A chat with Dr Kelly Wright, who’s been working on… well, really a lot. Kelly is at the juncture of a lot of areas we’re keen on.
Oxford’s effort to document African-American English? She’s been there.
Doing lexicography with the American Dialect Society? She’s on it.
The LSA’s social media committee? She… was on it.
And she’s been looking into a new unexplored area: people’s ideas about their own language knowledge.
But it’s not all easy. And Kelly Wright is here to tell us about her view of linguistics… from the struggle pile.
Listen to this episode
Related or Not?
This episode is sponsored by the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language.
Get access through your organisation or library, or become a subscriber.
Patreon supporters
Huge thanks to all our great patrons! Your support means a lot to us. Special thanks to:
- Iztin
- Termy
- Elías
- Matt
- Whitney
- Helen
- Udo
- Jack
- PharaohKatt
- Lord Mortis
- gramaryen
- Larry
- Kristofer
- Andy B
- James S
- Nigel
- Meredith
- Kate
- Nasrin
- Ayesha
- Moe
- Steele
- Manú
- Rodger
- Rhian
- Colleen
- Ignacio
- Sonic Snejhog
- Kevin
- Jeff
- Andy from Logophilius
- Stan
- Kathy
- Rach
- Cheyenne
- Felicity S
- Amir
- Canny Archer
- O Tim
- Alyssa
- Chris W
- Felicity G
and Kate B who — over one year ago — used the one-time donation button on our website (becauselanguage.com) to send us some much needed dough. We still speak of that long-ago time.
And our newest patrons:
- At the Friend level: Janaka and Justine
- And then Brian K bumped his pledge, more than doubling it from its former total.
- James S also bumped his pledge, coming in at the Supporter level.
Become a Patreon supporter yourself and get access to bonus episodes and more!
Become a Patron!Show notes
Dr Kelly Elizabeth Wright
https://liberalarts.vt.edu/departments-and-schools/department-of-english/faculty/kelly-elizabeth-wright.html
Kelly’s YouTube channel — go subscribe!
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCz5Wv1bBkcUXeUsfdXJtXMw
The Olivine Mineral Series
https://www.minerals.net/mineral/olivine.aspx
Olivine Pearl (Potatotally) | Steven Universe Fanon Wiki
https://sufanon.fandom.com/wiki/Olivine_Pearl_(Potatotally)
Properties of ‘baby talk’ similar across many languages
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221011105727.htm
A systematic review and Bayesian meta-analysis of the acoustic features of infant-directed speech | Nature Human Behavior
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01452-1
Crows Perform Yet Another Skill Once Thought Distinctively Human
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/crows-perform-yet-another-skill-once-thought-distinctively-human/
Crows able to understand the concept of recursion | Phys.org
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-crows-concept-recursion.html
Recursive sequence generation in crows | Science Advances
https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.abq3356?af=R
Taiwan Launches English Language TV Channel to Give it More International Punch | VOA
https://www.voanews.com/a/taiwan-launches-english-language-tv-channel-to-give-it-more-international-punch-/6774751.html
Adele reveals the correct pronunciation of her name
The “Trubbow” with L-Vocalization | Dialect Blog
http://dialectblog.com/2011/05/26/the-trubbow-with-l-vocalization/
New Oxford dictionary will document the lexicon of African American English | NPR
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/26/1113615386/new-oxford-dictionary-will-document-the-lexicon-of-african-american-english
Among the New Words | American Speech
https://read.dukeupress.edu/american-speech/article/97/3/412/319588/Among-the-New-Words
Social Media Committee | Linguistic Society of America
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/social-media-committee
Quidditch changes its name to Quadball after J.K. Rowling’s alleged anti-trans comments
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/07/21/quidditch-changes-its-name-to-quadball-after-jk-rowlings-alleged-anti-trans-comments
New Zealand proposes cow, sheep burp tax to curb emissions
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/10/11/new-zealand-farmers-to-face-livestock-emissions-charges-under-new
Cows and climate change: Making cattle more sustainable | UC Davis
https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustainable
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
Hedvig: Oh, no. Kelly’s going away because something came to her door or something.
Ben: Oh, I hope it’s a really cool delivery or it’s a ghost. It’s definitely a ghost.
Daniel: Did a ghost come into your house?
Ben: Kelly, was it a ghost?
Kelly: It just started raining really hard.
Ben: Okay.
[laughter]
Daniel: Okay.
[Because Language theme playing]
Daniel: Hello, and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. I’m Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. Hedvig, I’m going to borrow one of your questions because I saw that you were tweeting about this, so I want to use it. We have Hedvig Skirgård.
Hedvig: Hmm. Yes.
Daniel: Hedvig, favourite kind of rock?
Hedvig: Ooh, ah, yes. So, because, I think, Ben, I’m a fan of N. K. Jemisin, I’ve been getting more into kinds of rocks. So, I think obsidian. Obsidian is really cool.
Ben: A strong entry.
Daniel: Any particular size?
Hedvig: Size. What do you mean?
Daniel: Does it just have to be monolithic size or just the size of a small pocketknife?
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: I’m not sure obsidian comes in monolith size.
Ben: I reckon it must, right?
Daniel: I didn’t know that. If it’s volcanic.
Ben: Yeah. Surely, certain lava flows have made… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: I don’t know. I don’t care about size.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Some of those volcanoes are pretty big. It’s one minute in and we’ve already seen the word ‘plinth’. Also, Ben has not waited for me to introduce him but that’s all right.
Ben: That’s in keeping with every other episode we’ve ever had.
Hedvig: Yeah, I choose obsidian. Thank you for asking. I would like to know everyone else’s. What’s your favorite one, Daniel? What’s your favorite rock or precious stone?
Daniel: Yacht.
Ben: Yacht?
Hedvig: What is this?
Ben: What is yacht?
Hedvig: You mean…?
Daniel: Yacht rock.
Ben: No, Daniel. No. No, stop it.
Daniel: I don’t really much mind what kind of rock it is as long as it’s a pretty rock. I just like pretty rocks.
Hedvig: That’s not… that’s-that’s-that’s- no, no, no.
Ben: Name a pretty rock, at least give us that.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Okay, I think that mica is very pretty. That comes in little flinty layers and you can peel them off and I had fun finding mica in my hometown and flaking off the layers.
Hedvig: And it can be extracted by child labor and put into cosmetic products, which is a thing.
Daniel: Oh.
Ben: Yay.
Daniel: Shiny.
Hedvig: Flaky layers. Okay, let’s introduce Ben now. Ben Ainslie is coming on next and he’s going to tell us his favorite rock.
Ben: Well, when I was little, we did…
Daniel: Am I still here?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: No, you are irrelevant. I don’t know if anyone else did this but there was like… you know how like yo-yos and hula hoops and stuff, rock tumbling was like a fad that happened when I was a little… like maybe when I was like 10 or 11. And people would get like rock tumblers off of foreign order catalogs. I was living in a place in WA called [unintelligible 00:03:06] at the time, and it actually has some really interesting geology up there. My favorite was always tiger eye, both for the name and because of how cool it looks. Tiger eye just has a very, very pleasing, sort of, I feel, as far as a rock goes.
Daniel: And you can find them up there?
Ben: No. [laughs]
Hedvig: I learned something interesting about tiger eye last week, I think. It was a colleague at the institute who told me that if you put a tiger eye stone at the end of a string, and you have a question, yes or no, and you hold up the string and you see if it spins one way or the other, it’ll tell you what the decision should be.
Daniel: Ah, the ideomotor effect.
Kelly: Yeah. It’s scry stones.
Ben: Just to be clear, this is a colleague at the Max Planck Institute, correct?
Hedvig: Mm-hmm.
Ben: Okay, that’s moderately concerning.
Hedvig: We both understand that this isn’t real. We both understand that it can be helpful.
Daniel: What does it do for you? What does it give you, this mutual belief that you know to be wrong?
Hedvig: Well, the idea is that you already know what the decision is, like you already know. And then also, if the stone goes the opposite way, your sense of disappointment will tell you [laughs] what you should have done.
Ben: Yeah, right. It’s like a geological The Dice Man kind of setup.
Hedvig: Yeah. But she said it had to be tiger eye.
Ben: Ah, naturally.
Daniel: [laughs] Well, thank you both for being here. Our special guest for this episode, she’s a postdoctoral research fellow out of Virginia Tech where she does experimental sociolinguistics lexicography, and she advocates for linguistic justice. It’s Dr. Kelly Wright.
Kelly: Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi.
Daniel: Thanks for joining us.
Kelly: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
Ben: What is Kelly’s favorite rock?
Kelly: Okay. I have a lot of favorite rocks. I’ve been learning a lot of about geology during the pandemic actually. I’ll have to say right now, it’s probably olivine, which is on the surface of the Earth, it’s the gemstone, peridot. That’s my best friend’s birthstone. And it can be a lot of different colors, but it’s mostly what the upper mantle is made out of. If you were to travel to the center of the Earth, it would be primarily green, which is fantastic.
Ben: That’s dope. Yeah, that’s definitely…[crosstalk]
Kelly: And that’s why olivine is something I’m a little obsessed with right now.
Daniel: Wow. Okay.
Hedvig: I Google image searched it, and I can tell you it’s really pretty. And if you sort of, just…
Daniel: And I like it.
Hedvig: I’m not sure I didn’t know how to spell it. But it is spelled exactly like it sounds, like olivine, like…
Ben: Also, based on my Google image search, peridot is also a really cool one of the gems from Steven Universe. She’s got like a real cool vibe to it. So, I’m on board with that as well.
Kelly: Yeah, my best friend also has a very cool vibe.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. Oh, is this one of the evil characters?
Ben: I don’t think so. Certainly not based on the images that I’m seeing.
Hedvig: Okay. It’s super cool.
Daniel: Kelly, you were with us on our white supremacy episode a long while ago, and we were looking for a chance to have you back because lately you’ve been at the convergence of a lot of things we are intensely curious about.
Kelly: Yeah. I’m super happy to be here. I have been doing a lot of things. I wear many, many hats in this world, and only a few of them are joy filled.
[chuckles]
Daniel: And the rest of them have you on the struggle pile. That’s a phrase that you used when we were… we were on Twitter exchanging messages talking about, “Well, what is this going to be about?” And the phrase ‘struggle pile’ came up. Why did that come up?
Kelly: Because of the work that I do really, it intersects with depression, it intersects with just dealing with a lot of people’s pain. And then, working with a lot of different organizations who maybe aren’t thrilled to be engaging with that pain or depression, it puts me on the struggle pile pretty continuously.
Hedvig: Do you have a thing that you do to make yourself personally feel better?
Kelly: What an excellent question. I have a fantastic therapist-
[laughter]
Kelly: -who I see weekly. We have developed an ongoing relationship. If I didn’t have that and great friends and a good network, I wouldn’t be able to do the work that I do. I tell people about it. I tell people about how taxing it is. When students, especially younger students, reach out and they’re like, “I’m so interested in doing what you do,” I’m like, “Cool.” It’s hard and not for reasons that have anything to do with academic achievement.
Hedvig: Yeah. Ooh, but cool, but I am glad you have a way of coping.
Kelly: I mean, I’m working on developing those means. A lot of people get pushed out of the academy for a lot of reasons. And yeah, it’s difficult. Wow, we’re getting so dark so fast.
Hedvig: Okay.
Kelly: I’m doing so great. Y’all, I’m doing so great.
[chuckles]
Ben: Ah, Hedvig, every time. Every time.
Kelly: It’s okay.
Ben: [crosstalk] -within like four minutes.
Kelly: No, it’s an important question. It’s something that does really matter to talk about.
Daniel: Yeah. Just the emotional labor that’s involved is one thing that I think impresses me but also worries me because you can give too much of yourself in ways that you shouldn’t have to.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: I imagine that makes up a pretty substantial inner conversation. Words. Kelly, when you hang out with other people who sit at the intersections that you sit at and who are also of an activist bent, I imagine that occupies a lot of those conversations between members of that tribe, where you basically all go to each other, be like, “So, how do you stop from completely flaming out?”
Kelly: Yeah, it is. This is what I mean about having a good support network. There’s these groups of people that I’ve been around since the beginning. A lot of them are people of color who are going through this and not all of them are necessarily in the advocacy space, but they are at least working in bodies or with topics that haven’t been represented in my field. So, it’s good to just be able to talk to folks and be like, “Hey, how do I get over this particular hump?” Or, “How do you manage these competing conflicts or demands on your time or set boundaries in this space?”
A lot of times when we all actually end up getting together, and this is something I’ve had been talking to students about too, supportive networks don’t manifest themselves. So, creating space for that really does matter. When we end up getting together though, it ends up being for reasons. So, it’s actually really hard to find the time pulling people together from multiple continents at different times to say, “Can we just talk about our feelings today instead of the work we have to do?” So, it becomes difficult. It has become difficult. But we do it when we can.
Daniel: Well, we’re going to talk about how all of the things that you do blend together into an amazing tapestry. But first, our latest episode was a bonus episode for our patrons. We talked to Dr. Isabelle Burke about her work on the discourse pragmatic marker.
Hedvig: Yeah-nah.
Ben: Yeah-nah.
Daniel: Do you say it? Have you ever wondered what it does and why? Why particularly those two words? Yeah and no. You put them together and you get so many things. Why? Dr. Burke knows. And she tells us. Also, Izzy helped us answer lots of mailbag questions. So, if you want to hear that, and you’re not a patron, just join up at the listener level. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
Oh, also, we’re getting our yearly mail out together. Every patron, no matter what level, gets something. So, make sure that Patreon has your correct address. Make sure you update it. Take a second, stop the recording. Go, and update your address so that we get that to you. A big thank you to all of our patrons.
Ben: Shall we find out what’s been going on in the world?
Daniel: Yes.
Hedvig: [chuckles] In the world.
Ben: In the world.
Hedvig: We’re restricted to linguistics. I think we’re all after this week have enough rest of the world.
Ben: I want like a proper shotgun spread of every conceivable topic.
Kelly: We don’t.
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: Well, we’ve got a few. But let’s see what we got. First one is about baby talk. Baby talk. Something I’m very into. So, my young one, 5 years and 11 months, said something really interesting.
Hedvig: Yeah, not a baby.
Daniel: Not a baby. Child language acquisition. She said, “My sister doesn’t like Vegemite and so do I.”
Ben: Oh, interesting.
Daniel: We get little windows, don’t we? So, it’s been wondered how do children learn language so seemingly fast. I think it might be slow. But we’ve talked about our homebrew theory, and that is that children get all their needs met and they have very few responsibilities. So, they really have little else to do but go around and gather language data from other humans.
Ben: Bumble into mistakes over and over and have insanely patient people be like, “No, sweetie, that’s yes, and,” or whatever.
Hedvig: Or even just like, “I’ve invented my own word for this. And now my mom says the same word as well.”
[laughter]
Daniel: That’s right.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -actually not getting corrected and just forcing yourself on your environment.
Ben: Radical accommodation.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: “Ah, the Schlegelhot.” “Yes, of course, sweetie.”
Daniel: Children have incredibly patient interlocutors, except for my kids, they get patient every once in a while. Another idea as to how children acquire language is that people talk in a simplified way to children, this language is sometimes called child-directed speech. Child-directed input, I feel like speech is just for spoken languages. I would like to call it child-directed input, anyway. It’s louder, it’s slower, it’s got lots of nouns. It’s got an exaggerated intonational contour. The words are simple, it uses reduplication, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the idea is that this child-directed language provides a simplified introduction to language so that they can grab on to something, start acquiring chunks of language and start strapping them together. But the problem there is that every human learns a language regardless of what language it actually is. So, the question arises, is child-directed language similar across different languages of the world? Good so far?
Ben: Yeah, I’m following along.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah.
Ben: My inclination would be to say yes. Like the simplification, that sort of thing.
Daniel: Mm-hmm. Let’s see. This is work from Christopher Cox and a team from the University of York and Aarhus University. They looked at a few different languages and took a look at five different features.
Kelly: Emphasis on a few.
Daniel: There were a few. Here are some features that they were looking at. Fundamental frequency, is it high pitch, low pitch across different languages? Variability in intonation, like the ups and the downs. Vowel space area, do people use exaggerated vowels? Articulation rate, do they really talk slower across a lot of different languages? And vowel duration, once again, exaggerated vowels. And they found that across many languages, the pitch and the speed of delivery, they start out slow with kids, and then the adults ramp it up to adult speed pretty quickly in a child’s life. But the high-pitched intonation and the exaggerated vowels keep on going for quite a while longer into early life and the different languages seem to show this kind of pattern.
Ben: How interesting.
Hedvig: This is where I say also that this is a metanalysis of several different papers, and they have 30 languages, and I am pleased to report that not all of them are Indo-European.
Daniel: Yay.
Ben: Only 95%… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: A disproportionate part of them.
Kelly: Almost all of them.
Hedvig: If we take all the languages in the world, then like… No, I mean, so they did…
Daniel: We’ll take what we can get.
Hedvig: Australian English is in there. Canadian English, Danish, Dutch, British English, French, Scottish English. So, there’s several Englishes. German, Italian, Jamaican Creole, which probably lexified from Indo-European, 10 I’m up to. And then, New Zealand English. So, we’re getting US English, Norwegian, Polish.
Daniel: We have lots of different languages.
Kelly: 36 western languages.
Hedvig: Russian, Spanish, Swedish. So, that’s 17 out of 38. So, 17 divided by 38 is 44. So, 44% of the sample was Indo-European, and what was it, did I count like six Englishes?
Ben: Yeah, [chuckles] more.
Kelly: They’re all industrialized nations. Also, these studies were done decades ago already. So, it’s like, who’s funding it? What’s the point?
Hedvig: Yeah, there’s some language names here that I’ve never seen before, like Nyangatom. I’m going to see what that is.
Kelly: Something they randomly picked up, Guadeloupe.
Hedvig: Southern Ethiopia. Yeah, so some of them might be a bit more unusual. But, yeah, I mean, they did a meta study of the studies that exist. Right?
Daniel: Hmm.
Kelly: Mm-hmm.
Hedvig: So, the studies that exist are like this, that tells us something about what exists.
Kelly: Mm-hmm. In 1982, Elinor Ochs told us that children in Samoa learn in a very, very different way, shockingly, because their society is structured incredibly differently and people oriented to children very, very differently there. She was like, “Look, in anglicized cultures…” How many Englishes did we just mentioned? “In anglicized cultures, they follow a regularized pattern.” 35 years later, these scientists got funded to say, “Anglicized cultures follow a regularized pattern.” Cool. Amazing. Don’t care. I’m sorry. I don’t care.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: There’s a way to frame this that is… it’s a piece of information, maybe we already knew it. I’m also glad… I know a bit of Samoan and I’ve been to Samoa and I like Samoa and I’ve read Elinor Ochs and other people, but I’m usually the one to bring up Samoa and I’m so excited that someone else… [crosstalk] [laughs]
[laughter]
Hedvig: Oh, it’s really nice.
Ben: “I can put my burden down.”
Hedvig: Yeah. I’ll send it around to you. Yeah, super cool. There is the potential… I have a theory. We have a bunch of homebrew theories on this podcast, and I wanted to know Kelly’s opinion about one I have, which is that, for example, in Samoa, adults don’t speak to children much at all. Children’s main social input is other children, maybe some older children, peers, and also younger. There is the possibility that the input they get from other children is similarly simplified compared to adult language. So, maybe when parents speak a certain way to their children, they’re actually imitating how teenagers speak to their younger siblings. Does that make sense?
Ben: So, mean, like really, really mean.
[laughter]
Kelly: Well, it’s actually interesting because that Samoan paper, there’s a lot more scolding. But it is in this process of learning ritual. So, if they do interact with an adult, it’s like the oldest person in their culture who is drilling them on the proper ways of acting in their culture.
Ben: So, like the main sensei at the dojo if we were to make a comparison, like a person whose job it is explicitly to like, “You will learn the good things the right way.”
Kelly: It’s actually interesting that you went there because, yeah, teens are mean but it’s less of this like coddling, correcting, going with whatever you say to the baby, like, “Let me just adopt your language. Let me soften mine and change my pitch and get a whole new register. Let me pick up a whole new register for you.” It’s like, “Well, there’s actually not a register for you, you really aren’t a member of society until you participate in these ways.”
Hedvig: Yeah. But maybe the way that children learn better… I’m just thinking, I wonder if Samoan teenage children or preteen children would also… if they were included in this study. These 38 languages, they find similar patterns in how adults speak to children. That does not mean that it’s a global pattern for all human languages. It could also be possible that the way we speak to children now is not the way we spoke to children like hundred years ago. [crosstalk] There’s a lot of things about modern child rearing that are quite new concepts, I think.
Daniel: Well, let’s move on to our next story. This one was suggested by Diego, and it’s about Taiwan. We know that China has been putting some pressure on Taiwan’s space. It’s becoming a warmer topic. Taiwan is putting out some English language TV, broadcasting in English. They say, “Internationally, our voice has not been fully heard. China continually disseminates that Taiwan is part of China, and lots of people believe that. So, in the future, we’ll be using Taiwan’s own media to explain to the international community why that’s not so.”
Ben: Bring on the T-drama, I say.
Kelly: Yeah.
Hedvig: So, it’s like Russia Today, and I’ll just hear English, and I think TV5Monde in France does some English broadcast as well.
Ben: I would like to flag the play there, and putting Russia Today alongside Le Monde and-
Daniel: [laughs] Thank you.
Ben: -Al Jazeera English is not fair. One is state media and the other is not.
Daniel: Yeah.
Hedvig: All of them are, but I agree that one of them is worse than the others.
Ben: Le Monde isn’t state media.
Hedvig: Is it not?
Ben: No, it’s a public broadcast, but that’s different, right?
Hedvig: Sorry, I don’t understand. Like in most European countries, you have like a state-funded news network.
Ben: Yeah. Funded is one thing, but state controlled is… [crosstalk]
Hedvig: US doesn’t for some reason and it’s wild to an European.
Ben: Yeah, it does.
Hedvig: No, it doesn’t.
Ben: Yes, it does. It has a PBS.
Hedvig: Which has advertisement in it.
Ben: Okay. It’s a hybrid model, admittedly.
Daniel: PBS has advertisements?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Ben: They’ve done what SBS did like 30 years ago.
Hedvig: It’s been a while.
Ben: But I need to make this point very clearly. Russia Today, yes, is government funded, but it is also government run. And that’s not the case in other public broadcasters.
Hedvig: No.
Daniel: Are we trying to say, please don’t use RT, folks, when you’re tuning on news.
Hedvig: Oh, my God. This is not incredible news source.
Ben: Because Al Jazeera English is fantastic-
Daniel: Super good.
Ben: -and I [unintelligible 00:23:15] them really hard.
Daniel: Don’t you get your news from Deutsche Welle, Hedvig?
Hedvig: Yeah. So, Deutsche Welle is also state funded. I mean, most European countries that have state-funded media…
Ben: Public broadcast is not unusual.
Daniel: Hmm.
Hedvig: No. And some of them have more or less… for example, in Sweden, there’s a debate right now about the heating up conflict situation in the world and whether or not the government can tell the publicly funded media to do certain things in national-
Kelly: Well, they talk about that?
Hedvig: -security interest.
Kelly: You get to have conversations like… I’m sorry.
[laughter]
Daniel: I know, weird, huh?
Kelly: No way.
Hedvig: What if the government is like, “Everyone has to go inside their bunkers now”? Who gets to say that and how?
Ben: That’s really interesting because I was always, and we are probably digressing, but I was always under the impression that governments reserved the right to just blanket coopt all broadcast in those situations.
Hedvig: Right, but what are the limits of that?
Ben: Yeah, okay. I get you.
Hedvig: If a columnist on the TV wants to say, “I feel really worried and I’m personally going into my bunker,” and the state is like, “We don’t want people to panic,” can they tell the columnist to not say that?
Ben: Ah, interesting. Well, Britain has a very clear answer. Yes, because they have gag orders, and they’ve been around for a long time.
Hedvig: Right. So, we’re just having a conversation about-
Ben: They just have really problematic laws.
Hedvig: -where in that gray area our boundaries go.
Ben: That’s really interesting. Hey, Daniel, what’s happening in Taiwan?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I just think it’s fascinating how they’ve guessed rightly that we’re more likely to listen to them if they speak English. So, they’re doing a bit of a combination in media.
Kelly: It’s a commodity.
Daniel: It’s a way of ally building. And they’ve decided to do that through language. They’ve already got allies in American government, of course, like…
Ben: Tepid ones, I would argue. Like ones that are not clearly willing to go to the mat in any significant way. But look, I don’t want to oversimplify the situation, nor do I want to claim to be even remotely well informed. Like the Taiwanese Question, if that’s how we want to frame it, is an immensely complex one. Taiwanese voices need to make a really significant part of whatever the answer to the Taiwanese Question is. It’s not like the Taiwanese are a monolith by any stretch of the imagination. They broke away specifically to be democratic. So, there’s a whole bunch of different ideas about what should happen and what forward progress looks like and all that kind of stuff. I meant what I said before, I reckon bring on the T-dramas. Not in English, bring them on in language, to get some really cool, attractive younger generation people doing cool dramatic things. K-dramas have stormed the younger generation.
Daniel: True.
Ben: I think Taiwan is sleeping on this massive…
Hedvig: Filipino dramas as well.
Ben: Just wow.
Daniel: And don’t forget that the rise of K-pop and K-drama has brought in more, for example, English speakers who want to learn Korean. Korean language classes have skyrocketed since BTS, for example.
Hedvig: And also, creeps. I don’t know if anyone here knows about Oli London. I think I’ve told you about him before.
Ben: Oh, yeah.
Hedvig: But anyway, there’s always going to be weird people with fetishize other people. I wonder if the Taiwanese campaign also involves Mandarin news for… there’s a lot of Mandarin speakers outside of People’s Republic of China. For example, in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Singapore and Philippines probably as well.
Kelly: It’s a good point.
Hedvig: English is a choice, but there are other choices as well.
Ben: What? I refuse to accept this as a possibility. No.
Kelly: Dan, and to your point of getting us, getting their allies, getting our Western allies to pay attention, English is the medium of choice, my first work in linguistics is on nationalism in Africa and the Pan African movement and why those movements were conducted in English, why they necessarily had to be conducted in English because the language itself is a tool of politics and diplomacy and war. And if you’re going to become independent on the global stage, wresting that independence from a colonial power, which China absolutely is in this instance, has historically required employing the English language. Whether or not the English were part of your colonizing body, English needed to be involved in your independence movement. So, seeing Tsai Ing-wen, the female President of Taiwan, put energy behind this, I think speaks to the Taiwanese commitment to their self-determination.
Hedvig: One quick thing. Last year, we had an episode called the Chinese Languages with two guests, Mei-Shin Wu and Jingting Ye. We talked about differences between Cantonese and various languages in Taiwan and Mandarin and stuff. So, if you want to know more about that, you can go to that episode.
Daniel: It’s one of our most popular ones.
Ben: Really?
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yes, it is. Statistically, it was one of the peak. Let’s see this one. This story was suggested by Magistra Ane on our Discord, and this one’s about recursion. Oh, no, not recursion. Why are we bringing up recursion?
Hedvig: What is recursion, Daniel? Tell us.
Kelly: [chuckles]
Daniel: Well, recursion is the ability to embed things into other things. For example, I can in English embeds in inside the middle of another sentence. I can say, “The monkey saw the man.” That’s one sentence. “The man left,” that’s another sentence, but I can stick them together I can embed them so that it now says, “The man the monkey saw left,” and that’s recursive because I’ve got a sentence inside a sentence and I can do it over and over again. Okay, secretly, no, I can’t because if I tried to do it three times, it gets weird. “The man the monkey the girl knew saw left.” No, that doesn’t work.
Hedvig: Oh, my God. Germans love that stuff.
Ben: I was actually going to say if you’re not careful, you just end up accidentally writing Infinite Jest, I think if you go too far down that rabbit hole.
Hedvig: Oh, my God…[crosstalk]
Kelly: [crosstalk] -margins.
Daniel: The reason why recursion is a hot topic in linguistics is because Chomsky, Hauser, Fitch famously claimed that recursion is, they thought, the defining quality of human language the thing that separates human language from animal communication. Daniel Everett reckoned that Pirahã didn’t have it, and so that started the whole thing about, is it important or is it not. But this discussion is about some work from Dr. Diana Liao at the University of Tübingen in Germany. They were looking at center embedding like the example that I just gave, “The man the monkey saw left.” And they tried it with humans. They previously had tried this test with gibbons, I believe with primates. They would put up on a computer screen a bunch of brackets
Imagine this, curly brackets, left and right, straight brackets, left and right, all mixed up on a computer screen. What you have to learn to do is embed them. And if I was embedding them, what I would do is I would say, left hand, I don’t know, parenthesis. Left hand curly bracket. Right hand curly bracket. Right hand parenthesis. So, the ones that go together are on the outside, and the ones that go together, the other pair, are on the inside. It’s recursive. I have embedded that set of brackets into the other set of brackets. That’s the test.
Hedvig: And they actually gave the crows… they actually gave them visual stimuli of the brackets.
Kelly: Mm-hmm. And they’re tapping them.
Daniel: We haven’t mentioned crows yet.
Kelly: We haven’t mentioned the crows yet. First, they did it with monkeys and babies, and adults.
Daniel: Yes, it was adults, gave them verbal feedback if they got it right for humans and gave them some juice…
Kelly: Some snackies.
Daniel: If they were the primates.
Kelly: Little snackies. I wish that we also got snackies. Why couldn’t it be [unintelligible 00:31:42]? But okay.
Ben: I was just thinking the same thing.
Daniel: [chuckles] I wouldn’t mind some juice.
Ben: Give me some apple juice, I’m anyone’s, anyone’s.
Kelly: Or Capri Sun, okay. Continue.
Ben: Oh, my God. Yes. [unintelligible 00:31:52] in the states, there’s no Capri Sun here, and it kills me. It’s like I miss my fruit simulacrum fluid. It’s so good.
Kelly: It’s got to be the best [crosstalk] having kids is like, “Ooh, terrible food.”
Daniel: “I’m going to drink the rest of your juice box. Where’d my juice box go?”
Kelly: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: What’s that thing called… when I lived in Canada for a little bit, I would always buy… I think it was called Tang.
Ben: Oh, Tang. Yep.
Hedvig: Which is not allowed to be called a fruit juice, really. [laughs]
[crosstalk]
Ben: No, no, no, no. It’s an orange-flavored drink.
Hedvig: Yes. [crosstalk]
Kelly: It is an orange-flavored drink. It says that on the box.
Daniel: I think it’s a fungus.
Hedvig: Yeah. No, I like it.
Kelly: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: I lived on Tang, dumplings, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.
Daniel: Can we get back to the brackets?
Kelly: Yeah, okay.
Ben: Argh, fine.
Daniel: Both the humans and the primates did a pretty good job although the primates needed more trials when they got off of the list that they were trained on and got into having to tap a new set of brackets. So, pretty good, monkeys, not too bad. Now, it’s time to start with the crows. And guess what? Crows did pretty good as well. They didn’t need the extra training that the monkeys needed. They were clever critters because corvids, no slouches in the intellectual department.
Kelly: Corvids, good with beaks. Sorry.
Daniel: They sure are. So, the takeaway from this is meant to be that crows can do recursion. [crosstalk] center embed.
Ben: Can they? Is that where we’ve arrived? I always feel like whenever we do an animal language story, my job is to let you say a bunch of stuff and then basically be like…
Daniel: Which I did.
Ben: And then basically go, “Righto, linguists. Bullshit?” [chuckles]
Daniel: I want to take you to a linguistics conference, and they’ll present work like this. “And now we have a question. First up is Ben.” And you say, “Can they though? Really?”
Ben: Oh, fucking… [crosstalk] Really?
Kelly: They need that. We need that. Please, please, please.
Hedvig: I’m also for that. I have a question. There’s a couple of things. First of all, is recursion really what is so cool about human language? I’m not convinced.
Ben: Yeah. Okay. So, fundamental flaw number one.
Kelly: Please don’t make the average Everett people angry.
[laughter]
Hedvig: I’m not sure, I think we do cooler stuff that has to do with our social dynamics and empathy and failure [unintelligible 00:34:21] mine-
Ben: Oh, whatever, hippie.
Hedvig: -and being able to collaborate and put our needs.
Daniel: Yeah. Of course, it’s Chomsky saying that the one unique thing, a language is something syntactic because that’s his thing. But as we’ve said, if you’re looking for what’s special about language, and you’re looking in the syntax box, it’s possible that you’re looking in the wrong box even though syntax is very cool.
Hedvig: Like a lot of other social species are not as helpful as we are. We’re insanely helpful to each other. And that’s even factoring in that we make war against each other. [laughs]
Kelly: Like all the murder and stuff still.
Hedvig: Yeah, still, we’re insanely helpful.
Daniel: Murder, yes, and we can have that conversation, but still…
Ben: We help them right up until we kill.
Daniel: [chuckles]
Kelly: I do agree.
Hedvig: And then, there’s the Ben’s question, which is like, is this task testing what they say they’re testing? I don’t know. I’m looking at some of the stimuli here. It is literally what Daniel described. It’s a bunch of images with brackets. I’m amazed that like…
Daniel: Tap, tap, tap, tap. And some critics are saying, “Oh, well, they’re just learning that those things go on the outside.”
Ben: Like a pattern recognition thing. Like the videos of babies reading the words on the ground, or like a Border Collie knowing grammar and all that stuff, where it’s just like, what turns out, creatures really want food, like real bad. And they will figure out lots of ways to get food.
Kelly: Me too.
Daniel: Okay. But that’s what we want to know if they can figure it out, and it looks like they can.
Hedvig: There’s a bunch of stuff animals seem to be able to do when humans put like a cat person on the other end, but they don’t do it naturally themselves to each other. Is it interesting if they can figure it out, if they’re super motivated, and there’s a human there prodding them if they never do that behavior? If there was some observational study where there was some sort of… also, maybe we should stop saying like, “This is kind of a cool study.” It’s not, it is kind of neat. I don’t want too cynical. Also, we might be hiring a crow cognition person later in our department… [laughs]
Daniel: Really?
Hedvig: I don’t know, maybe, yeah.
Ben: I feel like Hedders is just guarding for like the Kent Brockman thing of just like, “And I for one would like to welcome our new corvid overlords.”
[chuckles]
Daniel: Corverlords.
Kelly: Corverlords.
Ben: Sorry, I really missed that obvious one.
Daniel: [laughs]
Kelly: I think I’m on the same page. [unintelligible [00:36:49] gets like, these however many crows that live in a testing facility certainly…
Daniel: Two.
Kelly: Right. Certainly, remember this sequence that they were trained on. I am not the person who’s going to be like, “All of these studies are just training…” That is something that we hear about all these kinds of studies. “They just learned this.” That doesn’t mean that people care… or that these creatures or species can’t do these operations, but I am on the same page of, “We trained these individuals to do this, or these individuals are showing us that they can, that doesn’t necessarily mean that these species do.” There are lots and lots of things that humans do that are things that humans don’t do, like climb to the top of Mount Everest. We display those behaviors but they’re not common to the species. Vallortigara is a scientist quoted in this who’s talking about the study, and he says like it is, “fascinating.” A very Spock response.
Ben: [laughs]
Kelly: I agree, it is fascinating. But he then goes on to say, “These crows aren’t producing anything like human language,” and it’s like, ‘Yeah, man, beaks.” [laughs] Were we expecting them to be like tap, tap, tap brackets and so they just jump into a conversation.
Daniel: In fairness to the study, they were good at the training set, but they were also good at a test set of four brackets, like two pairs. And then, they said, “Eff it. Let’s try three pairs, see if they can still do it.”
Hedvig: Hmm. It is fascinating.
Daniel: And they did. They actually did pretty well. Again, if you think recursion is a big deal in language, then this is interesting. If you think that the important stuff is not necessarily syntactic, if you think that syntax is not the defining… if you’re thinking the defining feature of human language is not in that box, then you’re not going to be as interested in that.
Hedvig: I always like corvids though. We just went on a walk here and we saw some birds that were dropping nuts onto the road to get them smashed by the car.
Ben: Crows are not on trial here. Crows are wicked [crosstalk] they’re awesome. My very favorite bird in the world is the magpie.
Hedvig: Australian.
Ben: Yeah, the Australian magpie. Not that bitch pretender from the continent.
Daniel: Not that garbage species.
Hedvig: They’re very different.
Ben: And I believe magpies, if not a true corvid, are like pretty corvid adjacent as far as birds go. They’re very smart, they got sharp beaks, they’re predators, blah, blah, blah. And I adore them.
Kelly: That’s what it is.
Ben: They’re just wicked. I love them.
Hedvig: I love any animal where when you look into their eyes, you can tell that there’s something going on. If you look in the eye of a goat, and then look into the eye of a sheep…
Ben: Oh, my God. Yes. I know exactly what you mean. Sheep are vacant.
Daniel: I had a crow experience. There was a crow hopping up close, trying to get some of my sandwich. I was eating a sandwich on the grass. He wanted some, hopped over, hopped over. I just ignored him. Looked at him at the corner of my eye. And then, I looked sharply at the crow. And he just started picking up leaves like, “Oh, I’m just… I have to do…[crosstalk]
Ben: “Well, nothing to see here.”
Daniel: I just liked crows after that. I just thought they’re cool.
Hedvig: They’re very sweet.
Daniel: Okay, let’s go on to this last one by Aristemo on our Discord just quickly. The article is we’ve been pronouncing Adele’s name wrong. Adele reveals the correct pronunciation of her name. This is a YouTube video by The Independent.
Hedvig: Adele, the British singer?
Kelly: Hmm.
Daniel: Thank you. Not some other person called Adele. I thought everybody knew Adele.
Kelly: Just this girl. [chuckles]
Daniel: “Oh, sorry. I thought I was talking about this girl I grew up with named Adele. I had a huge crush on her. It was massive.”
Hedvig: In this world where we’re getting more and more segregated, not everyone knows everything I’ve learned.
Daniel: Thank you.
Hedvig: Steve’s nephew has his guitar lessons. He’s like seven and we found out that he didn’t really know who the Beatles was. And he’s like from Manchester.
Kelly: Oh.
Daniel: Wow.
Hedvig: I feel really bad now for outing him. But he’s just a child, he’s learning it’s fine.
Ben: Do you know what? I’m going to be profoundly outside my gender and racial expectation. I’m so glad to hear that. The Beatles is finally leaving the cultural cash currency kind of thing, that makes me very happy. I think that’s right.
Hedvig: He does know who Boney M are though.
Ben: I’m going to say it, I like Boney M way more than the Beatles, way more.
Daniel: Did you tell him, “Oh, it’s that band with the guy from Wings”?
Kelly: [chuckles]
Ben: Yes, yes, Daniel. She made an incredibly bespoke music deep cut reference to the seven-year-old.
Daniel: Thank you.
Hedvig: I didn’t pretend there was anything wrong with it at all. I don’t think we need to.
Ben: Yeah, fair enough.
Kelly: No. It’s fascinating.
Ben: I get what you mean though. It’s surprising.
Hedvig: Okay, Adele.
Daniel: The singer Adele took a question from a fan who pronounced her name with L vocalization, as in something like… I’ll just play the audio here.
Annie: Hi, Adele, I’m Annie and I’m from London. And my question is on your journey…
Adele: Where is she from, Enfield or something? Love that. She said my name perfectly.
Interviewer: It just says London. Yeah.
Adele: He came and ask me how I say my name, and I was like, “Uh-DELL.” She’s like, “Uh-Dayle.”
Interviewer: Did I do Uh-Dell?
Adele: Uh-Dell. [laughs]
Hedvig: Uh-Dayle.
Daniel: Uh-Dell.
Ben: So, like a little kid, like with a W sound in there?
Kelly: I mean, wow.
Daniel: No, this is a feature of child language but it’s also a feature of lots of different kinds of English. And Adele, for her part, said, “Ooh, where’s she from?”
Kelly: She said, “Oh, you must be from X.” She knew exactly where she was from.
Daniel: “Yeah, you said my name perfectly. It’s Uh-Dayle.” So, this is a phenomenon known as L vocalization. It’s where’s the spoken, I know it’s incoming in some parts of Australia. Like in South Australia, they sometimes say milk with a W sound. Football, word final or Brazil. Brazil.
Ben: I’ve heard Brazil. I have heard Brazil here.
Kelly: Well, it’s a common feature of African American English.
Daniel: Yes, it is.
Kelly: I have trouble hearing the difference between these two sounds because I don’t separate them naturally.
Daniel: Ah, interesting.
Ben: Wow. Okay.
Hedvig: I can hear the difference for some of them, but not others. Like when you said Brazil, I got very confused because that just sounded… Can you say them the two ways, Brazil?
Daniel: So, this is with no L vocalization, Brazil, Brazil. And now, here’s with L vocalization, Brazil. Brazil.
Hedvig: It’s very small.
Daniel: Word final L sounds a lot like W for a whole lot of people. So, this isn’t necessarily we’ve been pronouncing Adele’s name wrong. It’s just that Adele commented on the way that someone said her name and thought it was cool.
Ben: Right. So, like a variety of English… Is it not unlike the fact that like some West Country people will say like the lamb and comb? It’s not that one is right and one is wrong. It’s just the different varieties of English handle the same word in different ways.
Kelly: But when it’s your name and you’re from a place…
Ben: Yeah, that’s what I was just about to say. I guess when it comes to a name you have, one would imagine, a bit more weight to it than lamb.
Hedvig: Where’s Adele from?
[typing]
Hedvig: Tottenham, London. There we go.
Daniel: Where else? Do we know anywhere else? I’m noticing an article from Dialect Blog, The Trubbow with L-Vocalization. And they mentioned, African American English, they mentioned Pittsburgh. There’s places in Australia. It’s thought to be cockney, but it’s not exclusively cockney. And it’s just one of those… I don’t know, desire paths that people take in English-speaking world. It’s all over the place.
Hedvig: And she does speak a little bit cockney, doesn’t she?
Ben: I think a little might be a bit generous. My understanding is that when she’s not singing, she sounds like a right gaffer.
Hedvig: Which is only a benefit and a plus in British medias and probably American as well.
Ben: Oh, big time.
Hedvig: People are like charming, love it, EastEnders, besting.
Ben: [laughs] All right.
Daniel: Well, hey, thanks to Aristemo for that one.
Ben: Thank you, Aristemo.
Daniel: Let’s move on to the Oxford game which we like to call it, Yeah-nah or Nah-yeah. In this game, I give you two words you have to figure out whether they are related or whether the similarity between them is merely coincidental. The answers will come from our sponsor, the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language.
Hedvig: Game on.
Daniel: Right. You two are both doing pretty well. You blitzed last week’s one. I’m wondering how Kelly’s going to do on this one.
Ben: Almost certainly better than us. That’s my guess.
Daniel: Here we go. Here are the words, and this pair was suggested by our patron, Iztin, on our Discord server. Garlic and garland.
Ben: Ooh.
Daniel: Because as all of us vampire hunters know, [Kelly chuckles] when you’re toting your garlic around, the easiest way to keep those cloves ready is to string them into a lovely garland shape hanging around your neck. And then when you need them, boom.
Ben: I like that.
Kelly: Boom.
Daniel: What do you reckon? Kelly, you want to go first?
Kelly: No.
[laughter]
Daniel: Hedvig, I’m looking at you.
Hedvig: Oh, shit.
Ben: I am loving the confident no just then. That was…
Hedvig: Yeah, I love a confident no.
Ben: If I could bottle that and just show it to people, be like, “This is what a comfortable boundary looks like, everyone.” Just calmly established. [laughs]
Daniel: I think we found our new gift for this episode.
Ben: No. Okay. I will take a stab.
Daniel: Okay.
Ben: I think that garlic and garland are different. I think they come from a different route. And my logic is this. From what limited understanding I have about food, my understanding is that Britain, until relatively speaking relatively recently, terrible. If we think boiling everything now is bad, prior to colonialism and spices coming in and all that kind of stuff, like neep and swede were the predominant fucking carbs for Brits for a good several millennia. And if you’ve ever had a neep or a suede, you know exactly how sad that is. So, I’m thinking garlic was actually again, relatively speaking, sort of recent. I reckon garland as a ceremonial thing probably has a slightly older root in English than garlic has. That’s my guess.
Daniel: Okay. Hedvig, your turn. Yeah-nah or nah-yeah?
Hedvig: I also think that garlic as a concept in North European cooking is comparatively recent. I don’t think it’s a new world food. I think it occurs in Asia and maybe around the Mediterranean. I don’t think it’s something that came over with from the Americas, I don’t think, but I might be wrong. But in other languages, I know garlic has very unrelated words. So, like English garlic-
Daniel: Oh, really?
Kelly: Yeah.
Hedvig: -Swedish white onion, gullök. German [unintelligible [00:48:20] which is like nub onion, I think.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: In French [unintelligible [00:48:26] and then those are the ones I can think of right now. So, that tells me that they’re not super old. That said, you guys say swede for something that everyone else said something else for and that’s super old. But generally, cabbage, onion and those kinds of vegetables are fairly similar. Often, English is the odd one out. So, I think it’s recent, and I know that when you store garlic a long time, you braid them into a thing.
Ben: Mm.
Kelly: Right. That’s…[crosstalk]
Hedvig: And I think that’s related to the garland. Yeah, Kelly?
Kelly: Yeah.
Hedvig: [crosstalk] -next.
Daniel: Kelly, your answer.
Kelly: I wanted to check on it. I do not think they’re related. I wanted to check one thing, and that was the root of ‘gar’ in garlic. I know we’re maybe not supposed to check things.
[chuckles]
Hedvig: Did you check something?
Kelly: I said. I don’t think they’re related. I checked the root of ‘gar’ in garlic, just to make sure that I was right about this, that it comes from spear.
Hedvig: [gasps]
Daniel: Okay.
Kelly: Right. And that’s not a garlic. This is what I’m thinking, like we braid garlic, maybe that’s the same as garlinge. But I feel whatever a garland is, this is coming from the practice of adorning homes for holidays and that is something that is much newer than whatever we were doing with drying garlic. Garlic, the spear part is about the plant, like what the plant itself looks like coming in and out of the ground. I don’t think they’re related. However, I do think that that root maybe comes way, way back from the same place, but I’m not sure of that. I just wanted to know if I was remembering spear correctly. I’m going to say no. I’m going to say no, they’re not related.
Ben: Okay, Daniel, put us out of our misery.
Daniel: Okay, so Ben and Kelly you think that they are unrelated. Hedvig, you think that they are related. Would it change your mind if I told you that garlic comes from about the year 1000?
Hedvig and Ben: No.
Hedvig: Maybe.
Daniel: The correct answer, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, yeah-nah, they’re not related.
Ben: Yes.
Daniel: So, garlic, the ‘gar’ is in fact a spear or a javelin, and the ‘lic’ is a leeks. That makes sense because garlics are kind of leeks a little bit and ‘gar’ is the javelin because the clove looks like a spear. So, a garlic is a spear leek.
Hedvig: No, the clove, surely the leaf, looks like a spear.
Kelly: No, like the top. That little top, it’s like [onomatopoeia].
Ben: [crosstalk] bulb.
Kelly: Yeah.
Hedvig: The chive part.
Ben: The bit that that comes out, Daniel.
Daniel: Oh, there is a little…[crosstalk]
Kelly: When it very first comes out of the ground, it looks like a spade, like the top of a spear.
Hedvig: Like a chive.
Daniel: Ah, I didn’t know that.
Kelly: When it very first breaks the ground, that’s the spear part.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Kelly: Yeah.
Daniel: Thank you. I learned about garlic today.
Kelly: They’re very different from when they come out.
Ben: Daniel, I have to ask, have you ever seen either a head of garlic or a spear before?
[laughter]
Kelly: It looks different when a leek pierces the ground.
Daniel: I just get all my garlic from a jar in the fridge. Thank you very much.
Ben: No. Ah, Geez Louise.
Daniel: And I stick it in my porridge which I make with water. Now then, garland on the other hand, for garland, the ‘gar’ is not a spear but it’s just a part of the word that they used for that thing. And the OED says that it shows up all over the romance languages. French guirlande, provencale. Italian, ghirlanda. Interestingly, Spanish guirnalda. Metathesis, flipping those sounds. And the OED says, “No satisfactory origin has yet been suggested for it.” So as far as we know, the answer is yeah-nah, not related.
Ben: Yeah.
Daniel: Thanks to the Oxford English Dictionary for supporting this episode of Because Language. If you like hearing the Oxford game, why don’t you tell them? And then, they might get us to keep doing it. They are @OED on Twitter. You can pester them. Also, while you’re pestering the OED, you can subscribe to the OED. If you don’t have access to your organization or your local library, you can subscribe. Just head over to the webpage for this episode becauselanguage.com, click the big OED button, that way they’ll know it’s from us, and that’s the Oxford English Dictionary, the definitive record of the English language.
Ben: Can I just say as well, thank you to the OED because being right is good, but beating Hedvig is gold.
Hedvig: [blows raspberry]
[laughter]
Hedvig: You’ve got to risk something to be …[crosstalk]
Daniel: You got to go contrary for a while.
Ben: Yeah. Go big or go home, Hedders. That’s what I want you to keep thinking so that I can keep winning.
Hedvig: What’s that saying? If you’re going to reach the mountain of Slay, you have to go to the Valley of Flop.
[laughter]
Ben: Get off…[crosstalk]
[laughter]
Hedvig: I knew that would annoy you. Sorry.
Ben: Oh, dear.
[interview begins]
Daniel: We’re talking with Dr. Kelly Wright about her work in linguistics and it touches a lot of different areas. Kelly, where do you want to start? We just did the Oxford game. You’ve been working with Oxford in their efforts to document words from African American English. What’s going on there? Or what has been going on there?
Kelly: Yeah, a lot. I am a member of the Oxford English Dictionary Researchers Advisory Guild, which sounds very fancy.
Ben: It sounds so dandy, I love it.
Daniel: That’s super Oxford.
Kelly: It is. It’s very Oxford. I love it though. It’s actually really cool. It is like an invitation-only space. But it’s nice because you get to be there and people who work for the dictionary post questions to this area where experts can comment on them. So, they say things like, “Oh, we got this submission and we’re not really sure about how to classify it,” or, “We’d need some more citations to support this. Do you do have language consultants? Do you know communities we might want to go into to support what one person has submitted?” Which is really nice. Most of what I am able to comment on as myself as an expert in that space because a lot of things come through where they’re just saying who can help, who can help, which is really nice.
They have this varieties of English page and it is entirely open access. which is really wonderful that the Oxford folks have done this, have made it public facing. Anyone can come to this page and search their own variety of English. So, you could look up Hindi English, or Indian English or Chinese English, these things that can get more fine grained. And if your variety isn’t there, you can say, “Hey, my variety isn’t here. There should be a page for it.” You can go to a page, and you can upload examples of your own language use, you can do that in any modalities. So, you could do a video. If you were a signer, you could sign-
Hedvig: Oh, really?
Kelly: -black sign language. You could sign or you can just speak it, you can say, “This word is used in my language, and here’s how you pronounce it.” It actually goes back to the earliest traditions of the Oxford English Dictionary, which they crowdsourced all of their material, people would send in lexical items on like slips of paper, and they would go to the dictionary and that’s how they got their one, two, three senses of a word. The more reportings that they got of a particular usage, that would be the top sense of it, that they had dated back farthest.
Ben: That’s fascinating.
Kelly: I really love being a part of these more inclusive and open access efforts that the dictionary is being a part of.
Daniel: Did you get a sense of why they’ve decided to do this? I know that we always have this problem in lexicography of trying to Columbus words from African American English, or different varieties of English. Did you feel this is a way of doing better or to redress what they’ve been doing?
Kelly: There’s a number of different motivating factors for these projects. I think one of them is there is this significant potential that there will never be another print edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. Having several volumes of it sit on a shelf, in the amount of time it would take for it to come out, it would already be out of date. And so, I think lexicographers are very aware now much in ways that they probably weren’t 200, 300 years ago of how fast language is changing and how these documentary efforts need to be much more inclusive. So, as their efforts move entirely digital out of necessity for just being able to capture the language as it is moving, if for no other reason, is that these pages help them to say, “What do we need to cover? How do we represent these origins in a more inclusive way?”, because the traditional sources that they have reached to things that have already been published, or varieties of English or other languages, or other usages that are covered in print journalism, or in the scripted media just don’t represent the way that language is being used on the ground, and they just don’t represent these word histories accurately. There has been a move for, honestly, about 150 years now for the dictionary to be more inclusive of these communities who are innovating on the ground.
Daniel: That far back, you reckon?
Kelly: Oh, yes, I do.
Hedvig: It’s really important that an institution like Oxford English Dictionary recognizes their power in this space, because a lot of people don’t believe that something [crosstalk] exists in the OED, which linguists and other people might not always think is true, but I think if you ask any random English speaker, they would say, “Oh, that’s not a real word. It’s not in the OED.” So, it means that they have a lot of power, whether they want to or not. A lot of people we’ve met throughout this show that work on dictionaries don’t want that power. They’re like, “No, no, no, no, we don’t want this.” But sometimes, you have power that you don’t want and to handle that responsibly makes sense. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more if you know anything more about what you said about sign language, because Oxford English Dictionary is about English, but British Sign and American Sign Language and Afro American Sign Language are not all English.
Kelly: Indeed. Yeah. I think that the dictionary wanted to be as inclusive as possible. So, they just didn’t limit modality restrictions for the ways in which you could upload data. I don’t necessarily know that we’re saying… they’re certainly not making the claim that sign languages are Englishes. I know that a lot of signers do not feel that way. I know that a lot of people who study it theoretically do not feel that way. I don’t want to make that claim. But there are certainly users of these languages that feel like they’re using a signed version of English, or that some of the styles that they use are signed versions of English as opposed to ASL, as opposed to BSL, as opposed to their home signs.
Ben: [crosstalk] like a long word.
Kelly: Indeed. I really brought it up just to mention that the accessibility is there, as opposed to that there’s a specific effort to document like English signed varieties that are specifically English.
Hedvig: I also imagine that the OED doesn’t… There’s a lot of Punjabi speakers in the UK and they’re not going to do a Punjabi dictionary. But, like you were saying, there are varieties of signs that… as far as from some people I know who are working on sign languages, I know that there’s deaf sign languages and then there are signed versions of specific languages that people use as a sort of intermediate thing with certain people.
Kelly: Or in certain spaces that call for it, like jargons or other professional languages, where there’s not anything else except for a one-to-one transliteration.
Hedvig: Right. And then, it could be more like, “Oh, maybe that is signed English.” [crosstalk]
Kelly: Right. And you’re very right about, like, maybe they’re not going to do a Punjabi dictionary. But if they get enough people saying, “I use this word, and here’s where it’s from, and all this stuff. And this word in English absolutely comes from this other word and my usage,” if they get enough people going in and talking about their own usage in this way, and the knowledge they possess from being members of the speech community, then they might be able to go in and edit the history of some of these terms, and be able to say things like, “They’re from this. They are a Punjabi term. And then, it got coopted into these more standard varieties when it was first documented in 1610 or it was first documented in,” whatever, whatever, because now we have the information from the speech community, which was never written down, or it was never in these, like other written sources that they traditionally point to.
Daniel: Could you tell us about a word that they came to you with and said, “What about this one?” I would love to hear a story about a word that you worked on.
Kelly: One of them was typa. T-Y-P-A. “You have some typa,” blah, blah, blah, right?
Hedvig: Ah, okay. Yeah.
Kelly: [crosstalk] -in English.
Daniel: Wow. Okay.
Kelly: Like he feels some type of way about this, like how you feel like that thing of like, you feel some type of way about this of it not being like a shortening or something like ‘gonna’, having to make an argument for this… this is lexicalized. People had uploaded a lot of information saying this word was lexicalized. And I was like, “It is in my experience. Here’s a bunch of examples of people using it as a full ass word,” and [unintelligible [01:03:27].
Hedvig: Yeah. And it also doesn’t mean the same thing as type of as far as I’ve heard it. If you say, “Oh, he felt some typa way,” I wouldn’t…
Kelly: Yeah. But there’s this idea that when people say ‘finna’ is a shortening, or it’s like a black version of ‘fix into’, that’s like saying, okay, that means black language isn’t a variety and doesn’t have its own lexical items. It’s like an X version of some other thing. To say that its own words aren’t words, that they are shortenings of something else or regionalisms of their own right, or racialization in their own right. No, it’s a word. Here’s what it means. It’s got its own history. We can show that it was borrowed, just like we show that lots of other words are borrowed that have phonological processes applied to them in different languages, seen as a word, it’s been in the dictionary for decades. That kind of thing of like, “Yep, that’s why they gave it its own entry and said it had its own history.” It’s like the same thing with ‘typa’. Yeah, it may mean the same thing but that doesn’t mean it’s not a word.
Hedvig: But I was going to ask because I don’t speak Afro American Vernacular English. For viewers who are not viewing a video. I’m a very, very white girl, and I’m not from the US. So, whatever I know about Afro American Vernacular English is through hanging out on the internet and watching shows and speaking to friends. It’s not my native variety at all. But I had thought that there was a semantic distinction as well, but I don’t know the exact boundaries of it.
Kelly: Oh, I guess the difference is, “Is it a word, does it mean the same thing?”, versus, “Is it always used in the same semantic space?”, I think are maybe two different questions. Meaning, capital M, little m, maybe different questions, I don’t know. In a sense that we would write a definition for it, versus how do people employ this in the world are maybe two different questions.
Hedvig: Oh, that’s where some people I know like to talk about meaning versus use. But if you say, “He feels some typa way about it.”
Kelly: That’s the thing, is what are we referencing when it comes up? The word itself in the sentence function as the same way as two separate terms in Standard American English or wide standardized spoken English.
Hedvig: It does though, right? It doesn’t feel to me like they are but [crosstalk] regular.
Kelly: [crosstalk] -using it where and when. But why you would choose to employ that construction is marking something about this person we’re talking about, “They feel some type of way about it,” is very they are being critical, they’re being overly critical. They’re feeling something that stems from their positionality in some way, it has something to do with them feeling X about…[crosstalk]
Hedvig: Yeah, is it also like…
Kelly: -experiences.
Hedvig: Okay. Is it also a thing of like, I, the person speaking and you, the person I’m saying it to, both know the way he’s feeling about it and that it’s negative?
Kelly: Yeah, perhaps. I mean, it depends. Yeah, I think that being employed and specific contextual, or most often employed in these specific contextual frames, I think, does have this assumed meaning for it or knowledge in community of like, “I know what you mean when you say that.” “If you’re going to feel some type of way about it, then blah, blah, blah.” If you’re going to get all up in your feelings, like that’s like another thing of being off in your feelings. Feeling some type of way and being all up in your feelings are similar. There’s a Venn diagram there. [chuckles]
Daniel: Wow. I can sense the enthusiasm that you have for this project. I think it must be tremendously validating. Do you feel that way?
Kelly: Yeah, it is., It’s really nice. And the people, the incredible women I work with at the OED are all very committed. They’re very committed to this work. They’re all very committed to making it free and getting the word out so that people just know they can, that they can be a part of contributing to these dictionary efforts. People of color were kept out of official processes of meaning making essentially for the entire history of print. So, I think that the dictionary recognizes its role in that, at least some of the members of this team are doing what they can to actively correct that. So, it’s nice to be a part of that work. Yeah, absolutely, for all of my dictionary work.
Daniel: Yeah, let’s move on to the other facet of your dictionary work. We used to have two areas here. You’ve been doing lexicographical work on the journal, American Speech, published by Duke University Press. Some great people on that one. Ben Zimmer is on that team. Is that the same deal or are there some differences there?
Kelly: Well, I’m actively actually working for them. I have been for two years. I write in this quarterly publication as the co-editor. I’m actually the first woman of color and graduate student to join that team in their 81-year history. I’m pretty proud of that. I’m a graduate student no more but was when I joined. I also have the pleasure of inviting guests to authors, which is fun. It’s 150 words on a word history. So, if people are excited about that, get in touch. But I love it because we dedicate two issues a year to covering the American Dialect Society Word of the Year vote.
Daniel: Oh, that’s coming up.
Kelly: Yeah, the other two issues are on a theme. So, I end up learning a lot, especially with these thematic issues. The last one we did was on cybersecurity. The next one we’re doing is on gender and sexuality. So, I get to learn a lot of terms and then the new words then keep me involved in what lots of communities are doing right now. I get deep into Reddit and TikTok and see what is happening really live in spaces of usage. So, I enjoy it.
Ben: No, no. I’m working, I’m working.
Kelly: Oh, yeah. 100%.
Hedvig: No, but also…
Ben: “I’ve been on TikTok for nine hours, I’m working.”
Kelly: Kind of. I mean I wrote an entry for WAP and it was like, “Excuse me, I have to watch music video again. It’s my job.”
[chuckles]
Hedvig: I can also imagine that some of those spaces can become draining depending on …
Kelly: Yeah. And there were like some times where I’m like, “Can’t do that one. Sorry, I’m not going in there. Yeah.” Especially ones that are about self-harm and this other stuff where I’m just like, “Not for me. Thanks.” But yeah, they can be incredibly draining. But also, it’s so important because for Among the New Words, we have this charge, which comes from our founders of documenting terms that are not already covered in other reference works, and terms from usage communities that are not well represented in other reference works. Three is terms that recently risen to prominence. So, calling it Among the New Words is somewhat misleading, especially to our readers who were like, “This term isn’t new?” It’s like, “It’s newly covered. It’s newly documented.” Also, especially in our thematic issues, where it’s like this is on cybersecurity. So, we’re reaching into a theme. We’re trying to be more representative and inclusive on this theme, and these terms that are prominent and weren’t covered and are from these communities that haven’t been documented. And so, that’s what we’ll be trying to do in this gender and sexuality issue. We’ll reach back into time in this effort to be more expansive and inclusive.
Hedvig: Totally fair enough. I don’t think there’s any way you could do it any other way.
Kelly: And I love it. We get to do like emojis and stuff and it’s all very multimodal. So, if you go into the sub… and they’re free. We’ve worked really hard to press to make them free.
Hedvig: Sweet. Good job.
Kelly: And all of the online resources are incredibly multimodal. So, you’ll see all of the tweets and the videos and the TikToks and everything there that we’ve referenced, instead of just a concordance style sentence thing.
Hedvig: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s so cool.
Kelly: And you can thank Todd [unintelligible 01:12:22] for that, he works tirelessly.
Daniel: Gosh. I was thinking about this aspect of your work, and I was thinking, “Gosh, sociolinguistics to lexicography, those are so different,” but they’re just no different, are they?
Kelly: Not at all. But it’s not like a well-worn pipeline. I don’t think a lot of people talk about lexicography as a profession. Especially to our undergrads and master students in the field, it is their job. It’s a real job. A global, international profession. Like I said, it is the hat that I wear that gives me the most joy. I love it. It’s sustaining work.
Daniel: Okay. Well, there are other aspects that are a little harder. I was thinking about… and I noticed that you are on the LSA Social Media Committee, because there had been missteps in the LSA. And we were super-duper encouraged to see people we like joining the Social Media Committee. And then, I see on the website now, “Established in 2020, the committee is currently inactive due to changes in the membership of the committee.”
Hedvig: Maybe for some of our listeners, we need to do a little bit of a recap.
Daniel: You mean like the missteps?
Hedvig: Linguistic Society of America.
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: I’m going to be shit at this recap. I should not to be doing it.
Daniel: No, no, please.
Hedvig: No, because there was so much back and forth. And some of start-[crosstalk]
Kelly: I know what your listeners know.
Ben: I will tell you what, can I take a stab at it? And, Kelly, because you are the very closest to this and probably have the greatest understanding of the four of us, you can tell me exactly how badly I fuck it up. But I’m just pitching this to just like…
Hedvig: Wait, can we check if Kelly wants to talk about this?
Kelly: Oh, no, we can talk about it. I ran away a little while ago.
Daniel: I did ask. [chuckles]
Ben: As has happened many a time too many an institution over the last 15, 20 years, the Linguistic Society of America ballsed up. I can’t actually specifically recall how they ballsed up right in this moment. But then, they doubled down and it all went fucking pear shaped. And then, as a way to redress that fuckup, and again, it is a fuck up, I’m not trying to minimize the fuckup. But what I’m trying to say is if you’ve followed the sorts of stories where a large institution has goofed real bad and then tried to fix it by appointing a committee of people to be like, “Oh, we’re going to do better at the thing that we fucked up,” this is broadly speaking the contour of this story as well. I believe, Kelly, that’s sort of where you came in, in the sense that you were part of that panel know that they convened to try and fix the fucked-up processes that had led to the fuckup in the first place.
Kelly: Yes, one of several committees and panels.
Ben: [laughs] A constellation of fuckupery.
Kelly: Yeah. At least for the Social Media Committee as far as it’s concerned, I personally was the canary in the coalmine for that committee during the… I guess it was 2021 annual meeting that was entirely online because the 2020 meeting was in person in New Orleans. So, this was the one after that. It was a colossal failure. It was a colossal failure of accessibility, all of these things. We had a very specific charge, the Social Media Committee, of how the ways in which we were allowed to respond to feedback from the internet or email or wherever, from social media. There was this unfolding crisis happening and people were saying things and we just weren’t getting any response from the people who are supposed to be taking our flagging of important things very seriously. So, because the issues were so egregious, I felt like I had to step away because I didn’t want my name associated with their efforts. To them be holding me up and saying, “This person is making sure we’re doing good things,” I was like, “I am not, because they aren’t listening to me in a way.”
Ben: Yeah. I am present, good things are not happening.
Kelly: Yeah. I was giving a lot of time to monitoring things as they were coming and no one was listening to this effort. So, it was like I certainly am connected and have this expertise and a positionality to be able to tell you when things are an issue. And it was my market year, and I was finishing my dissertation. So, I needed every ounce of energy I could get and they weren’t going to get any more of mine. But I will say that president, John Baugh, is currently president or will be through January and has had one hell of a year in attempting to just do as much… and it’s actually quite sad for me, because he’s a scholar who’s really inspired me and my work and a lot of other people for generations. And for him to have had this year be his year of presidency is actually quite depressing for a lot of us because he certainly had initiatives that he was never able to enact, because he was just trying to undo this Gordian knot anyway.
Hedvig: Wow. God, it is so, so rough.
Kelly: It is.
Hedvig: I think it was a very smart move for you personally, to choose to not…[crosstalk]
Kelly: I had to.
Hedvig: -energy at a time. You have to be able to finish your dissertation. That is the… [crosstalk]
Kelly: [crosstalk] Yeah.
Ben: Even putting… not that I’m saying you should put your own stuff aside but if we were to temporarily shelve the personal aspect of it, just being pulled in to do a thing and then no one allowing you to do the thing, it’s like, “Well, what the fuck?”
Kelly: Yeah. It’s like, “I can’t do what you asked.” It was hard. And then now, the committee doesn’t exist anymore. Since I left, it seems like all of the other members made a very similar decision, that it was not being well managed and so it couldn’t continue to form as a body.
Hedvig: What were the issues that were coming to the Social Media Committee? [crosstalk]
Kelly: Well, it’s essentially anything and everything that people would tweet with a tag. If we were tagged or tweeted at directly, it came straight to us. Not everything that the LSA was emailed directly, but certain things would be filtered in our direction. And then, there were also things from Instagram and LinkedIn, but it was mostly Twitter.
Hedvig: And then, what were you expected to do with that?
Kelly: We also had other things about publicizing stuff, because years ago, four years, there were non-linguists in charge of the forward-facing media of the LSA. So, they wanted linguists to help comment on, “Here’s the stories we share,” that are out totally valid that have like real science in them. So, that was a lot of what we were doing, is being like, “Here are stories from the real news that are good and real, and here’s how we should frame them.” We were working with the interns who are actually controlling the forward-facing social media presence of the LSA. Then we were like… also, which, again, full-time fucking job. Sorry, full-time job, that…
Ben: We swear. It’s fine.
Kelly: Okay, great. Full-time job, people get whole degrees in this.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah, for sure.
Kelly: Right. So, they had nine of us with our own full-time jobs, [chuckles] trying to be like, “This is something you could tweet. Here’s how it should look,” in the middle of our work weeks. But then, there was also this other thing of, “Somebody just tweeted at the LSA and they’re super mad. This needs a response today. Here’s how you should say something.” Never it did get a response today.
Ben: Can I ask and…[crosstalk]
Kelly: We weren’t allowed to tweet that.
Ben: Yeah. That was going to be my follow-up-
Kelly: Sorry.
Ben: -question of, obviously, you’re not allowed to respond as the committee. When I say obviously, as in this is an institution that doesn’t want to give that power away.
Kelly: An institution, one person, whatever. Yeah
Ben: Well, that was going to be my next question. Did you get the sense that the reason these things weren’t being actioned, these high order like, “Hey, this is a thing that you need to really action ASAP”, did you get the impression that they weren’t being actioned because the people or person in the position of authority were like, “Oh, that’s just that stupid online thing that doesn’t matter”, like that’s not actually that important?
Hedvig: It wasn’t necessarily about them discounting the importance of the online space. I think that there was a bottleneck. I don’t want to say that the very small staff of the LSA does not have a massive job. There are probably only four or five people who have real salaries there. It’s an international organization with thousands of members and a very limited budget. So, these people have full day jobs. That said, that bottleneck was created in our mandate. These people said, “Everything will go through us.” Our committee was created with this charge of, “We are not responding quickly enough to these issues, and that’s why everybody hates us. That’s why people are leaving in droves. That’s why you cannot get people to buy memberships, pay registration fees, get the freakin’ journal.” Do you know what I mean? That is what they care about social media for. Raising money, getting clicks. It’s not the worst thing because if they don’t do that, then they cannot fulfill their mission of supporting us as a research organization, which we desperately need, especially when free speech is under attack.
It really matters that we get that money. It matters that that’s what they value. They have to get it somewhere. When they get it from these veins that are our passive engagement, we don’t actively have to pay them, that’s really helpful for the organization. But they don’t think about it also in this way where people can tell you… give you feedback on how you are existing as an organization. They’re like, “Well, are these people members?” I’m like, “Who cares?”
[laughter]
Ben: Not the important question.
Hedvig: Can I ask something here? I’m not American, I’m European. In Europe, we have something called SLE, which is Societas Linguistica Europaea, which is the Latin name for the Linguistic Society of Europe. And Australia, there’s the ALS, Australia Linguistics Society. And they have quite, I would call, minimal approaches compared to the LSA. They organize a conference, they organize the proceedings of the conference. I think there’s a mailing list you can sign up to, to know what’s happening. I think I’m on the ALS one. So, I get like, “Oh, ALS, there’s a call for workshop coming out.” In my academic world, the SLE and the ALS are a bit similar to other conferences that are regularly organized, like the Historical Linguistics Conference, or the Linguistic Typology Conference, or New Ways of Analyzing Variation Conference. They’re all to me conferences and these two have a focus on a region like Australia and Europe, but other than that, they don’t play a big part in my academic life as a European academic. Whereas the LSA is a bit of a different beast.
Kelly: Indeed.
Hedvig: First of all, like you said, there are international members. So, it is Linguistic Society of America but I know people in Europe and Australia that are members and care about it and follow it. It hosts one of the most prestigious journals in linguistics, the journal of Language, which is a really big deal. It’s a really big deal, which also presumes to cover topics that don’t have anything to do with linguistics in Americas per se. Like if someone wrote…
Kelly: Yeah, a lot of the time not.
Hedvig: Yeah, so if someone wrote an article to language that had nothing to do with indigenous languages of America, or American English or anything like that…
Kelly: Sorry, I was the editor of Language… or the editor [unintelligible [01:25:51] Language for three years. So, yeah.
Hedvig: Right. As a European, it’s a little bit annoying, because it’s like, “Hey, you guys are the Linguistics Society of America, and you- [crosstalk]
Ben: Back off.
Daniel: [laughs]
Hedvig: -publish the journal of linguistics.”
Ben: The record of linguistics.
Hedvig: Yeah. “Maybe,” I don’t know.
Ben: Wo what I’m hearing Hedvig articulate is that we need to create another body, another guild, a global linguistic… [crosstalk] No, I’m kidding, that’s not the solution.
Kelly: We run the North American Research Network and Historical Sociolinguistics very much in the same way of we have an annual meeting, we put our proceedings online, and we don’t charge anybody fees, and it works pretty well for our international audience.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: I wanted to ask you, just on a slightly more encouraging note about your work on metalanguage.
Kelly: Oh, yes, thank you. Get us away from this topic.
Daniel: And that’s the struggle pile. So now, we’re climbing off the struggle pile for a second, that’s the…
Kelly: Oh, this is part of the struggle pile. But yeah, go ahead.
Ben: [laughs]
Daniel: Ah, okay. Metalanguage, we talked about this before, you and I, and I understand from my work in education, that metalanguage is your knowledge about language. I know what nouns and verbs are, and that’s my metalanguage, understanding. But you did research on how people understood their knowledge of language or how people viewed their own knowledge of language. What was going on there?
Kelly: Well, a lot. My dissertation is on perceptions of black professionalism. Those perceptions come from the community of black professionals as well as the wider public itself. So, I define metalinguistic awareness as something that encompasses what a language user knows about the relation of social factors like age, gender, and race to linguistic usage, distribution, meaning, or context of occurrence variants, which is essentially everything. It’s usage. It’s like what you know about domains of usage in relation to your usage. This dissertation tracks the ways in which 17 black professionals from Detroit use their language in general through their careers, but also in their lives, the ways in which they came to know the different styles they possess, how they categorize them for themselves, the words that they use to describe them, how they view them, like what is present in one that isn’t in the other and the domains of usages they occur in and then similar experiences between them. So, do you experience tone policing? When do you feel you use a whiter voice to stay safe? Things like this, these very similar questions.
I developed a new method of sociolinguistic interview to elicit these metalinguistic observations. And then, there’s an experiment that pulls variables from these observations. So, in this sociolinguistic interview, I’m not analyzing speech production, which is a major deviation from the goals of previous interview. I am very interested in what these people say, not how they say it, not how their language is organized. I’m not listening to you, I am listening to you. So, I am very interested in what people have to say and these patterns of observation of their usage.
The variables that I’m testing in the experiment are things that people told me that they avoid, of these patterns of self-censorship, in professional spaces, of parts of their language that they hold back when they feel like they have to be accepted in their jobs. We tested these variables to see how people feel about them. That study is not special in its methodology, but it is special in the fact that it uses only black speech. So, it is using a standard variety and a nonstandard variety of African American language as opposed to African American language versus white language in the study. So, white language is not defaulted here. What we find is that almost every listener, no matter what their demographics, out of 300 people, almost every listener, prefers the more standard productions in all environments. And so, that contrasts some of what people reported about their own productions and how they feel about usage in themselves and their own communities and the communities of others.
Hedvig: When you say prefers, how did…
Ben: How’s preference measured?
Hedvig: Or how do people frame that? Do they say, “I understand this better”? Or, “I like this better”?
Kelly: It’s a very pared-down phonetic experiment. So, they got two sentences, essentially, essentially, sentence A or sentence B, which one sounds more professional. The only difference in those two sentences that they heard, they only heard them, they did not see them, was one phonetic variable that had been manipulated. So, they got consonant cluster reduction in one sentence and not the other. So, they might have heard something like ‘fine’ instead of ‘find’. Because of that… it was actually trend. They heard ‘Trent’ instead of ‘trend’. And almost everyone preferred the sentence with ‘trend’. And that’s the only difference. In one sentence, you’re hearing a little more of an ending than the other.
Hedvig: They were specifically asked, “Which one do you think is more professional”?
Kelly: Yes. And that is a model from other literature, so I was just not replicating. But yeah, [crosstalk] going other work.
Hedvig: Yeah, that makes sense.
Daniel: Wow, Kelly, you just do so much in linguistics and for the linguistic community. I get the sense of there’s some joy, there’s some pain. What keeps you going?
Kelly: Part of this is two things. A, part of getting through the work itself, the distribution that’s 300 pages, which, please read them, I know, it’s hilarious.
[chuckles]
Daniel: We’ll have a link.
Kelly: -is pulling those stories forward. So, these 17 people who sat down with me in the early days of the pandemic and talked to me about their lives and everything that they have carried, which so much of that mirrors my own experience, even in this light-skinned body, I feel a profound responsibility to report that work, to create space for their words and their experiences to just live in the literature. And so, just having it, just having the opportunity to tell those stories is incredibly profound for me. And then, being able to show like, “Hey, did you know there’s variation in black language?”, it’s such a thing that it upsets me that we have to continue saying it. It’s something that I felt like I could get away with not saying for a while. I’ve done it, I felt like it was understood. But then, when you go looking back in the literature, like, “This isn’t understood,” because people are saying, like, “Oh, my gosh, did you realize that black people also have regional variation and they don’t do it in the same way as others?” And you’re like, “Huh.”
[laughter]
So, actually, taking the space to make that point of view of being like, “Let me show you very definitively. These people that are all from this place that share all of these identity categories, really orienting to these types of uses in different ways. And here’s why.” That points me into another thing that really sustains me is that I am the biggest nerd for this stuff.
[laughter]
I really love it. Underneath all of this stuff that feels bad on the outside, I have all of these questions about how language actually works and what is happening. So, understanding how ideology is maintained over time and through time at this interactional moment of perception where concepts like discursive irreducibility come in, where it’s like, “I am trying to mean something, and I have all of these goals as a person.” But I walk into a room, maybe that meaning just doesn’t happen, or I’m using these symbols, but they don’t mean everything that I want them to mean, because I can’t fully do so. All of this stuff is so interesting to me of the how and why it works, and how identities are even maintained under such pressures, and then how we claw ourselves out of all of that muck when we come into the world.
The absolutely massive potential of linguistic agency, when you think of it in this idea of the energy contained in an atom, an individual person has such potential for creativity and linguistic production, and all these things. And then, we’ve seen single human being’s language really alter the course of history. So, it’s this idea of if you go out into the world and do self, that’s actually such a radical move and all of this stuff. This is what really reinforces the wheel for me of being like, “Oh, gosh, it’s hard to live. What a risk.” And then, but if we keep pushing forward the way we want, it actually really improves the species let’s keep doing that. And then I just walk into the room with my ‘Film the Police’ t-shirt on or stuff like this. I’m like, “Let me live out loud as hard as I can right now.”
Hedvig: Yeah. I was flipping through the PDF of your dissertation. You have the coolest dedication that I’ve ever seen, is this dedication to self-determination.
Daniel: I love that stuff.
Hedvig: That’s pretty neat. Usually, people put something else there. I really liked that. I think that’s really cool. It is a bit of a more positive note, maybe.
Daniel: Dr. Kelly Write, thank you so much for telling us about your work, what motivates you, what fuels you and how you’re trying to make the world a better place with language. Thanks for all you do.
Kelly: Thanks for having me. It was so great to be here. So nice to meet you, Hedvig.
Hedvig: Yeah, same.
[interview concludes]
Hedvig: But you’re going to stick around, because next up is Word of the Week.
Daniel: And now, we have a word from Kelly, if you’d be so kind, if you got a word for us.
Kelly: I do. As I said, I’ve been working on this special edition of Among the New Words for gender and sexuality. So, a lot of new-to-me terms have come my way in the last several days and weeks. One of them was ‘gender anarchy’.
Hedvig: Ah, like relationship anarchy.
Kelly: Yeah. Which is not a particularly new word again. We’re being expansive. It actually comes out of the 1890s, maybe like European anarchist movements, but it is this idea of social revolution through means of queer liberation and the abolition of binaries and various forms of misogyny. So, I really like gender anarchy as my word of the…
Ben: Wow. Can I ask, is it conveying a sense of other anarchist movements, but just sort of pertaining to gender expression where it’s just like, “It’s this, it’s that, it’s everything in between, it’s nothing. It’s fucking some of your businesses, it’s none of your business. It’s all of these things at once in none of these things. And it’s just a lot, and it’s great.”
Kelly: Yeah. And it’s very bringing down any wall is this step towards bringing down every wall.
Ben: Right. Cool, cool, cool, cool. I like it. That’s fun.
Daniel: That’s good. This one came from Kate S on our Discord. The word is Starbucked. Starbucked, any guesses?
Ben: I have to assume it’s to do with coffee rather than fighter pilots from Battlestar Galactica.
Hedvig: Unfortunately.
Daniel: Okay, you’re in the right zone.
Kelly: It’s got to be something like Zuckerberg. “You’re Zucked,” right?
Daniel: [laughs] Getting Zucked.
Hedvig: Is this something about labor unions?
Daniel: This time it’s not.
Ben: Is it about pretend white names?
Daniel: No, it’s not. Here’s the message from Kate S. “I’m listening to The Doomsday Podcast.” I hadn’t heard about that one. “And the host just said a particular river was Starbucked with flour mills.”
Kelly: Gross.
Ben: Oh, okay.
Daniel: I’d never heard that before but understood it immediately.
Kelly: Maybe they’re like all over. They’re on both sides of the river. Is that it?
Daniel: That’s right. They’re all over the place. “I’ve never heard that before, but I understood it immediately. And now, I want to shoehorn it into conversation at least once today.” No?
Hedvig: No.
Kelly: That is not the same as Zucked, you guys.
Hedvig: Wait, that took a long time for me.
Daniel: Oh, okay.
Ben: The inevitable Hedvig penny drop has occurred.
Daniel: The place was Starbucked with dirty socks. No? Yeah? Okay.
Hedvig: Right. It comes from the metaphor that in United States on a lot of intersections, there’ll be a Starbuck and a Starbuck across from the Starbuck and they will just be everywhere. That’s what it’s referring to.
Ben: Yes.
Daniel: But not in Western Australia.
Ben: Not in Australia. Full stop.
Hedvig: We only have one Starbucks in Leipzig.
Kelly: Cool.
Daniel: Yeah. Okay, let’s go on. ‘Quadball’. This is a new name of a certain sport, but what’s the sport?
Hedvig: AFL?
Ben: No. Oh, maybe because they have such massive quads?
Kelly: [laughs]
Hedvig: Is it AFL? Australian Footie League, whatever?
Daniel: No, nobody is proposing renaming AFL to Quadball.
Ben: Oh, this is not like a funny “This is what thirsty women are calling the AFL now.” People are genuinely proposing this name for a sport.
Daniel: An entire sport is abandoning its old name and referring to Quadball instead.
Kelly: Ooh, is it bocce ball?
Daniel: Nope.
Hedvig: Is it…? Wait, wait, wait, wait, what a quad is like…
Ben: Four.
Daniel: I do not fully understand the etymology because I’m not immersed in the zone, but I believe it refers to four.
Kelly: Is it pickleball?
Daniel: No.
Ben: I was going to guess pickleball as well, Kelly, because I know it’s like the fastest growing sport in America at the moment.
Daniel: Also begins with Q, the old name also begins with Q.
Kelly: Oh, okay. Not that one.
Hedvig: Well, it can’t be Quidditch.
Kelly: Hold on, it could be Quidditch. You don’t know.
Hedvig: Is it Quidditch because of everyone hitting JK?
Daniel: It is Quidditch.
Ben: Oh.
Hedvig: Oh.
Kelly: Because of JK. Really?
Daniel: That is correct. The story by Theo Farrant on euronews.com, “Quidditch changed its name to Quadball after,” I love the after, “JK Rowling’s alleged anti-trans comments.”
Hedvig: Alleged. [laughs]
Ben: Yeah, so alleged.
Kelly: This is accretion. That’s what that it is.
Daniel: There are two reasons. Number one, the name ‘Quidditch’ is just trademarked by Warner, so they can’t really get sponsorship opportunities. But the second one they have cited is Rowling’s anti-trans positions as a reason for the change. So, the International Quidditch Association will probably become the International Quadball Association. Apparently, people like the sport. There you go.
Ben: I find that very hard to believe.
Kelly: They’ve been playing it since the beginning.
Hedvig: Yeah. I’ve seen videos of people playing it. [crosstalk] Yeah, if anyone hasn’t watched, it’s really fun. So, they have to run around with a broom between their legs, which one is improvement on any sport. If we can make people run with things between their legs in any other sport, that would make me happier. I will start watching football.
Kelly: I wish water polo was like that.
[laughter]
Ben: I was wondering, Hedvig, are you aware that horse-based sports exist? Because if not, your world is about to just get thoroughly robbed.
Hedvig: But horse-based sports are only available to rich people.
Ben: Yeah, fair enough.
Hedvig: A broom or a stick is available to most people.
Daniel: I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we add brooms to other sports and we can stick a Q on front of them. You could have like Quennis.
Hedvig: Qricket.
Daniel: You’ve got to have a racket. You could have Qricket. You could have Qiniature golf.
Ben: [laughs]
Hedvig: I know Daniel is really trying to keep us on Q here, but I have a number of sports that I think could do with various kinds of improvements. Do you want to hear?
Daniel: Please.
Hedvig: Okay, so for football, like European soccer football, I think, A, one or all of these things. Bigger goals, fewer people, more balls.
Kelly: Oh, more balls.
[laughter]
Daniel: Yes, okay.
Ben: What? What? Surely, the person to pitch ratio for soccer is already super low.
Kelly: I love the more balls idea.
Daniel: More goals all around the field.
Hedvig: There needs to be more things happening. Side goals. Okay, here we go. We’re on the same page. Yes. Whenever I mentioned this to my very British husband, he just tells me I’m too American.
Ben: Hedders, you’ve gone the wrong way with the number of players. Surely, like AFL style, make every in interaction this weird mishmash struggle, cuddle time.
Kelly: Right. Smaller, more intense.
Daniel: No, I’ve got it. You have two games playing on the same pitch at the same time.
Ben: Oh, that’s fun.
Kelly: Like they do for little kids.
Daniel: Anybody gets a ball into any goal, it scores for that team.
Hedvig: Yeah. Whenever I’ve mentioned this to my very British husband, he’s like, “Oh, you just want there to be like 10 goals a minute.” And I’m like, “No, it doesn’t have to be 10 goals a minute. It just doesn’t have to be like one goal in 90 minutes.”
Ben: There’s middle ground here.
Hedvig: There’s something in between those. There can’t be zero goals and then I have to watch this weird thing where you just line up and shoot balls. That’s not football. Penalties is not football.
Kelly: There are some great soccer games where it’s zero to one and some really horrible soccer games where it’s zero to one. [chuckles]
Hedvig: Yeah, I believe it.
Daniel: Last one, ‘Burp Tax’. This one came up last week.
Kelly: Burp tax.
Daniel: Burp tax as in belch.
Hedvig: Oh, yeah. Livestock.
Daniel: Yes. Correct. This is an article from Al Jazeera. New Zealand proposes cow, sheep burp tax-
Hedvig: For methane.
Daniel: -to curb emissions. Yes, that’s right. Livestock are responsible for approximately 15% of global greenhouse gases, and cows are the number one culprits. So, New Zealand, they proposed taxing the greenhouse gases the farm animals emit from their burps and from their wees because lots of nitrous oxide comes from cow urine. It’s not a popular idea, but it could be a curb on the methane and the nitrous oxide that gets emitted because it’s a lot.
Hedvig: Before someone says like poor cow farmers in New Zealand, first of all, they’re probably already fucked over by the agricultural system in general. But also, you could produce something else than beef.
Daniel: We just need to pay the real cost of meat.
Ben: Yeah, that’s my take on all of these sorts of things, is a carbon real price for things isn’t a bad… if it means meat is a lot more expensive, okay, maybe the world can eat a bit less meat, I’m thinking.
Hedvig: I remember a couple years ago in Australia, there was this big hubbub because there was going to be like a tax cut on peas, pea farming. A bunch of cattle farmers were upset because they’re like, “Oh, why do the pea farmers get more money than us?” And it’s like because their farms aren’t…
Kelly: Farming peas?
Hedvig: “They’re farming peas and they’re better. And you’re farming…”
Daniel: They’re farming peas and the pea protein is going to go a lot of it, into fake meat, which is what some of the veggie burgers are made up.
Ben: I also wonder if that was somehow to do with nitrogen fixing into the soil or something like that.
Daniel: Ah.
Hedvig: Maybe, but also there are pea farmers in Australia. They also exist.
Ben: And not an insubstantial number of them, certainly if you extend it out to all like pulses and legumes.
Hedvig: Yeah.
Daniel: Yep.
Hedvig: Okay, so burp tax from Al Jazeera.
Daniel: Gender Anarchy, Starbucked, Quadball, and Burp Tax are Words of the Week. Quick one from Keith. “Hello, Daniel, Hedvig, and Ben. A new phrase popping up from some cable news and talk show hosts. At the end of the interview where the host usually says, ‘Thank you for coming,’ or some such, I’m beginning to hear, ‘I appreciate you,’ instead. Not widely spread, but the hosts who use it do so fairly consistently. I’ve heard it so far only from African American hosts. So, I’m guessing that it’s more commonly used in African American English, but perhaps is a regional thing instead. I’ll be watching to see if it spreads over the next few months or years. As always, thanks to you and your team for your fine work. Because Language is a terrific show. And new episodes always get put at the very top of my increasingly along ‘listen to this’ list. From Keith.”
Ben: Aw, thanks, Keith.
Daniel: Thanks, Keith. Any intuitions here?
Kelly: I recently saw something on Black Twitter that said that a woman said she saw a white news anchor saying, “I appreciate you,” and was like, “I guess I’m not going to be appreciating people no more.”
[laughter]
Kelly: Now that white people are using it, they’re like, “Well, this is dead. We need something else.” Appreciate has been part of the African American lexicon for a long, long time. But I will say it’s perhaps regionalized. I mean, most usages are.
Daniel: That’s interesting that that was salient enough that language user identified it as, “Yeah, that’s a black thing.
Ben: So, I would imagine that it maybe got propelled into the whitosphere by Ted Lasso.
Kelly: Oh.
Ben: Because that’s his catchphrase. If you’re not watching Ted Lasso, one of his go-to lines throughout the show is like, “I appreciate you.” That’s how he often finishes a conversation with someone or something like that, because that whole show is like therapy, boy, good times. I think that’s where perhaps the white masses might have had this come more fully into there. Because as with all things, when a white face says it, it’s like way better. I really worry that no one could see my [crosstalk] [chuckles] facial expression. I need everyone to understand that I’m making fun of the whites right now.
Hedvig: After we finish recording this show, Daniel will often say off air, I think, “I really appreciate you, and I appreciate you coming and doing the show.”
Daniel: Have I said that?
Hedvig: Yeah, you say that a lot.
Daniel: I say that to you. I really appreciate you being on this. Yeah, I say that to you a lot.
Hedvig: But you don’t say, “Appreciate you.” You say, “I appreciate you coming. I appreciate you making time.” And I always thought it was part of the same kind of language as, “Your feelings are valid. I understand you feel upset,” this gentle parenting.
Ben: Therapy good time boy.
Daniel: No, it’s all real. I’m really, really grateful the two you guys doing this because it’s fun.
Hedvig: No but vocalizing that…
Ben: Just to be clear, gentle parenting can be real.
Kelly: And as a thing, it’s such a normal phrase. I think that we can’t always say that some of those usages come from a particular. It’s like this convergent evolution thing or something like that almost.
Daniel: Everything’s happening at once.
Ben: [crosstalk]
Hedvig: Maybe saying it at the end of conversations and just saying “I appreciate you,” maybe is more common in black communities, or has been?
Kelly: Or rural communities in general or working-class communities in general because you get… I grew up in the American South, so these things, for me personally, are very overlapped.
Hedvig: Right.
Daniel: Mm-hmm. All right. Thank you for that insight. Big thank yous to our guests for this episode. Dr. Kelly Wright. Kelly, thanks for coming on. How can people find out what you’re doing?
Kelly: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I am on Twitter @raciolinguistic, with a C at the end, and then I’m sure you all can link to my website. I am at Virginia Tech, just kellywright@vt.edu, if you want to get me.
Hedvig: Cool.
Daniel: Thanks to everybody who gave us ideas for the show. Thanks to Dustin of Sandman Stories. Good podcast. He recommends us to just about everyone in the Twittersphere.
Kelly: Oh, hi, Dustin.
Daniel: Hi, Dustin. Dustin loves you, he loves us too. We like him a lot. The team at SpeechDocs who transcribe everything that we say, they’re our buddies as well.
Ben: Yeah, sorry again, everyone. Just sorry, just to all of SpeechDocs on behalf of me and my voice.
Daniel: Thanks to our sponsors, the Oxford English Dictionary. And most of all, thanks to our patrons who give us so much support, make it possible to keep the show going. Y’all are great.
Hedvig: And if you like what you just heard, you can do a number of things to support this show. And I know all podcasters say this at the end of their show. Some of them are easy to do, some of them are hardest to do, but you should do at least one easy thing. And one of the easy things you can do is follow us on all the social meeds. We are @becauselangpod everywhere, except Spotify. We are still on Twitter. We’ll see.
[chuckles]
Ben: Yeah.
Hedvig: We’ll see. We’ll all see what happens next. We are also on Mastodon. We have been for ages. We don’t use it very much but we are actually also on there.
Daniel: I’m looking at it.
Ben: That might be changing soon.
Hedvig: Yeah. Also, I’ve seen people being like, “Hey, MySpace was not too bad.” So, if we don’t have a MySpace, maybe we should get a MySpace again?
Daniel: We’re not getting on MySpace.
Hedvig: You can also leave us a message by going to our website, becauselanguage.com, and leave a message with SpeakPipe. That’d be great. Then, we can hear your sweet voices and we can play them in the show. You can also send us an old-fashioned email at hello@becauselanguage.com. You can tell a friend about us and you can leave a review. I regularly check on the reviews on Podchaser because it’s a non-Apple, non-Google, maybe sponsored by one of them, I don’t know, place. And I see some people but I don’t see ones since I mentioned a review last.
Daniel: Come on, folks. We need you.
Hedvig: If you [crosstalk], I’ll probably read you out.
Ben: And, of course, you can always become a patron. You’ll get the cool bonus episodes when they first come out before we release them to the general public. You can hang out with us on Discord which, just low-key, is actually probably the greatest benefit of becoming a patron because it’s a really wonderful community of delightful nerds and lots and lots of cat photos. You’ll be making it possible for us to transcribe all of our shows, and I will continue to make some poor SpeechDocs person’s life not great, and so you can pay for that.
I would like just to shout out to some of our patrons right now. And they are Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Udo, Jack, PharaohKatt, Lord Mortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy B, James S, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Ayesha, Moe, Steele, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, still my favorite, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity S, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris W, Felicity G. And Kate B, we say this every week but she really did just obliterate… We’re talking orbital bombardment of the one-time donation button at becauselanguage.com. Last week, Daniel said she hit it so hard that it went away. But that was a fucking lie. It’s still there. And you can definitely still give…[crosstalk]
Daniel: It’s still there?
Ben: It’s still there.
Daniel: What?
Ben: You can give us money that way. And our newest patrons, at the Friend level, Janaka and Justine. And then, Brian K bumped his pledge, more than doubling it from its former total. Thanks, Brian, you’re a real cool guy. And thanks to all of our amazing patrons.
Daniel: Forgot to say James S also bumped his pledge. We’re getting some bumpers.
Ben: I thought you’re saying I forgot to say James, that sounds like a fucking [crosstalk] I said it real good.
Daniel: You did. Our theme music has been written to perform by Drew Krapljanov, a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
[beep]
Daniel: Hey, everybody, just a quick note. We’re running our Word of the Week of the Year competition, happens every year. We take all the Words of the Week that we have over the year, we let people vote on them on Twitter and on Facebook. Your likes are votes. Head on over to our accounts, we are @becauselangpod and you can vote and your favorite word might be the winner. We’ll have those results for a live patron episode in December.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]