We had the pleasure of an interview with two up-and-coming linguists, wanting to find out more about the show and linguistic communication. It was such a fun chat that we wanted to share it with you. Here’s Daniel and Hedvig with Kitty Liu and Romany Amber.
Part of this chat also appears in magazine form (along with a lot of other really good articles) : https://issuu.com/u-lingua/docs/issue_8_forweb
Thanks to Kitty and Romany for thinking of us, and thanks to U-Lingua for letting us make this audio public.
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Full issue of U-Lingua
https://issuu.com/u-lingua/docs/issue_8_forweb
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
HEDVIG: Oh, I’m sorry about the cricket. [LAUGHTER]
KITTY LIU: Yeah…
HEDVIG: It was just this morning.
DANIEL: 😟 …will it be okay…?
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: England lost the Ashes.
DANIEL: Oh, yeah, I think I heard about that somewhere.
HEDVIG: I don’t understand cricket. And today, I not only tried to understand the rules of cricket, but also how points are scored and when the different Ashes are played.
ROMANY AMBER: I follow football, so it’s just like get the ball between the posts, it’s fine.
HEDVIG: Yeah. There are three different things called a wicket.
DANIEL: Oh, right.
HEDVIG: But I know that the women’s also play what my supervisor used to call pyjama cricket, which is Twenty20, and which is more understandable. So, I’m going to watch the women’s pyjama cricket.
DANIEL: Well, I’m glad that there’s a kind of cricket named after an article of clothing.
HEDVIG: It’s actually a bit derogatory because they wear colourful clothes instead of white clothes. So, it looks like they’re wearing pyjamas.
DANIEL: Oh, boo.
KITTY: How dare they!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Normalise pyjama wearing in sport.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE INTRO]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this special bonus patron episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. For this episode, we’re joined by two very special guests, Kitty Liu and Romany Amber. Thanks for coming on the show, you two.
KITTY: Thank you for having us.
ROMANY: Yeah, it’s good to be here.
DANIEL: Could you tell us a little bit about yourselves and what you’re doing?
KITTY: I’ll go first. My name is Kitty. I’m a second-year undergraduate studying linguistics at Cambridge. So in this episode, we’ll be interviewing Daniel and Hedvig, from U-Lingua, the magazine for the Undergraduate Linguistics Association of Britain. That’s a huge mouthful. But, yeah, I work for them, which is why we’re doing this. And as a linguist, I like Historical Linguistics, bit of semiotics, bit of functionalism. Outside of that, I like reading fiction and various arts and crafts.
ROMANY: And, yeah, I’m Romany. I’m also in my second year at Cambridge. I do not regularly work for ULAB, but I’ve done some writing and stuff for them, which is why we’re doing this. Within linguistics, I really like phonology, and its links to psychology and bits of syntax and morphology. The not-scary bits. And anything that sees language is like a big puzzle. And also, using language to look at sociology and social issues and stuff. Outside of linguistics, I like playing football and badminton, quite like comedy and poetry and also going on lots of long walks. And yeah, I think that’s about it.
DANIEL: I say that you’re our special guests. But really, we’re your special guests because you interviewed us, which was lovely. And it’s extra nice, because the folks at U-Lingua very kindly allowed us to use this audio as a special bonus episode. And so, we’re going to play it, and thanks for thinking of us. That really meant a lot to us.
KITTY: We had a great time interviewing you.
ROMANY: Such a great time. We really like the show!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Aw! All right. Let’s hear the interview.
[INTERVIEW BEGINS]
ROMANY: To start with, could you tell us who you are, what you do, a little bit about the background of the podcast, your interests in and outside of linguistics and just describe what you do for anyone who’s reading and who doesn’t know?
HEDVIG: Do you want to start, Daniel?
DANIEL: Okay, my name is Daniel Midgley. I am a linguist. I taught linguistics at the University of Western Australia, and Edith Cowan University for many, many years. And now I am a cohost on Because Language, a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. I also do a gig on the ABC, the Australian ABC. There’s the Speakeasy in Perth, and then I do Polish a Word in Adelaide. I did not choose that title. I’m also a dad, and I like to listening to music and long walks on the beach.
HEDVIG: And piña colada.
ROMANY: It feels like a very Australian thing to say.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: It is.
HEDVIG: Right. Should I go?
DANIEL: Yeah, go for it.
HEDVIG: My name is Hedvig. I am from Sweden originally. I’ve done linguistics for quite a while now. I’ve just finished my PhD. And I’ve been studying linguistics since I got out of high school — secondary school is the correct term. I actually did linguistics in secondary school as well. So, I’ve been doing linguistics for a really long time, and I have learnt what I like and what I don’t like. I’m more and more going into interdisciplinary leaning with my linguistics. So, I like to collaborate with people from cultural evolution or evolutionary biology and things like that. I wrote my PhD thesis about Pacific languages and language diversification, and particularly when it comes to grammar. I also manage a project called Grambank, that’s going to be released hopefully this year, we just submitted the paper before Christmas.
Outside of linguistics, I like roleplaying games. I like comics. I don’t know — what else? Just finished both seasons of Witcher, and was very disappointed that there wasn’t another season right after. I like to take a lot of pictures of my cats. And I am always disappointed that whenever I put pictures of my cats online, they don’t get as many likes as I think they deserve.
ROMANY: That’s really funny.
KITTY: They deserve all the likes.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but I think all cat owners feel that way. So, I don’t know.
KITTY: I didn’t know you could do linguistics in secondary school in Sweden.
HEDVIG: You can; it’s not super common. Basically, when you go into secondary school, you can take different directions, and one of them is social science and languages. So what that means is you do more languages than usual. And you also take some basic introductory linguistics, so you learn what phonemes are, and you learn about regular sound change and a couple of things like that. But it’s an option that not everyone takes.
ROMANY: That’s really cool.
HEDVIG: But it meant that I knew about linguistics and chose it right away in university, and was just like: yeah. So I just got into it right away.
ROMANY: That’s really cool.
KITTY: That is cool.
ROMANY: Go Sweden, yay.
DANIEL: Not joining us is Ben Ainslie, our third member, whom we love dearly. And he’s not here because he is traveling. He’s doing some well-deserved pre-vacation, because this is going to be a big year for him. He’s a school teacher. I first knew him when he was doing an improvisational theatre group, and his improvisational skill is, of course, legendary. He’s tremendously funny, tremendously smart, and this is exactly what he would say if he were here right now.
[LAUGHTER]
KITTY: Representing the cause. Yay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
KITTY: Okay, so how did the podcast start?
ROMANY: That was a really good lead, Daniel.
KITTY: Yeah, That was.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Maybe I’ll start on this one, and then, Hedvig, you can pick up at the point. It started about 2009 when my supervisor and mentor, Alan Dench, Professor at UWA said, “Oh, I’m busy for this radio thing that I do. Could you do it? It’s called Talk the Talk on RTR, a community radio station.” And I said, “RTR? That’s right down the street from my house. I’ll just go and show up and do it. Yeah, sure, Alan, I’ll sub for you.” And I did, and I had a great time. It was lots of fun. He got busier, and so he said, “Do you want to just do it?” And I took over the Talk the Talk segment. It was a 7-minute thing, and then it grew to be, like, a 12-minute thing, with whoever was there in the studio that day. But over time, I thought, “Mm! I would like more control over this. I would like it to be pre-recorded and just play something.” I asked the DJ that I liked the best and had done the most shows with, and that was Ben Ainslie. I said, “Do you want to do this as a regular thing, pre-recorded?” And he said, “Yes!” So, we did, and we did lots and lots of shows. The show grew on RTR community radio, it grew to about an hour show. And then, we met a wonderful… [CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I have this tactic that I can recommend to any young linguist, which is when you read something and listen to something that you like, it’s a really good idea to send a message to the person who created that thing and say that you really like it. This goes for articles. Like, academia has a lot of negativity on it. And usually, the main interaction we have with our peers is critique. And that can be really draining. So sometimes when I read a paper I really like, I sent a message to the author, and I’m like, “I really liked your paper! It was really good for this and this reason.” And I was in the Netherlands and applied for PhD programs, and I listened to some Talk the Talk episodes. And I really liked it because for what I’m interested in as a person who’s already done linguistics for a while, I was interested, in fact, that Talk the Talk had research news and a bit more deep dives. That’s not to throw any shade on any other shows. It was just: for me, that was more interesting.
I like that there are a lot of shows that go into, for example, the etymology of words. But I actually happen to not be that interested in English! [LAUGHTER] I use it, I speak it and everything, and I write it. It’s not uninteresting, it is semi-interesting, but it’s not my main focus. So, I was interested in Talk the Talk. So, I sent a message to Daniel and said… What’d I say? I said like, “Oh, I really like your show.”
DANIEL: I still have that email. Do you want me to read it? No, that’s all right.
HEDVIG: No. NO! [laughs]
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I don’t remember what it says! Please don’t! And then, I got a PhD position in Australia. And I moved to Australia and I was like, “Oh, I’m moving to Australia.” And then, Daniel asked me to come on the show to talk about some Swedish things, I think it was?
DANIEL: Mhm.
HEDVIG: And then maybe also to talk about the Great Language Game. Is that true?
DANIEL: That was the second one. We had you on for two consecutive episodes. And we thought, “We like this person. She’s awesome.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. And then, they just invited me on.
DANIEL: Yep. Also, don’t forget the wonderful Kylie Sturgess, who was on Talk the Talk for so many shows as well, who is not on the show with us now. It’s a three-cohost deal with me, Ben and Hedvig, and we are having a great time cranking out shows.
KITTY: That’s great.
ROMANY: We’re having a great time listening too.
KITTY: We really are.
HEDVIG: Lovely. That’s fun.
ROMANY: Yay.
HEDVIG: I appreciate that.
ROMANY: I don’t know if this is a bad question. But do you guys have any favourite episodes of your show? Either Because Language or Talk the Talk, that you find the most fun to make or to talk about or to research? [PAUSE] There are two very thinky faces.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I like it when we do deep dives into research. But that requires a lot of seriousness and preparation. So, actually, one of the ones that was most fun for me was last year, where we did the OzCLO quiz. Because Henry did all of the preparation, and I just got to show up and like, try and be vaguely funny and competitive. So personally, I like that. I thought that was fun. But I do like it when we do more deep-dive things as well. I like the one we had Gary Lupyan.
DANIEL: Gary Lupyan. I like episodes… I loved our generative episodes. I’m proud of those. They were heavy going, but I’m glad we did them. I like every Mailbag that we do, because they’re so much fun. And just when you get a really great guest — I shouldn’t start naming them because I can never remember them all, but — the ones where I feel like we’re doing something good, the ones where I feel we’re contributing, handing the mic over to somebody who speaks a minority language, or to an Indigenous linguist, that makes me feel like we’re doing good work.
KITTY: We really appreciate it, us listeners.
I was going to say, one of the things that like me and Kitty like when we talk about your show, which comes up a weird amount is the sort of more social justice-y aspect of it and the fact that it’s like really explicitly talked about, we just thought was really interesting and really valuable for linguistics especially.
KITTY: Yeah, definitely.
DANIEL: Good! [LAUGHTER] That’s important for me as well. As a privileged white guy, I don’t feel like I’m good at social justice. I make mistakes all the time, but I feel the more I’m trying, and the more I use humility when I don’t do it well, I just feel it’s something that I should do. Like something that needs to happen. You create the show that you feel should exist, and this is the show that I want to do.
ROMANY: That’s really good.
KITTY: I guess just following on from that then, because obviously you guys are communicators, and you have podcasts, you give people a platform to contribute to things like social justice. Do you think academia has much of a role to play in this? Does it actually have much to offer?
HEDVIG: I think so. A lot of academics fool themselves into thinking that we’re some sort of neutral, objective observers of society and not actively participating in it. And I think that there’s some basic facts that we’ve learned through linguistics that, for example, all language have equal value, which is a very simple thing. Multilingualism and bilingualism in children is probably good, certainly not harmful. Things like that, that I believe that the wider society would benefit from knowing. And I think linguists have a part to play in that as the privileged people we are, who have degrees and who have a sense of authority working at universities or other institutions, our words matter and are often weighted more by other people, especially, unfortunately, if we come from an ethnic background or a gender that’s seen as more authoritative. I think we have that role to play. It doesn’t mean that all research needs to be focused on that, but that when you have an opportunity to be invited on where you’re interviewed by someone or something like that, you can just repeat these basic things because they need to be told.
And I also think that linguistics is changing right now, when it comes to documentation description for the better that there’s more collaborative data collection, and people are moving more and more away from the sense of being a white researcher in a Western country, going off to an exotic country and doing field work, and then just going back. In the beginning, there were discussions of, like, giving back in the sense of like printing out your grammar and giving people a copy, which is nice, probably not what anyone needs. [LAUGHS] Now, there’s more and more discussions of how to do collaborative field work, how to actively involve people, include them as coauthors, ask what do you think is interesting to do in your community? What would you like? And I think all those things are really good and happens to also contribute to better scholarship as well. I think more collaboration with speakers and signers and users of languages in the research actually also makes the research better. So, it’s just a win-win.
DANIEL: I have this experience a lot of trying to use linguistics for the public good, because there are two messages that I’ve tried to promote. One is that it’s normal for people to use language differently, and the other one is that it’s normal for language to change. When I walk into, for example, the ABC Studios in Perth on Thursday morning, I’m getting a new cohost, a new person is going to be handling the breakfast show this year, and I’m going to walk in. And he might do what everybody else does, and he’s probably going to say, “Oh, you’re a linguist. I bet that means that you’re really concerned about the purity of the language, right? Making sure everyone says things properly.” And they think that that’s going to be what happened because this is what I always encounter when I meet a radio host for the first time. And they are very surprised to hear me say, “No, actually, I’m interested when people do things differently. Actually, I’m not on board with the kind of urge that some people have to enforce language ideologies, and enforce language hygiene. I’m not on board.” They’re amazed.
And then if I have the same person, the same radio host for the next three or four weeks, something happens to them. They transform a little bit. They get used to this idea that language difference, language variation, language change are interesting, and not something to get angry about. And they even say things like, “We know, Daniel, we know, language changes,” which I love, because it means the message is getting out there. And then I’ll get somebody new, and then the process will begin again. And it just reminds me of the process with our audience who gradually get used to language being something interesting to look at, and not something to get angry about. And it’s something that our audience gets used to, and it’s something that I’ve watched waves and waves of students get used to. There’s fights at first because they’re, “Argh! But I learned in school, that language had to be this way! or I learned in my radio training, that language had to be this way, and now I can’t get used to it,” but they get on board. And then at the end of the semester, they go away, and you get a whole bunch of new students.
This gives me hope. It can work. We can change minds. And I know this because I see it over and over and over again, as long as we share the good news. And the good news is that you don’t have to be angry about the way people use language. You can have fun with it, because this is fun, and it’s beautiful, and it’s positive.
KITTY: They were both excellent answers to that question! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I think it’s telling that Daniel had that answer, because I don’t have to retrain a radio host regularly, and I don’t meet new students. And so basically, most people I interact with already know these things, so I don’t have to… So, I sometimes when we have shows that Daniel says this again, I’m like, “Yeah, that’s obvious. Surely, we don’t need to say this again!”
DANIEL: Doesn’t everybody know this…?
HEDVIG: But I think, yeah, he’s probably right. Yeah
DANIEL: Well, then you go to Twitter, and you see people with angry language fights. That hell site…! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That’s your Twitter feed. My Twitter feed isn’t like that.
DANIEL: I know. And I kind of put myself out there sometimes because…
HEDVIG: yeah! You choose to get into those fights.
KITTY: For the greater good! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I just move on to the videogames and cats.
DANIEL: Okay.
KITTY: The better side of Twitter. [laughs]
HEDVIG: I think so.
ROMANY: Quite a specific question, but do you think that The Language Instinct, plus other Steppan Plunker books should be taken off the official list of books to get people into linguistics? And we could capitalise those words!
KITTY: Because they are everywhere. Like, in our uni reading lists for first year, the pre-reading that you may want to do is, like, a couple of textbooks on syntax and phonology, and then just The Language Instinct.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I don’t know. I actually haven’t read it.
DANIEL: I did. And I learned heaps from it, but…
HEDVIG: I’d never felt the urge to read it. I don’t know, maybe this is going to come off as like… I don’t know, maybe I should read it.
DANIEL: [HAUGHTY TONE] Oh, I haven’t read it. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, I haven’t. So, I can’t really say if it’s good or bad. But I think that…
DANIEL: Storben who?
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: There might be better books out there. What is one that I think is…? Well, the one that got me into it is in Swedish. So, I don’t know.
KITTY: Which one is that, just for interest?
HEDVIG: It’s just a short… It’s in a series of research books for a lay audience and it’s called What is Language? And it’s by a linguist in Sweden who later became my supervisor. There’s like: what is physics? What is gender? And they’re like 100 pages, and you read them and you get excited.
KITTY: That’s really cool, because recently, a Swedish guy, I think, Sverker Johansson, I think, wrote one about theories of how language began, and that’s a really good book. I think that’s come out in English recently, but yeah.
ROMANY: Kitty lived in Sweden for a few years when she was younger, so. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Nice.
KITTY: Yeah, so Sweden.
HEDVIG: But I think… I mean, I can understand linguistics teachers having… they’re probably overworked, they probably are having a very hard time updating their curriculum every year. And once they settle on a book list that they think is decent, they’re not going to change it from year to year, because they’re like, “I’m going to stick with what works.” So, I have totally sympathy for that. And I haven’t read The Language Instinct, so I don’t know if it should be taken off or not.
KITTY: Fair enough!
HEDVIG: Daniel has read it.
DANIEL: I think that it should be taken off, but that’s because it takes a very Chomskyan view of nativism and language acquisition that I think is wrong. So, that’s why I think that it’s not very reliable. But this question also involves how we feel about the state of linguistics today, and many people have come to me and written on email and Discord and said, “There’s this person who I admired, who got me into linguistics.” They feel like… you know how you feel about that, that band, like the first record that you bought with your own money — okay, I’m dating myself here — but the first band that you listen to that made you say, “Oh, maybe music can be something more,” in the way that you read a book and you say, “Wow, maybe linguistics could be something more.” And for many people, that’s one or two different people. And then they come to me and say, “I don’t agree with where this person’s headed! What’s going on?”
And it speaks to the state of public linguistics today, where the people who are the influencers, the most influential, they’re not even doing linguistics anymore. They’re doing books on how if you’re woke, you’re terrible, or if you disagree with me, then you’re not being rational! And there’s a lot of pain there. I’ve often said I would never diss this person, unless the diss is disappointment and dismay, because I think that as a public linguist, what you’ve got to do is you’ve got to come to your conclusions — and I’ve said this on the show — whatever you’re using to get your answers, whether you’re using science, or rationality, or intelligence, whatever you want to call it, you’ve got to have at its core, compassion and intellectual humility and generosity of spirit. And if that’s not at the core of your intellectualism, of your rationality, then it is fruitless! It availeth you nothing. The most important thing is kindness. You’ve got to start there. Otherwise, it will take you into terrible people and terrible conclusions that you will think are great, because you got at them rationally.
HEDVIG: The problem is, I think, they think that they are kind. They think that the wrongs they’re pointing out, that they’re kind by pointing it out to people. I don’t agree with that either, but I think that they are in the mindset that they are kind. When I think about my linguistics, especially undergraduate education, one thing that I thought was really valuable was a breadth of books to read. So like, we had some readers like, George Yule, The Study of Language, we had as my intro book, and I actually really liked that one.
DANIEL: That’s a good one.
HEDVIG: Yeah. But then we also quite quickly transitioned into reading, like, research papers, like short ones, or anthology. When I took language acquisition in Winnipeg, we had language acquisition anthology reader, which had different chapters by lots of different people. And, yeah, just a diversity. So I’m not sure undergraduates should read one book by one author, unless it’s, like, the intro book to the basics of how things work. I think you should read more short things by lots of different people. And you should read some generativism, and you should read some functionalism, and sort of get a breadth, I think. So for that reason, even though I haven’t read The Language Instinct, I think it might be a bad thing to do anyway, because it’s like a thick book by one person, and I’m not sure that should be actually in undergraduate studies.
ROMANY: That’s very fair.
KITTY: Yeah, thank you for both of those answers. I guess following on from because, Daniel, you said, one of the reasons you disagree with The Language Instinct is its actual premises and conclusions, but then it is a very popular book that popularises linguistics to people. So, I guess related to that, popular depictions of linguistics are not necessarily correct. What do you think?
DANIEL: There are some ideas that are incredibly attractive. Like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Whorfianism, the idea that the language that you speak, or that the nuts and bolts of the language you speak has a spooky effect on the kind of behaviour that you’ll do, that you can’t quite explain. People are fascinated by that idea and linguists are certain that in many ways, it doesn’t hold up. And it’s not a dumb idea, but it doesn’t seem to work. It’s a cool idea that didn’t pan out. But do I mind? Well, it gives me something to talk about, that’s for sure. And that’s always fun, because I say, “Hey, you know that movie that just came out about alien languages? Wow, what a concept, right?” And in fact, Ben and I went to a screening of the movie Arrival. We were asked to come along and do a thing with other linguists and thinkers, and biologists and things, and it was really, really fun. We enjoyed it. We loved being part of the conversation. And even if there’s some wrong bits, everything we think is at least a little bit wrong. Nobody’s going to get it right all the time. So, that’s where we can say, “Here’s our best understanding.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. One of the other reasons I realised when I was thinking about why I might be anti some of those books is also because I think there are young, modern generativists that aren’t stuck in the trenches of the wars that they had in the ’70s and ’80s in the same way. We invited Taylor Miller on for the generativism episode, and she has a very different take. And I think they’re all a new crop of young generative linguists who are like: “I think it’s good to have a theory. I think it’s good to have a framework, and it makes a lot of sense and it makes me ask interesting questions of the languages I described. But I don’t think it’s, like, the ultimate universal truth, but I think it’s a useful tool in my arsenal,” or something like that. And the more we mainly cite these mainly older white men, the more stuck we get into the idea that we’re still fighting this very good-versus-evil war, and that it’s entirely black and white, and we need to fight each other. And I think that’s also not great.
DANIEL: It’s rough, because we need to know about those things, right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, you need to know about those things.
DANIEL: Yeah. It’s like when we talk about, for example, generativism or nativism or something, or whether apes can use language. I always think, “Am I contributing anything here? Or, am I just digging up decades-old, intractable fights?” And I don’t want to do the latter, but I do kind of want to know how we got here. And so, that’s one reason why I would approach topics like that.
HEDVIG: Yeah, but I’d say if you want to know about generativism, try engaging with more recent generativism because that’s probably more interesting.
ROMANY: Yes.
HEDVIG: And they do have new things to say, and they have new conferences and new papers. They’re not all just worshipping at the altar of Syntactic Structures every day.
ROMANY: It is very frustrating. Like, a lot of uni teaching, because you read all the classic texts, and you learn the classic, received findings, it’s just… Same with things like semantics and pragmatics, things like that, they teach you so much old stuff, and you get really familiar with what people said in the ’80s. But so much new stuff is still coming out, and we have no idea. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Max Planck once said, I believe, that “Science progresses one funeral at a time.”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Oh, God, I know that one. Don’t… yeah. That one is rough.
DANIEL: It is rough. But we don’t change our ideas, because we go, “Oh, I found something new. And I’m a late career researcher, and I’m finding out this new thing that’s changing my view.” That does happen.
HEDVIG: Some people do.
DANIEL: Some people do.
HEDVIG: It does happen.
DANIEL: It does.
HEDVIG: And the way that the lay public is taught what science is, what the scientific method is, they think that that is what we’re doing all the time. That’s what we get told that, “Oh, you should listen to these scientists, because when you present them with new evidence, they change their mind.” And that’s why it’s so disappointing when people don’t. And it happens more than I think we’d like to admit.
KITTY: We were talking just before the call about the kind of culture wars that sort of vaguely exist in linguistics and writing essays where you find out that, I don’t know, these two different researchers have taken the same piece of evidence and then come to different conclusions, because what they think the other person is talking about is different from what it is. And, like, I think you’re right. A lot of good bits of science are trying to steer away from that and focus on new evidence and perspectives.
DANIEL: This is one of the hard things because, yeah, I would be glad to change my mind if there were incontrovertible evidence that something I thought was wrong. But in language, that’s difficult because language is complicated and messy and multifactorial, and how would I ever really conclusively disprove a thing that I think about how children learn language? or, how do we represent what we think in? It’s difficult to show these things wrong.
HEDVIG: Yeah, it is difficult to show these things wrong. But a guideline could be to always try to not be 100% confident in your own theories. That sounds emotionally difficult… and it is. And to try and keep an open mind that when people critique you, and try and take their perspective and be like, “What is the question they’re trying to investigate? What is it that they consider to be evidence for and against it? And from their point of view, how they disproven me?” And if they have, can have a discussion about like, “Oh, that’s not the actually the research question that I’m interested in.” Maybe it’s because I’m now married to a philosopher, but it’s always good to reduce to the basic assumptions of where the conversations are starting, because otherwise you start talking past each other, because you’re actually not discussing the same things.
DANIEL: Somebody once told me, “You can have wisdom or you can have certainty, but you can’t have both.”
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: So, we need to be less certain.
KITTY: Daniel’s throwing out all the pearls of wisdom.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Just droppin’ a wisdom on you.
HEDVIG: It’s actually one of the reasons that I enjoy working in cross-disciplinary research, because the people who seriously engage with cross-disciplinary research are often, I find, quite humble, and will be like, “So, from our field, we would do it like this. What would you do?” There are those that just come in and dominate and are like, “I’m going to save your field and explain your theories.” But most people are not like that. And they’re also, I don’t know, in my experience, the ones that I’ve collaborated with so far are quite open to be disproven or open to learn, and it can be quite fruitful. Especially what I’m getting into more as well, these various kinds of quantitative methods, where you’re relying on a very formalised way of explaining your hypothesis and explaining how to test it. So, it’s very clear if you’ve done something wrong or right, or if you prove something wrong or right.
Whereas when people get into more qualitative arguments… I’m not saying qualitative science is unnecessary or bad but it’s a bit easier to talk past each other because the underpinnings of your arguments aren’t as formalised. So, people get into more fights, I think. This is me trying to do Historical Linguistics. [LAUGHS] Historical linguists get into fights where they talk past each other a fair amount. But when you do a formalised thing, and you say, “Oh, I have 75% certainty that this is the cognate class.” Then, someone else can say, “Oh, no, I think that you’ve misclassified this word, and therefore it should be like this.” And you can be like, “Okay, good. I can do something with that.”
ROMANY: Just about the process of making a podcast, from having the initial idea of the thing you’re going to talk about to the finished product in terms of like, finding guests, deciding what’s a good idea, the amount of research that goes into it, what you decide to cut out, just the process?
HEDVIG: The way it works is that Daniel does almost everything, and then I show up and have ideas. No, that’s… We have a run sheet, and there are three broad categories of things. One is, we’ve seen some research that we think are interesting to our audience, and we contact the researchers and ask them to come on our show. That’s one thing. The prep for that is having a look at some of the major journals and things like EurekAlert for linguistics, which is like a way science journalism news comes out, and just keeping on top of conferences and stuff like that.
The other thing is, sometimes we get contacted by someone who says, “I’ve just published a book, and I’d like to come on your show and talk about it.” And if we think that that’s interesting, we invite them on. The other is when it’s a more thematic thing that we’re like, “We would like to do a show about this thing in general.” Like when we had Mei-Shin and Jingting on last year to talk about the many things that people call Chinese. It was because I thought it would be interesting, and I thought they would have something interesting to say about it, and we had sort of a loose plan of what questions to ask them. But yeah, sort of those three categories of shows. We have like a Google Drive folder with lots of documents and lines and ideas for shows, and we try and get through them as best we can. Daniel usually writes up the run sheet. Yeah, tries to keep us on track, vaguely. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Yep. So we’ve kind of worked our way into three sort of general areas. One is the news and research. Another one is the main, and then the other is the words. A show can be like all words or it can be all news, or it can also be mailbags with people asking questions. I usually find that if I think it’s something interesting, if it ties into something recent, like, “What is this Wordle thing everybody’s doing?” [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: But then, people have jumped all over Wordle and done bits on that. So, then I have to say, “Okay, well, what can I bring to this? What can we bring to this? What value can we add?” Because you have to add value.
HEDVIG::I like playing Wordle. But I don’t think I have anything to say about it.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, then we go, “Okay. Is this something that we should do? Is it a news item? Is it a main?” Sometimes, you just find a topic that clicks. It’s like, “Oh, did you know that a researcher has found that there’s a correlation between Pokémon names and how big or evolved they are?”
KITTY: Really?
ROMANY: That’s so cool.
KITTY: That is really cool. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s really cool!
HEDVIG: They have longer names if they’re more evolved, right?
DANIEL: Yep, that’s right. And they have more obstruents, more voiced obstruents. Anyway, you find something like that, it’s like, “Oh. 🤤” So, then you try to get there first. So, yeah, I put the run sheet together with stuff that I found. Sometimes, it comes from our listeners, a lot of good ideas come from suggestions from listeners. And then, we get together and we do it. That means that we’re all in the same virtual space at the same time, and we talk. And sometimes we get there, and sometimes we don’t, but we do what we can. And then, I take away the audio, and I edit it to within an inch of its life and try to make sure that it sounds good from a technical point of view, like make sure that the sound is compressed, there’s noise reduction, that the silences are removed.
HEDVIG: …that Hedvig’s clicking and when she touches the table like this. [TABLE KNOCKS]
DANIEL: Yeah. I can’t really do anything about that.
HEDVIG: I know. I don’t always feel like… I try not to do it.
DANIEL: You’re… you’re doing great. You’re doing great.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] Also, he edits… Daniel knows what our ‘ums’ look like.
DANIEL: Um.
HEDVIG: He can look at the waveform and tell if it’s me or Ben saying ‘um’.
KITTY: I love that.
DANIEL: Even when a guest is saying ‘um’, there are some guests who say ‘um’ a lot. But I try to be respectful. The important thing is to be respectful about the conversation that you had. Edit for clarity, but don’t try to make yourself look like a genius by going back and recording things you didn’t say. Be respectful of the conversation that you had, when you were together like that. That’s what happened, and make sure you’re true to that conversation.
The main thing when we’re doing the recording is me making sure that we are moving along, but things aren’t too hard. And that’s why I looove having Ben and Hedvig, because Hedvig is a linguist and she has the knowledge. [HEDVIG LAUGHS] No, you… She really does. And then, Ben isn’t a linguist, but he’s super smart and he takes things from the layperson point of view. So, he keeps us grounded, Hedvig keeps us knowledgeable. I’m trying to keep everything moving and comprehensible, and I think the best thing for me is making sure that it’s not too high level, not too low level. And that’s just due to the fact that I’m not a very good linguist. I have a good smattering of knowledge, so I know when it’s contentful, but if I feel I’m getting out of my depth, then I know that it’s time to tie it down.
HEDVIG: I’m not sure I agree with the fact that you’re not a good linguist. But we can mute that.
DANIEL: [WHISPERS] I’m terrible. Terrible.
KITTY: You kind of touched on the next bit of one of the reasons that your podcast is so popular. The linguists we that we spoke to, when we told them we were doing this, got very excited, because it’s accessible to people who’ve never done linguistics before. But it also gives something new to people who are studying it at the minute and don’t get bored. How do you strike the balance between getting both of those two things right?
HEDVIG: That’s a good question. I’m sort of a big believer of the fact that a lot of research is accessible, more accessible than people think. And the main reason research isn’t accessible is because a lot of researchers are poor communicators. And that’s fine. That’s not their job. They didn’t sign up to be communicators. But I think most of linguistics is actually accessible to people, and can be made accessible. Like, I was at a bar once and I got talking to these two guys, and they asked me what I was researching, and I told them, “Why are there so many languages in the world?” And they’re like, “Oh, I think it’s because of this idea,” and I said, “Oh.” Someone suggested blah, blah.” And then later I was at the table, one of my friends who’s a linguist, and he said, “Oh, when people ask me that, I just lie because I think linguistics is so boring to lay people and they don’t understand the questions.” And I’m like, “Are you sure? Because they were really interested, and you can make it interesting.”
And another time, I was on a train in Netherlands, and I overheard the next table discussing why there are so many languages in the world. I was there with my ex-boyfriend. And I was looking at him, and I was like, “I’d really like to interrupt them, and talk to them.” And he was like, “Please don’t. I’m very tired.” I just sat there for 30 minutes, and I didn’t. But they were saying really smart things! And they weren’t linguists. And I hear this all the time. A lot of people have good and smart ideas about languages, and a lot of lay people can understand it, and you just have to be a good communicator. And I’m not sure we always are, but we try to be.
And I think a lot of academics think… I also think that I don’t want to do science that I can’t explain to lay people, because then I suspect that I’m not doing good science, actually. For me, that’s sort of a metric of what I should I engage in as a study. And you know, I talk to my family a lot. Like, my mom and my brother, I explained my research to them, and I try and make them understand. And I find that really valuable for myself, because if the only people I can talk to are other academics, then that’s a pretty poor world. I’m sorry to everyone.
[LAUGHTER]
We don’t shy away from… we think that most things are possible to make… I don’t think we’ve ever had a a conversation where we thought we could make something accessible. If we think it’s interesting, then we bank on that we can make it somewhat accessible. So, I don’t know if we try and strike a balance. We just don’t believe there is…! [LAUGHTER] that there is a balance to be struck, because, yeah, most things can be made accessible. And we go with things that we think are interesting. Some science news that other academics get really hyped about, we don’t find interesting, and then we don’t cover it.
KITTY: [CHUCKLES] That’s a good answer. Thank you.
HEDVIG: What do you think, Daniel?
DANIEL: I think I hope we hit the balance a lot, and we mostly do. But I think that’s because a lot of linguistic ideas, you really can boil them down. They really are comprehensible, if you explain them well. Being a dad, for me, is one thing that’s helped me to be a good explainer, because you answer a lot of questions, you’ve got to make it quick, and you’ve got to know or make guesses about what your audience already knows so that you can tie that in. So I guess, when you’re explaining something, my rules are: what do they know? What do they need to know? And is there an interesting way of saying it so that they will like it?
HEDVIG: Yeah, because your hesitation there when you said, “Do we spend a lot of time?”, I don’t think we spend a lot of time thinking how to make it accessible. We just assume that it’s interesting to us, and if we find it fun, then we can make it accessible. And sometimes in the show, we’ll do… it’s very rare, but sometimes we’ll do retakes, like Ben or someone will be like, “Oh, what is that word?”
DANIEL: “You guys, this isn’t…”
HEDVIG: And we do an explanation. Sometimes, we’ll do a second one. But usually, I’m sure we don’t always get it right. We did our listener survey recently, and most people found it to be accessible, but some people thought some things were hard to understand. So, we don’t always hit it right, but we give it our best shot.
ROMANY: Cool.
DANIEL: For the linguists — we asked people if they thought of themselves as linguists — and then we said, how easy was the show to understand? And the linguists said that it was about 1 on a scale of 1 to 5, which was pretty easy to understand.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah, one is good.
DANIEL: One is good. And the non-linguists, people who said they weren’t linguists said about 2, which was…
KITTY: Oh, wow!
ROMANY: That’s still pretty good.
KITTY: Yeah!
DANIEL: …still pretty easy to understand. So, I was like, “Okay, that’s what I wanted to know.”
KITTY: Finally, would you guys have any advice for people graduating with linguistics degrees, but don’t really know, like, what they want to do with it?
ROMANY: Asking for a friend.
[LAUGHTER]
KITTY: Or just people studying linguistics.
ROMANY: People studying linguistics, is there anything that you think would have been good to know?
HEDVIG: I think there are a lot of things you can do with linguistics that aren’t just being in academia. I think people don’t always know about that or get introduced to that, but there is actually. For one, if you wanted to stay in academia, you could go on to do a PhD or something in another topic. That’s one possibility. You don’t have to feel you’re locked into linguistics. There are other programs that would accept linguistics graduates. The other thing is: there are lots of other… we were just talking about communication, so a lot of institutions and companies have communicators that they hire, that’s something a linguistics degree is useful for. There is a breadth of things, but I would recommend going to Superlinguo, the blog, because they do regular interviews with people who have chosen different paths and I think that’s a really good starting-off point, I think.
DANIEL: Anna Marie Trester is doing a book about employing linguistics, and we are going to be talking to her very soon.
HEDVIG: Yes.
ROMANY: That’s cool.
DANIEL: But it’s okay to know that academia is not right for you. In my case, I had a full-time academic job, and I treasure the time that I spent in academia, but it wasn’t what I loved. You have to have, like, four or five very specific skills to be able to do it, and I had like two or three of those skills. But one of the skills that I had was teaching and explaining, and that was what I loved. And so, I decided to jump into doing this. It’s less remunerative, there’s less money in it, but it’s made me very happy. And I get to talk to Ben and Hedvig, and some really great linguistic people, because I decided that giving up was the right thing for me. We often say, “Never give up.” Give up if something’s wrong for you. The best things in my life were things that I gave up on.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I don’t know if you have to give up completely. You could also say, “I’m going to take a break for a while and then get back later.” That’s also possible. I took a break between my bachelor and master, master’s and PhD, all of them, I took a break to have an existential crisis and be like “Is this what I want to do with my life?” And it was really useful for me, because it made me think, “No, there are actually possibly mistakes that I don’t find interesting. And I don’t want to do and I’m not going to feign being interested in them, because I’m not. I’m going to focus on the things that I actually find interesting.” Because the linguistics program you’re in has a certain direction, or your supervisor has a set direction, it doesn’t mean you need to go with that direction. You can go with something else. And if you meet people in academia who talk about leaving academia as a failure, then they are toxic people and you should limit your time with them.
KITTY: Stay away.
DANIEL: What was the Word of the Week that we had? It was procrastiworking. Notice what you do when you procrastinate. When you should be doing work, but you do something different. See if that’s something that you are actually really interested in and that you could actually do, because it’s got to be what you love. Watch what you do when you’re procrastiworking.
ROMANY: That’s good advice,
KITTY: That is good advice. Yeah, thank you.
KITTY: Thank you.
HEDVIG: What am I doing?
DANIEL: What am I doing?
HEDVIG: What do you do when you procrastiwork, Daniel?
DANIEL: I play on the computer, and that is something… like, I’ll work on graphics for the show, or I’ll work on designs for our shop. And I’m like, “Oh, you know, maybe graphic design is something that I really enjoyed. Maybe I should be gravitating more toward that, make that more of a thing.” I’ve been as successful as I am — not very! — because I’ve looked for things that were extras, and I grabbed them, and I pulled them in. And that made my career really varied and super interesting. It’s like a colourful bunch of strings that I hold and I’ve got enough strings now that I feel like I’m doing what I want to do now and that’s been really good for me. Like talking to these two, I get off of a call with these two, and I think, “Why would I want to do anything else? This is the greatest”
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: God. Yeah, he butters this up like that a lot.
DANIEL: [WHISPERS] It’s true. It’s truuuuue!
ROMANY: Thank you, guys, a lot.
KITTY: Yeah, thank you so much.
ROMANY: I don’t think I’d be doing linguistics if your podcast didn’t exist. Genuinely, it was the first thing…
HEDVIG: Oh, wow!
ROMANY: …that got me into linguistics.
HEDVIG: That’s a lot of responsibility. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Are you serious?
ROMANY: Yeah, genuinely.
DANIEL: Oh, my gosh.
ROMANY: I wrote an essay about politics. And someone had done like linguistic analysis of some politicians. And I basically looked at that and thought, “Oh, I didn’t realise that was a field of study in its own right.” And just googled ‘things to get into linguistics,’ and your podcast came up. And then, it taught me some things that I researched for my personal statement and my application. So like, genuinely, I don’t think I’d be doing this degree. [crosstalk]
DANIEL: Thank you. I really appreciate that. That makes me feel really good.
ROMANY: Yeah, no pressure.
HEDVIG: Yeah, exactly!
DANIEL: Go forth and do more than I could do.
[INTERVIEW ENDS]
DANIEL: That was a lot of fun. Thanks to both of you, Kitty and Romany for interviewing us. And again, thanks to U-Lingua for allowing us to play this audio for everybody. If you would like to read the issue of U-Lingua in which we appear — and a whole bunch of other great articles as well — you can do a search for U-Lingua, it’s the Spring 2022, Issue 8, and we’ll have a link to that on our website, becauselanguage.com.
[MUSIC]
DANIEL: All right, you two, It’s time for the reads.
KITTY: [FINDING THE TEXT] …dooba dooba doo…
ROMANY: [LAUGHS]
KITTY: If you like the show, here’s what you can do: Send these lovely, lovely people ideas and feedback. They are becauselangpod on all the socials. You can leave them a message with SpeakPipe. And the website is becauselanguage.com. You can also send them an email at hello@becauselanguage.com. Or tell a friend about the show or leave a review. So, I heard about this show through my friend, Romany, who is right here. So, yes, that’s…
DANIEL: Now I’m curious. Romany, how did you find out about the show?
ROMANY: I discovered linguistics was a thing accidentally and then just googled, “how to get into linguistics,” and then discovered podcasts, because I hadn’t heard of them before. And then, googled “linguistics podcasts”, and you guys came up.
DANIEL: Oh, okay. That’s actually the most surprising thing. Okay, cool.
[LAUGHTER]
ROMANY: I don’t think you were top of the list.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: No, we’re definitely not top of the list, no.
KITTY: Yeah, tell a friend about the show, like Dustin of Sandman Stories does on Twitter. Or, you can become a patron to get bonus episodes, such as this one. We’re not patrons, so we’ll listen to it in a few months’ time.
[LAUGHTER]
ROMANY: I’m so sorry!
DANIEL: I’ll slip you a link!
[LAUGHTER]
KITTY: Yes, or hang out with the lovely people at Because Language on Discord.
DANIEL: You know, we have patrons that make it possible for us to do lots of things to keep the show going, but also make transcripts, so that if you don’t like to listen to shows or you can’t listen to shows, you can read them instead. And also, you can search things. You can do that because our transcripts are searchable. Thanks to the entire team at SpeechDocs. They are doing an amazing job on our transcripts. You could use them too.
Shoutout to our top patrons: Dustin, Termy, Chris B, Matt, Whitney, Chris L, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, Elías, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Manú, James, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, glyph, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Samantha, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny, O Tim, Alyssa, and the wonderful Kate B, who contributed by mashing the one-time donation button on our website becauselanguage.com.
KITTY: The lovely Because Language theme music — which I’m finding it weird hearing Daniel’s voice without — has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thanks for listening. They’ll catch you next time, Because Language.
[MUSIC STOPS]
ROMANY: It’s so cool that I got to do that bit!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] I’m so glad that you got the chance.
KITTY: We’re having a real fangirl moment right here.
[LAUGHTER]
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]