Linguistics as a discipline has some work to do when it comes to examining and eliminating the legacy of colonialism. How do we do it? And how do we feel about the overtly evangelical agenda of a lot of linguistic work? Dr Hannah Gibson joins us.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Saputo scraps Coon cheese brand name over implied racial slur – Inside FMCG
https://insidefmcg.com.au/2020/07/27/saputo-scraps-coon-cheese-brand-name-over-implied-racial-slur/
Name dumped: Canadian owners melt over ‘racist’ Aussie Coon cheese
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/canadian-owners-melting-over-racist-aussie-coon-cheese/news-story/9d71315f050955679547d43f17871ead
Finding Cross-Lingual Syntax in Multilingual BERT | SAIL Blog
https://ai.stanford.edu/blog/finding-crosslingual-syntax/
BERT Model Embeddings aren’t as good as you think
https://towardsdatascience.com/cutting-edge-bert-nlp-model-bb0bfc8b7aec
Finding Universal Grammatical Relations in Multilingual BERT
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.04511.pdf
Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates – The Verge
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates
Here’s the problematic map Hedvig mentioned from 1924. Click to open the full image in a new tab.
‘The Before Time’: A Sci-Fi Idea That Has Made Its Way to Real Life – WSJ
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-before-time-a-sci-fi-idea-that-has-made-its-way-to-real-life-11592580133
Is DROP KICK rhyming slang for PRICK? This book thinks so.
Google Books link
dropkick and punt, n. — Green’s Dictionary of Slang
https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/pyyb3py
The Dudes Who Won’t Wear Masks – The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/dudes-who-wont-wear-masks/613375/
Why Won’t White People Wear Masks?
https://medium.com/indica/why-wont-white-people-wear-masks-dbb8046a9471
Shaming people who refuse to wear face masks isn’t a good look | Arwa Mahdawi | Opinion | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/22/shaming-people-who-refuse-to-wear-face-masks-isnt-a-good-look
What to Say to Someone Who Won’t Wear a Mask
https://www.menshealth.com/health/a33267635/wont-wear-a-mask-what-to-say/
Urban Dictionary: Rat-Licker
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rat-Licker
Transcript
Many thanks to Maya Klein of Voicing Words for transcription. And huge thanks to our patrons, who support the show and make it possible for these transcripts to exist. Help us continue by becoming a patron.
DANIEL: Transitional music!
BEN and HEDVIG: [SINGING] Bee doo bee boo ba doo doo!
[THEME MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name’s Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. Beautiful human being and absolute pleasure to be on a podcast with, it’s Hedvig Skirgård.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] I didn’t know which one you were going to do!
DANIEL: You never know with me!
HEDVIG: It could be me or Ben, I have no idea.
BEN: Well, he’s departed from last week’s super, brutally, uncomfortably true descriptions.
HEDVIG: Oh my god, yeah, that was rough.
DANIEL: I was mean.
HEDVIG: That was rough.
BEN: I felt seen in all the wrong ways.
DANIEL: I have to make it up to you for this one. And Ben Ainslie. Hello, Ben.
BEN: Hello. [LAUGHTER] If I sound different to everyone, I must fully acknowledge that I got the most fun text in podcasting, which is like: Hey, Ben, uh, we’re all waiting for you. So I scrambled and I am recording through a particularly lo-fi set up this week. So apologies to every person’s ear holes hearing my voice.
DANIEL: But not apology to people who are reading this on the transcript. By the way, did you know our transcript tool is live and people can correct five seconds of audio to help us? Lots of people have already joined in. They’ve listened to a tiny snippet, they’ve corrected the automatic text and if enough people do that, we’ll have all of our transcripts sorted really soon.
BEN: That is so wicked. I really, really like that.
DANIEL: We have a special guest. Our special guest co-host this time is Dr. Hannah Gibson, lecturer in linguistics at the University of Essex. Hello, Hannah.
HANNAH: Hi, everyone.
DANIEL: Thanks for coming on the show.
HANNAH: Great to be here! Really looking forward to it.
BEN: Yeah, we’re really excited.
DANIEL: Tell us about your research. What kind of stuff do you do?
HANNAH: Most of my research is on African languages, and I’m particularly interested in language contact and language change. So what happens when languages, lots of languages are spoken in one area or lots of languages are used in one area? And yeah, most of my research has been done in East Africa, so primarily Tanzania and Kenya. And then more recently, I’ve started collaborating with colleagues in South Africa as well. So that’s exciting.
HEDVIG: That is exciting.
DANIEL: One thing that’s been on our minds lately is the colonialism and the racism, not only in our society, but that has been inherent in linguistics, and how we work our way through that, how we decolonise the discipline. This has been on your mind, too, I guess?
HANNAH: Absolutely. Yeah. I think these are really interesting questions and it’s really important stuff that we talk about and we acknowledge and we just engage with. I don’t think there’s a… I’m certainly not going to provide any, like, answers really, but like questions that we just have to keep on asking ourselves, asking each other and just making sure that we acknowledge that, as you say, the kind of history of our discipline, basically.
DANIEL: This is episode six of Because Language. And if you’re wondering what happened to episodes four and five, they are bonus episodes. Patrons get to hear them and we’re going to be having one or even two of those per month, so they’re definitely worth checking out. Episode four was about if there’s any advantage to bilingualism. We talked to Dr Iryna Khodos. And number five was…
BEN: A rant, would we call it a rant? [LAUGHTER] I’m going to… I don’t want to call it too early, but I felt pretty ranty in that episode!
HEDVIG: Yeah, me too.
DANIEL: Turned into one, didn’t it? I’m calling it a walkthrough. A walkthrough of the LSA Open Letter, where people called for the dropping of Steven Pinker off the list of LSA media experts. And a whole bunch of public intellectuals, instead of reflecting on it, decided to write their own letter. I’m calling this the worst response to feedback ever.
BEN: I think, like, if anyone is genuinely wondering what we talked about in that episode, it was more or less an hour long treatise on quote-unquote “cancel culture” and the sort of the culture wars, both of which are phrases that I don’t endorse, but that like people are using, and us basically going, this is dumb. So much of this is really dumb.
HEDVIG: Yeah. I mean, so that episode started out, Daniel had listed the LSA letter as a news item and we were going to talk about something else, I think?
BEN: It was supposed to be show that tailed it…
HEDVIG: And we were like, this isn’t happening, we’re just going to talk about this for an hour. We need to go through this.
BEN: I think it was more like… It’s not like: “This is happening, we’re going to talk about this for an hour,” but more like, “Oh, wow, we’ve been going for like an hour and 20 minutes, I think this is the show now!”
DANIEL: Yeah, this is the show. So if you want to hear what we had to say about that, sign up and become a patron at the listener level. That’s patreon.com/becauselanguage. You’ll be supporting the show and keeping us going. Thanks to all our patrons.
BEN: Okay, Daniel, I think that is enough spruiking, you shameless, shameless money man. What is in the news this week?
DANIEL: Our discussion of racist brand names continues. This will contain a few slurs, so terribly sorry. Brace yourself, gird your loins, etc. PharaohKatt was the one who noticed this one. The Canadian dairy company Saputo, which is the one that owns the racist brand of cheese known as…
BEN: Yup. Which I think we need to acknowledge, like, can we just say it the once for our international listeners? Because every Australian knows what we’re talking about, but I think a lot of non-Australians will be surprised to know there is a cheese that’s called this in Australia.
HEDVIG: Like the guest we have on the show…
HANNAH: I was going to say, I certainly don’t know what cheese you’re talking about.
BEN: Oh my goodness, Hannah, it’s just, like, this is one of those things where we’re going to say it and you’re going to be like: you’re joking, that’s a joke. It’s a terrible joke, but you must be joking.
DANIEL: Slur coming in three, two, one… Coon cheese.
HANNAH: No.
BEN and DANIEL: Yes.
HANNAH: Wow. So, sorry, is this is an Australian brand or is this is a Canadian brand?
HEDVIG: Australian.
BEN: It’s an Australian brand owned by a Canadian dairy company. But it is… I assume it was acquired by said Canadian company at some stage, but it was Australian.
HANNAH: Sure, yeah. I mean, also racist terms internationalise and globalise nicely, so, you know.
BEN: Mmm, yeah
DANIEL: It’s been through a number of hands. You know, we need to actually track Aboriginal activist Stephen Hagan, who has lobbied for more than 20 years. First, he lobbied Kraft and then got knocked back, then lobbied Dairy Farmers for a change. Now that Saputo has it, they have agreed to change the name. Their comment: “At Saputo, one of our basic principles as an organisation is to treat people with respect and without discrimination, and we will not condone behaviour that goes against this. After thorough consideration, Saputo has decided to retire the brand name. We are working to develop a new brand name that will honour the brand affinity felt by our valued customers.” You know what? Fuck those people. [LAUGHTER] “While aligning” – that’s my statement, not Saputo’s [LAUGHTER] – “while aligning with current attitudes and perspectives.” Who feels brand affinity because of the name? Lots of people, actually.
HEDVIG: We should probably also explain to Hannah — you might be wondering why it’s called this. And my understanding is, the explanation has to do with either a family name or a place name. Is that correct?
DANIEL: Edward William Coon, who allegedly made the cheese ripening process. But the activist Stephen Hagan says nah, it was always a racist joke. At first the cheese was packaged in a black label. So that’s why it got the name.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay, never mind.
HANNAH: Mmm, the statement also sounds like a bit of a sorry, not sorry. The bit at the end about like: oh, it’s not in line with current thinking or something. It’s like: Oh, you people are all just too sort of politically correct and you know, I’m going to have to change it, kind of thing.
BEN: I’m so glad you said that, Hannah, because that’s exactly what it sounded like to me, which was like: Ugh, now that everyone’s making a ~huge fuss~, I guess we’ll change it. Which is really… it’s just such a dick move.
DANIEL: And you know what? People are really slow walking these changes as well. Like, we’ve had a bunch of brands, including a sports team and a couple of candy names, and they’ve all said “We are thinking of changing this,” and it’s been weeks. And they’re not doing it.
HEDVIG: Yeah, what’s the news on the sports team?
DANIEL: They did release the statement, but they didn’t release the new name.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: So maybe this is one of those where I’ll believe it when I see it.
BEN and HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I wonder if they’re hoping that, like: “this-here racial fuss will blow over”, and they get to just go back to the status quo. I really hope they’re not that stupid, though.
DANIEL: Well, time for a few tweets, perhaps. “Hey, how’s the name thing going?”
BEN: Oh, yeah, true. True. Let’s get some famous people to just, like, put the pressure on…
DANIEL: Or us. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Or us. But also it can be like a little follow up. We can check in every week, see if they’ve done it.
DANIEL: Brand watch.
BEN: Racist cheese, still racist. Racist baseball, still racist.
DANIEL: Racist candy, still racist. Well, let’s leave that for a while and talk about mBERT.
HEDVIG: Yes!
BEN: M-what?
DANIEL and HEDVIG: mBert!
DANIEL: You got excited by this, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I got excited. I also don’t fully understand it, but I got excited, which is to me, like, a good…
BEN: Can we, can we just, can we take one step back, just for a second and just analyse the sentence: I didn’t fully understand it, but I got really excited!
HEDVIG: Yeah!
DANIEL: I’m excited, and I understand it!
HEDVIG: Hannah or Ben, do you want to guess what mBERT is?
DANIEL: Or just BERT, even?
HEDVIG: Or BERT?
DANIEL: [IN THE VOICE OF ERNIE FROM SESAME STREET] Oh, Bert!
BEN: Okay, I’m going to guess that… I’m going to go first of all, by Hannah’s silence that she thinks similarly to me, has no idea. [LAUGHTER] Yeah.
HANNAH: Rescue me! Thanks!
BEN: So I’m going to throw myself on this little linguistic grenade. I feel like it is a tool of some kind, like a data tool for linguistics.
DANIEL: Ben wins.
BEN: Yesss…!
HEDVIG: Yeah, yeah, he wins. It’s NLP stuff, so natural language processing. So BERT stands for Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers. And it’s…
BEN: Oh, that explains everything. I can’t believe I didn’t understand!
HEDVIG: Yeah, BERT for short. And it’s a neural network kind of thingamajig, and the M stands for…?
DANIEL: Multilingual.
HEDVIG: Multilingual.
DANIEL: Oh, sorry, was I not supposed to say?
HEDVIG: I thought… I don’t know. That was probably not a good thing to make someone guess for.
BEN: Hold on, hold on. Now that Daniel’s told me the answer, let me guess. Does it stand for multilingual?
DANIEL: No, I got it wrong.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: No, I got it right. Okay!
HEDVIG: Okay, so I don’t fully understand neural nets. And from my understanding, people who work with neural nets don’t fully understand them either.
DANIEL: True.
HEDVIG: That’s sort of the thing about them, correct? That you… it’s a little bit of a black box. You put things in, it learns things and then things come out and then you say, oh, that’s fun, but you’re not really sure.
DANIEL: Shall I give the explainer?
HEDVIG: Okay! [LAUGHTER]
BEN: No, no, no. Hedvig, you were doing really good, says Daniel, but here I might just do it totally better! [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: So we have talked before about how we know the meanings of words. We know what a word means because of context.
BEN: Sure. You know a word by its friends.
DANIEL: Yeah, when I go for a walk with my tiny daughters, and we see a bird, I say: “Oh, look, there’s a bird. It flew by. It’s… oh, it went up in the tree. Do you think it has a nest up in the tree?” So then they’re hearing words like BIRD and TREE and FLY and NEST, and they know those words are related because they encounter them in the same neighbourhoods. So lately, the NLP community has worked on creating embeddings, which is sort of like a bunch of numbers that shows how likely a word is to appear near another word.
BEN: So are we talking sort of like a metadata sort of taxonomy almost? Like, so you’ve got the corpus, and then you’ve got this layer of metadata over the top that is kind of almost like a heat map of what words are falling next to other words?
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s right. And so we know the word ROYAL comes near KING and QUEEN and so on, and that’s how we know those words are related. And you can use these embeddings to predict maybe like what word should go in a sentence. Like we can do this. We say “Every day my son comes home from…”
BEN: School!
DANIEL: Yeah, okay. That’s a pretty good…
BEN: I’m so good at these games. Keep going.
DANIEL: You can even — and this is kind of scary — you can predict what the next sentence should be, and that’s when you’re not filling in the blank, you’re filling in, like, the answer to a question. So BERT can be used for a lot of different stuff. And it’s bidirectional because some embedding methods read left to right, they work through their sentence left or right, or right to left. But this just — BLOM — does it. Bidirectional or no directional.
BEN: Well, I mean, I guess that makes sense, right? Because it’s not like the second word of a sentence is only ever relating to the first words. Sometimes it can relate to the third word and all that kind of stuff, but that can go in the other direction too.
DANIEL: That is true.
HEDVIG: Yeah, like a preposition or something.
BEN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: We should also say BERT, I believe, has also been making the rounds for trying to predict… So it learns from text, right? So it only knows what we give it. There’s also been some negative news stories in the press about, like, if you put in — in a lot of these new training models — if you put in something like two Muslims __, you get not great things after that. Yeah. So like any model based on corpus data is only as good as the corpus you put in.
BEN: Which, when taken from the internet, is uniformly terrible humans being terrible, yeah.
DANIEL: Ah, but that’s where our friend Robyn Speer steps in and takes the bias and tries to tweak it, which is a show we did a couple of years ago on Talk the Talk.
BEN: I remember that! Yeah, I remember that.
HEDVIG: But we don’t know what they did here, but it’s something that should… yeah.
DANIEL: So let’s move on to multilingual BERT, and this is going to get us into some work by Ethan Chi, and a team from Stanford University. So what you do here is you don’t just do it for English. You take a hundred and four languages and you dump everything into the hopper, without telling the computer what languages every sentence comes from.
BEN: Oh, whoa.
DANIEL: Yeah. And it works!
BEN: Oh, that’s cool.
DANIEL: Yeah. And here’s the nice thing: With all that information… like, let’s say that I want to figure out, I don’t know, like, which stocks people are feeling good about, which have positive words and which ones have negative words, and I’ve collected a lot of information in English only from Reddit. So I can take mBERT and I can add to that my English data and do a little bit more training. And then it can tell me which stocks or which movies or which products people like in English, but it can also do the same job in like maybe German, without any German data from me. It just works it out.
HEDVIG: And excitingly, maybe also for Hannah, because Hannah and I know each other through morpho-syntax and grammar research. And mBERT also tried to define… it ended up defining grammatical categories. So it found like: Ah, these are negatives, ah, these are prepositions. And they try to see how, if it could find [WHISPERS] “universal grammar” across languages.
HANNAH: Whispered! I have a question, because I was excited about the M when you said multilingual, but I guess it’s only one language at a time. So, it’s not like… what happens if I start my sentence in English and then I throw in a German word?
DANIEL: Might still work.
HEDVIG: Oh, no, I think the sentence, I think this… no, I think the sentences are still one language at a time. So we should also say what languages they were. Because as I saw this news floating around, I couldn’t easily find out which language they were, so I digged into the paper and I found. And so it’s Arabic, Chinese, Mandarin, Czech, English, Farsi, Finnish, French, German, Indonesian, Latvian, and Spanish. Now, that is a whole of a lot of Indo-European languages.
BEN: Yeah, that’s what I was thinking. There’s a bit of a… shall we say that there’s some things missing!
DANIEL: But I heard that mBERT has a hundred and four languages. I wonder what that list is.
HEDVIG: I don’t know. I just know that for this study, they only used 11, so they must have used the 11 ones with the largest corpora. And surprise, surprise, like it does… like, for some ways of measuring how well it’s doing this, it does worse at Mandarin than, you know, German.
BEN: So basically, the further you stray from a sort of Indo-European sort of centric model, the more it struggles.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, that’s really interesting though, that it’s not only acquiring — sort of what we could say — the meanings of words, it’s also pulling syntactic data off of them. That is so interesting.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And they try to do a pairwise thing where they trained it on one and then made it guess it in another language and see how well it did. So there’s this nice little table of, like, pairings of the different languages.
HANNAH: Well, that would be probably quite challenging for Mandarin. I mean, lots of other languages as well, but if you take all of those other languages, they have probably broadly similar grammatical functions and categories and things. And then you plug a language like Mandarin in. Especially, I don’t know if it’s doing… like, how it works with scripts as well. That’s an interesting kind of question there with a language like Mandarin.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no. So it does the worst at… they say Chinese but I’m assuming it’s Mandarin. It definitely does the worst at it. But it also does okay at… this is where it got very complicated, this study. And I feel like maybe we should have someone on to talk about it, because the way they evaluate how well it does, I couldn’t really understand.
BEN: Well, I think we need to create a, like, a shorthand in this show. And I’m putting forward the idea of, we’re going to open letter it, and it’s any time we start talking about it for so long that it’s like bogarting the entire show!
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, yeah.
HEDVIG: Sorry for that.
BEN: We’re open letter-ing it, quick pull back, pull back!
HEDVIG: Daniel’s great at wrapping things up.
DANIEL: Still really good stuff. The cool thing about mBERT to me is that you can take a high-resource language like English where a lot of data gathering has been done, and then you can use that information to just magically develop things for low-resource languages. That’s very cool.
BEN: If that is a thing that tracks really well, that would be awesome. It sounds to me, as like a lay person from the outside, like one of those ideas that people who make tools like this are like: This is what it can be used for! And then you try and use it for that and it’s like: Mmmm, needs improvement.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Finally, Nigel has suggested this one on Facebook.
HEDVIG: I love this.
DANIEL: Scientists have been doing work on genes, and they use R and they use Python, but sometimes they use Excel because who doesn’t love a big sloppy spreadsheet? I do!
HEDVIG: I do!
DANIEL: That’s where my favourite programming happens.
BEN: I got to say, I’ve been doing some new study at university and there are a lot, like a lot of people in my course from the resource industry. And man oh man, do they love themselves a spreadsheet!
DANIEL: So good.
HEDVIG: I love a spreadsheet.
BEN: Just… hoo hoo hoo, I have never seen spreadsheet love to this level. And not only spreadsheet love, but, like, spreadsheet skills.
DANIEL: Ooooh, scary.
HEDVIG: No, you can be, like, if you properly know how to use Excel and LibreOffice office and all the spreadsheet tools, you can do so much. Like honestly, my first step into programming was not ten years ago when someone tried to teach me Python. It was when I in my BA was using Excel a lot and just figured out, like, very complicated…
BEN: Like, macros scripts.
HEDVIG: Yeah, like macro scripts or doing different things, like: If this one that thing, and then that thing, and then there, and then something like that, and then take that part of that part… that is arguably programming.
DANIEL: Oh yeah, sure.
BEN: I don’t even think you need to say “arguably”, it’s just programming.
DANIEL: Well, it’s very cool. But what happens when you take a gene with a name like “Membrane Associated Ring CH-Type Finger One” which has the name [LAUGHTER] I know, I know. It has this name MARCH1.
BEN: Ah.
DANIL: You plug it into the database. It turns it into a date.
BEN: Yes. That would be really annoying. Even my limited usage of Excel, I’ve already run into the problem that these very smart genetic scientists run into.
DANIEL: But, you know, you could avoid that by specifying that this is not a date, this is text. But then what happens when you export that to a CSV file, somebody else opens it and they don’t know how to solve the problem in Excel. So the Hugo Gene Nomenclature Committee or HGNC, has published new guidelines for gene naming. They just basically found that it was easier to change the names of the genes than it was to fight Excel.
BEN: Oh, that makes sense, especially considering the name of the gene we just listed was Membrane Associated Ring CH-Type Finger One, I feel like we could do a little bit of trimming there. Just a little bit.
HANNAH: So does this mean all genes are now going to be named after dates of the year? [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: That is another solution, yeah.
DANIEL: Yeah, sure, just do it.
HEDVIG: Just do the opposite.
DANIEL: MARCH1 has now become MARCHF1 and SEPT1 has become SEPTIN1, that one was changed in April. So overall, twenty-seven genes have been changed.
BEN: I think this is one of those stories that, to an outside listener is like: huh, that’s interesting. And there’s a very small number of people in the world for whom this is a truly biblical change. Like, this makes so much of their lives incredibly easier. And so to those — I don’t know — hundred people, I say congratulations. I’m glad. I’m glad this one thing that probably just seems so dumb, and that every normal person like me at a party when you complained about this to gave you a blank stare, this is the moment where that blank stare person is going: You know what? I feel you, bro. Good job.
DANIEL: We see you.
HEDVIG: I’ve heard geneticists complain that there is data in genetics databases that have, like, irreversibly been lost due to this.
DANIEL: Yep.
BEN: Oh, wow.
HEDVIG: So, like, this is a big deal. Yeah.
BEN: Excellent.
DANIEL: Let me just put on my Microsoft sucks hat and say Apple Numbers…
BEN: Don’t! Don’t, Daniel!
DANIEL: …doesn’t automatically interpret things as a date.
BEN: Because you’re also a Pages man and I will never get on board with your thinking.
DANIEL: Oh, you know, they’re both good, but this is one thing where [SINGS] ~Numbers doesn’t have this problem~
HEDVIG: [SINGS] ~LibraOffice doesn’t either~
DANIEL: Oh, really?
HEDVIG: No.
DANIEL: Oh, well, use that. It’s good that they change the names probably.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: We are here on Because Language with Dr Hannah Gibson from the University of Essex, talking about linguistics, colonialism, and racism. Thanks for joining us, Hannah.
HANNAH: Thanks very much.
HEDVIG: Now, which end should we start at? Because…
HANNAH: I hope that’s not my first question! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: No, it’s something I’ve been thinking about since… So I asked Hannah to join us because I’ve been thinking about talking about colonialism in linguistics. I read a lot of grammars. And some grammars were written a very long time ago, and they contain things that make me feel uncomfortable.
BEN: Can I just really quickly, not to derail us straight away, but when you say “I read a lot of grammars”, my stupid layperson brain doesn’t understand what that means.
HEDVIG: Okay!
BEN: What do you mean you read a lot of grammars?
HEDVIG: No, that’s fine. I think Hannah and I both read a fair amount of grammars, correct?
HANNAH: Yes, absolutely. But I totally understand your question.
BEN: So my understanding was like: grammar is the rule of how language works to be understood. So do you read a language rule book?
HEDVIG: No. So what I do is, what I’ve been doing, and what I’ve been doing for the past six years, more or less, is I’ve been working on this database of grammatical structures of the world’s languages. So we say, let’s spend… let’s pretend that you are… pick a language.
BEN: Okay, I pick — oo, I don’t know why it just came to my head — Urdu.
HEDVIG: Okay, you are the full community of Urdu, okay? And you speak your language and you will speak it a bit differently maybe, but there’s some coherence to your grammar so you can talk to each other. And some linguist — maybe an Urdu speaker themselves, or someone from outside of the community — decides to write up these rules in a book. And they say…
BEN: Sure.
HEDVIG: You know, Ben puts his nouns before his prepositions, or he doesn’t, and blah blah blah. And you write…
BEN: So is this sort of like what people will be engaging in, in like language revitalisation projects, right? So, like, the people in Indigenous communities are, like, desperately trying to figure out some of these things from the older language speakers of the community before it all goes pear shaped.
HEDVIG: Yeah. Yeah. So there are different approaches to language revitalisation. And often, you know, a linguist coming and writing a complicated, jargony grammar book isn’t always the most useful to the community itself, but it’s often…
BEN: Right, but that book of rules is the thing you’re talking about.
HEDVIG: That book of rules is the thing I’m talking about. Yeah.
BEN: So you’ll sit down. So it actually is kind of… what I said only semi-jokingly, which is you will sit down, you’ll read the rulebook for a given language.
HEDVIG: Yeah. And that book is written by a person who has a lot of preconceived ideas about how language works, and what variety of the language they are describing. You know, they might also be doing a dictionary at the same time, and they might choose to not have certain words in it or not. Like I have a Samoan dictionary that doesn’t contain any rude terms.
BEN: Because someone who was recording that stuff was just kind of prudish?
HEDVIG: Actually, just kind of Christian.
BEN: Okay, yeah, okay. Yeah, sure. You said the same thing as me, but with a different word, but no worries. [LAUGHTER] Sorry!
HEDVIG: And this is the thing, like, you Ben, as the speaker of Urdu, you all have grammar in your heads and that abstract thing in your head exists with you. And then someone tries to put it in a book.
BEN: And it’s not a thing that I’m necessarily aware of either. Like classically, single language speakers don’t have a hugely good grammar understanding!
HEDVIG: Yeah. And even multilingual speakers, if, you know, if you grow up in a multilingual home, you might not be aware of the rules you are applying. And that’s totally fine. That’s how grammar works. You know, you don’t have to know the name of…
BEN: Unless you’re a cool linguist like Hannah or Hedvig, and you’re sitting down reading those rule books!
DANIEL: So what makes you uncomfortable in a grammar? Both, this one’s to Hannah and to Hedvig. What… what’s the gross bits? Because as someone who doesn’t read a lot of grammars, I’m wondering what’s in there.
HANNAH: Oh, yeah. I think probably where Hedvig and I work means that there are different things, but maybe some of them are similar? So much of my work, as I said earlier on, is on languages spoken in Africa. So there are really outdated and racist terms in books, so grammars or reference grammars from the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, and in some cases much more recently, which used words that we would consider to be inappropriate, offensive, and they just use them in a sentence to show you where you put your noun and where you put your verb, that kind of thing.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Oh, wow.
HEDVIG: I had a sentence as I asked… I have student assistants who read grammars and I ask them to send in some examples, and there are examples, like example sentences which are, you know, or was it recently? It was, “Black men are not as clever as the whites”.
DANIEL: Oof.
BEN: Oh, wow.
HEDVIG: And just stuff like that. And that can happen in example sentences. We’ve also encountered examples of the grammar writer, writing things like: “You know, complex syntax like you find in civilised countries is not present in this language”.
DANIEL: Which is so untrue.
HEDVIG: “The grammar of the natives here is concerned with the concrete.”
DANIEL: How can you be a linguist and think that? That’s so odd.
BEN: But I mean, you are… I’m assuming both of you were talking about texts potentially, that have I mean, you’ve already said it Hannah, like from over 100 years ago. I’m guessing linguistics as a discipline was probably not quite so self-aware back then.
HANNAH: Yeah, I think that’s fair to say. I mean, I think one of the questions is how self-aware is linguistics now, even in 2020? But perhaps we can come back to that. But I think some of it is like really overt, like the example Hedvig gave. And then I think some of the stuff which is perhaps more subtle certainly still persists. So you have like, you know, if you want to know how to pronounce this, go and ask your, like, insert expletive, like, go and ask your servant or find an African or find a native to do this or, you know, all references implying that, yeah, in this case Black people would be subservient, would be servants, domestic workers, would be working the kitchen. And then similar things like you said, Hedvig, about not being clever, or not being civilised, not being able to have the capacity for complex abstract thoughts, and things like that. But yeah, you can see ways in which that also continued kind of up till today, albeit with slightly different words, perhaps.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: This is reminding me of our episode with Emma Murphy and Caroline Hughes of Living Languages. You know, now that native linguists, people who have the language, the traditional guardians of the language, they’re now trying to do linguistic work to preserve these languages. And they pick up old grammars and kaboom, you know, there’s these things in there.
BEN; Oh, they get real… So there’s a real sort of trauma, historical trauma that can be very triggering to people doing this work, because they get to see first-hand exactly how colonialism played out on like, rubber-meets-the-road colonialism, like, moment to moment, which must just be horrendous.
HEDVIG: And that’s sort of where I started thinking about this. And just, like… I think it’s necessary in all humanities and in linguistics in particular, to just be aware that this is our heritage, this is how the discipline was, and that there are certain ways in which it is still colonial today. And that we need to tackle that, and not ignore it and pretend like it doesn’t exist, and that it was only a thing that happened a long time ago with weirdos that were sort of outliers.
BEN: Is there more that we sort of need to explore in some of this historical stuff, or can we more or less just jump straight into what’s going on now? Because I know that’s the burning question on my head, because you give this context of like just horrifically racist stuff from a time when colonialism was in full swing, and that damage was just sweeping across all of these different places and spaces. But so, what… I mean, am I stupid for thinking that a sentence like “if you want to find out how to say this, ask your servant”, like, that wouldn’t happen in a grammar today, surely. So what does happen? What are we still saying that is problematic and sort of still perniciously perpetuating ideas of white supremacy?
HANNAH: It’s a really good question. I mean, there’s lots of different avenues to explore that, I think. One thing, just to build on the idea of, like, these grammars is actually just even classifying languages and then using concepts from typically European languages to identify parts of speech. So some of these older grammars… so I work on a group of languages, so kind of a language family spoken across much of Africa, which is called the Bantu languages. And actually that in itself is a topic of… that’s a very controversial term, so I can talk about that in a second, perhaps. But what you find in these older grammars is that people talk about case systems. So this is familiar from lots of European languages. In English, it’s the difference between like “I” and “me”. So English has a very reduced case system. But if you’ve studied other languages or speak other languages, then you know about things like nominative, accusative and dative and things like that. So people who work on Bantu languages these days don’t really talk about case, because these languages don’t have case systems in the form that you see in, yeah, lots of the world’s languages. But obviously early, often missionaries or early people who are describing these languages and putting together these grammars, went with having studied Latin, ancient Greek, obviously, whether it’s English, German, French, whatever. And we’re like, oh, so how does case work in this language? So they looked for accusative, nominative, dative and — surprise, surprise! — they found it! Even though, to my eyes it doesn’t exist because the language is constructed completely differently.
So, I mean, I suppose that is one of the dangers, is that you take your ideas of what language is and how language is organised, and then you just apply it to something else. And that, perhaps on the surface of it, is not as explicitly racist as saying, like some of the things that we mentioned earlier on. But actually what it’s doing is setting, in this case, European language and structures of many European languages as the model against which you judge everything else.
BEN: It’s like the default and the other.
HANNAH: Absolutely, right? So this is the default, and of course, the default – and this is where it links to white supremacy and other sort of structures is – the default is most sort of… speaks most loudly and is most violent by its absence. So you’re not aware of it. So it is “just language” rather than saying, oh, well, actually this is how French, English, Spanish, Portuguese work. You say “this is how languages work”. And then you impose those things on whether it’s African languages, whether it’s Indigenous languages for much of the world, in fact, languages in Europe that don’t belong to Indo-European language, family, you know, similar sort of things happened.
So, yeah, if you take that to the classroom today or you take that to what’s happening now, you can see ways in which perhaps students who speak varieties of languages which are considered to be “non-standard” perhaps – I’m doing desperate air quotes as quickly as I can, although they don’t work very well in the podcast… [LAUGHTER]
BEN: I find myself doing them all the time.
HANNAH: Like my hands are just clicking away! But any kind of variation from what we consider to be the “standard” of English, for example, is then very similar things happen, right? And so that’s how it plays out in terms of race. It plays out in terms of class as well, and all sorts of other sort of structures. So that’s kind of, I suppose, fast forward and you can see how that would work, actually, even if you’re talking about English or Englishes perhaps.
HEDVIG: Mm. I think that’s an excellent point. And it’s something I’ve been thinking about as well. There’s also… so there is continuous work in linguistics to define languages on their own terms, and try and work sort of bottom up and try and not bring preconceived notions about how grammar is, so that you don’t do what Hannah described, which is you just find what you’re looking for and force things into a cookie cutter. Of course, the other extreme end, which like I don’t think really happens, but maybe someone would critique this for, is that you know, it’s very… it’s impossible to come with zero preconceived notions. It’s very hard to… like, we’re not babies when we come somewhere. But we can try and make linguistics and make linguistics education and introductions feature a more variety of what we have found in non-Indo-European languages. Like our medical database that I work on was actually first designed with Austronesian and New Guinea languages as a basis. So we have, we have a little bit of a bias towards having more granular categories for those languages. We’ve since tried to expand and add more so that we sort of — how do you say — so that we spread out the bias a bit more. But it is incredibly hard, and it’s incredibly hard to do from scratch, but it is worth it.
HANNAH: Well, I think that’s where it comes back full circle to the question is that we need to acknowledge this. Right, so what is the history of linguistics? What is the history of studying language and what ideas were around? So, yes, if these grammars were written a hundred years ago, then perhaps we don’t use those words anymore. But those were the ideas that were dominant at the time, which then informed what we considered language to be, what we consider linguistics to be, how the science… essentially how the discipline moved forward. And if we can perhaps study an entire linguistics degree or, you know, if you’re sort of self-educated, like read lots of linguistics books and no one ever say: Well, actually, linguistics was also used to categorise people, to say: oh, this group is this group and this group is not that group because they speak a different language or they speak a different dialect. If we can get through and engage with linguistics without ever acknowledging that it has been used to power, to sort of forward racist ideas and colonialism.
BEN: It was just another tool of oppression.
HANNAH: Absolutely. Yeah.
HEDVIG: I have this map. I have a map. I have a lot of maps. [LAUGHTER] And I’ve really been struggling with what to do with it because I want to do something with it, because I think it’s important. It’s a map from my school atlas in a Swedish book from 1924, and it shows…
BEN: Hang on, you were using a textbook from 1924?
DANIEL: At school?
HEDVIG: I just… I think it was like in my grandmother’s library…
HANNAH: I was going to say, “you’re older than you sound”.
BEN: I was going to say, “well damn!”
HEDVIG: I mean it’s… a map came into my possession, so I just have this old map and it shows like language families of the world as they understood them at the time. Maybe Hannah can guess where I’m going here but… So first of all, it shows much, much more granularity in Europe, so it’s like: These are Celtic languages. These are Germanic languages, like very neat little categories. And then when it comes to Asia, it says: Isolating, which is a characteristic of grammar, and it’s not a genetic group. That’s the start of it. But then it also takes these groups it’s defined. So they’ve found Austronesian language family, they call it something else. They found a couple of other things, and then it groups it into races. So, you know, there’s a list of: these are the white races’ languages…
BEN: I was about to say, like, basically you’ve got like Europe, which is just this incredibly diverse, rich, contextually relevant thing. And then it’s like: and these African languages or something like that.
HEDVIG: It actually just says white, yellow, black.
BEN: Ooh.
DANIEL: Yoiks.
HEDVIG: And for me, I keep that map and I want to do something with that map, because I think it’s a great reminder of how obvious and self-evident, how these categories to people at that time were just so normal.
HANNAH: Yeah, there’s a there’s a fantastic book called “How to Argue with a Racist”, written by Adam Rutherford, who’s a geneticist at UCL, in London. And it’s got four sort of chapters of kind of case studies. But it’s really interesting, showing how so much of those ideas, actually pre that ideas about grouping the world have then continued and very much inform how we see the world. So, like, you know, I was listening to a podcast yesterday and someone was like, “oh, my husband went to Africa”. And I’m like that kind of… right! Africa! It’s massive, there is more genetic diversity within the people of Africa than there is in the rest of the world. Like this is a huge… many countries, many languages. And, you know, I think the person was actually from Canada. And I was sort of thinking what would be the equivalent? So I suppose you might say I went to Central America. You might say I went to South America. You may well say you went to Europe. But of course, the historical baggage with saying that is slightly different from this ongoing, like, grouping of Africa together as just one people with all of these other negative associations as well. Very reductionist.
DANIEL: Since we’re talking about the history of linguistics, I think there is something that we’re not mentioning, and that is the evangelical history, where a lot of the work in the early days was done by Christian missionaries who would show up, you know, figure out the language and then translate maybe the New Testament in, and leave them with a Bible, so that they could, you know, find Jesus and stuff. Which… I don’t know what to do with this work. I mean, I know that because of my history, and my own de-conversion from my religion of origin, you know, I’m kind of allergic to that stuff. I don’t want to say it’s not good work that they did, but I’m sure that on some level…
HEDVIG: Well, some of it, some of it, like some examples that Hannah and I were talking about earlier, when people say something like, you know, “the people here don’t have complex enough thought to do X or Y”, that’s actually bad linguistics. That should make you doubt the quality of the analysis. Like that just makes you think like: okay, they said this and this thing about the verb morphology, I don’t know if I can trust that anymore! Like, honestly!
BEN: Is there… like, as a layperson, can I ask: is there a burning need to use the information generated by missionaries during the colonial, sort of, pillaging of the world?
HANNAH: That’s an excellent question. I would say yes, in many parts of the world it is because I mean, so, you know, I work in East Africa…
BEN: I imagine there could be a reason why. I just wanted to make sure there was a reason why.
HANNAH: The case is that lots of these languages are very much, as we would say, underdescribed or underdocumented. So really, like I work on, you know, I’ve done some work on Swahili, one of the most widely spoken languages across East Africa, something like 100 to 130 million speakers. And the reference grammar — so the grammar that one would read, that Hedvig would scan — is from 1947! That’s like, okay, that’s not quite early missionaries, but that shows you one of these major, major languages, and actually it is written by someone not from East Africa, so this is someone from the UK… and actually before that, dialectal studies, I think there’s one from like 1906 or 1908. So there is these… in contrast to sort of a very high-resource language or kind of what we might be more familiar with as users and speakers of English, for example. Actually my key reference point of a language that is spoken by something like 130 million people is still at a push 60, 70 years old. And then before that…
BEN: Is there a reason? Like, is it an insanely laborious task? Can we not just go and make a better, fresher grammar without all of the baggage of being someone whose only goal was to be like: “hey, everyone, Jesus is great”?
HANNAH: So that’s a great question. And I suppose the sort of answer is that the other part of the puzzle here, I think, is that there has been a complete overlooking of many of the languages of the majority world in the history of linguistics. It’s actually… linguistics is a relatively new, young discipline. Most of the work still is on others — correct me if you think differently — Most of the work is still in English, there’s some work on some other European languages.
HEDVIG: Spanish.
HANNAH: You get a few other sort of things, like people have done more and more work on Japanese, for example, perhaps more and more work on Mandarin, some large languages like Hindi. But really, like, when you get to most of the languages in the world, there is very, very little work done on them at all. And I suppose this is the idea. This is the kind of perhaps underlyingly racist idea that there is nothing to be gained from these languages. So what can they add to our knowledge? What can they add to our understanding of humans?
BEN: My goodness.
HANNAH: Because they are “simple, easy, not capable of expressing complex ideas.” So there’s that. And then the other question going back to the missionaries is also: who would do this work? So like, really, this work of linguistics? So sitting down and writing a reference grammar or doing a study on a preposition or on a verb? It’s really only going to be the work of a linguist. The revitalisation type stuff that we were talking about earlier on, you might have communities very much engaged in that. But there is not, in many cases, a national body or board or thousands of people working and saying: what we really, really need in our lives is a fantastic reference grammar of Swahili. Actually, you know what? We want thirty reference grammars of Swahili because there are so many dialects and there’s so much room for different analyses, because what’s happened in most of these cases is that many of these countries have adopted a European language after the end of the colonial era. And so think, well, actually, it’s much more important than our schoolkids, for example, to learn English or French, Spanish, Portuguese. And so any money that you have, you invest in education, which then again continues to marginalise these much larger, you know, local languages, Indigenous languages in lots of parts of the world. So it’s this kind of, I think, the two things ride together. There isn’t work done on this. Linguistics is quite small. And then who would do this work? And if it’s education, then you get back to the European languages. So it’s this kind of full circle. That’s very much talking from the context of working in Africa, at least.
DANIEL: So do we owe a debt of gratitude to these evangelist linguists, or how should we feel about this?
HANNAH: Yeah, I wondered whether what Hedvig was going to say earlier is that if someone says, you know, these people are not capable of abstract thought, then I’m not going to trust their analysis. But some of the linguistics work was actually very good, right? So some of the descriptive grammar, the reason that we still read them a hundred years later is because the work was good. Like the analysis, the grammatical, morphological, whatever, the morpho-syntax… that was good work. It doesn’t mean that we don’t need more. It doesn’t mean that… also, these languages change. So one of the dangers now is that… so the project that I’m working on with a colleague in South Africa is looking at two varieties of Sesotho and Setswana. So two of South Africa’s national languages. And what happens when kids go to school and have a chance to learn these languages is that they’re taught forms which are based on those missionary grammars that were put together in the end of the 19th century! And of course, they don’t in any way resemble their use of the language on the day to day. So it would be like us going to school and being taught in, I’m not quite sure, Shakespearean English or something.
So we’re being so we’re being told, oh, but you had the chance to speak your language, you have the chance to learn in your language, and then you get there and you’re like, this is not language I recognise. And that’s the other danger of this, is this kind of oversight of either exoticism or absolute obsession with “this is the traditional form of this language, it’s so precious. This is what it was spoken like in the rural areas”, so often obsession with rural use, which doesn’t at all represent lots of contemporary Africa, which is urbanising, or involving kind of circular patterns of migration between urban and rural areas, high high levels of multilingualism. So the reason I asked about the multilingualism in the mBERT was also that in lots of these places, people are multilingual, bilingual. They use multiple languages on day to day basis. You don’t see that in these reference grammars, right? You don’t see that in their school textbooks. It’s “this is English” or “this is Setswana” or “this is Swahili”. And it doesn’t in any way reflect what goes on in their lives outside of those contexts.
DANIEL: So one solution is more resources, and I guess that’s the constant solution. But I feel like part of this is going to be not just doing more work, but getting our heads in order, even those of us who don’t do field work. How do we do this?
HANNAH: So, I mean, absolutely. So as someone who teaches, I’m a lecturer at a university and I’m a lecturer at university in England, in the UK, with its colonial past and all of the hangovers that come along with that. And I think that if I think of why do I, why are my students studying linguistics? Some of them are doing so perhaps a bit reluctantly, or they want to become English teachers, perhaps they want to be you know, they have brushes with linguistics. What can we do in those contexts to, as you say, get our heads in order? So we have students who speak either a non-standard variety, or languages from the majority world, or the Global South at home. But throughout their education, they have been either overtly or sort of covertly told that those languages are not valuable. So if you speak Japanese and English, you’re bilingual and it’s great. If you speak French and English, you’re bilingual and it’s great. If you speak Urdu and English, then Urdu is causing a barrier to your schooling, and probably you’re going to have a difficult time getting on. You know, these underlying, essentially racist ideas, which continue to put languages into categories and hierarchies and then are imposed on a variety of different communities. So I suppose as someone who also kind of teaches, trying to undo that.
So coming back to this idea of decolonising linguistics, I think what we teach and importantly how we teach it is a really big part of that. It’s not the only part of the puzzle, but it has to be, I think for me, and especially in the US, there’s also a much, much bigger kind of focus now on African-American varieties of English, like African-American Vernacular English. There’s been a big conference recently, to kind of forward African-American linguists and African-American linguistics as a discipline. So, yeah, I think there’s a lot of work to be done on that side as well.
HEDVIG: So we’ve spoken before on the show about this specifically. We talk about, like, language teaching in the elementary and primary and high school. And so I know some people, I know teachers in Sweden who teach Swedish, and a lot of them that I encounter, that I meet through, like linguistic Olympiads and other public outreach are actually, to me often had a refreshing attitude. They often said, you know, we’re teaching this variety of Swedish in the classroom because that’s what we’re teaching and that’s the national variety. But they try to not talk down about other varieties, and instead say: oh, they’re other interesting varieties and they do this and this. But I’ve been thinking about this teaching in the classroom. And I want your opinion, Hannah, on that kind of attitude, of saying that other varieties are fine and are valuable, but still committing to teaching a standard in the classroom and trying to do that in our… it seems hard to do.
HANNAH: I think, I mean, I think it’s again, talking about acknowledging things. I think it’s really impressive that your friends or people you know are able to say that because it takes quite a lot of confidence as a teacher to be able to say: Right, you need to know this, but you need to know this as well. And on one hand, I agree. I think it’s quite difficult. But actually, all of us, even if you’re monolingual, you use different registers, right? So, like, the way that I speak to my grandmother is different from the way that I speak in the classroom is different perhaps to the way that I speak to my 18-year-old cousin. And that’s within one language. So actually, I think the idea is that… So I completely agree. We should allow for varieties of languages to be used, and the way that plays out with racialised and minoritised communities… so, you may still be talking about English or you may still be talking about Swedish, but then there are different perhaps minoritised groups within that who use the language differently or have certain pronunciations which are often stigmatised for no good reason. I mean, they are just linguistic features associated with a particular community, but the reason they’re stigmatised is because the group that uses them is stigmatised.
So part of me thinks, yes, that’s really important. And the other part of me thinks, well, people do this anyway. So do we need to sort of say, you know, like: oh well… As long as we have a system that is resourced enough to be able to teach people the skills they need in terms of literacy and numeracy, and to have a hopefully positive experience of education, I think we don’t… I don’t know if we need to do that explicitly, because then what do you get into sort of saying, oh, you make that like [æz], but when you write it, you write it with an H. Well, in English at least there are so many things like that anyway, the writing system is so idiosyncratic. Maybe that doesn’t play out in other languages, but I think it’s really important and it’s it would be great to have — yeah — you know, elementary school, high school, university teachers confident enough in their own knowledge, and also to be able to talk about systems of oppression and colonial histories, to be able to say: oh, some of these varieties of this language are stigmatised. I mean, maybe you don’t say that to a seven year old. But, you know, I think that’s part of the problem.
So here there’s this, again, the backdrop of Black Lives Matter in the UK, a lot of this discourse has taken on that we need to decolonise the curriculum. And people are talking particularly about history in school. So we want primary school and secondary school, people should learn about the colonial history of Britain. And absolutely. But I think it’s really interesting that that has become the focus. But if that did happen, then maybe we would have teachers who would feel confident enough to say: well, actually, the reason that you as a Black person whose parents or grandparents came from Jamaica, the reason that your varieties are stigmatised is because of, you know, the position and how you’re racialised as Black or of someone of Jamaican background, rather than anything to do with how you’ve actually pronounced that.
But at the moment, I don’t think we have many, certainly not, you know, people who are confident enough to say those things. Maybe we shy away from them little much. And I think that’s true of lots of subjects, not just linguistics. But I think, yeah, we just need to be much more aware and also say, I don’t know. Be much more honest about the gaps in our knowledge, I think.
BEN: I think I think for me, one of the biggest steps towards that that needs to be taken is… so, everything that you’ve just described is stuff that I’m happy to do in a classroom in front of my high school students. But it feels to me like even that isn’t enough. Right? Like it’s… that still feels fundamentally hollow. It still feels like a…
HEDVIG: Well, because you still need to grade them. If they submit an essay…
BEN: Well, no, that’s not the problem that I have at all. The problem that I have is that, like, as a person standing up in front of them: saying: These sort of just… these are codes. These are codes that you can use to your advantage. And certain codes have been stigmatised and racialised and that’s really problematic, and it’s… like, people who exist in those communities, I don’t know, I don’t have anything really to say to you, but I’m really sorry that the world has just been super racist or classist or whatever it happens to be. But I feel like that’s still a white guy standing up going: “Mmm, sorry everyone. Turns out the world kind of sucks sometimes!” It feels to me like what we really need is speakers of those minority versions, both of like, say, English or just other languages, being able to stand up in front of a class and in, say, a heavy accent just basically go: The way I speak is fine. The way I speak is acceptable. And that you need to be able to do a bit of work to understand me, because that’s what it is to live in the world that we live in.
HANNAH: So. So, yeah. Can I just jump in on something there? So I think, I absolutely agree with you on that. So one of the things that I find really interesting is a personal experience, is that I’m Black. I was born in England. And when I say I study African languages, people are like, oh, so your family’s from Africa? And I should be able to… I studied Swahili at university, right. Like I chose a subject to study at university. It was Swahili. Not because my family are from East Africa, not because I had ever even heard Swahili before I chose to study it, actually! So I agree with you entirely, but I think there has to be space for all of these things, right. It shouldn’t then be, like, the responsibility of people of color. So I should also be able to…
BEN: No, no, no, no, no, no. God, no, no. That’s not what I mean at all. [LAUGHTER] No, I’d hate for it to sound like: Black people need to do all the work.
HEDVIG: There’s a lot of unpaid labour!
HANNAH: Yeah. So I think what we need all of those things, right. But by perhaps, you know, a white teacher saying that, then what you hope — and this is why what I hope and that’s why I’m in education — is that then some of the students in my classroom think: Wow, the variety I speak, the language as I speak, these are resources. These are not obstacles. These are things, I could also be a teacher like you. I could also do that, or I could be a linguist or I could be a computer programmer or I can do whatever. Whereas what often happens is people have to hide these resources away and you know, yeah, sort of conform to the standard. And as you say, that’s not only like race, it’s not only language. It happens in lots of ways as well. So I think, yeah, I think it has to be the first step that we acknowledge that. But I agree it can be a bit hollow if we just say it.
HEDVIG: And also, I wonder, because if you set up as a teacher… if I was teaching Swedish as a white woman and I said: You know, I’m going to teach you standard Swedish, it’s going to probably, unfortunately, be better for you in employment interviews when you’re an adult. And I’m sorry about that, but such is the world, and I’m going to teach you, and just by the way, I’m going to let you know that all other varieties and dialects of Swedish are okay. That still comes across as standard being better. Right? Like even if I say the words… everything, all the varieties are fine. I still…
BEN: Can I offer my take on that?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: And I’d really like Hannah to finish off with her thoughts on it. But basically my thinking is: I just… I describe the system, right? I describe to the students: There is an unfair system at play, and it’s not great, and I exist in it, and you’re going to exist in it. So, look, I want to be able to give you as much of an edge within that system as possible. Right? I want to teach you the code so that you can fool stupid people into thinking you are what they want you to be. But it’s your tool that you get to use however you want to use it.
DANIEL: You know what, I used to agree with that. But then I realised it’s a bit like: there’s a knife-wielding attacker out there, and you’re trying to teach them how to avoid that knife-wielding attacker, so that the knife-wielding attacker will attack somebody else. And what we need to do, instead of getting students to “pass” as standard English speakers, we need to remove the attacker. You know, because it won’t do any good to teach students to “pass”, because it’s not about the language. They’ll just get them on something else because it’s not about the language and it never was. I think what we need to do is educate… I mean, you could say, let’s approach this a couple of ways, teach students to “pass”, and then also educate people so there’s less prejudice. And I just feel like the first goal, I just feel like it’s not going to work. I just feel like we need to keep doing the work of educating people and attacking racism, because that’s what it comes down to.
BEN: Hannah, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Like, what do you… what’s your take? What do we… where should we be directing the fight?
HANNAH: Yeah, I think distressingly like both and everything, right? So I think you’re absolutely right. Because like, really, the knife-wielding attackers are just other people with their own prejudices and their own views as well, right? So whether they’ve had these fantastic teachers who say all codes are equal or not, and also we can’t undermine… we can’t kind of forget how entrenched these things can be in ourselves as well. So we, despite saying all of these things are equal or there’s nothing negative, they are just associated with certain groups which are oppressed and sort of at the whim of the system, essentially. So I think like, teaching about the system, acknowledging the system ourselves, working out what we can do, so whether that’s being anti-racist ourselves, advocating for anti-racist policies, advocating for anti-racist leaders like — and this is just what the focus on race, but obviously intersects with other things — So I think that’s really important. And then I think, I’m also at pains to say in my own positions, though, as someone who’s just declared that I am English, but I work on African languages, there is a much bigger… So I’m really only talking about teaching. And so people talk about decolonising the curriculum, decolonising university, but actually, like, all of these things play out in my research as well.
So I get on my plane, and I get a visa and I go to Tanzania, I go to South Africa and I go with my with my baggage. I go with my privilege, with my British passport. All of that stuff that I tow with me, you know, reluctantly tow with me. And then in my case, I do quite a lot of collaboration with colleagues based in Tanzania and in South Africa. But again, the funding structures are such that, you know, the funding comes from the north, the funding comes from UK government or UK organisations. And I go and again, I’m setting up these very inequitable power structures by saying: well, here I am, let’s work on this project together, you know, essentially on my terms, with the requirements of my funding bodies from the country that I’m from.
So I think, like, again, this is parallel to what you’re saying. So I can think about teaching in the classroom. But then I also have to think about my research. I have to think about how that plays out in collaboration. And then things like language documentation and description or revitalization, what role do I have there as an outsider, someone who… so I can be an advocate, but I’m also not positioned within the community. I’m very apparently not from there. So I think that kind of breadth is exactly what then plays out in your classrooms as well, right?
So not only saying it’s fine to speak non-standard varieties, but then what about our syllabus? Can we teach texts? Can we not just teach text, but can we look at films, YouTube videos, blogs like why? What is the canon? And are they getting the same message? So if you say: well, it’s also fine to use these varieties outside of the classroom, but as soon as you walk over the threshold into the school, this is what is all around you. It’s this formal… you know, what message is that giving? Despite my very best efforts to say everyone is equal and everyone is welcome, I then stand there with my own class privilege, with my own university degree, PhD, whatever. It’s, it’s… so that goes back to your idea about having different teachers, teachers from different backgrounds, teachers with different gender identities, teachers of different classes. Like all of those things, I think distressingly — this is the bad news — I think it’s like whack-a-mole. You have to do all of these things all of the time. And I think that’s why it also takes so many people, because, like, one person can’t really do that. And then what is… what are we teaching them at school? Like what is education? What is that based on? You know, you might do a great class on whatever subject, but like, the whole school system is set up with a particular approach or a particular class system, a kind of colonial history, depending on where you are in the world.
Like, yeah, again, you know, actually when I work in Tanzania, the school system is like the school system in England. Right? Because that was a colonial export. So, yeah, I think these things are impossibly messy.
BEN: And presumably the syllabus system is just as political as it is everywhere else, right? People are trying to get things in that look good in the press, as often as they are trying to get good educational outcomes.
HANNAH: Absolutely. Because it’s the same pressures everywhere, isn’t it, Right? Schools are underfunded. Parents want this. Schools want their teachers want this. The government wants this. Interestingly, Tanzania was the only country in Africa to declare an African language as its official language of independence.
HEDVIG: Yes, I remember! We had that as a news item a while ago. Very exciting!
HANNAH: Amazing, right? But in the whole of Africa. So there are sort of, of course, other countries which have a national language. So Kenya also has Swahili, but alongside English. So Tanzania has this very stand out policy. But then what that means is primary education is in Swahili. Very… a real minority of the population speak Swahili as the first language, so kids get to school and they’re like: “Oh, I can’t speak my home language at school, right. Got to learn Swahili as quickly as possible.” If you make it through primary school to secondary school, all schooling is that in English? So, again, you have this second hurdle. We’re like: “Oh, wow, I’ve now got to learn English to go through secondary school.” Like, all of these are, you know, structures which are really set up to, you know, I mean, not to make people, they’re not designed to make people fail, but you’ve got to do really well to be able to… what… master two languages without any sort of real support, at two really crucial stages.
DANIEL: Yeah. So that’s the bad news. Is there any good news?
HANNAH: I think conversations like this are the good news. So there are fantastic things happening all around the world. There’s more and more discussion about — and this is not new — but more and more like South-South collaboration so that everything doesn’t have to be mediated through the Global North. And like I talked about, African-American Linguists and Linguistics Conference, I think this year was their second year. More and more people talking about the link between linguistics and social justice. So actually, your discussion about the Open Letter is good news, right? Like there was a time that that wouldn’t have been… it wouldn’t have been an open letter. It wouldn’t have been news, it certainly wouldn’t have made the news in the BBC here.
So the good news is, I think, the conversation is happening and I think it’s happening all around us and there’s a real urgency to it, which I think is long overdue.
HEDVIG: So it’s been really good having you on. I actually had more things for us to talk about, but I think we talked a lot and it was really incredibly useful. You also guested the Field Notes podcast recently, which is hosted by Martha…
HANNAH: Tsutsui Billins, yeah.
HEDVIG: And on that podcast, you talked a lot about our definitions of “the field”.
HANNAH: Yeah, well, I don’t like to use the word “fieldwork” to talk about data collection.
HEDVIG: Yeah. What kind of place that is, and what kind of space we imagine that that is, and what that does to how we treat people there and how we, how we interact with it. And I don’t think we have time unfortunately, to talk about all of that there. But I really want to point all of our listeners to that episode, because I think that was a really good, good discussion.
BEN: I love when a podcast puts me on to another good podcast. It’s my very favourite thing in the whole world. I feel like people who I am already pretending are my friends have just introduced me to new cool friends. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Dr Hannah Gibson from the University of Essex, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us. You’re going to hang out with us for Word of the Week?
HANNAH: Um, yeah, I’m going to hear… I’m not sure we’ve got any to add, but I’m going to hear what you have to say. So, yeah, but it’s been a real pleasure. Really interesting conversations. Thanks for having me.
DANIEL: Thank you so much.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: It’s time for Words of the Week.
BEN: [WITHOUT ENTHUSIASM] Yay.
DANIEL: First up, BEFORETIMES. This word was once considered archaic and it’s now getting some new play.
BEN: So I’ve only ever heard of this in relation to Mad Max. Sorry, I’m just showing my Australian here a little bit. But like, I remember in I think Mad Max 3, there’s a bit where they’re like: from the before times, long, long ago. That’s the only time I’ve ever heard it used.
DANIEL: I think the one that you’re referring to there… that quote doesn’t appear in Mad Max, but it does appear in South Park, in the year 2000. “That was in the beforetime in the long, long ago”. Could you have been quoting South Park?
BEN: Is that the one where all the parents go to jail?
HEDVIG: I think so, yeah.
DANIEL: I haven’t watched the episode, but I think they modeled it on an earlier episode of Star Trek. By the way, I’m pulling this from a really great article by Ben Zimmer — who else? — his column for the Wall Street Journal. He points out that Star Trek popularised this expression in the episode Miri, named after the girl who shows up and says “That was when they started to get sick, in the beforetimes.” So now people are starting to talk about… and you know, there’s this thing in our brains where, like I got an alert the other day that I was supposed to be in the USA a few weeks ago, you know, and we keep looking through the window and seeing what our lives would have been like. And we talk about stuff before coronavirus… Wow, that was the beforetime.
BEN: I think that’s probably… I reckon it would be even more relevant to people in, say, the UK with Hannah, or in the US currently. Like, I feel so spoil… like I almost feel, like, guilt over how so not terrible where I am in the world is right now, because to be in America at the moment would just be horrendous. They have been… they’re five months in and just no end in sight, and it must just be awful. Awful. So I’m not surprised there’s a fetishisation of when things weren’t shit all the time.
HANNAH: I’ve heard a lot of discussion or emails where people have started capitalising These Times, These Times. When “These Times” are over. Capital T, capital T. So fits in with that.
BEN: That’s… I like that. I think we’ll probably see that condensed down to just double T.
HANNAH: TT!
HEDVIG: CURRENT SITUATION I’ve seen a lot. I went to a supermarket in Sweden and they were out of like canned tomatoes, and it just had a sign saying “we are also canned tomatoes due to the current situation”. And I was like: Oh right, this is how they’re phrasing it.
BEN: I tell you what… can we just also just zero in on how concerning it is to run out of a canned thing? Like if they’re out of bananas, that’s one thing. But canned tomatoes? Fuck!
DANIEL: Next one: DROPKICK. What’s a dropkick, Ben?
BEN: Oh, you just, you’re repping all my Aussie love this week. A dropkick is a semi-affectionate pejorative for a person who might be stupid or a bit feckless.
HEDVIG: It sounds violent and bad. Is it?
DANIEL: Well, not this… I wonder if this is getting a bit ableist, I don’t mean to be that way, but WA Premier Mark McGowan has referred to people who refuse to wear masks as “dropkicks”.
HEDVIG: Ah, okay.
BEN: Yeah, so it’s like, it’s like an old… I would put it on par with, like, something kind of a bit more twee, like drongo. Like being a drongo.
DANIEL: [AUSSIE ACCENT ATTEMPT] Ah, you drongo!
HANNAH: Is that an Aussie Rules reference? No, American football.
BEN: Yeah, it would be an Aussie Rules reference, I’d say.
DANIEL: Okay, but how did it get that way. Why do we use that expression?
BEN: I would say… oh God, Daniel, you know what I’m like with sports, stop it. [LAUGHTER] I’m thinking because in the earlier days of AFL, dropkicks were actually relatively inaccurate, and kind of all over the shop, maybe?
DANIEL: Okay, no. Let’s have a guess from Hedvig. [LONG PAUSE] Nothing?
HEDVIG: No, no, no, no, I’m just, I’m just taking a breath and going, like, Oh, sports.
BEN: She’s processing.
HEDVIG: So I have… I feign an interest in soccer, football for my partner. I’ve been trying to understand baseball because of blaseball.
DANIEL: That’s love.
BEN: What I love, Daniel, is that there are four wheelhouses in this show. And I certainly can’t speak for Hannah, but I know we are outside three of those wheelhouses, definitely. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: So, isn’t a dropkick like a thing you do, like a movement you do with the ball? Question mark?
DANIEL: You drop the ball, and when it’s almost to your foot, you give it a boot.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay, this one is rhyming slang, but rhyming slang for what?
BEN: Oh… dropkick… um…
DANIEL: He’s a real…
HEDVIG: Dick? Something dick?
DANIEL: Good, good, good. Getting there.
BEN: Not dickhead.
DANIEL: One could also say prick, but… And in fact, this was kind of confusing because I checked out a book, called “It’s All About Australia” on Google Books, says it’s rhyming slang for PRICK. Points to the Macquarie Dictionary as that source. But that’s weird because I picked up my enormous Macquarie Dictionary and I got the same thing that other dictionaries say, including Jonathan Green’s excellent Dictionary of Slang: Rhyming slang, dropkick and punt. Ta-dah!
BEN: Oh, dear.
HEDVIG: [VERY SOFT] …what?
DANIEL: Yep. So rather regrettable origins. But in the news, so it’s one of our Words of the Week.
BEN: Hang on, hang on, hang on. Hedvig, did I hear you say a very soft “what”?
HANNAH: It’s like a double rhyming. You’ve got to like rhyme one, then rhyme the other.
HEDVIG: Ugh, okay. Sounds like a lot of work! [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Rhyming slang can be that way.
BEN: That’s the joy of Cockney rhyming slang, right? You have to decode it, like, four levels deep.
HEDVIG: I’m still skeptical that it’s a natural thing.
BEN: What do you mean a natural…?
HEDVIG: It sounds like something, like, linguists make up like half the time. Like how many people?
BEN: That’s that’s true for all of these sort of like delightful sort of like thieves cant-esque things, right?
DANIEL: No, I agree, though. I think that we should be suspicious whenever somebody says that the origin is rhyming slang.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: I’m sorry. As soon as you said dropkick / punt I was like, oh, yes, I understand now.
DANIEL: There was a rightness. Yeah, and that rightness can be deceiving. But as far as I can tell from John Green’s Dictionary of Slang, that is greensdictofslang.com, and also the other sources I found, it really does appear to be where this comes from. So, DROPKICK, that’s number two.
Last of all, what do you call somebody who is such an idiot about wearing masks or taking basic precautions to preserve even their own health?
BEN: Ooh, I know this one, but I’m not going to jump in. I want to see if someone else has it.
HEDVIG: I submitted it, so I think Hannah should guess it.
HANNAH: Oh, no… I was going to say “corona-denier” or something like that? But it’s obviously something more clever than that so, yeah.
BEN: Is it, I haven’t actually looked at the show notes. Is it COVIDIOT?
HEDVIG: Oh no. That’s a good idea.
DANIEL: Well, that was one. We did that one a long time ago. That’s a good one. I’ve also heard MASK HOLE.
BEN: Yes, I’ve heard that one.
DANIEL: Any others we’ve heard?
BEN: Just WANKER? I’ve heard that a lot! [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: It’s not bad.
DANIEL: Go, Hedvig.
HEDVIG: RAT LICKER.
DANIEL: Yum yum.
BEN: What? Bless you?
HANNAH: I’m with you as well. I’m like, is this also rhyming slang?
HEDVIG: No, no. It’s just in reference to like, so I saw this in a tweet. I’m bringing it up now. The reference is that people are so anti covid precautions that they would… if it was a plague, they would go and lick a rat.
BEN: Oh, right. Wow, that’s, that’s a bit deep as well. But I kind of like it just because it’s so evocative.
DANIEL: Just to own the libs.
HANNAH: Yeah, that’s more convincing than the DROPKICK one, I think, because it’s like you said, it’s really evocative. You’re like: oooh gross.
BEN: Yeah, yeah. I’ve just I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m just picturing just like a tongue moving all the way up the back of a rat.
DANIEL: Mlem mlem mlem.
HEDVIG: Gross.
DANIEL: Can’t unsee. Thank you.
BEN: You’re welcome.
DANIEL: I feel like pointing out here at this point that there’s a lot of work that shows that simply shaming someone for not wearing a mask doesn’t actually make them want to wear a mask, even though not wearing one is dangerous and endangers people’s health. But on the other hand, I can also see how terms like RAT LICKER and MASK HOLE and COVIDIOT help to normalise mask wearing among a population. So I don’t know what the answer is. This is messy and complicated, but there it is.
So: BEFORETIMES, DROPKICK and RAT LICKER: our rather unpleasant covid Words of the Week.
Let’s get to some comments from our last episode: Cass on Patreon says “in response to staying up late as protest” — ah yes, we talked about revenge bedtime procrastination. That was one of our Words of the Week.
HEDVIG: Hannah, it’s when you feel like you don’t have any power in your day-to-day work, and you feel like claustrophobic about not being a boss of your own time, but in protest to that, you stay up really late and like, play a game.
HANNAH: Well, we’ve all been there. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, Cass sent an article from NPR about Tricia Hersey.
HANNAH: Oh, the Nap Ministry!
DANIEL: Yes, the Nap Ministry! You know this one? Have you seen this?
HANNAH: They’re fantastic. Yeah. She does great work. Rest as reparations.
BEN: That is… what a great line!
DANIEL: She says “This is a racial and social justice issue. You know, sleep deprivation is a justice issue, because it’s been traced from all the way back during slavery. Slavery was horrific. And the times, during those times for black people, we were human machines. And so grind culture continues today to try and attempt to make us all human machines and not to see the divinity of who we really are.”
HEDVIG: Wow. I didn’t understand anything of this, so when Hannah said something about repatriation, I was like, I don’t, but now I get it.
DANIEL: You know, I did a search for “worker productivity wages”, and I found lots of charts showing that productivity has gone way up for decades and wages have remained flat. So somebody is getting all that, and it’s not the workers. You know, it’s very difficult for most people to earn enough for a family. And we have been conditioned to accept that. And that’s why we’re all running around, not able to focus on politics, just subsisting. And I think the ones who benefit from that are the people who commit outrages, because they know that they’ll do something outrageous and we’ll just move on. You know, they get away with it because who has time to track all of it? Who has the head space? It’s time to normalise rest.
BEN: Agreed.
HANNAH: Fantastic.
HEDVIG: Can I teach you a fun Marxist term?
DANIEL: Please. [LAUGHTER] Always!
BEN: All Marxist terms are fun terms.
HEDVIG: SURPLUS VALUE. It’s the name for, like, for the work you do, and if you take that and you subtract the wage you have, the surplus value is what your employer gains.
BEN: Okay. Yeah, I dig it.
DANIEL: This one’s from Cameron, on Patreon. He says, “I was happy to hear you talking about griots on the show.” That was one of our Words of the Week recently in connection with the late Congressman John Lewis.
HEDVIG: I think Hannah knows this word quite well.
HANNAH: Yeah, I think it’s more commonly associated with West Africa. So you have these kind of griot families, and it’s a kind of lineage type thing.
HEDVIG: Is it just, has the term spread at all from East Africa? Because I’ve heard it also mainly in West African countries.
HANNAH: Yeah. So also I think, I only, there may be equivalent terms in East Africa, but this kind of family like lineage type thing I think is much more, as far as I know, associated with West Africa. I know other places around Senegal, it’s quite prominent. And some of these kind of Senegalese reggae stars that you may have heard of are sort of in these griot families, so yeah.
HEDVIG: So it seems to have moved to the US as well.
HANNAH: Interesting.
DANIEL: Cameron says, according to Merriam Webster, it’s pronounced “grio” [gɹio], [gʁio]. Here I was like an idiot pronouncing it “griot” [gɹiɔt]
BEN: That’s okay, Daniel. I drive a pur-gi-ot piɹ.͡dʒi.ɔt okay?
HANNAH: But I think it’s just because it’s like French influence, right? So I think that’s why it’s silent T. But I think, of course, there would be other words in the areas which would be… so I think you pronounce it however you want. [LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, well. Cameron says, “I think it’s French. So the final T is silent. I served as a volunteer in the US Peace Corps in southeastern Senegal.” By the way, I love Cameron’s delicacy here. He doesn’t say, “You dingus, it’s griot [gʁio].” He says, you know, I’m not totally sure about this, but I did serve in the Peace Corps in Senegal!
BEN: No, it’s fine, Cameron. Daniel’s an idiot.
DANIEL: I’m an idiot. He says, “A resident of my tiny village of three hundred was a celebrated griot who traveled all around Senegal, Guinea, and Mali to perform ceremonies, settle disputes, and host parties. He was an amazing language informant who taught me countless words, someone with a sweet mouth, as they say in Pulaar.” I like that, sweet mouth. “When I had friends visit from other parts of the country, he would always tell stories about wherever they were visiting from. Anyway, thank you for reminding me of Farba Conte, the griot in Thianguey, Senegal.”
Oh, thank you Cameron.
HEDVIG: That’s nice.
HANNAH: That’s a great message.
BEN: I want to meet that person, based purely on Cameron’s account, I just like, I want to know that man so badly.
DANIEL: I know! Imagine what a charismatic person that would be.
BEN: I think you have a sweet mouth, Daniel. Is that what you want to hear?
DANIEL: Thank you, Ben. Aww, stop it, I’m blushing.
From Emily on Patreon, “I especially want to thank you for the most recent episode about the LSA letter. I feel like I heard snippets about it on Twitter, but never understood the full picture. I appreciate how you all walked through each part of it.” Thanks, Emily. That’s great.
Nigel says on Facebook. One of our words was TOILET PLUME, which is the disgusting flume of water that erupts when you flush the can, covering everything in small bits of everything. “Following the explanation of the term TOILET PLUME, I’d like to share my personal hygiene solution and best investment to date,” he says. It’s the ToTo S55e Washlet, it’s a review. “The Washlet runs an air filter while you’re being… productive!” [LAUGHTER]
BEN: Wow. What is with the rest of the world?
DANIEL: I know! Just say it! It’s just poop!
BEN: You’re just doing a shit! It’s not fucking rocket science!
DANIEL: Goddamn!
HANNAH: Speaking as someone who spent three months living in Japan, where the ToTo is a regular feature in toilets, so there’s like, a toilet that makes plays music. [LAUGhTER] All singing, all dancing. Basically like, even at train stations, you know, the kind of most usually the worst toilets anywhere you go.
DANIEL: My toilet doesn’t have a remote, but this one does.
HEDVIG: I just want one of those, what’s it called?
BEN: You want a bidet?
HEDVIG: I want something that shoots water.
BEN: Yeah, you want a bidet.
HEDVIG: Okay.
HANNAH: Or a bidet [bi.det]. [UPROARIOUS LAUGHTER, EXCEPT DANIEL]
DANIEL: Shaddap! Shut up!
BEN: Oh, Hannah in with the late burn! Love it!
DANIEL: That’s why I didn’t say it. That’s why I let somebody else say that line.
Thanks to everybody for your messages. Once again, Dr. Hannah Gibson, thank you so much for joining us and talking about all the stuff that we need to do, to do better.
HANNAH: Thanks very much.
[END THEME]
HEDVIG: Thank you everyone, for those messages. It’s always fun to hear what you think of the show and what you like, and just sharing your wisdom and snippets of knowledge here and there. If you want to get in touch with us, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Mastodon, and Patreon. We’re in all the cool places, not TikTok yet. We are becauselangpod everywhere in those places. You can also send us an old-fashioned email at hello@becauselanguage.com. And I believe also Hannah, you are also on Twitter, is that correct?
HANNAH: That’s right, yeah. My handle is just @itsthegibson. [LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: Good one.
BEN: That’s a good one.
HEDVIG: If you want to follow her and see what she’s up to, you can find her there. We would really appreciate it, if you like the show, if you tell a friend about us. That’s how I hear about all my favorite podcasts. That’s how you all heard about Field Notes today, if you consider us your friend. And also leave us a review anywhere, any where you go, you know, a lamp post, Podcast Addict, iTunes, don’t care.
DANIEL: Is Lamp Post an app?
HEDVIG: No, I just… here in Leipzig, there’s a lot of, like, stickers with a lot of text on lampposts. [LAUGHTER] Don’t know why.
BEN: Hey patrons, Ben here. I just thought I’d take a moment to single you out and say: You’re doing great work being a patron, giving us a bit of money. Daniel works really hard to make this show. As you can probably tell from the quality of my voice this week, I don’t particularly. But he does and he deserves recompense. So I would just really like to say thank you for all of the wonderful patronage that you have supplied for us. You get special things if you become a patron. Everyone out there who is not currently a patron, like a whole bunch of shows that we don’t necessarily release to the general public. But a special thanks goes to: Termy, Chris B, Lyssa, The Major, Chris L, Matt, Whitney, Damien, Helen, Jack, Elías, Michael, Larry, Lord Mortis… sorry, sorry [METAL VOICE] Lord Mortis, Binh, Kristofer, Dustin, Andy, Nigel, Bob, Kate, Jen, Christelle, Nasrin, Ayesha, Keighley, and Emma. And certainly not to be forgotten, Kitty.
DANIEL: Our music is written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, and you can hear him in Ryan Beno and Didion’s Bible, two great Perth bands. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. Because Language.
[FAINT APPLAUSE]