For many students, university opens up new frontiers of learning — and new ways to be marginalised for their language use. A new book explores the problem of linguistic discrimination in higher education, and how to work toward fixing it.
Also: Danish presents an unusual challenge for those who try to learn it — even babies. Why is Danish like this, and what does it tell us about language?
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Linguistic Discrimination in US Higher Education: Power, Prejudice, Impacts, and Remedies
https://www.routledge.com/Linguistic-Discrimination-in-US-Higher-Education-Power-Prejudice-Impacts/Clements-Petray/p/book/9780367415358
White translator removed from Amanda Gorman poem, amid controversy in Europe – The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/03/11/amanda-gorman-white-translator-spain/
The translations of Amanda Gorman’s poetry are sparking conversations in the industry – The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/book-translations-gorman-controversy/2021/03/24/8ea3223e-8cd5-11eb-9423-04079921c915_story.html
Amanda Gorman translation backlash sparks racial controversy – Los Angeles Times
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-03-22/amanda-gorman-hill-we-climb-translation-backlash-sparks-controversy
Barcelona Journal; Catalonia Is Pressing Ahead as Olympic ‘Country’
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/18/world/barcelona-journal-catalonia-is-pressing-ahead-as-olympic-country.html
Foreign language learners should be exposed to slang in the classroom and here’s why….
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/02/210217121727.htm
Danish as a Window Onto Language Processing and Learning
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/lang.12450
Danish language — the Camelösö sketch
Inventory Elfdalian (EA 2473) | Phoible
https://phoible.org/inventories/view/2473
Inventory So (Thavung) (PH 1014) | Phoible
https://phoible.org/inventories/view/1014
English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the U
https://www.routledge.com/English-with-an-Accent-Language-Ideology-and-Discrimination-in-the-United/Lippi-Green/p/book/9780415559119
Bread and circuses – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses
Transcript
DANIEL: And with me now is someone whose captivating ways have given a whole new meaning to Stockholm Syndrome…
HEDVIG: Oh, that was…! What? What is that supposed to be?
DANIEL: I was thinking of, you know, a large city in Sweden.
HEDVIG: Uh huh. But are you saying that I am so charming that I’m… or what?
DANIEL: Yes. That is what I am saying.
HEDVIG: Okay.
DANIEL: Once you get in your orbit, you won’t want to leave. It’s like… okay, now I’m thinking of the Sirens from the Odyssey. But that’s not right.
HEDVIG: Daniel, that’s a little bit… [LAUGHTER] Do you have another one? Do you have a plan B?
DANIEL: Fine, fine.
[LAUGHTER]
[INTRO MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. And with me now: her interests are linguistics, role playing games, and architectural tattoos. It’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: This is true! I’m really into architectural tattoos. I wish they made it a category on Ink Master, like buildings.
DANIEL: Mmm, yeah. Do you want to go farther on that? Or are you happy to leave it there? Just be myst…
HEDVIG: I’m happy to leave it there.
DANIEL: Okay, very good. At least until it’s it’s dry.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: We have special guest co-hosts for this episode. It’s Gail Clements of Duke University and Marnie Jo Petray of Slippery Rock University. Hello, hello.
GAIL CLEMENTS: Hello.
MARNIE JO PETRAY: Hi. Nice to be here.
GAIL: Thanks for having us.
DANIEL: It is a pleasure. They are the editors of a brand new book, “Linguistic discrimination in US higher education: Power, prejudice, impacts and remedies.” Wow! That’s quite a title.
MARNIE: It is.
GAIL: It is.
DANIEL: And it gives us a pretty good impression of what’s inside, wouldn’t you say, Gail?
GAIL: Absolutely. That’s why we chose that kind of long, extra subtitle was to really get people to know exactly what the book is going to be about. Because you know, you… looking at all of these different publishers for linguistics or other academic texts, and you kind of just peruse, pass and you go: Oh, well, that one looks good, that one looks good, or maybe. But if you can give people a really great idea of what is really the main subject matter, linguistic discrimination is great. But to really tell people how we hope to work through some of that, and address some of that was really the point of the subtitle.
MARNIE: To include that continuum, you know, from what it is and why it is and then hopefully to start the discussion about how to address it and remedies.
DANIEL: Power, prejudice, impacts and remedies, all four really important ingredients.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s very cool.
DANIEL: Let me ask, we’re gonna be talking a lot about those four things. But what got you both into editing this book and put it all together? How did you come to get here?
GAIL: Um, it started, Marnie and I both sit on the Linguistics and Higher Education Committee of the Linguistic Society of America. And I was senior chair that year. And we were looking to kind of break out of the things that our committee had done before at the larger conference, annual meeting. And so I’d really been thinking about my own life as a linguist and working in academia, from being a student, you know, up to now, and I just proposed this, let’s do this seminar. I know that there are people out there that we already know that are doing research on what’s going on on university campuses. At the same time, it was… you know, we had our own experiences. As a southerner, absolutely. Born in Florida, but raised in Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and North Carolina, and my parents’ families are from North Carolina. So I have a lot of Southernisms, and some northernisms. And I’ve often been not particularly called out in class. But through modeling other professors that I had that were Southern, started to shift my dialect to something more about a little generic American. So it would be more accepted in the academy.
And then I had this great incident at a conference in Denmark years ago. And another student came up to me after my presentation, and he was from Harvard. And we were talking very academically in Standard English. And then at one point, he said, Well, where are you from? And I said: Oh, North Carolina. And he goes: Oh, my god, I’m from Georgia. It’s so good to talk to another southerner,” and just kind of relaxed, straight away, right? [LAUGHTER]
So and then I kind of relaxed too. And then we found this other guy from Missouri, and we just had a great conversation. So kind of thinking about all those things, you know, I said, let’s do this linguistic discrimination. We know it’s out there. Let’s put this panel together. And Marnie had great ideas for input, and so did other members of the committee. And the panel went so well, that actually a Routledge editor came up to me afterward and said, I’d really like to talk about maybe putting this into a book and adding some more voices to it. And so that’s kind of, it just kind of happened and here we are.
DANIEL: Marnie, that your side of the story too?
MARNIE: Equivalent. Yeah, so I’m from Arkansas originally, I’m a fifth generation Arkansan. And you know, I didn’t have the Denmark experience, but I definitely remember getting to grad school at Purdue University and talking to a secretary about going to get the oil [ɔl] in my car changed. And, you know, the shock on her face was like… I was, you know, completely using a different language altogether. She had no idea what I was saying. And having to modify my speech, initially, in teaching, because students, even as close as the Midwest is to Arkansas, just you know, the feeling that they were not following me, and then having to have to modify my speech to be comprehensible in the classroom. And so here we are today.
DANIEL: All right. Thank you both for being here. We’re going to get into the book. But first: couple of things. Our last episode was a bonus Mailbag show with the Layman’s Linguist. We had a lot of fun answering language questions from all our lovely listeners.
HEDVIG: That was really fun. And she… I really enjoyed having her on. I hope we get more chances to have her on.
DANIEL: How would you compare it to, say, a barrel of monkeys? About as much fun? Less fun? More fun?
HEDVIG: Wait… I… What?
DANIEL: Oh no! It’s an idiom! Oh no!
HEDVIG: No, I know what it means… sort of.
DANIEL: Oh, you’ve heard that one? Okay.
HEDVIG: But, like, isn’t it a bad thing?
DANIEL: Well, I mean, a real barrel of monkeys is not something that I would want. However, apparently, when this idiom was being coined, people had much laxer standards on what made a great weekend, and the barrel of monkeys became kind of a fun thing. You know? It was a simpler age.
HEDVIG: Okay. But how fun is it?
DANIEL: Pretty darn fun! It became the standard against which other measures of fun were measured! So I just want to know, Hedvig, how fun was it?!
HEDVIG: Compared to…? I don’t know, ’cause like, I still feel like I don’t…
DANIEL: [AGONISED SCREAM]
HEDVIG: It’s just a lot of fun. And then she was a lot of fun. And I don’t know I… yeah, everyone else is looking at me like I’m crazy. But I don’t how to scale that.
GAIL: They made a toy that was a yellow barrel and had red monkeys with big arms on the inside!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And you would link them!
MARNIE: Yes.
DANIEL: I totally had a barrel of monkeys!
GAIL and MARNIE: Yep.
DANIEL: It was not my most fun toy.
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: But it was pretty fun! Okay, well…
HEDVIG: Okay, sorry.
DANIEL: If you would like to hear that episode, you can sign up as a Patron at the listener level. You’ll be supporting the show, and also you’ll be able to attend our Lingfest live show coming up. Getting ready!
HEDVIG: And you can tell me how much more or less fun than a barrel of monkeys that episode was…
DANIEL: I will.
HEDVIG: …so that I can get a range of how fun a barrel of monkeys is. That’d be great.
DANIEL: We’re attenuating. This is simian calibration, is what this is. Very good. If you’re a Patron at any level, we will invite you to sit in on the Zoom show and even vote in the surveys, because it’s all about great debates in semantics. There are some questions that need answering. Like: if something is deceptively simple, was it easy, or was it hard? Your answers will become the standard for this. So that’s on the first of May, 7pm Perth time, it’s gonna be fun. We’re gonna get Ben going, hmm? Hmm? Not hard.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHING] Yeah, and we should… unfortunately, Ben isn’t with us today. He has external reasons for not being here. But he loves you all very much and will surely be around for the live show.
DANIEL: Yes. So you can sign up for that at patreon.com/becauselangpod. Let’s get to the news. This one was suggested by Diego on Patreon. By the way, Diego is a veritable ferret for finding good news stories and good ideas. Wouldn’t you say?
HEDVIG: I feel like he’s he’s gunning for my job. But um…
DANIEL: No, that’s PharaohKatt.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah, that too. Yeah.
DANIEL: So the Washington Post has had a couple of articles about this: Black American poet, Amanda Gorman, absolutely ripped up the stage at Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration with her poem, “The Hill We Climb.” So naturally, it’s being translated into different languages including Catalan, which is a language of…? Catalonia.
HEDVIG: Spain?
DANIEL: I was gonna say Spain, but then I thought I might get in trouble. I’ve gotten in trouble on Catalan before.
HEDVIG: Oh, but a lot of people who wouldn’t know Catalonia also wouldn’t know Catalan. So saying that it’s spoken in Catalonia won’t add… It’s in, within the nation state of Spain. No one can argue with that.
DANIEL: You are correct. However, it is also true that Catalonia is an autonomous community, and did you know that when Barcelona was the seat of the Summer Olympics — or was it Winter Olympics? I’m pretty sure it was Summer Olympics…
HEDVIG: Surely.
DANIEL: …they ran ads in major magazines saying, “Where is Barcelona? It’s in Catalonia.” They actually ran ads saying this is in Catalonia, in like 1992, I think. Was it ’92?
HEDVIG: No, I’m sure they want to be a prominent country, but someone who doesn’t know where Catalan is spoken also won’t know where Catalonia is, I think.
DANIEL: You might be right. So a white translator has been removed from translating the poetry of Amanda Gorman into Catalan, because he was, quote, not the right person. Any feels on this? I’m going to throw this open.
HEDVIG: I know there are a lot of different approaches to translating. There are some where you try and get across the emotions and the atmosphere, but not necessarily word by word translations. And then there are some where people go much more word by word. And I feel like there might be other styles out there as well. But depending on which one of those tracks you go down… And I guess if the attempt was to go more on the atmosphere, the emotions, then maybe they want to someone who could reach for parts of the vocabulary and the language that wouldn’t be accessible for a white person.
DANIEL: Okay. Gail, how about you?
GAIL: When I was reading this last night, I kind of thought back. Now my experience is not at all on this level. But when I was doing my masters at the University of South Carolina, my thesis supervisor was Dr Tracey Weldon, who works in Gullah and Geechee and I was her research assistant. And as a white girl, although I am Southern, I’m not a participant in Gullah and Geechee, and she gave me all of her tapes of recordings of where she had interviewed people, and all of the things they were talking about, and it was my job to transcribe them. Now, that was a word for word transcription and not trying to capture or notate feeling or emotion. And obviously, I’m sure Dr Weldon, after I turned in transcriptions for one or two tapes, I’m sure she listened back through them and made her own notations as well. But technically, the only other research assistant was a white girl who was from Bulgaria. So in that instance, I was technically the most qualified…? At least as a southern American, right? So this sort of made sense? But what I was thinking was: if this translator is Catalonian, and he speaks the language, then he may understand a little bit of what African Americans here in the US feel like. They are often
DANIEL: Oh, that’s interesting
GAIL: They are often oppressed. You know, Catalonians are, are constantly… they’re searching for independence, they want to be their own free state, they want… And so I felt when I read this, I kind of felt like: well, maybe he does understand what it’s like. Yes, he is white, Spanish. And so that certainly would mean he doesn’t understand the exact experience. But at the same time, are there any African Americans who would understand that experience, who happened to be experts in translating into Catalan? So that could be a very small pool, or a non-existent pool. And also, the article talks about a Dutch translator who left the project as well, even though he said he was trying to capture the feeling and the emotion of the piece, but he left the project as well. So it seems like, are we looking for experts in the other languages? Are we looking for people who are experts in poetry and translating, like Hedvig said, the sort of emotion and feeling? And then should it matter if that person can understand and do that, do they have to be the exact same race or type or kind of person that you are?
HEDVIG: I think the case for the Dutch, I lived in the Netherlands for a while. And there are a lot of non-white people in Netherlands who faced similar situations. So maybe like a Moroccan or an Indonesian person with those heritage would make more sense than necessarily like an Afro-Dutch person. I don’t know? Those are large groups that I know, in Netherlands, which are in somewhat at least comparable situations.
DANIEL: Marnie, what do you got? What are your thoughts on this?
MARNIE: So I guess, I’m just thinking about what a mistake it might be to essentialise language to the point of exclusion. You know, I’m just not on board with kind of manning that strict boundary of only this, and not that. I think it’s a much more nuanced and complex question about who has the right to translate from one language to another? So that’s not really an answer as much as it is opening up, you know, into another question, but…
DANIEL: This is kind of what the translator said. I’ll just read this quote, “It is a very complicated subject that cannot be treated with frivolity,” by the way, this is translator Victor Obiols. He says, “…but if I cannot translate a poet because she’s a woman, young, black or an American of the 21st century, neither can I translate Homer because I’m not a Greek of the eighth century BC, or could not have translated Shakespeare because I’m not a 16th century Englishman.”
HEDVIG: But there are not any other ancient Greeks around, translators that we could use instead?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Right.
MARNIE: The practicality.
HEDVIG: Whereas there are people of colour within these populations. So I don’t think that’s comparable. I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.
MARNIE: But it does speak to the idea of the inseparability of language and culture, right? I mean, how the two have to be considered together. And…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: That’s a good point.
GAIL: Because it’s translation. As I said before, it could be really difficult. The Catalonian translator, he had, the article detailed that he was an expert translator, and had worked on Shakespeare translations and all of these things. So I guess too, like Marnie said, culture and language and identity are so bound up together. Are we looking to of course, capture Amanda Gorman’s identity? But then when a Catalonian reads this in their own language, it needs to somehow translate to their identity as well. So do we get a translator who’s more like Amanda Gorman? Or do we get a translator that’s more like a Catalonian?
DANIEL: Yeah. Do we bank shot it? Or do we get it straight?
GAIL: And so you, you have this interesting kind of conundrum where you might be looking to pair like people. I believe the Dutch translator also said that he was homosexual. And he said, you know, I understand what it’s like to be marginalised and things, and I really wanted to bring her work, to, you know, my language and things. But because of the kind of controversy around it, I think he left the project, instead of being let go. And so I think he, I think he understood why people felt that way about the work. And he wanted to leave the project. But, you know, do you have to be a minority of the same kind to understand someone else’s struggle and encapsulate that?
HEDVIG: I think the answer is that often, I think you can maybe find someone who is Catalonian, and who is from a ethnic minority within the country that is comparable, in some ways. I’m thinking that if we don’t go looking for people who fit that category, if we don’t reject the majority white translators in the first run, then maybe we wouldn’t find those people who actually fit the bill a bit closer? I don’t know, I’m just imagining a positive world where there are translators that fit this out there, and we just need to go looking for them. And in order to do that, we need to not pick our first choices. And I don’t know, I’ve lived in the Netherlands, this is all going to be very sensitive, obviously. But like, I don’t think being gay in the Netherlands and being Black in America is in the same box.
GAIL: Right.
MARNIE: I was just gonna say as well, I think that, I think the genre is important to consider, right? So translation is a big topic, could refer to any kind of discourse, but especially since poetry is a certain kind of communication, and especially since her work in this particular instance was an inaugural address that was intended to be… to become part of public domain, right? I mean, it was, it was an oratory for the masses. And so even though her intent as an author, as a poet, as the, you know, as the originator of the ideas is one thing, once it gets out there, it seems like then it has a life of its own, as it should. That may be very different than another kind of discourse that is not so public, or is not so, so much out there in the sense of: how should it mean to me as a… How should it mean to Gail as a white southerner, how should it mean to, you know, Hedvig as a woman living in the Netherlands.
DANIEL: Let me put something out there. Aboriginal people in Australia have a saying when it comes to projects involving their language: “Nothing about us, without us.” Nothing about us without us. And it made me think of actors. I mean, yes, an actor could be skilled enough to play a gay character or a trans character, or an Asian character. But were there no gay actors or trans actors or Asian actors? It seems to me like when we want to translate something from a writer who comes from a historically disadvantaged or marginalised community, and that person is not so much so, then we come perilously close to making something about a community that is without that community. And that may affect the final product, as well.
HEDVIG: But we should also recognise that like, the situation of Black people in America is also… I mean, racism is everywhere, but it also has very particular American features to it that, so you’d have to compare. You probably maybe don’t want to pick a Black person in a white majority country, that might not actually be the same kind of experience. You might want to go for another group within there. And the thing that comes up with the actors, is like, people can say: Oh, no, but like whoever it is — I can’t think of a good example right now, but — is doing such a good job. It’s like, but if there are Asian or gay or trans actors out there, if they can’t even get the jobs for the characters that fit their identity, what other jobs can’t they get?!
MARNIE: Good point.
GAIL: It seems like where this might lead us to, is on the front end, we wouldn’t have these problems at the time of translation if we were able to encourage and foster people of all different backgrounds doing more language study, right? There might be someone who had been an African American, who would maybe have studied Catalan, if they had had that opportunity, or realised there was a job in that or knew that they would that would be useful in the future. So maybe fostering more language study and more cultural study on the front end in high schools and colleges and universities, would then mean that there would be more people that we could go to in situations like this, that would be closer to the actual writer’s background or the creator’s background of something. And they would be able to capture not only the language that it was being translated to, but the feel, the movement, just the whole idea, right? of the piece.
HEDVIG: That’s a very good point.
DANIEL: That’s a really good point. I think that’s a good place to end that one on. Hedvig, do you want to take our next story?
HEDVIG: Yes! So I’m in charge (partially) of finding news for this show, and I’ve discovered that there are these great science outlets that already cultivate news for, like, actual journalists. I’m not an actual journalist. I think the only one on our team that is an actual journalist is Ben?
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s Ben. [LAUGHTER] He has been one.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Um, but there’s something, for example, called EurekaAlert, and Science Daily, and you can click on things and I always find so much good. And I found something really good that I thought Marnie and Gail would also be interested in. So this is a policy paper from Sascha Stollhans from Lancaster University, in a policy paper argued that it is beneficial for second language learners to learn so-called slang or non-normative language. There’s this discussion whether you should include variants or alternatives in language education, and some people find that it would confuse or lead to ambiguity for learners. But he argues in this paper that it is actually useful. And if learners are supposed to interact with native speakers, then this is an important area that they should be exposed to early. And yeah, and I thought that was that was really interesting. So apparently, this is a big discussion in the UK, and they’re having this discussion. So this is a policy paper. So this is not just an academic paper, right? It’s meant for the British government, which is a kind of discourse that I’m not as familiar with, despite having been five years in Canberra.
DANIEL: Who among us have done English teaching? I’ve done English teaching.
GAIL: I have.
MARNIE: Me too. Yes. Yeah.
DANIEL: Marnie? Okay.Wait, Hedvig, have you done any TESOL?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Okay. I was just wondering if maybe you had somewhere along the line.
HEDVIG: I’ve tutored high school students in Sweden who need better English.
DANIEL: Yeah, that counts. So, um, has there been any sort of effort to not use slang? Or have you ever told or been told or told somebody else not to use it in class? Or is it pretty much accepted?
MARNIE: I think it depends on the context. I mean, you know, clearly, if you’re doing Communicative Language Teaching, then you’re all about the students’ needs. So depending on what discourses and what functions they need to be able to enable, slang may be a very important part of that communicative competence. So it’s going to depend on that. But I was thinking, back in November, you guys had… the show that you had with Ian Cushing, and I was thinking about how this particular policy paper connects back to his research in terms of — also in the UK, I think, with respect to kids who were being punished, you know, for using slang and all the punitive ways that they were being punished for using anything less than formal English.
DANIEL: What do you got, Gail? Have you heard anything like “don’t say slang”, or…?
GAIL: Certainly. Having been, actually I started out as a fourth grade teacher, and I taught English Language Arts. Here in the South. And actually, there was a very large push, I was at a school that was labeled a Title One. And if you don’t know, for the audience, Title One schools in the United States are underperforming. And often they have transient and minority populations, and the socio-economic level is lower-middle or working class. And so a lot of the teachers in the school actually came from that same community, and they went back to work in their community. And so my job was to take the students who had the most dialectical language and try to transfer or translate them or transition them to a more Standard English. I hate… in a sense, I kind of hated the job. I… you understand it, right? I said earlier, sometimes I certainly have more Standard English than my Southern family might, you know, use and so I codeswitch to them, right? So…
But I would constantly tell the students, I’d say, the way you talk at home, how you talk with your friends, all of these are absolutely valid. And you can come up to me and ask me a question in that same dialect. And I’m going to understand you, and we’re going to be able to communicate. But when you are writing, you know, your paragraph for class, or when you’re maybe talking to the principal or someone that you respect, people expect you to use a more standard form. And it may not be fair. But it’s kind of the status quo at this point. And I think we can still see, in our book, that’s often… the status quo still holds for most people, even in more progressive environments. And so I think this is a great move to kind of say to language learners: hey, yeah, you’re going to be in a school setting where maybe you might use different words or a little bit more complex syntax. And then you’re going to be in another area, where you’re going to use just as complex syntax, it’s just a different style, or kind. And you’re going to use words differently, because that’s what’s part of… if you’re really trying to get to native speaker status, right? Where you can converse, like Marnie said, students need to converse academically, with friends, and to engage in cultural, you know, movements. And so you really need the breadth of language experience in that way. And so it seems like, we should be including this. Maybe not in the entirety of English education, but in parts of it, as discussions with students and letting them know, you know, the way you talk in the hallway is great, that’s fine.
HEDVIG: We’ve talked about this before on the show. It’s a bit of a running bit, isn’t it, Daniel? You and Ben disagree on this.
DANIEL: Oh, it’s a tough balance.
HEDVIG: And I’ve sort of shifted a bit over the time, because I used to think that it’s unfortunate that if you come from a background where you didn’t learn the standard expected variety of your native language, you might be disenfranchised when you later go out and try and get a job. And that’s shit. And the world is shit. And as a teacher, you could either say: Okay, I am going to pretend that the world isn’t shit and educate my students as if it’s like, the best of all worlds. Or you can say: the world is shit, and like, here are some tools that will make it, like, a little bit less shit for you, which is pragmatic and make sense. But I’m more and more thinking that maybe that is also just sustaining the shitty world! Maybe we should be more radical.
And it’s really difficult, but because that policy can also mean that a lot of people have to live shittier lives than they otherwise would. And that’s not really fair, to just let them bear the brunt of it, where, when I’m a person who wouldn’t really bear the brunt of it. My English is usually considered more or less acceptable, except in writing. [LAUGHTER] And my Swedish is usually considered acceptable. So I don’t have to take that shit, right? I wouldn’t bear the brunt of that, that campaign. So, so it’s really difficult. We had this discussion recently in my department as well, because we were talking about academic writing in English and how many people are writing in their second language, myself included. You can ask all of my supervisors, I am very bad at English verb agreement. I am not… It’s not a thing my brain does in writing apparently, I just can’t be bothered.
At one point, I was struggling so much, I actually looked up some studies that this is apparently a thing among native speakers as well, that they’re not necessarily good at verb agreement. And I tried to convince my supervisors to stop correcting me on this, but they correctly said this is what is expected of a PhD thesis, you need to be able to do. You need to be able to use IS and ARE correctly, which is fair. But we were talking about, one of my colleagues was reviewing a paper by some Italian people who had written a paper in English and they used sort of non-standard sentence constructions, but it was all understandable. And my colleague had said that they had chosen to not correct them, because they said: This is understandable. I don’t want to be nitpicky. I am also a non-native speaker of English. And you know there are more non-native speakers of English than native speakers.
GAIL: That’s right.
HEDVIG: So fuck y’all!
[LAUGHTER]
MARNIE: I also think that there’s a practicality point to this question about, you know, how should we feel about standards and whether or not teaching disenfranchised populations the standard is a is a form of perpetuating the ideology that we all want to change. It takes a long time for language, you know, standards to change. So I think it has to be a both and. It’s important to educate kids in such a way so that they can be economically upward bound. But at the same time, it doesn’t remove the obligation we have to try to educate culture about, you know, ways to do things better. Because if you only do one or the other, then things don’t really change. So…
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s a really good point. We don’t have to choose one or the other.
DANIEL: That’s true.
HEDVIG: Let’s just do both. Maybe you’ve solved this recurrent argument that we always have on this show. Thank you, Marnie.
MARNIE: It would be, it would be nice. It would be nice, but also ideal.
DANIEL: I’m still a radical, because the argument that you need to teach students to toe the line on the standard so that they can have social access… where that comes down for me is that they will still deny students social access, even if they speak perfectly, because it’s not about language and never was.
MARNIE: Right, the identity connection. I understand that. Yeah, I understand that. And agree. I agree. Because I mean, that’s a big part about what our book, you know, tries to display is how language is really about identity, and that there’s no coincidence to to who is disenfranchised in forms of linguistic discrimination. It’s the same groups that suffer the same kinds of other forms of bias in other ways.
DANIEL: So I guess I agree with the both-ends idea, teach them that there are expectations — unfair though they be, there are expectations — but then also teach them to BURN IT ALL DOWN! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Let’s go on to our next story. Hedvig, you found a thing by Fabio Trecca? How did you pitch this to me?
HEDVIG: Oh, I saw it on Twitter, because that’s where I like to hang out for linguistics news. I saw that at the Aarhus University in Denmark, they have a research project with Fabio Trecca, Morten Christiansen and colleagues, where they are trying to… it’s called “The Puzzle of Danish,” because Danish has been shown in several studies to actually be a bit harder for children to acquire. They’re still studying why that is, and what could be the cause of it. And as we also discussed in the piece, this might not only be a thing about Danish. There might be other languages out there.
DANIEL: So we got the chance to talk to Fabio Trecca of Aarhus University about the puzzle of Danish.
HEDVIG: Fabio Trecca, here from Aarhaus University. He was a part of the exciting research project, the puzzle of Danish, and as a Swedish person, I’m of course very interested in this. It’s always fun to get a reason to sort of lord our superiority over our neighbors.
DANIEL: Oh, stop it. Stop it.
HEDVIG: I’m being incredibly ironic and sarcastic, of course.
DANIEL: This is a running joke for us.
HEDVIG: I like… I like Danish, actually. I went to Denmark last year, got married in Denmark.
DANIEL: Yes, you did.
HEDVIG: And I interacted with Danish people. I spoke Swedish. They spoke Danish, it worked pretty well.
FABIO TRECCA: Great!
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah! But nonetheless, I am interested in what the puzzle of Danish is. Can you tell us a bit more about the project?
FABIO: Yeah, for sure. So I guess the puzzle of Danish would be that we have two pieces of evidence: one of them telling us that the Danish language is slightly weird in some sense. Its pronunciation, it’s very unusual compared to similar languages. That would be Swedish and Norwegian, but also, I guess, Icelandic and Faroese and German for… Yeah. So, that’s one side of the story. And the other side of the story would be that we can see that Danish learning children are delayed in a number of different aspects of their language acquisition. So that would be vocabulary acquisition and grammar acquisition, and some aspects of pragmatics as well. So the puzzle would be in trying to figure out whether there’s a causal connection between these two things. Is that possible that the awkward pronunciation of Danish makes it hard to learn the language, even for native speakers?
DANIEL: [CHUCKLE] I got to bust in here. When I was younger, when I was a younger person that didn’t know anything about linguistics, I thought: Is it possible that there’s a language that’s so difficult to learn that even babies in that language are like: Oh crap, I have no idea what’s going on here? And then I learned about linguistics, and I thought I was rather well informed. And I thought: No, all languages pretty much do the same thing. All languages are about equally complex, because the human brain can handle a certain amount of complexity. We all have a human brain. If a language were not complex enough to do the job, it would complexify itself and if it were too complex, then it would de-complexify, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This is what I thought. I thought: No, all languages are just about the same. Now you’re telling me that this is a language, that in Danish, even babies are like: Crap, I don’t know what’s going on.
FABIO: Yes. Yes.
DANIEL: [LAUGHTER] WHAT???
HEDVIG: Maybe the critical thing is: how… how much delayed are they? So you guys just published a paper with Kristian Tylén, Anders Højen, and Morten Christiansen. Morten, I believe, has been on the show before, no, Daniel?
DANIEL: We’ve talked about his work a lot of times. He’s never been on, we’ve never talked to him yet. But I’d love to.
HEDVIG: Oh, maybe we should then.
DANIEL: Morten! Yeah, yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But so you guys just came up with this, came out with this new paper “Danish as a window onto language processing and learning.” So what are the, what are the hard facts here? How much delayed are they?
FABIO: Not that much. But we can see that, if you look at vocabulary acquisition, we have some studies looking at the age range from eight months to one and a half years. And we can see that through the whole period, Danish children are at the bottom of the distribution in terms of how many words they can produce, compared to, to 15 other languages from Europe and North America. So if you look at the Croatian children, for instance, who are really good at… or really fast at building a vocabulary from from scratch, and you compare them with Danish children, we can see a difference of around 100 words at age one… one year and three months. So if you take a Croatian child and a Danish child at one year and three months, then yeah, there’s a difference of about 100 words.
DANIEL: And this is also the case for people who are learning Danish as well. Is that right?
FABIO: Yeah. So we look at adults as well in the paper. So this is a big review paper, right? So we’re collecting evidence that’s been produced in the last 20 years. The reason we did this is that we were lacking a kind of overview of what’s out there about Danish, and we’re trying to compare Danish and Swedish and Norwegian. And the reason we’re doing this is that they used to be basically the same language at some point historically, and then they, for geopolitical reasons, divided up in three separate languages. But they still look a lot like each other in written form, for instance. So they’re like the perfect natural experiment. So it’s interesting to look at, even adults, right? How easy it is to understand Danish for Norwegians, for instance, or for Swedish people. And the other way around. So it turns out that Danes understand Swedish much better than Swedes understand Danish, even though in written form, they’re basically the same language or they’re quite close to each other. So there must be something about phonetics. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Or… or it’s something about attitudes. I believe that in the… Fabio, and I were emailing, and we figured out both of us know the same person, Charlotte Gooskens, and I believe she’s participated in papers also about attitudes to languages. So if you… if Swedes are more suspicious of Danes, then they’re also gonna, like, maybe give up earlier at understanding them.
DANIEL: That’s interesting!
HEDVIG: So there might be things that are going on, besides the actual, like, the “pure” linguistics signal. I was wondering what you thought about those kinds of extra factors.
FABIO: That’s… that’s true. And that’s been proven by a number of studies, among others, the ones that you’re quoting, but there’s even some self-report studies that show the same. However, there’s some evidence showing that if you factor that out — so if you factor attitude out — you still see a bit of difference in, so the the mutual intelligibility is not, it’s not symmetrical.
HEDVIG: That’s so funny.
FABIO: So Swedes are still having a harder time understanding Danish than the other way around. And this is controlling for attitude and exposure to, for instance, newscasts in the other language.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I was just gonna say that, because that’s the other factor that I bet is important to consider is, whether — so I don’t know if people know this, because most Danes live close to the border of Sweden, a lot of people live in Copenhagen — you can actually get Swedish TV across the straits, and the other way around. So people who grew up in this area can actually, like, on their TVs, generally tune in the other countries’ TV programs. So when I went to Copenhagen this fall, I was very pleased to turn on TV and just be able to watch Swedish TV! I’m not used to that. [LAUGHTER] And it might be that maybe Danes are watching more Swedish TV than Swedes are watching Danish TV, and then you’d expect a difference. But if you’re controlling for exposure — if you ask informants how much TV do you watch, or how much reading do you do — if you can control for that as well, and the effects still stands, then, you know, there was something else.
FABIO: Then it’s a true effect, or at least… Yeah, that’s…
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s very interesting.
DANIEL: Okay. So let’s drill down into this, then. We’re saying that it’s the phonology of Danish that makes it a little bit more tricky to make yourself understood? What is it about the sounds of Danish? I would love to hear some examples.
FABIO: Yeah, so disclaimer: I’m not a linguist. I’m actually a cognitive psychologist working with language. So I’ll do my best. But…
DANIEL: Yeah yeah yeah [LAUGHTER]
FABIO: But there’s there’s at least two points here. So one point is that there are a lot of vowel sounds in Danish. So if you look at the phonetic inventory of the language, and depending on how you count it, so different theorists have different guesses as to how many individual vowel sounds you have. But, but we have around 40 — 44 actually — different vowel sounds. So different vowel nuances that can change the meaning of a word.
DANIEL: What?!
FABIO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, so in English, we’ve got like 14, and then we sometimes combine those into diphthongs that we might get like 20, but 40?!
FABIO: Yes. Forty different vowel qualities. Plus you have diphthongs.
HEDVIG: That’s impressive.
FABIO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Man!
HEDVIG: Can we get some wonderful illustrations?
DANIEL: Yeah. Give me some minimal pairs.
FABIO: Yeah, so [hinə] and [hʊnə] and [henə] and [hunə].
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Wait. Okay.
FABIO: Yeah.
DANIEL: Some of those sounded really different, but I think number two and four, the [hunə]…
FABIO: Yes, and [hɯnə]
DANIEL: Give me those two again.
FABIO: Yeah, yeah. So another disclaimer is that I’m not even a native speaker of Danish. I’ve just lived here for so many years that I’ve kind of acquired it passively, I guess, but…
DANIEL: You’re doing better than me. So…
HEDVIG: I think it sounded really good. But also, I’m also not a native speaker.
FABIO: So yeah, what’s the closest one? So [hinə] and [hɨnə]? But but there’s there’s even closer ones, closer examples that I yeah, maybe I can’t come up with right now. But, but sometimes it gets really tricky. So, and sometimes the difference is quite hard to perceive.
DANIEL: So what, can you tell me what those four things mean?
FABIO: Yeah, so [hinə], that’s a pronoun. That’s HER. And [hɨnə], that’s a… oh, I don’t even know what that’s called in English. But it’s a, it’s like the outer layer of the human eye. I guess that’s an example of [hɨnə].
HEDVIG: Oh, [hɨna] they call it MEMBRANE in English!
FABIO: MEMBRANE! Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, cool.
HEDVIG: Because the first two words were [henə] and [hinə] in Swedish, so I’m on board.
FABIO: Okay. And then [hunə] would be, like, a pillow you put on a chair? I don’t know if that’s there’s a specific name for that in…
HEDVIG: They call it CUSHION.
FABIO: Yeah, CUSHION. Yeah.
DANIEL: Nice.
FABIO: And [hʊnə], that’s a…
HEDVIG: CHICKEN.
FABIO: Yeah, CHICKEN. Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Hen, even, specifically.
FABIO: Yes.
DANIEL: I can see how having a lot of vowels would mess up someone who’s trying to learn language. Anything going on with consonants that you were able to pick up?
FABIO: Yeah, so that’s the second half of the story. Consonants, they are rarely pronounced as real consonants.
DANIEL: Oh, shit.
FABIO: Well, so there there usually, there’s this phenomenon called consonant weakening or consonant lenition, by which consonants, they lose their consonantal qualities and they become more like vowels, in some cases. So this is pervasive in Danish. You have… most consonants that occur in unstressed syllables, they become reduced and they are pronounced more like, with with kind of vowel-like qualities. So an example of that would be the word KNIV [knju], the word for KNIFE. So KNIV, K-N-I-V, the last letter, that would be a V historically, but has been weakened to a [u] kind of sound so [knju] instead of [knif] as it would have been.
HEDVIG: Sorry, can you say KNEE for us please?
FABIO: knæ [kni]
HEDVIG: And then say KNIFE?
FABIO: Kniv [knju]
DANIEL: They do sound different
FABIO: Yeah, they do sound different.
HEDVIG: They do.
FABIO: Yeah. Yeah. Not much though.
HEDVIG: Not by much! [LAUGHTER]
FABIO: So there’s definitely a lot of minimal pairs in Danish and, and then you get this extra layer, added layer of difficulty, which is the consonants being reduced to… sometimes they’re just outright vowels. So another example of this would be the Danish word for STREET, which is gade [geð], G-A-D-E, but the D sound is actually weakened to a soft D, which is [ð], which is actually, the flow of, the amount of air passing through your mouth is basically the same as in the case of a vowel. So you have full passage of air through your vocal tract, without any interaction or interruption or friction, right? So it’s it’s not a prototypical consonant, it actually sounds more like a vowel. And I guess the Swedish word for street, this gata or something
HEDVIG: Gata, yes
FABIO: Gata. So it’s more clearly a consonant vowel consonant vowel word, whereas in Danish it you can definitely hear the consonant at the beginning, and the rest is just kind of a blurry vowel-like sound. Gade [geð].
HEDVIG: Gade [geð].
DANIEL: Danish, why are you like this?
FABIO: Yeah!
HEDVIG: Yeah, why? This is the state of affairs, it is… a lot of sounds sort of bleed into each other. Why is that?
FABIO: Well, that’s a good question. And it goes back to what Daniel mentioned at the beginning. So why, how is it possible that a language becomes harder to learn instead of easier to learn, because that would be the general assumption. Which is true. So of course, languages kind of evolved to get, to become easier to be acquired by their users. But there’s also the aspect of cultural evolution, which can lead a specific language away from a maximum of processability, towards a minimum of processability, right? So there are historical cultural processes that lead languages in different directions, which might not be optimal in terms of learnability. And this is a… it goes up and down, right? So languages become easier, and then harder, and then easier again, and then harder to learn, because they change constantly. So Danish could be in a local minimum of learnability. And it might get out of it at some point.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: And so the reason is that people can still communicate enough. That’s what all, like, evolutionary change is about, right? It’s not about excelling at the job. It’s about getting it done! And if you get it done, if you’re able to do things by lesser effort, then you can just keep on minimising that effort until you hit like an absolute minimum. But then the case must be that Danish is still functional enough that it can get by with this.
FABIO: Yes, it’s about doing it well enough.
DANIEL: Yeah, it’s not that evolution rewards success so much. It’s that it just punishes failure.
FABIO: Yes.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So the idea is that this is a language that is able to avoid failures, you know. They produced Kirkegaard and other great scholars, and they have a working parliament and trade system, and you know, they’re fine, right?
DANIEL: But to avoid failure, they must have to engage in some compensatory tactics, maybe like when you’re in a conversation, or when you’re making a sentence? Have you looked into that as well?
FABIO: Yeah. So this is some of the most recent evidence that we have, is from studies of adult speaking Danes and… adult speakers of Danish and comparing them with adult speakers of Norwegian. And what we found out is that there seems to be an increased reliance on some other types of information in Danish speakers. So it seems like Danish speakers compensate for the opacity of the pronounciation by relying more on other types of cues. That would be in this case be contextual cues, right? So it seems like Danish people rely more on top-down information when processing the speech input than Norwegians do.
HEDVIG: Oh, right.
DANIEL: Like what?
FABIO: So this would be, if you have a minimal pair of sounds, for instance, we ran a categorical perception study, and it turns out that Danes use the context more to disambiguate sounds that are ambiguous. So we ran an experiment in which we use two words that are a minimal pair in Danish which is SENDT and TÆNDT, so “sent” and “lit”. So you would send an email and light a candle, for instance. And then turns out that Danes were more prone to using the sentence context in order to disambiguate the two sounds. So if you produce a kind of a hybrid between the [s] and [t] sound at the beginning of the minimal pair, right, if you put them in different contexts that were either more congruent with one interpretation or the other, then Danes would rely more on that type of information. So yeah, so there, they would be more prone to choosing for instance, SENDT if they were talking about an email, or TÆNDT, which is lit, if they were talking about a candle, even though the sound might have been maybe 50/50, a 50% mix of the two original sounds.
HEDVIG: Wow. This talk about ambiguity when you were saying the minimal pairs and things, it can sound like it would get really confusing, but just this study proves: most of the time, if you know the rest of the sentence, if you know what comes before and after, and maybe you can even see your interlocutor and you’ve had a conversation, it’s usually not that hard to disambiguate what’s going on.
FABIO: Exactly.
HEDVIG: So maybe the question should be not what’s the puzzle of Danish? But like, what’s the puzzle of all other languages? Why is, why are not all languages like Danish?
FABIO: Yes, that’s a good point. This is something we know of course: all languages use both bottom-up and top-down cues, right? So people mix information or combine information from bottom-up and top-down dimensions when trying to understand each other. And I guess the difference is that some languages rely maybe more on top-down cues than others, whereas other languages may rely more on bottom-up cues than other languages. So it’s a matter of balance between: how much do we rely on top-down versus bottom-up cues in understanding each other.
HEDVIG: I think that’s a really good point. And sometimes when people talk about linguistic complexity — whatever, whatever that is, um — there’s this assumption that if you have a lot of adult learners, and if you have a large population, and if you maybe have things like universities and books and stuff, then you’re more likely to do more bottom-up because you might have shared, less shared common ground with your interlocutor. You might meet a stranger that you don’t know, and then you can’t really rely on context clues. So maybe that drives you to use language that is more bottom-up, you know, compositional so that every… if you do follow every word, you can get the signal. Whereas if you live in a smaller community, where you don’t write as much and you don’t meet as many strangers, maybe you are more likely to do this top-down, because you don’t need to do bottom-up because everyone has a shared… same shared knowledge. This is an argument, sort of, that’s in some of the linguistic complexity literature a bit. Something… the spirit of this kind of argument, I feel like is looming over some of it. But that’s funny then, because Danish… Denmark is, you know, as language populations goes, that’s several million users. A fair amount of strangers come to Denmark, has over a long period of time, literacy has been a thing for a long time. It doesn’t really fit the profile of these types of languages, does it?
FABIO: No, I agree with you, for sure. And so it could just be that… yeah, our idea would be that these mechanisms are just a way of compensating for the pronounciation being so as opaque as it is, right? So something that children probably learn at an early age and learn to rely more on some types of information than others, because they realise that the actual speech signal is probably not as informative as it could be.
HEDVIG: Maybe more languages are weird, like this!
DANIEL: Maybe more languages! What other languages are weird? Where are they?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. But there’s a lot of them out there. And most of them haven’t been studied in such a great detail. And most of them, you know, don’t have neighbors who like to make fun of them! So you know, maybe we’ve blown up the case of Danish. Maybe there are more languages that are in this kind of minimal effort… what would you say was the opposite of a peak? Valley?
FABIO: Yeah, I call it a minimum.
DANIEL: Local minimum.
HEDVIG: Yeah. A minimum. Yeah!
FABIO: So we have examples, for instance of tribal languages that are just as weird, if not weirder, in terms of pronounciation. There’s some examples of tribal languages that only have consonants, for instance, or mostly have consonants. So that would be kind of that would be the opposite of what Danish is. But they are minor languages; they don’t have a large population of users, as Danish does. And the interesting thing about Danish is, of course it’s a major Western language in terms of how many users it has, but also that it’s… it has some interesting neighbours, as you mentioned, in the sense that we can compare Danish speakers with Swedish speakers and Norwegian speakers. Because both at the societal level and cultural level, but also at the linguistic level, they’re very similar to each other. So the only thing that really stands out is the Danish pronunciation compared to Swedish and Norwegian.
DANIEL: I’m sorry, you’re blowing my mind! Which languages have only consonants? What?!
FABIO: Yeah, so this would be that the Berber language? That’s the one we…
HEDVIG: Berber, yeah.
FABIO: That’s the one we quote in the paper.
DANIEL: Goodness gracious!
FABIO: I don’t know very much about it. I just know that they have words at least that only comprise stop consonants or obstruents.
DANIEL: Yeah, wow.
HEDVIG: If you go to the wonderful site phoible.com, which is a collection of… it’s a catalogue of languages and their phonological inventories, you can sort languages by how many vowels they have. And I see here that there are three entries of languages in this catalog that are listed as having only two vowels and over 20 consonants each.
DANIEL: Wow. Yeah, okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and there’s a whole heap that have three actually. Let’s look at that. There’s 154.
DANIEL: I had thought previously that three was some kind of lower limit, but obviously I am incorrect.
HEDVIG: Yeah, there might be… you can probably, you might be able to argue. People sometimes argue right? If, for example, if long and short vowels are two different vowels, or not?
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: This is a Scandinavian argument we like to have. [LAUGHTER] So you know, maybe some people would count them as two, and some people, that’s three. But still two and three, pretty low!
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: I have a question, which is: what has the reception been in Denmark of your research project so far? Have you… for example, has anyone in the project been on, I don’t know, Danish radio? And like, how are Danes perceiving this research?
FABIO: Well, so the first study about Danish being weird came out in the late ’90s. And there’s been a few studies coming out in the… so, since 2008, between 2008 and 2013, I think there have been a number of studies that we review in the paper that came out, and those made the news. So it’s not entirely new in Denmark, people have heard it before, but it still makes the news, and I was on national television a couple of years ago talking about this stuff. And people seemed really excited about this. People are curious and maybe even a bit proud of this? That there’s something that, you know, Danish is so unique.
HEDVIG: I must say I think that… yeah, the Danes are usually annoyingly jovial about it! I kind of almost wanted you to say that they took great offense, and then I could be like: Hahahaaa! We upset them!
DANIEL: Nope, you don’t get to.
HEDVIG: No, but we don’t get to, they’re just like: Haha, it’s very funny, I’m gonna go and eat a big sausage and have a big beer. And laugh at it. It’s like: fuck. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: We’ll be keeping track of the kind of stuff that’s coming out of this project. We’re really glad to hear about it. It’s so interesting. And it’s really got us thinking. So Fabio Trecca, of Aarhaus University, thank you so much for having a chat with us today.
FABIO: Thank you guys.
DANIEL: So that was Fabio Trecca of Aarhaus University talking about the puzzle of Danish. Any thoughts? I’ve got one. I thought it was very interesting that Danish had 40 vowels, and that that contributed to the difficulty. Could we maybe find more weird languages like this by just looking at inventories of vowels and seeing which ones have the most? Because maybe they’ll be difficult too? Eh? Eh?
MARNIE: Interesting.
HEDVIG: I think it’s a good idea. I went to the wonderful site Phoible. And you can find languages that are about as bad/good, depending on your definition of bad and good. Danish is counted as 49 vowels actually on Phoible. And there are two languages with more. One of them is a dialect/sister language of Swedish, Efdalian?
DANIEL: What?! Do you know about this one? Do you speak this?
HEDVIG: No, no, no, I don’t speak this. This is like… it’s it’s a very, very mountainous Valley region in the middle of Sweden, where basically it’s like Old Norse/Icelandic just got to progress on their own in this valley.
DANIEL: Whoa!
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s fun!
DANIEL: And which… so this is a version of Swedish?
HEDVIG: It’s very often classified as a separate language correctly. So it’s… among people who are nerds about Scandanavian stuff, this is usually well known.
DANIEL: Oh, my god.
HEDVIG: But they have… so Danish, the special thing about Danish is also that there are not that many consonants. There’s 20 consonants. Whereas… oh! [The language] So has 22 consonants.
DANIEL: Hot dog! [CLAPS HANDS IN ANTICIPATION]
HEDVIG: Hey, no one should have 50 vowels and 22 consonants. That’s not a good ratio.
DANIEL: It’s a test ground! We can do this.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Cool cool cool.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Any thoughts?
GAIL: It seems like… Having worked with adults who are learning English, sometimes for the first time, many of them come from languages that we would consider very difficult, like Chinese, with the numerous characters and things like that. And so they come to English and they go: Oh, this is really hard. And so I think what you said before, Daniel, kind of hits the nail on the head that every language has something that’s complex. You know, linguists always like to say the two basic tenets are, languages are always changing and languages are always simplifying. But sometimes it seems like when a language is simplifying in one area, it almost seems to get more complex in another. So I’ve only studied Old English, historically, not Danish. But maybe if we looked back, we could see why they have so many vowels and really kind of see what’s happening there. Because while that portion of their language system might be more difficult and more complex, we might could find other places that seem more simplified or, quote, easier, right? than something in another language. And so I think we have to kind of take that, that it might be hard to learn to speak, but maybe there are other parts of it that are easier to learn. And so I think when we even it all out, you know, like Hedvig said, you know, it, it’s a little bit slower for babies. It’s not particularly… I read an article years ago about a particular tribe in Africa where they don’t even worry about their babies speaking until they’re two, whereas most people in America if your child’s not talking by one or you know, 12 months or 16 months you’re trying to take them to the speech therapist saying: What’s wrong with my child” There’s nothing wrong. And so…
HEDVIG: Yeah.
GAIL: So you know, we have to look at that, too, is our perspective of what we assume baby should learn and when they should learn it. I do a little child language acquisition in class, and sometimes someone will say: Oh, my baby sister, or my little cousin is not there yet, or is there yet. And I say, these are just averages, these are not hard targets that you have to hit. Right? So absolutely, Danish definitely, obviously has way more vowels than English does, even if we include the diphthongs and all the different ways, you know that maybe the northern chain shift and the southern shift and things like that, the different ways people pronounce things. But at the same time, there’s probably parts of that system that are a little bit easier. And another language has something very more complex. So I, I still kind of am of the mind that it might even out at some point.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So this is what’s sometimes called like the swings and roundabouts theory; that they’re all equally whatever, whatever… I actually really don’t like the term complexity anymore. Because I think everyone when they say it means something slightly different and complex for the hearer, complex for the learner, complex for the the person producing it, complex for a baby. These are all different things. But it is noteworthy. So what they did in this paper that we discussed that just came out, they overview a bunch of different papers that worked on Danish, and they obviously had this whole research project to take in quite a comprehensive view is that it’s not second language adult learners, it’s actually babies, which is a bit of more of a fair comparison. So if you compare that to babies in Sweden or Norway, where child rearing practices are quite similar, the babies are still a bit slower. So that really stood out to me.
DANIEL: Yeah.
MARNIE: It’s interesting.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are talking to Dr Gail Clements of Duke University and Dr Marnie Jo Petray of Slippery Rock University. Thanks for hanging in there with us. We’re talking about your book, “Linguistic discrimination in US higher education: Power, prejudice, impact, and remedies.” I was wondering, just to get started, you edited this book from a whole bunch of different papers, a whole bunch of different works. What were the common themes that you noticed that were criss-crossing through all the various works? What what ideas seem to come up over and over again?
MARNIE: Standard language ideology, for sure. Lots of reference to Lippi-Green’s work, “English with an accent”. That seems to be an incredibly important foundational piece as a springboard for other people’s, you know, consideration of similar ideas.
DANIEL: I wouldn’t mind digging into that a little bit, can we? Because that’s not a work that I’ve read. And I would like to know more about it. What’s in there?
MARNIE: So it’s in the second edition, it’s a Routledge book. And she basically explores the idea of standard language ideology, and what it means within society, in terms of people’s prejudices, people’s beliefs about what’s proper, what’s not.
GAIL: The quote that’s most used in several of the chapters in our book is where Lippi-Green basically says: most other kinds of discrimination are now viewed as bad or wrong, but that language and dialect and linguistic…
MARNIE: And formalised into policy.
GAIL: Right, that language is the last, and this is her exact quote: “The last backdoor to discrimination,” that you can use language to almost legitimately discriminate against all the minorities and the non-standard speakers and things that we’ve been talking about. Because often the non-standard speakers, particularly in American context, come from lower class, they’re more rural, they’re less educated. They’re, you know, certainly African American, Hispanic, you know, so we look at sort of category of, you can arguably say race, because some people say that’s not the right term, either. But what we’re doing then is, you know, she really argues that people use language, and oh, you don’t speak standard language? I’m not going to hire you. When really, it’s not that. It’s the fact that the person was African American, or the person sounded Southern or the person sounded, you know, whatever it is. And so because the identity and who you are, and yes, your race and your gender, and things are bound up, the region you grew up in, all of these things are bound up in how you speak, that people feel that it’s necessary to change the way they speak, to be accepted, and to have more access to jobs and higher jobs and promotions and possibly different mates or higher education. And so, if we’re still discriminating people, but we’re using language as the basis, it really still is discrimination that is sexist and racist and genderist and all of these other things.
HEDVIG: So it’s sort of like people would like to, like, if they were completely honest, they maybe would say that they were discriminating based on other grounds, but they using language as sort of as an excuse.
GAIL: So here was a great event that happened. Right after we did this wonderful panel at LSA, in 2019 in January, at the beginning of January, I came home, went back to work. And here in North Carolina — a particular university in a science-based graduate degree — some students were speaking Chinese in one of the common rooms in the hallway, meant for students, not a classroom, not an assignment, not a discussion with a professor. And two professors went into the graduate office of that particular program and said: Pull up these students; pictures, we want to, we want to know who was speaking Chinese, because they’re here and they should be only practicing English. And this is really important for them. And it certainly, it is important to practice your other language when you’re at a country and another university. But it also should be okay to say: Hey, if you’re talking about class, or you don’t like that teacher, or you just feel more comfortable, right? in your home language, when you’re with your friends, you shouldn’t be called out for that.
And specifically, the teachers were wanting to see their pictures so if the students asked for recommendation in the future, an internship opportunity, or a research opportunity, they find they could deny them that, right?
HEDVIG: Oh, fuck!
GAIL: And this is at a tier-one research institution here in the south. And it ended up making BBC News, it was… the Education Minister of China likened it to what if American students that came here for study abroad? What if we told them even in the market, even in the dorm, even with their American friends they could only speak Chinese? You wouldn’t stand for that. Of course we wouldn’t. So yeah, it really does seem as if, when someone is called out, and actually the Chinese students, there was a big confab about it, right? The Chinese students, many of them even said: Had we been speaking French, maybe nobody would have even said anything. Right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
GAIL: So what you do is you get, you get that this is a racial issue of these professors and of how people view them, right? And so that’s where Lippi-Green’s quote really comes in, is they were saying: Oh, they should be practicing English, they’re here at an American University, they should take up that opportunity. And while that’s not wrong, and they are practicing in class, and in all their homeworks, and in, you know, class seminars and discussions, it’s okay. It’s absolutely fine to say, I’m with my friends, and we all speak Chinese. And we’re going to do that, you know.
DANIEL: Stop being Chinese!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: God.
MARNIE: Keep in mind that this event happened pre-COVID, right? So imagine in today’s world with all of the, you know, horrible things that are happening with respect to anti-Asian sentiment, imagine today how that same thing would play out even more dramatically, sadly. But I was gonna say too, that part of Lippi-Green’s argument is, is to kind of lay bare how ridiculous it is for us to expect, given the way that language acquisition happens in in a second language acquisition context, how ridiculous it is for us to believe that someone, you know, could actually even if they wanted to, achieve native speaker accent as their goal. You know, that there… she has this extended metaphor of the sound house in terms of how, you know, a person’s first language sort of forms a sound house and then acquiring other languages after that, you know, puts some necessary limitations in terms of what sound is going to possibly be like, and that the the individuals who can ever achieve native speaker pronunciation, whatever that might be, are going to be the super few and far between and maybe none. And that that should be okay, you know, that native speaker proficiency should not be the standard that we hold everyone to because after all, what does it really justify? So, the kind of discrimination that she covers really ranges from that to, you know, the more racially and ethnic based types that Gail was talking about.
HEDVIG: And besides these points, the other thing that this kind of ideology does, I think, is also sell the human capacity for variation very, very short. Like, being as monolingual and as monodialectal as many communities are now is, in human history, probably a rarity.
DANIEL: Very weird.
HEDVIG: We are capable of learning many varieties, we are capable of adapting to many different individuals’ usage, we are capable of all this variation. And if we don’t give students and second language learners and people access to train that capability in variation, they’re not going to be very good at it. I have friends in Sweden who struggle a bit more than me with like understanding various dialects and are studying Norwegian. And it’s just, it’s just about exposure, right? And we… yeah, we’re capable of so so much more.The human brain CAN do this! Just let it.
MARNIE: And the fear that seems to be behind hearing, for some people, hearing another language that they can’t understand, the fear that seems to go along with that is just, I don’t know, a function of some sort of weird anxiety or… I don’t understand it. You know, I don’t have a bias.
HEDVIG: It’s just xenophobia, isn’t it?
MARNIE: Yeah, it is. It really is, it’s xenophobia. I mean, to think that, you know, they’re talking about me or you know, whatever the kind of automatic, you know, ridiculous jump to conclusion that they make.
DANIEL: I noticed something in one of the chapters, about professors. A lot of professors profess — profess! — to have good attitudes about language diversity, and they can, they say: Yes, I am accepting of diversity, and they can say why it’s a good thing to be accepting of diversity. But then if they run across essays that contain African American English, they fail them.
GAIL: Yes.
DANIEL: And the essay in question was a controlled experiment where it was written in standardised English, but then there were elements of African-American English added to that already-written essay. And professors just torpedoed it.
GAIL: Absolutely.
DANIEL: So I thought that was an interesting thing.
GAIL: That’s Ho’omana Horton’s work, again at a very large, enormous university, kind of in the southeast. And he was struck by this, you know, he has one parent who’s Japanese and you know, one who’s not, and he kind of firsthand saw some language discrimination when he was younger, and was working in the Writing Center at the University, and had these students, you know, African American students come in to him and say: Hey, you know, I really need some help with this. I did terribly on my last paper. And he, as a linguist, right? was saying, well, you’re using this. And, you know, this paper is about your background, or a topic that’s close to you. And so it makes sense that linguistically, you would choose a lot of these words. And no matter what the topic was, no matter what course it was, he was seeing that students were still being downgraded. And that’s where we see, you know, again, Lippi-Green’s idea come about. Well, it’s about what’s standard and how you should write. It’s a prescriptivist look at language, right? This is how you’re supposed to write in academia.
But maybe there’s a way we can craft an assignment that allows students to talk about who they are, and talk about it in a way where they produce who they are and what they are on the page. And maybe there’s a way, like Marnie said before, both/and, right? Either/or is fallacious thinking. We should know that right? And, and so maybe we could figure out a way with some of these students where they could use that language and where they could perform language in that way that’s their own way, their home dialect, and then grade that paper based on on those things, and based on content, maybe more so. And then, yes, there are always going to be professors who require Standard English. But while a lot of these professors claim to understand and know and accept diversity, it’s still that idea, like I said, of Lippi-Green, that the language, the professors perceive it as an inability for them to speak or write in Standard. But what they’re really saying is, it’s because you’re African American, you don’t sound right. And so I’m going to downgrade that. It’s similar in Melinda Reichelt’s work, when she talks about in the book, ESL speakers coming in. Often African American students are downgraded in similar ways to ESL speakers. And there certainly have been universities that have tried to — in diversity weeks and things — educate about language differences. But it still seems to be an area where many professors feel like a gatekeeper. I am the gatekeeper, not only to my subject, but to how you talk and write within my subject, right?
DANIEL: That’s what I find so frustrating about this is, if it were just a matter of educating professors, we could do that. But no, they already understand this terrain, and yet they fail papers anyway. AHH!
MARNIE: But I think part of it is that lack of connection of language to identity. They don’t… you know, while they may have good intentions with respect to being open and inclusive with respect to their, you know, their practices, for some reason, language has been kept out of that circle of consideration. And that’s where… that’s where the problem seems to arise. People don’t consider how language is part of identity in that same way. And that the kind of bias that they’re, that they’re bringing with respect to their evaluations is detrimental, just like any other form of racism or sexism or xenophobia.
DANIEL: Hmm.
HEDVIG: How do you think, because something that we found us talking about now is written language, right? So in general, I think people have a greater tendency to understand spoken variation, and that written variation is a bit harder maybe to get over, I feel that way myself. Like, I… for a while I was looking into this Swedish dialectal corpus where there are different dialects that are written sort of phonologically. And it does take me a longer time than when I hear those dialects spoken, to get over it. But it is also just an exposure. Once you get over it, you can get over it. But what do you think about… because there’s different kinds of variation we can talk about. One is like how you spell certain words, maybe? Another one is the, like, syntactic constructions that you make. The syntactic constructions I find easier to deal with if there’s variation, than the spelling of words. Spelling of words is already removed from pronunciation in many cases. [LAUGHS] So when I see variation there, it is a little bit harder for me.
GAIL: I would, I would love to say that in those, that in our book we have a definite split, that it’s just written English. But even in the work I did, when I was doing a conference in Sweden, actually, at Örebro University back in 2019, before COVID. I surveyed a lot of my students at two universities here in North Carolina, and also sent the survey out to, you know, some professors and other things that I knew. And terribly, a professor that took my class just, you know, as an audit, not really for credit, but she teaches Hindi at the university, and she took the linguistics class, because her students had — she reported to me — that her students had told her that she needed to lose her Hindi accent because they couldn’t understand her. But she’s teaching a Hindi course. So when she spoke to them in English, she had a Hindi accent, obviously. And I had a student who reported that a professor in the middle of her giving an oral presentation, not in a linguistics class, but in a class. And she her topic was gangs. And she was from New York, and she was talking about the social movement of gangs in New York. And the professor interrupted her and said, What word are you saying? What… I don’t understand what word you’re saying. And she’s from New York. So she has more of a nasally [æ]. It was like gangs [gæ̃ŋz]. And he was like: that’s not how you pronounce that word, in front of the entire class. He calls her out. Would he have done that if she were male, would he have done? Could he not just look at the slide? Or he knew what her topic was. What… You know, but he felt the need to address it in front of her. And she said, she was mortally embarrassed. She said, “I almost cried, I dropped my cards. I, I had to kind of sort everything back out. I barely made it through the presentation. And then I left the class.” I mean, that is… and again, you know,
MARNIE: It’s demoralising.
GAIL: Absolutely. And he could have said… if he didn’t really understand it, he could have said something afterwards. He could have said: You know, I had a little bit of difficulty, just because our accents are different and could you you know, talk me through some of these things, or…. But, you know, it just, there was a different way to approach that. And it just to me, when she was recounting it, felt like he wanted to call her out. He wanted to downgrade her. Right? And, and same with the students in the… if you take a class in Hindi, you should expect that your teacher might have a Hindi accent and…
DANIEL: Might be a good thing. [LAUGHTER]
GAIL: And so I think we see that still, even in spoken language, we still have people getting downgraded on evaluations. Professors… Geoffrey Pullum just mentioned, you know something about how a student didn’t think he spoke good English. And he has almost RP, right? from England. And he said, you know, the other students were like, why can’t he talk better? And they were like: you know, it’s, that’s a really great standard dialect and accent patterning for England. It is different in the United States. But why can’t you get to the fact that it’s the same words? You know, and so even with spoken language, people still seem to have this real ingrained prejudice.
MARNIE: And research does demonstrate, you know, given the same photograph, for example, you know, with two different samples of spoken language, that belief or you know, perception is part of what feeds into their notion of comprehensibility. So they can say that one text spoken is comprehensive when they believe that the person is white, or you know, a native speaker. And when the picture or the image is something that they could perceive is not native speaker, then suddenly they can’t understand it. So perception, it’s not just a simple matter of pure scientific comprehensibility, as if that’s something that can be measured quantitatively.
DANIEL: We’ve heard a lot of bad stories. Tell me some good stories. Have you run across anybody who’s doing this right? Who should I be like?
GAIL: We have a couple of chapters in the text, one by Walt Wolfram and Stephanie Dunstan and they’re at North Carolina State University. And Walt Wolfram runs the Language in Life project here in North Carolina, which actually has a lot of materials for, like, K through 12 teachers. But what he’s done at NC State is include linguistics in diversity weeks, have trainings for professors. He’s really kind of — he and his team, right? He’s got grad students and other people that help with this — but they’ve really done a lot of work. He’ll stand outside in the university when all the fresh, year ones the fresh people are moving in, with big placards and like a sandwich board and say things like, you know: Howl Like You Want To, because they’re The Wolf Pack. So their thing is howl this way, or howl that way. And so he’ll like, you know Howl Like a Wolf Pack, and Wolf Packs Howl in Lots of Different Ways, and he really tries to get the students, the faculty, the administration on board. Now, obviously, it’s not perfect, but that sort of way of trying to educate… he has an article called “educating the educated”, right? Trying to teach professors about these things.
And that system has been sort of adapted by Christina Higgins, who is at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. And she also has a chapter in the book, and she’s really working on, for a long time, Hawaiian Pidgin, or Creole English was not allowed in the university, not allowed in the schools, downgraded, you know. And she’s really worked, not only with the local school systems, but on the university campus with different activities and trainings to have other professors recognise that this is a legitimate way of communicating. And it’s not deficient, it’s different, right? That’s the kind of thing. There is no deficiency in Hawaiian Pidgin English or Creole English, it’s just different. And what we need to do is allow students to present in that, or to write in that. And that is a legitimate way of communicating in certain parts of the world, particularly when you’re a university in Hawaii. And so they’ve been able to kind of get some of these things back into their campus and have discussions and really look at professors and call professors to account. And it does seem to be making some movement on those campuses. But we need something more widespread, we need administrators to really tackle this as well, with us.
HEDVIG: It seems like one of the barriers is sort of exposure and training to be able to read it without… So I often get the writing advice like: reading your writing should be effortless as far as possible, right? You don’t want people to get stuck up on things. You want them to get to the meaning of what you’re saying. And in order to do that you need to conform to certain norms. That sort of what I’ve repeatedly been told.
MARNIE: Is that effortless?
GAIL: Not at all.
MARNIE: I’ve never heard of the advice before to make… that good writing is effortless. Quite the contrary.
HEDVIG: Not effortless to produce, certainly not. Effortless to read.
MARNIE: I remember a colleague saying to me recently, like: Sometimes I don’t have the time to be efficient in my language, because it does take time to sort of, you know, be less wordy, as opposed to wordy.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. This reminds me of… I saw that there’s a thing that’s going around the internet right now, the great British writer Douglas Adams, who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, among other things. His writing, when you read it is quite effortless, to me at least. And apparently, he really struggled. And it was so much time and effort to make it like that. And I think that’s true, you know, you shouldn’t be fooled by… when you read something that’s effortless to read, that probably meant it took a lot of effort from the writers. But what I wanted to get at is that for a lot of people, dealing with variation in written language is effort-full for them. Right? And part of that is maybe training and exposure. So if you… if you more often read Hawaiian Creole English, if you more often read variations of English, you’d probably not find it as much effort.
MARNIE: Right.
HEDVIG: So how do we train people and give them exposure to these things?
MARNIE: Yeah, so for a different project for the LSA we, for linguistics in higher education, we did a study of second… well, of master’s programs that train teachers at the Masters… masters programs that train teachers who were involved in language teaching. Some of them were TESOL, other ones were, you know, foreign or second language, or world languages. And we looked at how well integrated linguistics was into the curricula. And sadly, we found out the answer was: not very much. So it seems even from the standpoint of language teacher training — and we just looked at Master’s levels programs — but it seems like even from the standpoint of language teacher training, that there’s not enough exposure, even at the basic level, to have linguistics, and to have language as a science part of what people learn, when actually what they’re doing with their career is teaching language. So it seems like a no-brainer that it would be there. But in fact, it’s not.
And the reason for it, you know, there are a lot of reasons for it. One of them, obviously, is that every university today is struggling with how to pack more into less, you know, the number of credits a program has and all the restrictions on enrollments and how much people have to mind their economics plays into what they have time to do in their curricula. But it just seems like on some basic level that if your job is to teach language, you would get at least an introduction to linguistics, because it’s… it’s sort of like, you know, teaching algebra without having had math or something. It’s just the most basic level exposure that we could give them. So that that would be one help for sure.
DANIEL: Which is why we try to do an end run around the crowded curriculum, by making it entertaining!
MARNIE: Yes. Right.
DANIEL: More linguistics is always the answer.
MARNIE: I was gonna say too, in the final chapter, one of the… you know, we don’t want to accuse our colleagues in higher education of all being conscientious about this discrimination.
GAIL: Absolutely.
MARNIE: Some of them have very good intentions, they’re not necessarily aware, maybe they’re not, you know… they themselves didn’t have the benefit of being trained in linguistics. So one of the things we want to do, especially with regard to this idea of you know, thinking of it as difference not deficient, is to encourage them to be very self reflective. And what… you know, one of the most basic things we can all do as professionals is what Vincent Leach calls intimate critique. And so just reflecting on, you know, what do you do in the classroom that actually could be reflective of these ideas? And what does it mean? And how could you change it? And how could you adapt it? Even if you start in very small ways, of introducing one new assignment, to let your students, let your learners explore the way that language is a function of their identity, would be a step in the right direction. So like, in my intro to linguistics courses, I oftentimes had a writing assignment called a linguistic autobiography. And I think it’s a pretty common thing, at least within the states that’s done in linguistics courses so that students could reflect on their home language, whether it’s, you know, a non-standard variety of English or another language altogether. But to sort of think about how they use that language and what functions, what does it sound like, you know, what… what are the structures there? What other people that they know use it, and it starts to uncover the ways that other varieties play important roles in our lives and that can elevate the conversation in the right way.
DANIEL: We are four white people talking about linguistic discrimination.
[LAUGHTER]
MARNIE: Right.
DANIEL: And we don’t want to Columbus this issue. On the other hand, there are some good reasons for white academics to be in this fight. Why should we be talking about this? And how do we do it as white people?
GAIL: I come at it as a southerner, because certainly in the United States, right, Southern English is looked down upon, and is often tied to racism, and classism, being less educated and all of these things. And when I walk into class, and I give an example to my students, right? I say: Oh, my goodness, guys, I just walked into the bathroom. And we have these, you know, the lights automatically come on, right to save power. So they go off when there’s no movement in the room. And I walked in, and what I thought to myself, when I walked in the bathroom, and the lights weren’t on was: “Nobody done turned these lights on yet”, like nobody’s been in here, right? In my little Southern — right? — ideology in my own head and the way I communicate to myself. So I put that example on the board. And I said, here’s what I just said to myself, “Nobody’s done turned on these lights yet”, right? That’s not standard at all. And I said, who understands what I thought to myself? Everybody raises their hand, even the non native English speakers, right?
So I use myself as an example in class, I use myself as an example in the book, I use myself as, as: this is who I am. And I recognise that about myself. I don’t certainly understand racism, I’m kind of just middle class, right? So I really don’t get the classist ideology as well. I’ve never experienced that. But I think it’s important for us to say: Hey, this is something that no matter what your race, no matter what your background, we really need to be talking about this. And, and let’s put it forward. And let’s… that was such an important part of the book was getting so many other voices — right? — into the text. Making sure that we had a Native American or at least mixed Native American, working on that chapter, making sure that we had, you know, people from other places, and people with other backgrounds, kind of commenting on these things as well.
And it was difficult, because not all academics… we certainly know that there’s a disparity there are not as many minority academics, right? That’s something else we really need to foster, to build up our diversity in the faculty as we try to build up diversity in our student bodies. And so it really seems important to say: hey, I’ve recognised this in myself. Even as a southerner, and a woman, I often still have caught myself grading something and I’ll… you know, and then I go back and go, you know what, minus zero this time because I understand why you’re doing this, right? And I’ll talk to the student and I’ll say: Hey, I get why you’re doing this, and it’s actually okay here. I don’t know if other professors will be okay with this, you may want to think about that as you move forward in your writing or in your presentation or whatever it might be. But it’s important for us to recognise it and tell other people. And that way, then others can come up and say: yeah, I’ve had this too. Yeah, I’ve, I’ve experienced that as well. No matter your background, we can kind of have this dialogue.
MARNIE: Yeah, clearly, one of the many problems with higher ed is the woefully insufficient representation of administrators and faculty and students of colour, other minority and disenfranchised groups. And I think that white academics need to discuss these issues within among those who bear the brunt of this discrimination, because we have much to learn from one another about how to be more inclusive, how to rectify the biases, the things, the research that’s demonstrated in our book. I think such dialogue can be productive and lead to new knowledge for everyone, and lead to the betterment of our institutions. And that’s something we can all get on board with.
HEDVIG: Maybe, Daniel, your question could also be phrased sort of like, why would we leave these kinds of discussions to non white people? That sounds like a very difficult and heavy burden, to just sort of choose to not… to not engage with?
DANIEL: That’s what I got from a discussion that we both went to a session, an LSA session. It was Anne Charity Hudley who said “as Black women, we’re programmed to take the fire, but it’s getting old.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, it’s rough! It’s gotta be.
DANIEL: And you know what? Also people listen to us, I mean, we’re the least, I mean, I’m the LEAST qualified person to talk about this, but I’m also going to be the most listened to, for unfair reasons. So man, I guess, I’m not gonna say I know everything. And I’m gonna pass the mic whenever I can, to the voices of people of colour, people who have experience with this stuff. But I’m also going to, in a humble way, try to do some of the work insofar as I can.
HEDVIG: That’s a really hard thing to say, Daniel! Because that’s really hard to say without sounding very non-humble. I’m sorry.
DANIEL: I know! It’s terrible.
HEDVIG: I’m sorry. I know, I don’t know what to say instead.
DANIEL: Well, that’s why I fronted it with that, because I knew that this is, I’m gonna say this, and it’s gonna sound really bad. So um, but you know, you gotta… you got… it requires me to do a lot of work on myself too, you know? Like, I got to deal with my fragility when I make mistakes and get called out: Okay, that’s cool. You know, that’s why I think that the quality that is so important, and that so many… We’ve been rough on some academics during this year of the show, like the LSA Open Letter episode that we did, all right, we call out some specific people. The quality that I find absent in those people is intellectual humility, and it is so repulsive when it’s absent. And it is so attractive, for me anyway, when it’s present. And I just think it’s so necessary.
MARNIE: I agree. I always hate to witness colleagues using their degree and their status as a weapon to prove how brilliant they are. It’s just incorrigible, you know? And faculty doing it to students as well. I mean, that’s kind of part of the idea of how standard operates, is kind of a imprimatur of I know more than you. Well, that’s not necessarily the case. You may know some things more than me. But I learn as much from my students as they learn from me, at least I hope that that’s, you know, that’s the give and take that we all signed up for.
DANIEL: The book is “Linguistic discrimination in US higher education: Power, prejudice, impacts and remedies.” It’s available now from Routledge. So Gail Clements and Marnie Jo Petray, thank you so much for talking about your work with us today.
GAIL: Thank you.
MARNIE: Thanks for having us.
[TRANSTIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: It’s our Words of the Week, where we talk about words that are breaking, trending, on our minds. Gail and Marnie, you had a word for us?
MARNIE: So our word was PIVOT.
HEDVIG: Ah ha!
DANIEL: Which is something that’s very difficult for boats to do.
[LAUGHTER]
MARNIE: In the Suez Canal, right?
DANIEL: When they are launched in a canal.
HEDVIG: Why are Americans…? So I only saw this in the news because of Twitter and Americans tweeting about it. I went up in the morning and I looked at my Dolce Vella news app, wasn’t on there. I went to my Google Home and I was like, what are the news from BBC? Wasn’t really on there. Someone in America I think blew this up.
GAIL: There are memes. There are memes everywhere. As a matter of fact, I showed my son a meme last night and it’s too particular from Austin Powers where Mike Myers as the actor is trying to get the little vehicle and it’s stuck in between the walls and they put little cargo things all over it. And then the other one I showed my son with the cargo ship with Bernie, from… Bernie Sanders, and his little gloves and hat from the inauguration, and they put Bernie on top of the… so it’s kind of meshing memes together now. So for some reason it has captivated us. I don’t
HEDVIG: It really has.
MARNIE: Isn’t it supposed to impact the price of oil?
GAIL: I think.
MARNIE: You know, because of… Right?
GAIL: If other ships can’t get through. Absolutely. Right.
DANIEL: Meanwhile, the sun just keeps on shining! [LAUGHTER] How about that? Something to think about!
HEDVIG: Maybe we should just for people who might listen to this years later say what it’s about. So in the Suez Canal in Egypt, which connects the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean, and the Arabic Gulf, there is a big, big, big ship that is stuck diagonally. That’s fair enough?
GAIL: Absolutely.
DANIEL: My partner and I were talking about this. And she said “that boat should just, you know, like, go straight.”
GAIL: Most of them do, right?
DANIEL: They do. I said: Would you like me to get their phone number and you can suggest that? Because I think they could really… I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that going straight is one of those things that they covered on the first day of boat driving school. I think!
GAIL: Of course, we were kind of also coming at the word, it is perfectly timely for the funny bits, right? But Marnie had a great kind of reason for suggesting it in the first place. So I will let her take it away.
DANIEL: Go Marnie.
MARNIE: So, at least within my institution, pivoting, pivoting online for education, pivoting to remote instruction, then pivoting back to the classroom, even within a hybrid delivery context, you know, pivoting back and forth between the two, depending on what someone’s institution is asking them to do. So it seems like we’re all pivoting today, for lots of reasons connected to covid.
DANIEL: What a great word. And that’s not one that I would have noticed, you know, like coming up over and over again, and I’ve been, I’ve been noticing the covid stuff, but that’s a great one.
GAIL: I was thinking even about our text, when she suggested the word I thought, you know, it really works metaphorically as well, because a pivot is a point around which the object turns, right? And I was thinking, you know, language is the point at which around our identity, our life, school, so many things turns. And so if language is the point around which so many things turn, then it really is integral to daily communication in school and work and education and so many things.
DANIEL: PIVOT. That’s awesome.
HEDVIG: PIVOT. Yeah, I like it.
DANIEL: That’s super relevant, super important. All right, good word. Hedvig, you came with not a word, but an entire phrase.
HEDVIG: Well, I just heard this phrase, I saw it sort of trending and being spread around and I really liked it. And it’s one of those things that everyone’s sharing, but I’m not sure if we all have the same reading of it, so I’d be interested to know what you thought. So what’s being shared is a screen grab from Tumblr, where someone says something that is essentially a spoiler for a TV show. And then someone else says, “Please God, let me find these things out normally, I’m begging you.” And then the other one says, “If you go to the circus for news, don’t complain if a clown tells it to you.” [LAUGHTER] And I liked it. And I think I understand what it means. It means, like: you spoil this for yourself by coming here. Sort of.
DANIEL: I feel like we’re walking the line here between clever sayings and conventionalised idioms.
HEDVIG: I’m not really sure what that line is. If that line is…
DANIEL: Do you feel like this, this is working its way into a common expression? Or do you think this is a clever expression that someone came up with?
HEDVIG: I don’t know. When I googled it, I mainly get this screengrab from Tumblr. I saw it being spread around on Twitter by my favourite Geeta Jackson. And I… yeah, I don’t know, I just a lot of people really like it. It all gets retweets with the thing of, like: Oh, I love that, or that really made me you know, just, like really happy, but no one seems to say what they think it means. So what do you think it means?
GAIL: When you first read it and I first read it last night on the the document you sent, I thought, you know, a lot of people that are doing the news, at least in the United States are not actually journalists. And so we get we get very polarised news sites, right? And we get a lot of people just commenting on the news and what they think it means too. And so I kind of thought, if you go to the circus for news, well, you wouldn’t go to a circus with a ringleader and, you know, trapeze artists and things like that for news. So if you go to these sites that are not reputable or credible, then, you know, don’t complain if you get the wrong information was kind of how I read it.
DANIEL: I like that. I’m into that. It made me wonder what other circus idioms there are. I’ve got a couple but I wonder if anybody guessed mine.
HEDVIG: Is barrel of monkeys an idiom?
MARNIE: I guess it could be…
GAIL: Not really a circus thing. I don’t know, is it?
MARNIE: Three ring circus.
GAIL: Yeah, three ring circus.
DANIEL: I think we should normalise the monkeys outside of the circus context. That’s, I just, you know, I’m very pro-monkey.
HEDVIG: I see.
DANIEL: Let them out of the barrel, Hedvig! I thought of this one that was monkey related or monkey adjacent. “Not my circus, not my monkeys.”
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah.
MARNIE: Which is a reference to the Wizard of Oz right?
DANIEL: It is?!
MARNIE: I thought so.
GAIL: Fly monkeys, fly.
DANIEL: I wasn’t… I wasn’t thinking of that. It appears to be a Polish proverb, a straight translation from Polish. It’s like: there are problems that I have, they belong to me. There are problems that do not belong to me and I do not have to fix them. Which I think is very good.
MARNIE: And I’m a spectator. I can just sit back and enjoy all the, yeah.
DANIEL: Yep. These monkeys are, do not pertain to me.
HEDVIG: There’s gotta be more with clowns, right?
MARNIE: Yeah, three ring circus.
DANIEL: Yep. Media circus, naturally.
HEDVIG: Right, media circus. Yeah, that’s true.
GAIL: We call people a ringleader. But it’s not really a metaphor. It’s just taking that particular.
DANIEL: That’s good. Oh, that’s good. I thought of “bread and circuses”.
MARNIE: I don’t know that.
GAIL: I don’t know that.
HEDVIG: Oh, yes, as in the Roman thing.
DANIEL: This is… Yeah, this is an ancient Roman thing. The Roman poet Juvenal, who pointed out in one of his satirical Juvenalias that leaders were trying to placate the masses with with food and diversion instead of governing responsibly. Actually, I think giving food is actually a pretty good idea, but anyway.
HEDVIG: And circus in that setting, I think also might include like Hippodromes and stuff.
DANIEL: Hippodromes?
HEDVIG: Like, you race horses. The Romans love this. Byzantines love this as well. Horse racing.
DANIEL: I had not until this minute realise that Hippodromes did not actually involve hippos.
HEDVIG: No, no, it’s horses. Hippopotamuses are, are…
DANIEL: River horses.
HEDVIG: Yeah, river horses, obviously.
DANIEL: I was telling my daughter this today. My four year old daughter in the car because we heard — you won’t believe this — we heard “The Mesopotamians” which is a song by They Might Be Giants. And I was explaining that Mesopotamia meant “between the rivers”, “in the middle of the rivers”, and then the “river horse” thing went from there, but I did not extend it to the drome of the hippos.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s a hippodrome.
DANIEL: Which are not hippos.
MARNIE: I just cheated in Google. And so DOG AND PONY SHOW.
GAIL: Oh, that’s a good one.
HEDVIG: Oh yeah, that’s a good one.
DANIEL: Good, good. Good. Good.
MARNIE: Always pejorative.
DANIEL: Yeah, yes, yes. For some reason, we look down on circuses, and we don’t honour the work of the brave people who labour therein. Sorry, I didn’t mean to make everyone feel bad. Sorry. [LAUGHTER] Alright, so PIVOT, and… if you hang on, I have to scroll down to get the whole thing on the page.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it’s not really a word, is it?
DANIEL: That’s okay. I’m okay with that. If you go to the circus for news, don’t complain if a clown tells it to you. It’s our words slash phrases of the week. Gail Clements and Marnie Jo Petray, thank you so so so much for coming on the show today and telling us about your work. It’s been so much fun to have you.
GAIL: Thanks, you guys, it’s been so fun.
MARNIE: Great to be here, thanks.
DANIEL: Once again, the book is “Linguistic discrimination in US higher education: Power, prejudice, impact and remedies.” It’s available now from Routledge. Go get it, go read it, recommend it to your classes, recommend it to your university library. That’d be a good idea.
[ENDNG MUSIC]
HEDVIG: And as we reached the end of the show, we want to remind you all that if you have a question, comment, or if you just want to say hi you can get in touch with us. We are on so many things! We really really are.
DANIEL: All the things!
HEDVIG: We’re on all the things and we are becauselangpod on basically all the things. We’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastadon, Patreon, TikTok and Clubhouse. I am wondering how we can sustain all of these? I’m going to leave that answer to Daniel.
DANIEL: I’m busy.
HEDVIG: The most straightforward way of getting in touch with us may be a good old fashioned email. Most people have emails. But you can of course also send us messages on all of these other platforms. But if you choose to send us a good old fashioned email, that is at hello@becauselanguage.com. And if you like the show, please tell a friend about us, or leave us a review in all the places where you can leave a review, [WHISPERS] especially iTunes Store is a really good to leave a review for all podcasts that you like.
DANIEL: Yes, please.
HEDVIG: Every podcast will tell you that is a good place to leave them. If you do these things, if you tell a friend about us, or if you leave us a review, that will mean that more people will find us. And we would as usual by now also say thank you to Dustin of the podcast Sandman Stories, who continues to recommend us and many other great pods on Twitter whenever someone bravely asks the question if someone knows any good podcasts, which is an insane question to ask. But Dustin is always there saying “Yes, Yes, I do. I do indeed.” And then he sends them to us and other great shows. And another way you can support us is also by becoming a Patreon. If you become a patron on Patreon, we can improve the show with the money you give us. Among other things we spend that money on transcripts. Maya Klein of Voicing Words does our transcripts, and transcripts lets people who may be struggling to keep up with our voices access content from our show, but also it makes it possible for us to search episodes and find previous things we’ve said. So if we wanted to know in what particular show some particular anecdote was told, you can find them easily and you can find them as well.
DANIEL: How many times does Ben say fuck in an episode?
HEDVIG: That’s true. Oh my gosh, this opens up so many venues. We can do stats.
DANIEL: I know. It’s like the Because Language corpus.
HEDVIG: If you have any guesses on which one of us says fuck the most, I’d like to know, because maybe we can find that out.
DANIEL: Not counting this bit.
HEDVIG: Not counting this bit.
DANIEL: It’s not me. I can tell you. We would like to give a very special shout out to our top Patrons: Termy, Chris B, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Damien, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Lyssa, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Andrew, James, Shane, Eloise, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Manú, and Kevin. Big thanks to all of our patrons for your support. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who is a member of Ryan Beno, and of Dideon’s Bible, two bands worth checking out. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. Because Language.