it’s a game of how similar is your name to the name of a language.
DANIEL: That has some endangerment status. All right, Ben, you want to go on ahead?
BEN: We’ll start with Rene and Dene. Then Kevin with Krevin. Stan with Svan. Kathy with Kathu. Rach with Sach. Amir with Amis. Laura with Laua. Aldo with Aluo. Helen with Helong. Lyssa with Bussa. Larry with Lari but with an I. Nigel with Jirel. Nasrin with Narim. Joanna with Hoanya. Nikoli with Nihali. Keith with Keiga. Ayesha with Yanesha. Manú with Mang. I almost certainly butchered that one, because it’s Chinese and Vietnamese, which means there’s some tonal stuff I’ve definitely got wrong.
Fiona with Kona. Luis with Kui. Tony with Mon. James with Amis. Amy with Mam. Lucy with Lude. Xekri with Mehri. Lance with Lauje. Becky with Beeke. Sydney with Stoney. Martha with Mara. Daryl with Dari. Ben, me, with Mon. Daniel with Danisi. Amanita with Santa. Chris L with Chairel. Andy B with Adyge. Steele with Gyele. Diego with Mizo. Rodger with Rongpo. Colleen with Moklen. O Tim with Kati.
HEDVIG: Do you want me to take over?
BEN: You can if you want.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES] You were doing the intonation like I think this is the end and I looked at the list and I was like, “It’s not the end.”
BEN: Tap me up. I’m like a WWE wrestler, I’m out. I’m out. Help me out.
HEDVIG: Okay. O Tim with Kati. John K with Jone. Mignon with Mon. Heather with Meithei. Whitney with also Meithei. Hedvig with Helong, just like Helen. Elías with Erzya. gramaryen with Kamarian. LordMortis with Lorkoti. Kristofer with Kristang. Meredith with Xerente. Ignacio with Guajiro. Wolfdog with Bodo. sæ̃m with Somm. Yevaud with Newar. Rosemary with Romani. Ariaflame with Apinaje. Molly Dee with Moklen. J0HNTR0Y with Juhur. PharaohKatt with Piaroa. Canny Archer with Panare. Sonic Snejhog with Singpho. Faux Frenchie with Eastern Cham. Linguistic Chaos with Ligurian. And Andy from Logophilius with Aromanian.
What was fun to me there’s some languages that are occurring more than once. So, I think Amis, traditional language of Taiwan and…
BEN: Mon came up a bunch of times.
HEDVIG: Moklen occurred several times, Meithei occurred twice. So, there are some that are more similar to the name of our Patreon supporters, which I thought was fun. Thank you so much, Daniel, for doing that. That was really fun.
DANIEL: Yeah, I liked it because as you look down the list and you see the number of speakers of these endangered languages, and I’m just thinking, this issue affects millions and millions of people. So, I’m glad that we’re paying a little bit of attention to it.
Our theme music was written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who also performs with Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Pew, pew, pew, pew.
HEDVIG: Pew, pew, pew, pew.
[BOOP]
HEDVIG: And now… Sorry, let’s try it.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I have a monstera plant.
DANIEL: It’s the jungle. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: It has decided to grow. It’s the jungle. I’ll maybe share a picture. It’s growing in a very silly way and I have not really figured out.
DANIEL: I’d like to introduce you to the merits of pruning.
HEDVIG: But I’m so flattered that it’s so happy.
DANIEL: But it’s getting a bit rangy. Maybe if you trim back the tendrils, then more would come and it would be bushy. Have you thought about that?
HEDVIG: This one only has one long ass… anyway.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] One long ass tendril. Some of us are only really good at one thing, you know?
HEDVIG: Yeah, this one’s definitely… Let’s see if I can make this fun. Is that helpful? Never mind.
DANIEL: Oh, yes. Now I can see a leaf. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: And a cat!
HEDVIG: Yes.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: I will just say that the knapping when you’re knocking pieces of stone off and you’re doing napping like that, probably imitative. And nappies…
BEN: Mm-hmm. Okay. And onamatopoeic.
DANIEL: Yep, and nappies, a little cloth. A little nappy.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Did you…
DANIEL: I didn’t do that. That was… that was…
BEN: Did you just… did… Oh my god, we have turned into some sort of like Twitch streamer, like, hate fest. Was that you, Hedvig? Did you manage to do that?
HEDVIG: No, that was Daniel did that.
BEN: Oh, okay. Daniel’s thumbs downing himself. Okay, good to know.
DANIEL: No, that was me. I didn’t…
HEDVIG: He was doing something like this and it was like: You’re doing a thumbs down. But nothing’s happening for me, look.
BEN: Oh, it was automatic. Interesting. How do I get the cool stuff?
DANIEL: It could be just my background thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah yeah yeah. It was picking up on his movements. It’s not happening for me.
BEN: Mm. Sorry, Daniel.
DANIEL: Anyway, if we could move on from this unfortunate incident.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]