Linguistics as a discipline throws up challenges to Indigenous linguists. At the same time, they’re the ones called upon to fix it. It can’t stay like this. How do we make linguistics a safe place to work?
Daniel, Hedvig, and very special co-host Ayesha Marshall are having a yarn with Lesley Woods and Dr Alice Gaby about their work in changing linguistics for the better.
Listen to this episode
Patreon supporters
Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to:
- Dustin
- Termy
- Chris B
- Chris L
- Matt
- Whitney
- Damien
- JoAnna
- Helen
- Bob
- Jack
- Kitty
- Lord Mortis
- Elías
- Erica
- Michael
- Larry
- Binh
- Kristofer
- Andy
- Maj
- James
- Nigel
- Kate
- Jen
- Nasrin
- River
- Nikoli
- Ayesha
- Moe
- Steele
- Andrew
- Manú
- James
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Jonathan
- Colleen
- glyph
- Ignacio
- Kevin
- Jeff
- Dave H
- Andy from Logophilius
- Samantha
And most recently:
- zo
- Kathy
- and udo
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
‘Talking drum’ shown to accurately mimic speech patterns of west African language
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-shown-accurately-mimic-speech-patterns.html
Frontiers | Rhythm-Speech Correlations in a Corpus of Senegalese Drum Language | Communication
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.643683/full
ATLAS – Yorùbá: Pronunciation
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/atlas/yoruba/pronunciation.html
Frontiers | When Music Speaks: An Acoustic Study of the Speech Surrogacy of the Nigerian Dùndún Talking Drum | Communication
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.652690/full
New study finds people who speak more are more likely to be viewed as leaders
https://www.psypost.org/2021/07/new-study-finds-people-who-speak-more-are-more-likely-to-be-viewed-as-leaders-61540
Testing the babble hypothesis: Speaking time predicts leader emergence in small groups – ScienceDirect
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1048984320300369
Testing the babble hypothesis: Speaking time predicts leader emergence in small groups — Waseda University
https://waseda.pure.elsevier.com/en/publications/testing-the-babble-hypothesis-speaking-time-predicts-leader-emerg
Words matter: Language can reduce mental health and addiction stigma — ScienceDaily
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210718213303.htm
[PDF] Choosing appropriate language to reduce the stigma around mental illness and substance use disorders
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-021-01069-4.pdf
Project MUSE – Toward linguistic justice for Indigenous people: A response to Charity Hudley, Mallinson, and Bucholtz
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/775381
Decolonising Linguistics: Spinning a Better Yarn – Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language
http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/ialr/decolonising-linguistics-spinning-a-better-yarn/
“Meet the Authors” Webinar: Toward Racial Justice in Linguistics (Language, Volume 96, Number 4) – YouTube
Project MUSE – Toward racial justice in linguistics: Interdisciplinary insights into theorizing race in the discipline and diversifying the profession
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/775377
What is biophilic design and why is it so popular?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90333072/what-is-biophilic-design-and-can-it-really-make-you-happier-and-healthier
More NSW spreadyboi locations : CoronavirusDownunder
https://www.reddit.com/r/CoronavirusDownunder/comments/opxpgj/more_nsw_spreadyboi_locations/
Dat Boi | Know Your Meme
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/dat-boi
Boi – Nonbinary Wiki
https://nonbinary.miraheze.org/wiki/Boi
Ngiyampaa dictionary: Winangakirri
https://nyngan.storylines.com.au/2016/08/25/goals-goal-setting/
Transcript
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE INTRO THEME]
DANIEL: Hello and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. She’s linguist, podcaster, and part-time cat entertainer, it’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: Yes. I have cats and they need entertainment. This is true. Thank you very much.
DANIEL: They’re very demanding.
HEDVIG: Ah, yeah. They’re very active. They want to be played with. They want to move in an unpredictable pattern. This is true.
DANIEL: Don’t we all? Not a linguist, but also not Ben. It’s our good friend and Ben’s actual partner, it’s Ayesha Marshall! Ayesha, thank you for coming on the show.
AYESHA MARSHALL: Thank you so much for having me. I love hearing about Hedvig’s cat because, on the other hand, I have a 16-year-old demented cat with chronic kidney disease that I manage at home, who has long lost her interests and wants.
HEDVIG: Aww.
AYESHA: It’s so nice imagining her when she was younger, and when I see other cats who still have that energy, I really, really love it.
DANIEL: Aww, give her a pat for us. We love the idea of doing partner episodes. Hedvig’s partner, Stephen Mann, is coming on to our next Journal Club. So, it is great to have you here. Tell us about yourself a little bit.
AYESHA: Oh, gosh. Well, I am a medical doctor and I work in intensive care. I also work in medical education, and I do a lot of work in terms of social justice, intersexual feminism, and increasing gender parity and gender representation in medicine. So, I have just a lot of interest in that area. My other medical area is also palliative care. So, just wide-ranging interests.
DANIEL: It is great to have you. We have a couple of special guest cohosts. First up, Lesley Woods, who is a doctoral student at the Australian National University or ANU. Hello, Lesley.
LESLEY WOODS: Hello. How are you?
DANIEL: Doing well. Tell us about the kind of linguistics that you do.
LESLEY: I’m currently doing my PhD, as you just said. We’re writing a plain language grammar of my language, Ngiyampaa, just to make it accessible to the community, decoding linguistic terminology.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: That’s really cool.
DANIEL: We also have returning champion, Dr Alice Gaby, of Monash University. Hello, Alice.
ALICE GABY: Hello.
DANIEL: We’ve talked to you before about your work with speakers of Marshallese and how people use language to talk about directions instead of north, south, east, and west.
ALICE: That’s absolutely true. One of my great research passions. It’s lovely to be here.
DANIEL: It’s great to have you back.
HEDVIG: Oh, that’s fascinating, Alice, because I struggle with the north, south, east, and west. I’m really, really bad at that. Very bad at that.
ALICE: A lot of English speakers do, you’re not alone. You can get by without them in English-speaking countries, but there are plenty of places where you’d be in trouble.
DANIEL: Well, I just switched to talking about seaward and landward. That’s all I knew.
HEDVIG: Yeah, Perth.
AYESHA: Yeah, in Perth, makes a lot of sense. At our newest hospital, Fiona Stanley Hospital, it was built with all indications to seaward and landward. So, there’s the red side and the blue side of the hospital. All of the Indigenous art is from that area, demonstrating those two sides. It’s been great. It’s been fantastic for patients and also as clinicians for us to learn more about.
DANIEL: Wow.
ALICE: And do you feel you pay more attention to that distinction now that’s becoming part of your habitus?
AYESHA: Definitely, because you find yourself constantly saying it to patients and families, “Head to the seaward elevators and take them up to this floor.” It’s fantastic. It’s really good.
ALICE: Well, that’s how it happens. [laughs] Seeping its way into your brain without you even realizing it.
DANIEL: Now, Ayesha and myself, we’re on Whadjuk country, the Noongar people’s land. Lesley, how about you?
LESLEY: I’m on Kariyarra country in Port Hedland, Western Australia.
HEDVIG: And, Alice, where are you?
ALICE: I’m on Wurundjeri country here in the north side of Melbourne. And I would love to acknowledge that country in Woiwurrung, but sadly, that language is still in reclamation mode. So, it’s for the community to reclaim that language first before nonIndigenous people like me start using it.
HEDVIG: As listeners of this show know, I’m in Europe. I’m not in Australia at all. I’m the only person here not in Australia. I’m in Germany, and there is no such convention of acknowledging country here really. But we were wondering if, Lesley, would you like to do a Welcome to Country?
LESLEY: Yes, I would like to do a Welcome to Country. Our language is also a reclamation language and we just put this Welcome to Country and acknowledgement of country together a couple of weeks ago. The first time I used it was last week. This is the second time I’ll be using it and I’m still a little bit clunky with it, so you’ll have to forgive me.
[speaks Ngiyampaa]
Hello, my name is Lesley. I’m a Ngiyampaa person. I live and work in Kariyarra country. Since the beginning of time, Aboriginal people have been on country. We must always remember our old men and our old women, elders past and present. We must always remember to take care of the earth, the water, and the trees and make our country well.
HEDVIG: That’s beautiful.
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: Thank you.
LESLEY: You’re welcome.
DANIEL: One of the things we’re going to be talking about today is some work that you two have been doing on decolonizing linguistics, making the process of working with Aboriginal people and Indigenous people more fair and equitable. This work was actually published way back in December. We’ve been trying to get to this episode for a long time, it’s taken eight months. But I guess that is academic timescale, is it not?
ALICE: Ethically appropriate.
DANIEL: [laughs] Perfect. Well, before we get to that, let me just say, we can do this show because we are supported by a number of wonderful patrons. So, thanks to all of you. They keep the show ad free, and they help us to make transcripts. You can be a patron to and depending on your reward level, you can listen to bonus episodes, hang out with us on our Discord channel, get our yearly merch mailouts, and all patrons automatically get warm and fluffy feelings. If you’d like to support the show, you can do that on Patreon for as little as $1 a month. We are becauselangpod. Thanks everybody.
Hey, Ayesha, this is where you do the thing.
HEDVIG: [laughs] No, I can try and do the thing.
AYESHA: I don’t know the thing. I hear Ben doing the thing in another room most of the time, but—
DANIEL: I can’t talk you through this. You have to do it yourself.
HEDVIG: Or should I try and do it instead?
DANIEL: Okay, that’s fine. Ayesha, do— [crosstalk]
AYESHA: No, go for it, Hedvig. [crosstalk]
HEDVIG: Thank you all of our patrons. It’s good to have your support. Now, Daniel, what’s been happening in linguistics in the news gone past, is how I’m going to phrase it, and I’m not going to redo a retake.
DANIEL: Well, I’ll tell you. This one was suggested to us by Wolf of the Wisp. I don’t know if anybody’s ever heard of talking drums. Anyone?
HEDVIG: Alice raises her hand.
DANIEL: What do you know, Alice?
ALICE: Well, I know of a community in the Amazon, I think. It’s on the border of Colombia and Peru, the Bora people who use drums to communicate with one another over vast distances, really huge.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: This is actually giving me a feeling of the whistled languages of the world where they can communicate over large distances by converting the speech into whistles.
HEDVIG: Or like in some places in Europe, where you’re out herding animals, and you’re on different places, and you do— not like yodeling, but these really forceful— I don’t know if anyone’s heard them, but— [laughs] I can’t do them.
AYESHA: Hedvig, can you do one?
HEDVIG: They’re so loud and it’s 8:00 AM in my apartment building in Europe, and it’s a Sunday when we’re recording, which in Germany is considered to be a place of silence, so I won’t do it. This is a style of singing, you can say, that’s just incredibly loud. But all of these things are meant to be getting your language across large distances, is what I want to get at.
ALICE: It’s the regular words, but they’re just projecting them a lot louder or is there sort of a modification of the language?
HEDVIG: No, they’re modified and they’re in the singing style that’s really loud. You do them both to animals, but also to people. It’s like you want your animals to come to a place. I’ll find a recording and maybe Daniel will splice it in.
DANIEL: We will add a link on the blog post for this episode. That’s becauselanguage.com. Well, this is about the Dùndún. I’m not saying dun-dun, I’m just saying Dùndún, because this is about Yoruba.
HEDVIG: Yoruba, language of Nigeria, I believe.
DANIEL: Yep, that’s right. And the Dùndún is they’re talking drums. So, this is some work in the frontiers in communication. And we’re talking about something called speech surrogacy, where instead of speaking, you use some other thing as a surrogate. Now, the thing about Yoruba is that it has tones. It has three tones, rising, falling and flat. That’s why the drum is not the dun-dun, it’s the Dùndún. The drum has three tones as well. That’s because there’s a ring that you can use to increase or decrease the tension on the skin, so that you can actually give it a bit of a whoop or a oop, a little bit of tone, which is very cool. I was going to try to play this. Can I just play a couple of things? The first thing I’m going to play is a speech sample of Yoruba.
[Yoruba language]
DANIEL: And then, I’m going to play the drums.
[Dùndún playing]
HEDVIG: Wow.
AYESHA: That’s fascinating.
HEDVIG: That sounded like intonation cycle.
DANIEL: You can really hear the tones, right?
ALICE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
ALICE: Bora is also a tonal language, so it makes sense. I’m right on the opposite side of the world of Nigeria, but it makes sense for that kind of system to work, you need those tones to cue into what the words potentially be.
DANIEL: These are strategies, aren’t they? What this research team did was, they wanted to see if there was really a connection between the speaking and the drums. So, they got recordings of people saying sentences in Yoruba, and then they got professional drummers who had been drumming for decades on the Dùndún to mimic what they were hearing, the speech that they were hearing. Then, they did some analysis of the pitch and the tone and intensity, and they found that there was just a wonderful correlation between them. The talking drums really are able to mimic speech.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s really neat.
AYESHA: I was wondering, do they use the talking drums as part of music to convey the same things that have been spoken at the same time? Or are they used in place of, do you know?
DANIEL: In the experiment, they were doing three different kinds of things. They were using drums as music, drums as rhythm, and then drums of speech. Other experiments that have been done using the Dùndún have relied on the first two. But this is to my knowledge, the first time when they’ve actually taken speech and tried to make a direct substitution, and then see if it worked. And it really, really did.
HEDVIG: Cool.
DANIEL: Thanks to Wolf of the Wisp for that suggestion. Next, I wonder if anybody’s had this experience. When I was younger, in school, there was an activity where we had to work in a small group and decide our position on a certain issue and then present that to the class. No one in the group wanted to say anything, including me, but I did very hesitantly. And within seconds, I became the leader of the group, and I didn’t want to be, but I was really surprised at how easy it was. All I had to do was talk. Has anyone noticed that the talker tends to be the leader or do you think it’s the person with the good ideas?
[LONG SILENCE]
HEDVIG: Oh, god. Okay.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Long silence.
ALICE: None of us wants to be the leader.
LESLEY: Exactly.
AYESHA: The thing that comes to mind for me is that I do a lot of simulation training in medical education, and I teach people how to lead resuscitations. If we have a code blue in a hospital, and someone has needs resuscitation, we have a number of people that converge in the room. We have an actual med team, which is the medical emergency team that attends. But in the interim, a number of people enter the room to try and figure out what’s going on and to assist the patient. So, there are a number of studies that have been done to look at how teams form in this particular situation, and how you would pick out a leader because it’s not just always a question of seniority.
The thing that I teach very specifically in medical education in terms of simulations for resus is that the leader of the team does not need to be the most senior, does not necessarily need to be the most knowledgeable in the room. The problem is in medicine, we have this tradition of hierarchy. It’s a deeply hierarchical system that we are trying at the moment to flatten with limited success. One of the things that happens is that we encourage a leadership and followership culture where the person who leads should stand away from what’s going on, observe, sportscast, and close feedback loops. They don’t have to be the person that’s speaking the most, but when they do speak, everyone else has to listen.
It’s very interesting to see how leadership emerges, particularly as the people in the room change. The first people in the room, obviously, usually are nursing staff, followed by junior medical staff, before some of the senior staff arrive, and you see leadership evolve through that process. This is so interesting, the babble hypothesis in terms of how that would fit in, as well as the other cultures, I’m talking about of hierarchy and what’s expected. Nurses find it very difficult to say to doctors, “You need to go and do this at the moment.” But we’re actually encouraging that because we find that that you get a team that works better, when there is just this sense of wanting to work together and dropping your titles of doctors and nursing staff when you go into work together.
HEDVIG: Really. Is it usually a person who’s first on scene who ends up being a leader?
AYESHA: Well, yes. The first person there has to start. Well, you first have to start your resuscitation of the patient, but the second person that comes in, you then have to look at each other, and make a decision, and you have to vocalise it. So, this is the thing that we were finding was happening, people were stepping into leadership positions, but not saying it out loud. We literally train people to say, “I am now handing over leadership to Evan.” We ask everyone to use each other’s names. Once that’s done, everyone should be turning to Evan, for example, and feeding back everything that they’re doing and everything that they’re saying back through that person. That person’s main job is to keep bringing all of the information that we’re collecting about what’s happening to the patient and the deterioration to the one space and sportscasting it out to the rest of the team again. So, their job is mainly communication and coordination.
You don’t actually have to know very much at all. You constantly ask your team members for their input as well. So, it’s an area that is still very fluid, we’re still learning a lot about, we’re still doing a lot of studies in. But just even thinking about the person who speaks the most, for me, is fascinating. I’m just thinking, as I now go and watch a few more simulations, I’m just going to look for that [crosstalk] as well.
DANIEL: Yeah. But this, as you say, Ayesha, has been referred to as the babble hypothesis, the one who speaks the most is the leader, is the subject of some new work by
HEDVIG: [laughs]
DANIEL: -in the Leadership Quarterly. They found out who the leader is, depends not just on who says the most important things or the good input, but the one who talks the most. They gave groups a task. And then, at the end of the task, they asked them to nominate one to five individuals in the group who they thought had emerged as leaders. They found that speaking time was the most direct factor, even when you’ve accounted for intelligence, personality, and gender.
HEDVIG: I’ve been to journal clubs and book clubs, now that we’re all on Zoom, and Skype and BigBlueButton, and what all of these things are called. I know there’s some functionality that where people ask everyone if they agree first, but then during the video conversation, there’s a record being kept on who’s talking. Then, at the end of the session, you get a little trans— Not transcript, but like— this is so probably in our talk-to-talk sessions, Daniel being the main hosts and keeping us on track, [laughs] is probably maybe talking the most, I think, depending on how chatty Ben and I are feeling, but it’s interesting to see that kind of transcript. You also get a little— I think, because my partner, Steve, was participating in one of those, so you got to during the meeting as well. So, if you had been talking a lot, you could sort of notice.
DANIEL: That is interesting.
AYESHA: That is something that is also appearing in medicine. Sorry, I keep bringing it back to this and I apologise.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: That’s why you’re here.
[LAUGHTER]
AYESHA: If people didn’t know I was a doctor, if they joined this halfway through, they pretty much very quickly—[crosstalk]
[LAUGHTER]
AYESHA: -that a woman works somewhere clinically. But one of the things that we’re doing in medicine, again, in terms of improving gender parity, is in a lot of our journal clubs, and now in a lot of our symposiums and conferences, during the meeting, we are noting down the gender of the person who speaks the most as well and we are attempting to improve that parity as well as we go. For example, in the last three years, I lead a clinical debriefing group of final-year medical students just prior to them going into internship. What we do each time we meet is, we have one person, it’s rotating who documents who’s speaking and the issues that we’re speaking on. Essentially, the group has to self-monitor and make decisions about how we feel about how those things are going. That’s been a great thing to do. It’s so good to hear that’s happening in other areas as well. It does make people more conscious of how we communicate with each other.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Something you need to do when everyone’s collaborating and consenting and aboard on it, because it could easily get a bit nasty or uncomfortable, I think.
DANIEL: Lesley, Alice, what have you noticed?
ALICE: Oh, from an Indigenous perspective, that would be quite difficult to apply this hypothesis because Indigenous people typically don’t want to be the center of attention and don’t want to be the talkers. It’s usually the elders or the nominated kind of— or it’s not in that context of a leaderless group, but I think that would be very hard to apply that hypothesis in Indigenous communities. And here’s me sitting not saying much.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Do you think that as well, maybe, that it’s not really fair to try and make people talk more? Because some people don’t want to talk as much like you say and forcing people to talk more is not necessarily always the kind thing to do, right?
ALICE: Well, I think that sometimes maybe people do want to talk more and then I’ll give them the space to do that. In Aboriginal culture, it’s always about allowing the time and the space for people to talk. Sometimes, there might be a bit of silence, and silence isn’t considered a bad thing. It’s always about giving people that space to pluck up the courage to talk if they want to talk. It’s quite a different dynamic.
LESLEY: I personally grew up in a talking culture where silences mean that someone is probably brooding or feeling bad. For example, people from up north in my country, just do more silences. When they do that, I think that they’re mad at me.
DANIEL: On the radio, when you’ve got a silence about this long [short silence] everyone glances up sharply because something’s gone wrong. There’s a problem.
AYESHA: It’s called dead air, isn’t it, Daniel?
DANIEL: Yeah.
AYESHA: It’s already got a negative tone related to it.
DANIEL: Les, what have you got?
LESLEY: I think about all of this a lot, particularly in my teaching, because like Hedvig, I’m not, by nature, comfortable with silence, and it’s something I’ve really had to work on and learn over my lifetime, just to make peace with creating the room for people to speak, who aren’t going to be the first to leap in at that particular point. So, that definitely, is a very important skill in the tutorials. But also, I think, as you’re saying, recognizing that, particularly in group work, and so on, that people may be taking on those leadership roles without necessarily wanting to dominate the other people in the group, but perhaps they themselves are not so comfortable with the silence or whatever else, and they may not actually be the best equipped to be playing that leadership role. So, how do we either empower people in groups to identify appropriate leaders in different ways, other than just defaulting to whoever’s talking the most or perhaps intervene in certain circumstances? Of course, a linguistics tutorial is a little bit— there’s less on the line than in a medical setting, [chuckles] that is a lot less than if someone’s being resuscitated, but still, it’s important to think about.
DANIEL: I guess the lesson is, speak up if you have something to say. And if you are someone who is typically encouraged to speak like I feel like I am, make the space, hang back a bit, let it happen.
HEDVIG: It’s hard, but it is good. Yes.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Lastly, we sometimes on Because Language try to avoid the stigmatizing language around mental illness. We try not to say, “That’s crazy,” or, “That’s insane.” Instead, we say things like, “That’s bananas.” “That’s bonkers.” “That’s bizarre.” “That’s weird.” We sometimes wonder does it do any good. But this is some work from Nora Volkow, and a team from the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health in the USA. This was published in Neuropsychopharmacology. They argue that language plays a major role in shaping thoughts and beliefs, and we encounter harmful stereotypes in the mental illness sphere by adjusting the language we use. They talk about internalised stigma or self-stigma, because, in their words, it decreases the chance that someone will seek help, it decreases their self-esteem and self-worth, reduces their hope for recovery, affects their social relationships, and makes psychiatric symptoms worse.
HEDVIG: I can believe that.
AYESHA: It’s something that we see.
LESLEY: Yeah.
DANIEL: What have you noticed?
AYESHA: Oh gosh, I mean, we have been fighting this for a very long time in terms of referring to patients with their illness rather than— instead of saying, “Oh, the diabetic patient,” we would say, “The patient with diabetes,” but it sometimes feels like a bit of a losing battle. People in medicine, we’re trying to convey a lot of information in a short amount of time. We’re time pressured, and very frequently, I find people still referring in that way. But I would agree that in mental illness and addiction in particular, you really need people to be separate from the things that are happening to them and the way that they perceive themselves.
I think as well, it’s also, it’s a leaky space linguistically or in terms of how people understand it in the community, because words like psychotic have very specific medical meanings, but have a very different meaning when used by a layperson. Even things like schizophrenic now have taken on different meanings, and we are very reluctant to use words like drug abuse. We tend to talk about drug use disorder now, because we understand many of the pressures and other factors that feed into why people use certain drugs and other substances the way that they do. It’s a highly evolving space, but I think starting out with how we choose our language around it is really, really important.
DANIEL: Their recommendations include avoiding adjectives like schizophrenic or alcoholic. They encourage people to say that someone died by suicide, instead of using the word ‘committed,’ which we often use for things like committing fraud, committing crimes, and so on. Avoiding clean and dirty in the context of drug toxicology results.
HEDVIG: Oh. I didn’t know that was a thing.
DANIEL: Well, a clean test, came out clean.
AYESHA: Okay.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: Or even getting clean.
HEDVIG: Speaking of died by suicide, I’ve also heard people say death by depression. I heard that recently. Someone say, or passed away in depression or something like that, which I actually didn’t know exactly what it was, but I assume that it was possibly suicide, but not even saying that, but saying the illness instead.
AYESHA: We also encourage completed suicide rather than committed suicide.
DANIEL: Oh, wow. I haven’t heard that one. This is controversial, though, like Ayesha, you mentioned saying a person with schizophrenia instead of a schizophrenic person, which makes sense, and this was their recommendation as well. However, in many spheres, for example, autistic people themselves overwhelmingly prefer identity-first language instead of person-first language. And so now, they’re advocating person-first usage. Many people themselves advocate identity-first usage. It’s a whole thing.
AYESHA: Do you think, Daniel, that’s the difference between an illness and an identity? Again, in terms of neurodivergence, it’s still an area that we are struggling to classify in terms of whether this is a divergent neurotype, or whether this different physiology that exists within the brains of people who are neuro-atypical, even saying neuro-atypical feels a little bit stigmatizing, is actually an illness or not. Classification around those things still remain, I think, challenging. Not everyone identifies with their illness. A lot of people feel a lot of relief once the illness is named though. I take my cue on an individual basis from patients based on how they identify themselves to me sometimes. But I wonder, yeah, that’s the thing that comes to my mind, because I agree with you. I have a lot of friends and colleagues who prefer to refer to themselves as disabled or autistic, and that’s their personal preference, and I would take their lead on it. I think it’s heterogenous.
HEDVIG: Exactly. Maybe that’s not really a problem. Maybe, we’re able to deal with that, maybe we’re able to deal with some variation. Maybe we don’t need all to just go by one rule.
ALICE: The one thing I would say on that is that it’s really important to be attending to language and respecting how people want to be labeled themselves in the first place, and then following what seems to have the best effect in terms of the research as well. But all of this needs to go alongside social change that is reducing the stigma associated with these things. Otherwise, we see the words end up on the euphemism treadmill as it’s known, and no matter how shiny and new and completely free of stigma a word is, if it stays attached to something that is socially stigmatised, the same will eventually be pejorative.
DANIEL: Yeah, great point.
HEDVIG: Yeah, the euphemism treadmill, it happens with so many things. I’ve seen it happen in Swedish with various words for people who clean places. It used to be cleaners, and now it’s caretaker of localities. And it’s like you say, Alice, that becomes a stigmatised word instead, because people still look down upon people who clean our places and make sure they’re hygienic and safe. [crosstalk]
ALICE: [crosstalk] respecting the people doing that work, and not just changing the word.
DANIEL: They also note in the paper that when doctoral level clinicians given case studies, some received the language, “This is a substance abuser,” and others got the case that said, “This is a case of substance use disorder.” Whenever the person was described as a substance abuser, the clinicians were more likely to favor punishment, instead of not. So, the language we use definitely has persuasive power, even if language affects our thinking in limited ways.
I wish that the paper had been a little bit more presenting their own original research to show that, “Oh, yes, look, this language had this effect.” Instead, they were revealing a lot of other studies that they were bringing to light, and I was glad for that. But at least it was interesting to see what people in the health field think about language at this stage.
HEDVIG: Yeah, that’s really cool. That gives quite a motivation to continue trying to use fair language.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are talking about racial justice and accessible grammar. We’re talking with Dr Alice Gaby and doctoral candidate, Lesley Woods. Hello, and thank you for being here.
ALICE: Hello.
LESLEY: Hello, you’re welcome.
DANIEL: There was a lot of attention paid to a special edition of the journal, Language, that your work appeared in, which was about racial justice. I thought that your work was really interesting here. I was wondering how you came to be involved in it?
ALICE: Well, Lesley, correct me if I’m wrong. The real impetus came with Lesley’s wonderful master’s thesis, which she completed way back in— what would it be, about 2017 maybe?
LESLEY: Yeah.
ALICE: Well, Lesley, do you want to summarise that master’s thesis?
LESLEY: Yeah. Well, I’ll give a bit of background to it as well. Being an Indigenous person within linguistics over a very long period of time now, I’ve been studying part time off and on because of family and other things going on but over a long period of time being involved in the field of linguistics as a student, and coming across lots of things that were upsetting to me as an Indigenous person about the way things were done. Time and time again, I’d come across things, and it was a really often uncomfortable place for me to be in. At times, I felt like pulling out because it was just too hard, it was too upsetting. Particularly when I was doing my master’s degree at Monash, where I ended up catching up with Alice as my supervisor, and the topic of research methodologies and what that was all about, and that’s when it hit a point for me, and I went, “You know what? something’s got to change.” I was questioning linguists around me and saying, “Why don’t I hear about Indigenous voices in this space? Why am I not hearing about Indigenous methodologies or what Indigenous people think about this?” There’s no authors. None of the readings include Indigenous authors.
I wasn’t even sure at that time, how many were around because in that particular course I was doing, there were none. I thought, “Well, maybe I need to do something about this.” So, I decided to undertake my research project on ethics in linguistic research and see where things were at. So, that’s how that came about. My master’s thesis came out of that.
DANIEL: Well, one thing that came up last year when we talked to some folks from Living Languages was that linguists would find old descriptions of, for example, Aboriginal languages, but the descriptions of the languages would contain some pretty terrible things, some pretty terrible comments about the people themselves. Is that kind of what we’re talking about here?
LESLEY: Well, yeah, partly, and that’s the historical stuff, but I was more interested in the practice that we have today, and how, basically, Indigenous people still don’t have control over the language and cultural knowledge because of the way research is done. That’s not because of any individual linguist wanting to control anybody’s language and cultural knowledge, but about the norms around how research is done, the copyright laws, and so on. It essentially took away from Indigenous people.
I’ll give you an example from my own community. In the 70s, a linguist did her PhD thesis on my language, and she wrote a grammar, and did lots of recordings and she did a beautiful job. If it wasn’t for her work, today, we’d have nothing. I’m not criticizing her in any way, except to say that by default, her pressing the button on the recorder, meant that she owned the language material on the recorder, that was recorded. She didn’t mean to do that, it’s just the default copyright laws. She pressed the button, that now belongs to her. Now, all of our recordings and the linguist who did these recordings, and all of the work that she did on our language has now passed away. I’m not meaning to disrespect her in any way, and I had a very good relationship with her, in fact. But, by default, she owns all of that. She owned all of the recordings that exist about our language.
When she passed away, the copyright to those recordings went to her children. So, now we have to talk to— if we want to get copies of our recordings or any of the work that person did that isn’t in the public domain, we have to go through her children now. They’re really uncomfortable with that, they don’t want that kind of responsibility themselves. But that’s just the way— that’s what I’m talking about, when I say that the current way that research is undertaken means that by default, they lose control of their language and cultural knowledge in that particular project. In our case, it’s everything we have. That’s the kind of place I’m hoping to change through the use of agreements, and asking people to think more about that, and how that affects communities.
Then, the other things that I’ve thought about a lot in that research was, well, A, the use of agreements, and how you can negotiate copyright to remain with communities and stuff like that, and getting people to think more about that, and then there’s all the other stuff around that. Well, there’s a space made in research for making of agreements and the time it takes to negotiate and consult with communities, and find a happy balance for everybody that everybody agrees with, so that the community gets to maintain the control of the language and cultural knowledge, the researcher gets what they want out of it, so it’s all those processes and steps, rather than the historical stuff that’s happened, that’s where we were. And definitely, we’ve got a lot of movement in terms of people like Alice, and lots of other nonIndigenous linguists who are thinking about these things as well and trying to work out how we get to where we want to be. That was what my research was about.
HEDVIG: That’s very interesting. Thank you for sharing that. I was wondering, you were saying about, it’s unlikely perhaps that it’s to do with individual linguist having some sort of intention to claim and own. Maybe that can happen, I don’t know, maybe that does happen. I’ve heard some horror stories about field workers arguing with each other about who owns the right to access a community, which sounds so toxic and scary, I don’t even want to think about it for too long. But maybe the bodies that are important here are things like departments and universities as well as individuals, so a structural problem, because there are people who are doing their individual thing. Do you think that that conversation is happening as well at the level of universities and chancellors and whoever else is in that space?
LESLEY: Well, that’s the space that my research looks at predominantly. It looks at what the structure is in the university system, the ethics committees, and how that structure either helps or doesn’t help the situation of Indigenous communities, and how do we undo that stuff? How do we move the yardstick, so that ethics committees can take into account that you probably need six months up your sleeve before you even start a research project to talk to communities and work out whether they want to be involved in a research project or not and what the outputs of that research will be? Who belongs to and who owns what outputs and what can be done? It takes probably more than six months, but let’s say, just to make it possibly appealing to universities, in any sense at all that we might have a six-month window, before we start a research project, whether it be honors, master’s, or PhDs.
I’m also thinking about funding bodies doing this kind of thing. We talked about that, the Australian Research Council, and talking about how there’s no space made for that consultation to happen prior to submitting an application. You submit an application, it’s meant to be a whole thing and you either get funding or you don’t get funding but where is the space made or the funding, perhaps, seed funding for a big research project, “Here’s $10,000, $20,000 to go out and do your consultation. Go away and do your consultation. Come back to us with a fully formed agreement that shows that the Indigenous community are on board, all the outputs are negotiated, who owns what is clearly understood.” Perhaps, that’s another step we need to put into funding bodies as well. I believe somebody was saying last week when we had this [unintelligible 00:41:43] that’s sort of happening to a degree in health research already. We’ve got a model, there is a precedent. Why can’t we apply this now to linguistics and other social sciences research that takes place within the Indigenous communities?
ALICE: I think that will be a huge step forward, but also alternatively, looking at funding communities to engage the linguists to come out and work with them on language documentation and description and really putting that language down for future generations on their terms rather than funding the linguist as the owner of the project.
LESLEY: Yeah. Thanks, Alice. That’s something else I do talk about. I talk about communities developing their own research agendas and putting the call out, “We need a linguist, we need an anthropologist, we need an archaeologist. What do we need? We need people to come and work with us on the things that we want to achieve on our own terms.” So, it’s really important for Indigenous communities to understand the value of research and what research can do for them, and not be scared to say, “Well, we need a linguist to come and work with us.” But a lot of Indigenous communities at the moment are really shy of linguists and researchers, other researchers, because of the way things were done in the past. We need to get over that hurdle and get to the point where it’s like, “Research is a good thing, and it’s something that can help you, and this is how you can engage researchers to come and work with you.”
DANIEL: Let’s not also forget that there is a big role for Indigenous linguists to be doing the work, but I feel that’s also a double-edged sword because it’s like white linguist says, “Oh, thank goodness, an Indigenous linguist. Now, you can work to fix all the bad stuff that we did that affected you, but now you can be the one to fix it, in addition to your regular work.” Anne Charity Hudley said this herself. She said, “As black women, we’re programmed to take the fire, but it’s getting old.”
LESLEY: Yeah.
ALICE: Yeah.
LESLEY: When we had Ruth Singer and Felicity Meakins put forward the idea for the decolonizing linguistic study group, they took the baton. They said, “We hear you. We know we need to create spaces for these conversations to happen.” They took the baton and they approached me and said, “Do you want to do this?” I said, “Well, yes, I do want to do it. I want to see it happen but I’m getting tired.” This kind of work not only really traumatises you, but it’s also exhausting. As Vicki Couzens, one of the participants in the research said, “The time for educating white fellows, whether they’re linguists or other university people, is over. I’m tired, I just want to put my energy into my own community.” For me, this was too important. I had to do something and I did, and hopefully a book will come out at the end of this year. But it’s taken its toll.
HEDVIG: Can you tell us a bit more? I heard about this, it’s an Australian-based study group called Decolonising Linguistics: Spinning a Better Yarn. That was the first session just this week or last week, and you did a presentation together with Dr Jakelin Troy. That sounded really interesting. A lot of what you talked about now maybe it was part of the first session, is that right?
LESLEY: Yeah, it definitely was. I just did a brief, very rough overview of what was in the manuscript and talked about that. And then, we took questions afterwards. It was about an hour and a half long, so it was a really good way to kick off the study group. Jackie has been a PhD for a very long time, a doctor for a very long time, and I’ve just yet to get my doctorate [laughs] hopefully next year, but there’s not many Indigenous linguists out there at the moment. It’s because the field has been so difficult to work in, culturally unsafe to work in, I would say. But there were many times throughout my time as an undergraduate student and doing my master’s that I’ve just felt like dropping out, because it was too hard. We don’t have many Indigenous linguists coming through. We need to make this a more comfortable space, a more culturally safe space for the future generations of young linguists coming through, so that we do have more linguists.
I don’t want anyone to ever have to go through like what I’ve been through. So, I’d like them to get into linguistics, their voices are heard and valued, their work is valued. They can just get out there and do the work without having to put up with all the stuff that I’ve had to put up with and other people.
ALICE: Yeah.
HEDVIG: It’s interesting that you say that, because coming from Europe, as I do, I know that a lot of people who do linguistic fieldwork who come from Europe and America and other places, look to Australia partially as a leader in this realm.
LESLEY: Excellent.
HEDVIG: I hope I’ve interpreted my fellow linguists correctly, because I remember even as an undergrad hearing that in Australia, there was discussions about copyright and ownership of data and ownership of language. It was given to me as an example that this discussion was only really happening in Australia and nowhere else.
LESLEY: Oh, really?
HEDVIG: Yeah. I even remember hearing people being a bit grumpy saying, “Oh, it’s so hard to do fieldwork in Australia, because people put demands on you,” and things like that. So, it was phrased both as a positive and as an annoying thing, actually, which I think is horrible and unfair. But I really remember that, a lot of people look to Australia, in leadership in this realm, actually.
LESLEY: I think North America is doing a lot in this space as well, and they’re talking about this also. I came across a lot of really good publications by various Indigenous linguists, and they’ve got more linguists over there than we have in Australia, so they’re already ahead of us. I’m looking to what they’re doing in America. I’ve been looking at the North Americas and Canada and places like that, to see what they’re doing. There’s some really good publications that have come out of those areas that I drew on quite heavily for my research, but there’s no voices yet in Australia. Well, up until just recently, we’ve started having people talking about this, and I’m not the only one, so the conversation has been going on for quite a long time but we’ve just haven’t got to the place.
Jeanie Bell, who my research is dedicated to, was my champion Indigenous linguist before me and before her was [unintelligible 00:49:29] an Indigenous linguist called [unintelligible 00:49:32], but they were making noises about this a very long time ago and making with a couple of publications, but not a lot, but I found that, and even for myself, in my own work, that as an Indigenous linguist student, your voice is silenced or ignored, so I’ve had to make a big noise in a way to get my voice heard. And I think it was helping me with my master’s thesis giving me the courage to keep doing it has been a huge help. But it does take it out of you, it’s exhausting, and I just want to see things change, so that other people don’t have to fight this fight.
ALICE: As Daniel was saying, I think it’s unquestionably a wonderful thing for linguistics. It’s just sad, but I think it does come with a cost for you, Lesley, and I think we are profoundly grateful that you put in that time and effort.
LESLEY: I just like to move on and do the things that I want to do now without—
[chuckles]
AYESHA: My comment was just going to be something similar, actually, Lesley, because I can hear just in your voice, how much of a toll this has taken on you. Speaking as a person of color in my workplace, which is largely male and white dominated, there’s so much emotional labor that goes into continuously, daily addressing issues of inequality that exist within medicine and healthcare and improving access for people. You do go from being someone who can be deeply passionate about it, to becoming deeply exhausted by being one of a very small number of voices speaking up continuously, and also being expected to feel very grateful when space is being made by people who have held leadership positions for a very long time. So, when I listened to you say that, I can see how important that work is personally to you, and then within the field of linguistics. So, thank you.
DANIEL: Let’s go through some of the recommendations you make in the paper. Repatriate or rematriate Indigenous language knowledge. We’ve talked about that with making sure that copyright goes to the right people. Is there anything else that people should know about that step?
LESLEY: Do you want to speak to that, Alice?
ALICE: Sure. Look, there’s a lot more to it in the sense that historically— Again, as Lesley says, historically, always settler linguists have been the ones to press the button on the recording device and then to hold those recordings. So, the notebooks, transcripts, the recordings themselves, the analysis have always been held by the linguist in the linguist filing cabinet to some extent, not even as much as we want and need in public archives like AIATSIS, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and other archives around the country. But even when the materials are in archives, communities typically have to go back through the linguist or their descendants for permission to access those recordings.
The knowledge that has been contributed to the documentation project by the elders in the community, or anyone in the community is then, in a very real sense, owned by outsider linguists. So, it’s absolutely crucial to ensure as linguists whether Indigenous or non-Indigenous, whether from the community or not ensuring that all our work, and in particular, the recordings we make are returned to that community, if not owned by the community from the very get-go.
LESLEY: We’re talking about the whole thing about having the same goal as documentary linguists want to help Indigenous languages survive. I don’t know if survive is the right word. They want to document the language for the last [unintelligible [00:54:10] is usually what you hear, that’s the kind of rhetoric we hear around endangered languages, where endangered language communities might actually have the goal of language continuous. We want our languages to be living. We want the languages passed on, as Richard Grounds says breath to breath, where you’ve got an endangered language community, he says in his particular case, a few old language status left, the linguist is coming in and taking up the time of the language, the elders. And there’s a competition of time, on the energies and time of the elders to teach the language back to the communities in. We’ve got this understanding now that documentation alone doesn’t save a language.
Linguists talk about, “We’re going to save the languages by documenting them. We’re going to write a grammar. We’re going to write a dictionary. There’s going to be all these recordings.” And then, they go away and write it all up in language that nobody can understand apart from other linguists, and sometimes not even other linguists. And the language, well, it took me almost 20 years to get to the point where I could work on my own language and unlock it from the technical language of linguistics so the community could have access to it. We need to start thinking about that as well. We need to start thinking about— we’ve had these discussions, haven’t we? Can a linguist let go of their linguistic terminology? Can they write in a way that would not lock out the Indigenous community from that language? If we’re working on severely endangered languages, can we change our research questions? Can we talk about how do we stop this language from going to sleep? How do we create these speakers of this language before it dies? Instead of, “Quickly, let’s get in there and record it before it dies because we’re not going to have [crosstalk] the language.” Then, how about we start thinking about how do we create the next generation of speakers instead?
In my case, when my language was being recorded back in the 70s and 80s, I was a teenager at the time. I could have learned my own language. I could have if there was a focus. There wasn’t, of course, back then. It was just starting to be discussed, these ideas of continuance rather than recording a language before it dies, and that’s coming from Indigenous perspectives. People are saying, “We’ve had 20, 30 years of documentation in our community but still, the children aren’t speaking the language.”
HEDVIG: Right.
DANIEL: What I keep hearing is that linguists don’t save the language, instead it’s something more like save as.
LESLEY: Yeah. It becomes a static thing. So, you’ve got this grammar, you’ve got these recordings, and community quite often don’t even know how to engage with that because our case, in 80s, we’re talking about 40 years later I’m coming back to it and going, “Well, this is our language.” And people have been so long without speaking that language, now they’re speaking varieties of Aboriginal English and they feel quite scared or threatened by a language that’s presented to them as, “This is your language and this is how it’s spoken.” I’m trying to find ways to help people feel more comfortable with having a go at speaking their language and stop being so purist about it, kind of just, “Have a go. Doesn’t matter if you’re not getting it right. Do what you like.” Whatever it takes for people to engage with the language and does it.
HEDVIG: I used to say, also we were looking at in this paper you wrote, there were other recommendations as well. We’ve been talking about the repatriate or rematriate Indigenous language knowledge. The other things you talked about were recognizing Indigenous knowledge sovereignty, avoiding, degrading, or dehumanizing language or rhetoric and acknowledging the context of languages. When I read your paper, when I read these recommendations, it struck me that these seemed like fairly basic. It didn’t seem like it should be needed to be said, avoiding, degrading, or dehumanizing language. It seems like an easy target.
LESLEY: It seems like an easy thing to do, and I’m really glad to hear you say that, Hedvig, because we know that historically there’s been dehumanizing language used in the context of Indigenous people, even in linguistics. So, that’s the historical thing, but it’s still happening today when we talk about language reclamation and things like that. We’ve got words like— help me out here, Alice, what we’re talking about.
ALICE: Well, I’m not sure exactly what you had in mind, but I was thinking about a lot of the rhetoric around endangered languages and speaking-
LESLEY: Oh, yeah.
ALICE: -about which— sort of just erases the people who speak them so the language can exist on its own. And the analogy I always come back to is, I always think about these languages as living or dead when actually they’re just vessels for the ideas of the people who speak them.
LESLEY: I guess, I was thinking about how Indigenous peoples use, so my use of saying today’s “Welcome to country” in my own language or “Acknowledgement of country,” in my own language is often described as memorialization or valorization of language use. It’s reduced to this tiny little thing, when it basically describes we can’t use our language in any other context. This is all it means to us, is to use it in this way. But that doesn’t take into account our aspirations for wanting to speak our languages again, not just for acknowledgments of country and saying, hello and goodbye but we really do want to relearn our languages and speak them fully again. These kinds of terms like valorization and memorialization, stuff like that, it’s quite offensive to Indigenous people. I think we need to be thinking about that as well.
DANIEL: If anybody wants to help, what could they do? If any of our listeners who maybe are linguists, maybe not, is there anything they should know at the end of this or be able to do?
LESLEY: What I’d like for people to do is engage more with the Indigenous literature that is out there already. You don’t have to wait for my book to come out. There’s lots of great Indigenous literature from America and other places, like New Zealand context and North America and Canada and stuff like that. So, just start engaging with the literature and start. And here Hedvig saying, this seems like it’s a little bit— we should know this stuff already, why are we talking about this? What I love to hear young people saying because it’s already— why are we talking about this? It’s a given that people should be spoken about basically—
ALICE: Respectfully.
LESLEY: Yeah, respectfully, and all of those things, and that’s what I found. As young linguists have said to me, “Everything you’re talking about, I just don’t know why we’re having this argument. Why is it even an issue?” I guess, maybe they don’t have the historical context, but it’s fantastic to hear young linguists say that because they’re already there.
ALICE: Absolutely, as well as international scholars, as Lesley’s already said. There’s some really wonderful published work out there by scholars like Jeanie Bell, Jakelin Troy, Vicki Couzens, as well as Lesley herself, and then upcoming students, PhD students like [unintelligible 01:02:13] and Cory Theatre and others. I’m sure I’m forgetting some, but the written work, and principally anyone who’s involved in working with Indigenous communities on any linguistic topic, just principally talking to them and really listening because there’s no magic formula. The most important thing is obviously to follow the wishes of the people involved.
LESLEY: Just remember that this is a human rights framework. We’re talking about basic human rights, there’s nothing fantastic or out there. It’s just, “Let’s get up to speed.”
DANIEL: Sounds good.
HEDVIG: I wanted to make a particular book recommendation if I can. Decolonizing Methodologies by Linda Tuhiwai Smith. If you’re looking for a place to start, if you’re new to this area, I would really recommend that book. That’s specifically from a more Pacifica perspective, but it’s a really cool and challenging book that I recommend reading.
LESLEY: And she’s just put out a third edition in 2021, so keep your eye out for that.
DANIEL: Yay.
HEDVIG: Excellent.
DANIEL: Lesley Woods and Dr Alice Gaby, thanks so much for telling us about your work.
LESLEY: Thank you.
ALICE: Thank you.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: Words of the Week, our favorite segment. Is it possible, Lesley and/or Alice, that you might have a word for us that you have noticed that is new, breaking, or just on your mind? Alice, your word?
ALICE: Yeah, my word popped into my head because there’s a building site just down the road from my house which is claiming to be building biophilic apartments, which got me curious about what biophilia is. I learned that it’s the human propensity to want to be around other living forms. So, living forms of other species. And of course, in these days of lockdown here in Melbourne, we’ve seen a lot of people getting pets, which I think is an illustration of this desire, but also more for my own sake, trying to get out every day into nature. Going for long walks in the park lands and so much is just so crucial for mental health. Ayesha, you also reminded me of the wonderful studies that have shown patients in hospitals recovering so much faster when they’re on the side of the hospital from which you can see out into green spaces. So, there’s so many benefits for us all to be engaged with nature.
AYESHA: Yes. Oh, that’s great that you say that because one of the jokes that we constantly make in hospital, especially since last year with lockdowns, has been the shift from a lot of cat ladies, we exist everywhere, doctors and nurses, to a lot of plant ladies as well.
ALICE: [laughs]
HEDVIG: Yes.
AYESHA: A lot of people collecting plants and sharing advice about how to keep their plants alive because they’re a lot harder to keep alive than dogs and cats.
ALICE: [laughs] I [crosstalk] would agree.
AYESHA: [laughs] But there is again that sense of wanting to be around living things during this time of disconnection from other humans and being so secluded during lockdown periods, and I agree with you, Alice, there is evidence. In fact, the newest hospital that I was mentioning before here in Perth that had been designed with seaward and landward, in the intensive care unit, has some of the largest windows for patients within the intensive care unit to be able to look out of and areas within the ICU that have gardens where we take a fully ventilated patient out on the bed with the ventilator and they have an hour of garden time with the physiotherapists and with a nurse, because we definitely, definitely appreciate benefits to that.
ALICE: So great.
DANIEL: Wow, okay.
HEDVIG: I think when it comes to plants— I think I am the youngest person here maybe, I don’t know, but a lot of millennials and the generations below, zoomers, I believe they called, you might not have the work and life security to keep an animal with you and moving around, and a lot of people are turning to plants instead. From my personal experience, these can sometimes be in conflict. I became a plant mother first. I got a lot of plants in the lockdown. And then, we got cats. And then, I found out that most of the plants I have gotten are toxic to cats, that if they eat them, they will throw up and be ill. So, I had to move all the plants to my office in another building at the university. So, my office is now the most lush office because the plants that I had planned to be in a whole apartment are just in one room.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It looks very nice, but it wasn’t really intended.
AYESHA: Yeah, very lush. It sounds very lushisfic.
HEDVIG: It is lush, but I can recommend if you are planning on getting plants and animals, look up what is toxic to whom, because they’re not necessarily compatible.
DANIEL: You said you felt weird about calling yourself a cat mother, but you feel okay with plant mother?
HEDVIG: I feel better about plant mother because it feels sillier.
DANIEL: Okay.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Fair enough. Our next word of the week comes from Feral Cat on Discord, spreadyboi. A spreadyboi is somebody who’s been in the community whilst infectious with COVID and there’s a thread on Reddit, More New South Wales spreadyboi locations.
HEDVIG: Uh, I am conflicted.
DANIEL: No?
AYESHA: Is this like Egg Boi?
DANIEL: What’s Egg Boi?
AYESHA: Egg Boi was the guy who threw an egg at a politician. [crosstalk] [laughs]
HEDVIG: Yes.
DANIEL: Well, I don’t know. Does it end with a Y or with an I, Egg Boi?
AYESHA: With an I, and I have been conflicted about the use of the word ‘boi’ when it’s attached to anything because my original understanding was that it was related to African American vernacular English and I do my best not to intrude and use that terminology inappropriately. But I might be incorrect because I’ve also been told that it’s a term that’s been used a lot in the LGBTQ+ community as well. Please help me out, Daniel and Hedvig, as the keepers of knowledge in this area.
HEDVIG: I don’t know, but I was conflicted about this word because I just feel conflicted about making light of COVID spreading, I guess, in general. But I have heard about this word.
DANIEL: It could be inappropriate on multiple levels. So, it reminded me of the boy meme, which was the froggy on a unicycle, you know that picture that came up?
HEDVIG: I think I do.
DANIEL: Dat Boi was the meme.
HEDVIG: Yes, and spelled D-A-T, correct?
DANIEL: D-A-T B-O-I.
AYESHA: Oh.
HEDVIG: Which makes me, I think, Ayesha might be on the right track about Afro-American vernacular English because the T-H-A-T spelling. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, yeah, that’s correct just about all the way along. So, let’s start with hip hop culture. It shows up there notably in Big Boi from Outkast. It also gets used for people in the LGBTQI+ community, although that gets complicated. And then, it circles around to the dat boi meme, the frog on the unicycle. We have found a place for it in our familial life actually. For example, a spider is still in our house, when a spider gets in, it’s a leggy boi. A grasshopper is a jumpy boi.
LESLEY: It’s used a lot in the Indigenous youth as well.
DANIEL: Same kind of thing, huh?
LESLEY: Hmm.
DANIEL: Just getting away from the boi idea, and just getting back to this idea of having a list of places, it’s always so weird when they publish lists of potential infection sites, because first you scan the list, you say, “Okay, phew, I wasn’t at any of those places.” And then you kind of say, “Man, how did this person visit 35 different places in a day and a half?” What happened there?
ALICE: I always get so much FOMO. I look at those lists and think, “Oh, that sounds like a great day. It’s been a long time since I’ve had it—” [crosstalk] [laughs]
DANIEL: But then everybody’s like scanning through the list and it’s like three hours. That’s a long time to spend at a petrol station. It’s really weird to have your whole schedule published.
AYESHA: I know that you guys have had a lot of coronavirus Word of the Week things though, haven’t you, like on Because Language? There’s been everything from han sani all the way through— But I agree with you, I feel a bit uncomfortable about this one.
HEDVIG: Yeah, spreadboi is definitely not my favorite word. I understand it’s the Word of the Week because it’s been in the news, but I’m not sure I like it.
DANIEL: No. Well, we used to try to avoid Trump words of the week, and now we’re trying to avoid COVID ones, but this is one.
Okay, let’s go on to another suggestion from Keith via email, hello@becauselanguage.com, and that is “Take or Took Arrest.” Keith says, “A quick Google search shows the phrase popping up a few times in the last three or four years but I heard a lot on US news last week after the voting rights protests in Washington. People who take part in these protests expecting to be arrested for their civil disobedience are described, not as getting or being arrested, but as taking arrest, emphasizing that they knew what would happen and chose to do it anyway as a demonstration of their support for the cause.” Keith continues, “Thanks again for a terrific show. It’s a highlight of my week.” Keith is in West Hollywood, California. Notice this one, anybody?
HEDVIG: No, I haven’t, but I understand what it’s doing. So, the people who are saying it is the people themselves who said, ooh, I took arrest for my— or is it being reported this person took arrest? Which one?
DANIEL: I’m seeing it in the former. For example, there’s a tweet from Fight for 15, this is back in May 2021, replying to us Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib who was arrested at a Pro Labor Rally in Detroit. They tweeted, “Solidarity, we’ll never forget when you took arrest with us.”
HEDVIG: Mm, right.
DANIEL: As someone who’s taught English, I’m just always fascinated by verbs like ‘get’ and ‘take’ and ‘make’ and ‘do’ and why we use them. But I think the ‘take’ gives us an agentive role in the arrest. It’s not getting arrested, where an arrest is something you acquire, you take it, that’s more active.
HEDVIG: Right.
AYESHA: I just feel it should be undertaking, like undertaking arrest, but it just doesn’t roll off the tongue very easily, but I like the idea behind it.
HEDVIG: It sounds like a similar analogy to take a knee, take arrest.
LESLEY: Take a break.
DANIEL: Take a break. Great suggestion. Thanks a lot, Keith.
Okay, next one. This one was from a tweet by @StrangeBeasties, the Strange Beasties Podcast. They asked us, “I’ve noticed the word ‘highkey’ showing up recently as in these screenshots from the other day.” Like this person, “The highkey wants to be a vampire.” Has it been a thing and I’m just not very observant or is it new? I like it.
HEDVIG: I think it’s been a thing because there’s low-key which is to do something in a casual, nonchalant or not intense manner, and then there’s high key. There was a very good song that I can recommend by Avenue Beat called— I’m going to use a profanity, so blah, blah, blah, it’s called Fuck 2020.
DANIEL: I remember[?] that.
HEDVIG: It’s [singing] Lowkey fuck 2020.
DANIEL: That’s right.
HEDVIG: A lot of people commented under and said, “No, highkey fuck 2020.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Very good. I’m fascinated by low-key as an adverb. I low-key hate that.
HEDVIG: Lesley looks [laughs] like—
AYESHA: I’m sitting.
HEDVIG: Have you heard it? Do you like it?
LESLEY: Low-key? Yeah, I heard low-key but I haven’t heard I low-key like it, is just I don’t like it very much. Is that what you saying?
AYESHA: I suppose it means, “I like it, but I don’t want everyone to know that I like it.”
LESLEY: Oh, right.
HEDVIG: Or, “I like it, but it’s not a hill I’m willing to die on.”
AYESHA: Yes.
DANIEL: Kinda.
HEDVIG: Like if you low-key hate 2020, it’s like I hate it, but— well, they made a song about it. So, you can say that’s quite intense.
DANIEL: But it is the nonchalance, isn’t it? I’m being nonchalant here.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
ALICE: Right.
AYESHA: What I do like about it is that it conveys that it’s in opposition to a low-key, but it’s not taking on negative aspects of being too intense. One of the things that I always struggled with when I first immigrated to Australia was this idea of being quite casual about a lot of things. Ben teases me about teases me about it all the time but I am not a big teaser. I don’t do that a lot myself, and I tend to take things seriously and assume most people are being serious about things they’re talking about sometimes, inadvertently, to my own detriment, because I’ve misunderstood. But, yeah, there’s this idea that you’re only cool if you don’t really care, if you have a sense of indifference about it. We, I say the collective we, looked down a little bit on people who are a bit too earnest or a bit too passionate, and the word highkey seems to convey to me that this is something that really means something to someone, but they’re not being seen as, I don’t know, being odd for liking it so much, for nerding out on it, and that resonates with me.
DANIEL: Wow.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I like that too. I think that your sentiments might be a bit of an Australian sentiment as well. I know other Australians who seem to want to be nonchalant. I’ve always perceived as a European that Americans are very earnest in their likes and dislikes. They’re much less into this suave, cool thing, I think. Americans on vacation are always like, “Oh, I love this,” and they mean it. They’re just honest in their appreciation of something, which can be refreshing.
AYESHA: Yeah, I like that.
HEDVIG: It’s major generalization, all Australians and all Americans. It’s not. Just a bit of a tendency, I think.
DANIEL: Lesley, you’ve got a word of the week for us, I believe.
LESLEY: Winangakirri. Let’s remember, let’s remember everything we’ve talked about today. Let’s keep it in our minds.
HEDVIG: That’s a wonderful word. Is it one word or a phrase?
LESLEY: Yes, one word. Winangakirri, to remember, we must remember, let’s remember.
HEDVIG: I like that.
DANIEL: I love it. Biophilic, spreadyboi, take arrest, highkey, and Winangakirri, which in Nganampa means remember, that are Words of the Week. Lesley Woods and Dr Alice Gaby, thank you once again for taking some time and explaining your work to us and helping to hopefully improve the discipline of linguistics in future.
LESLEY: You’re welcome.
ALICE: Always a pleasure to see you.
DANIEL: Also, Ayesha Marshall, thank you so much for filling in the Ben spot. Great to have you.
AYESHA: Thank you very much for having me. And, yeah, I’m going to have a long chat to Ben about what I got to listen in on today. It was great.
DANIEL: Awesome.
[outro theme]
HEDVIG: That was a great discussion, a great yarn, as I’ve learned that discussions like that can be called. I really enjoyed that, and I hope we get the chance to return to Alice and Lesley’s work, perhaps when Lesley has finished her PhD thesis, that’d be really cool. So, I hope you enjoyed that episode. There might be more of that stuff coming.
If you have a question or comment or feedback about this episode or any other episode we’ve made, you can always get in touch with us. We are @becauselangpod on all the things. By all the things, I mean Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon, Patreon, TikTok, Clubhouse, and Substack You can also send a good old-fashioned email to us. We are hello@becauselanguage.com.
And if you enjoy this show, and think that more people should listen to us and our guests, you can help spread the show. There are many ways you can do that. One of the best ways is to tell a friend about us, either in person or as [unintelligible 01:19:00] stories on the Twitters. You can also leave us a review, in particular the Apple iTunes Store is a great place to leave podcast reviews. You can keep that in mind both for our show and other shows you like. Really, iTunes Store is a great place to leave reviews. Even if you’re not an Apple user, you can try and get your way in there and leave a review anyway. Doing all of those things will help people find us.
Because Language has patrons who support the show, and because of them, we can make episodes and release them for free without any annoying ads. We can make transcripts, thanks to the work of Maya Klein of Voicing Words. That means our shows are accessible for people who can’t listen or just don’t want to, and our shows are searchable, which is really fantastic. And I say that to just myself as someone who really appreciates that.
Shout out to our top patrons. Dustin, Termi, Chris B, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien Joanna, Helen, Bob, Jack, Kitty, Lord Mortis, Elías, Erica, Michael, Larry, Binh, Christopher, Andy, Maj, James, Nigel, Kate, Jen, Nasrin, River, Nikoli, Ayesha, Moa, Steele, Andrew, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Jonathan, Colleen, Glyph, Ignacio, Kevin, Jeff, Dave H, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, and most recently, Zo. Thank you to all of our patrons for your support.
DANIEL: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov from Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible. Thanks so much for listening. We’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
[BOOP]
DANIEL: Would it be fair to say that you’re an inadvertent cat mom? Would that be how I should introduce you?
HEDVIG: Inadvertent cat mom? No, I’m still on the fence about cat mom and cat dad.
DANIEL: Okay.
HEDVIG: I still feel— [exhales] it’s growing on me.
DANIEL: That’s okay. An inadvertent cat person, that will work.
HEDVIG: No, but I think I am a cat person.
DANIEL: Oh. How do you describe this catness being thrust upon you?
HEDVIG: Awoken by kitties?
DANIEL: [laughs] In a state of feline awakening.
HEDVIG: No, that sounds like it’s something sexual. I don’t like that.
DANIEL: It doesn’t. [laughs]