How do we make the discipline of linguistics — and our world — a more just, diverse, and equitable place? Why does our personal history and personal perspective matter when doing science? How do we build community? And what happens if we do nothing?
This episode is really kind of a mini-conference. We found some new work from linguists we admire, so we put out the word to our patrons and piled into a room!
We’re hearing work from Dr Aris Clemons, Dr Caitlin Green, and Dr Rikker Dockum on this episode.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Aris Clemons: Scholarly & Creative Works
https://faculty.utk.edu/Aris.Clemons/publications
Aris Clemons , Anna Lawrence: Beyond position statements on race: Fostering an ethos of antiracist scholarship in linguistic research (Response to Charity Hudley et al.)
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/24/article/775380/pdf
The Terrible Sea Lion | Wondermark
http://wondermark.com/1k62/
What Is Solarpunk? A Guide to the Environmental Art Movement.
https://builtin.com/greentech/solarpunk
Statistical Rethinking: A Bayesian Course with Examples in R and Stan | Richard McElreath
https://xcelab.net/rm/statistical-rethinking/
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard P. Feynman
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/richard_p_feynman_137642
Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics | Basic Books
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/r-marie-griffith/moral-combat/9780465094769/
Rikker Dockum, Caitlin Green: Toward a Big Tent Linguistics: Inclusion and the Myth of the Lone Genius
https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/007292
also here:
https://psyarxiv.com/n3hyg/
Dockum and Green (2022) NWAV panel – Google Slides
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pa073r_3Tbsdmt8hZJBAtsBLIXdLr0S9KGNTAjNqhSg/edit#slide=id.g15e4dcd2686_0_154
Haugen, Margaris, and Calvo: Faculty placements into Linguistics PhD programs across the US and Canada: Market share and gender distribution
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/abstract/faculty-placements-linguistics-phd-programs-across-us-and-canada-market-share-and-gender
CITE BLACK WOMEN
https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/
Ryan Cecil Jobson: The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.13398
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – 2012-03-21
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2012-03-21
Vita Peacock: Academic precarity as hierarchical dependence in the Max Planck Society
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.14318/hau6.1.006
Charity Hudley, Mallionson and Bucholtz Toward racial justice in linguistics: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/24/article/775377
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to this very special episode of Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley. Let’s meet the team. He’s been with me on this linguistic journey for over a decade despite the fact that he’s not a linguist. He’s kind of the Sancho Panza to my Don Quixote. It’s Ben Ainslie.
HEDVIG: [CHUCKLES]
BEN: I really do wish I was a better-read and more erudite gentleman so I knew exactly how cutting that insult was. [CHUCKLES] Instead, I’m just like, “I’m sure he’s the wacky sidekick. All right!”
DANIEL: Okay, okay, Sancho Panza is his sidekick, but he’s kind of the smarter one, and he doesn’t realise that Don Quixote is actually in a fantasy world.
BEN: Ohhhh, okay. I’m your enabler.
HEDVIG: But how smart is he?
DANIEL: That’s it. That’s it.
BEN: I like that. “Yeah, man, linguistic away, you go for it.” And then, I’m just like…
DANIEL: “I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t see any of this.” She’s also the Don Quixote somehow, but she’s smarter and knows more, which isn’t very Quixote-ish. But anyway, it’s Hedvig Skirgård.
BEN: Maybe you’re the windmill.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I want to carve out an identity on this program that is to be, like, unnecessarily contrarian and chaos, and I feel like whenever you say that I’m very smart, that sort of… you’re cramping my style.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Hedvig wants to be punk. And, man, punk is not smart, Daniel. Stop it!
HEDVIG: [EXCITEDLY] Yeah!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I say that Ben’s smart as well. Have I told you about how smart Ben is lately?
BEN: Oh. Don’t. Just… That’s not fair.
DANIEL: He always…
BEN: Don’t. No. Hang on. Just because she’s asked you to not say it, doesn’t mean you got to start heaping just… Ugh. No. Um-hmm.
DANIEL: Compliments are his kryptonite.
HEDVIG: Anyway, I love you guys, but we are not alone here, and listeners to the show will not realise that there are a lot of other people [CHUCKLES] looking at our little screens when we’re talking silly. We’re not alone.
DANIEL: That’s right, because our episode today is a different sort of episode. Usually, what we do is we find out about cool work or interesting research, and we do interviews. But for this episode, we found out about some great work by people we really like and admire. And so, we’ve gotten them together along with our patrons, our listeners, and it’s kind of like a mini conference where our guests will tell us about their recent work. I’m really excited. Maybe if this works, we can do it more. I don’t know. We’re trying it out. So, let’s take a moment and introduce our special guests. Our first guest is an Assistant Professor of Hispanic Linguistics in the Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She is a scholar of raciolinguistics, sort of like how race and language and power and politics intersect, with a focus on social justice. It’s Dr Aris Clemons. Aris, thanks for coming on.
ARIS: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
BEN: I’m clapping on behalf of everyone.
DANIEL: Yay. It is a pleasure to meet you finally. Let’s see, tell us about the areas of linguistics that you’re working in just by way of introduction. How did you get to this point?
ARIS: Yeah. So for many, this might seem like a pretty easy question, but for me, it is a wild ride. [LAUGHTER] So, I guess I will start by saying that I like to tell people that I was, like a born linguist. I loved languages. I was really into it. But I didn’t realize that I was a born linguist until I was sitting in a introduction to sociolinguistics class in the education department during my PhD. And I was reading a book, and I said, “I think this is citing my aunt. Wait a minute, that’s my grandmother!” And then, I realized that I was raised by this group of women who were instrumental in fighting for the recognition of African American Vernacular English…
BEN: What!
ARIS: …as a valid and rule-based language. And they would be some of the people that would fight for Ebonics in school context in the Oakland Ebonics debates of the 1990s. And so, I was like, “Huh! That makes sense.” I thought I just was a language nerd and was really into tree-ifying sentences during my master’s program. And so, that alongside with being trained as an educator and working as a teacher from when I was a child, I really knew that I was going to be a teacher, and seeing the ideologies that people had behind the language that my students were producing, I kind of smashed those things together and thought to myself, “What does it look like when we see how language is implicated, is involved in the construction of social categories as well as our understandings of the world around me?” And I realized that I couldn’t do that just from one disciplinary standpoint.
So, though I call myself a linguist, I’m also a social anthropologist, an education scholar, a scholar of ethnic and race studies. And I do all of that through a kind of frame of Black, feminist, and liberatory studies, right? And so, I’ll talk about a little bit how that frame really is what I put into this chapter that we’re going to talk about today of apolitical linguistics doesn’t exist, and it shouldn’t.
DANIEL: Awesome. Can’t wait to hear it. Thank you. Okay, moving on. She’s a linguist studying power and bias, but she’s also been tireless in her efforts to promote decency and respect for all our LGBTQ+ friends. She’s like the fourth person that Storben Plunker blocked. She’s always smashing away, [BEN LAUGHS] always there with the facts. She’s definitely got time for your bullshit. It’s Dr Caitlin Green. Hey, Caitlin. Nice to have you back on the show.
CAITLIN: Hi. It’s so great to be back.
DANIEL: No, but seriously, Twitter right now is like: imagine I’m walking around outside, and I see what looks like a finger bone sticking up out of the ground, and I think, “Oh, my god, what is this? Is this something terrible? Do I need to know about this? How deep does it go?” And I look over, and there’s Caitlin, and she’s wearing a miner’s helmet with a light on it, and she’s gesturing to a hole in the ground saying, “Come on!”
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: “Oh, look what I found. It’s really gross.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s like kids that pick up bugs. Except for you, it’s like opinions.
BEN: It’s like a spelunking enthusiast. “Check out this cave!”
CAITLIN: I was that kid with the bugs. So, maybe that explains what’s going on now. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: What is going on now? This is not what we were going to talk about, but this is one way that I know you, so I’ve got to ask. I’ve never seen this kind of backlash to Pride before.
CAITLIN: Yeah, I think we’re right at the apex — or the nadir, depending on how you feel about it, right? — of the backlash against the liberation of a lot of different groups that people have been fighting for, that… There are people who are not okay with the addition or the protection of rights for people of color, for black people, especially in America, which is where I’m working, LGBTQ people. It is all this kind of widening and contracting. So right now, they’re trying to hold on as tight as possible. It is not a coincidence that it’s happening at the same time as an undermining of the democratic process. This is all an attempt to regain and restrengthen control over people.
HEDVIG: Wait. As the token European on the show, I actually don’t know what you’re talking about. I know that Uganda just did really harsh punishments for being homosexual, including, I think, death punishment, capital punishment, possibly, but I don’t know what you’re talking about now, you, Daniel and Caitlin, actually, because I’ve been actually trying to not follow US news as much as…
CAITLIN: I’m so sorry. [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: No, it’s okay.
BEN: No no no, we congratulate people who manage to not have to follow American news. Yay for you!
CAITLIN: But I’m about to ruin that for you, and I’m really sorry about that.
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: So here in the United States, we’re seeing an onslaught of anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ and anti-Black laws happening at the same time. So, there’s restrictions on voting that people are trying to pass, essentially things like citizenship tests, which should be in the Constitution. I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to be doing that. Raising the age of voting, reducing voting locations. We’ve got censorship of materials in books and libraries. People are…
HEDVIG: Oh, I have heard about that one.
CAITLIN: …removing teachers and school board and school leadership who teach antiracism or who teach about sex ed or who teach about LGBTQ issues in the classroom and laws that are preventing people from accessing trans healthcare. It’s all happening right now.
HEDVIG: I’m so sorry.
ARIS: I’ll add to that. They’re not trying to be passed. They’ve been passed. As a person who’s doing work right now, doing discourse analysis of the legislation that have been passed, and living in a state where this legislation has been passed, they’ve already been passed. We’re dealing with the consequences of it right now.
CAITLIN: Yeah, we’ve got ones up on the board. We’ve got ones that are already passed.
DANIEL: Hmm. Okay. Well, on a lighter note, you also win the award for worst time zone.
CAITLIN: Yeah. Hello from 6 o’clock in the morning. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: West US always sucks. Thank you.
BEN: Oh, that’s a mean bush, I’m sorry.
DANIEL: Okay, I got one more intro here. He teaches linguistics at Swarthmore College in the USA. He does phonology, tone, Thai languages, and he has the distinction of having the most googleable name in linguistics. You always know it’s him. By the way, least googleable name in linguistics? Any guesses?
BEN: Ben Ainslie.
DANIEL: No.
BEN: What?
DANIEL: Nobody’s saying. David Bowie. All right. Yeah, it has to be. Hi, David. It’s Dr Rikker Dockum. Great to see you again, Rikker.
RIKKER: Hey, thanks for having me back. Good to be here again. Not in quite as terrible of a time zone. I’m on the East Coast.
DANIEL: What’s going on for you during these times? What you’ve been doing lately besides the…?
RIKKER: Well, we are gearing up for summer research mode, so grades are submitted and meeting with students, and so I’ve got some really interesting projects. We’re doing a sort of historical study of hiring in linguistics, looking at not just who has the jobs now, but how has those things changed over time? Basically, what schools do they come from, time to degree, time to advancement, lots of things the field has never looked at in a serious way. So, I have three undergrads working full time on that this summer, gathering data.
And then, on the sort of Southeast Asian linguistics side that I also spend a lot of time on, we are studying the history of the changes to the Thai pronoun system. Over the past 500 years, it went from a very sort of almost European-looking paradigm, sort of boring and normal in that way, but to a much more interesting system where it’s almost like an open class of words. You can have all kinds of different sort of social factors encoded in the pronoun system, which makes it really difficult when there are 17 ways to say “I.”
DANIEL: Hmm. We’re talking about a work that you and Caitlin have collaborated on. How did you both manage to get together to work on this?
RIKKER: Well, I guess I shouldn’t say the name of the person who brought us together, but he’s a well-known blocker on Twitter.
[LAUGHTER]
RIKKER: No, I think Caitlin can chime in. We are sort of part of a larger group of people who came together in the wake of things in 2020 and just looking at the field in a way that many of us hadn’t had to. And so, we started saying that there’s a lot that needs to be said and a lot that needs to be examined. And so, we have… I’m not sure exactly what this is. Maybe our third or so. There’s a few different papers we’ve worked on together at this point.
CAITLIN: Yeah, that’s exactly it. It was kind of like a working group/support group where we were kind of talking through all the things that were happening. I cannot overstate the degree to which I was minding my own business when the Steven Pinker thing really came out. Like, I had a new baby, I was, like, living in a new place. And then I just absolutely hated what I was seeing and the discourses that were coming out to cast these people who just wanted justice as monsters and demons and Maoists, I think, also. And so, I started talking about it in public. And people reached out to me, including Rikker, and we became really good friends.
DANIEL: That’s cool. Well, it’s great to have all of you here. The theme for this episode is Big Tent, and we’re asking questions like — not limited to — how do we challenge some of the discourse that we’re seeing rise up? How are we challenging some of the bad ideas that are preventing our discipline and our world from being more just, diverse, and inclusive? We’d like this to be scholarly and conferencey, but we also want to have a bit of fun and be a little loose. So, we’re just going to see how that goes.
Before we get to that, just like to say thank you to everyone who was with us for this episode. As patrons, you help us to make episodes where we can look at news and research and issues in linguistics, have some fun playing with words, talk about language which, Ben and Hedvig, is something that we like doing, yes?
BEN: Only when I win, obviously. That’s when I like doing it, is when I win.
HEDVIG: Ben, you lost last episode, right? He did, didn’t he?
DANIEL: By a throw of the dice, yes.
BEN: Uh-huh. Yep.
HEDVIG: So, we had a dice standing in for you, and you lost.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Random number generator Ben Ainslie.
BEN: As an avid board gamer, I will begrudgingly accept fate’s verdict of me.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Now, all of this takes work and a bit of money. Fortunately, we have patrons who support the show. Every month, they give us a donation to keep the show going. Unfortunately, every month we also lose a few patrons as well. And sometimes, that’s because people only intended to contribute for a limited time, and that’s fine. Sometimes, people’s financial situation changes, which is unfortunate, but it does happen. And sometimes, people change their interests and they just get into different things, which is great too. But it does mean that we need to hold on to as many patrons as we can and attract new ones when possible.
So, if you are not a patron, we need you. Come and join us. For as little as a buck a month, you get live episodes like this one, access to our Discord server, which is really, really fun. I’ve noticed you two creeping in every once in a while. Actually, I’ve noticed a few of our guests creeping in as well.
CAITLIN: I don’t know what you mean by that.
DANIEL: Well, not creeping, but you know. So, depending on your level, there are mailouts, shoutouts, bonus episodes, and of course, our Discord. So, come join us. We are patreon.com/becauselangpod. All right. It’s time for our first presentation. We’d like to hear from Aris Clemons. You’ve got a chapter in publication and the title — I’m going to read it — “A-political linguistics doesn’t exist, and it shouldn’t: Developing a Black feminist praxis toward political transparency.” That’s been your recent work, but let’s hear from you, Aris, and what you’ve got to share with us.
ARIS: I wanted to take a moment to share how all of us, Rikker, Caitlin, and I, kind of got together, and it was through this tireless work that has been going on here in the United States and with our linguistics organization. So a few folks got together in linguistics organizations, and they were like: Actually, we need to take a vocal stance against a lot of these kinds of the legislations that we’re talking about, just like racist and colonial histories of linguistics and how that has been upheld by our scholarly organization, education in general, academic institutions, these kinds of things. And so, they kind of put out this call to kind of urge scholars of language to actually take a stance against the racist histories of the field, and then they asked people to respond to that call. And so, several of us, including myself, we got together and we wrote our own responses, and we focused on the things that we thought were pretty important.
And so, myself, with one of my other colleagues, put out a piece called Beyond Position Statements, because I don’t know if this was happening in other places, but in 2020 in the United States, people were like: ~Oh, no, racism. We should make a statement about it.~ [CHUCKLES] And then, they just basically wrote a Dear John letter to racism and were like: “I’m good! I’m not a racist!” And so, we were like: Listen, you got to do more than just put out a statement that says that you’re against it. There’s got to be some actionable steps that help us dismantle the systems of racism that cause harm to those who are marginalized or who are othered by these systems, these larger systems of racism.
And so, we put out a piece, several other people. It ended up being a special issue in language, which is like our premier journal of linguistics.
And then, we got some backlash from some of the people, maybe, that Caitlin and Rikker talk about, but also others who are more obscure and who don’t put themselves out there. And they called our work, in the strangest turn of events, they were like, “Actually, you guys are racist.” And I was like, “Oh, this is the wonderful kind of dog whistling that I like to engage in in my daily life.” And so, we were like, “You know, we actually have to take seriously the ways that our work is helping people understand social formations.” The ways that linguistics in general helps people understand the world around them.
And so that made me ask two pretty base questions that helped me form the chapter, the article that we’re talking about, the a-political article. So, the first question I asked was, does linguistics exist solely as this kind of academic endeavor where we get to, say, do the fun things that I love to do, again, treefying sentences, looking at phonological rules, all of those kinds of things, and being generally nerdy about language? It is my happy place, let’s be honest.
But I was like, you know: is it just this academic endeavor that I’ve learned actually does turn away a lot of scholars? Even those of us who are linguists were like, “That first linguistics class was rough. It felt like a chemistry class. I love language, I don’t know how I got into this science situation.” And I decided to ask, can we actually use linguistics to push society towards a more equitable and socially just formation, right? And if we’re doing that, I wanted to know, what responsibility do we as linguists, or as language scholars, have to our own language communities, to the communities that we investigate, and to society at large.
I will say one of the things that didn’t end up in the paper is that I move through a lot of different social circles, right? I’m a professor, so I hang out with my professor friends. I’m a teacher, I hang out with my former students. I worked in schools in Brooklyn, New York, and I hang out with their kids. And I hang out with my family a lot. And my family has a wide range from high school education through doctoral degree education. And I was realizing that a lot of people had these, like, negative feelings about their own language. Right? They were like… I heard my cousin say one time, “Oh, no, no. Black people don’t speak right. We speak wrong. We speak street language.” And I was like, “Oh, my little linguistic soul, you’re crushing my heart!” [CHUCKLES]
BEN: “My baby. My baby, come here, please. Stop it. Stop it. Stop saying these evil words!”
ARIS: I was like, okay. So, two things. One, linguists, we’re just talking to each other, so nobody else is getting the literal only thing that we agree on as linguist is that all languages are language. Right?
HEDVIG: Yeah, I agree so much.
ARIS: And they all, like, function.
HEDVIG: Why are we failing at saying this to anyone else? Sorry.
ARIS: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Well, gee-willikers, we’re giving it a red hot go on this show.
ARIS: Yeah, that’s the whole thing. We’re like, “Oh, yes.” Linguists will be like, “No, that’s not the way this is. Let’s talk about a whole new theory for understanding the deep structure of TO BE”. But then, we all agree on the fact that language is used for communication. And if it’s used for communication, then it’s valid. Right? That is not something that the general populace understands or agrees with or has access to. And I’m like, “Well, linguist, we failed at a basic mission.” In doing that though, we have to actually make a stance for why we’re talking about these things and why they become important to the people around us. Right?
And so, the kind of psychological damage that I saw as a teacher to students who came from speaking backgrounds who were stigmatized or marginalized under larger systems, made me really say: You know what? It’s not only that we have to say all languages functions. We have to actually take action to give back pride, to give back understandings, to talk about how language actually functions so that people can understand that these are systems that are created politically. These are systems that are created socially, and it actually doesn’t have to do with the structure of your language or how you’re producing your language.
Also, I got sick of reading science that I was like, “Oh, this is just like your base understanding of something, as if science can be objective? We get to ask the questions, so nothing can be objective. And I don’t want to read your science if you don’t tell me where you’re coming from and why you’re doing your science.” And so that is what the article is about.
DANIEL: And I guess as scientists, we make hypotheses and we do all that stuff that we talk about with the scientific method. But the range of hypotheses, the range of ideas we can have are really conditioned by what we already kind of accept and what we’re geared towards. So, I really do see science as — this is not new — but as a social activity.
BEN: I will put my hand up and say: yeah, this is the first time I’ve ever… because I don’t walk in scientific circles, not at a tertiary or a quaternary level or anything like that. This is the first time I’ve heard anyone express the fact that the scientific method is inherently biased because of the fact that every single person who practices it can only frame their questions via their own perceptive reality. And as soon as it’s said out loud, it’s like, “Oh, yeah, duh, of course.” Right? But unless a very smart person says that, you absolutely… because it’s billed to the world as, like, the gold standard of rational inquiry. Right? It rises above all of that messy humanness because it’s the scientific method. But it’s clearly not! Obviously, it’s not!
HEDVIG: Yeah. And a lot of that comes from the idea that the philosophy of science is mainly just the same as it is like in physics. So like, I think especially Americans, when they think science, they think like Carl Sagan and that kind of thinking. And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do science. But like I was saying, you should make clear what ground you’re standing on and why you think those questions are interesting, why you’re asking them and from what angle.
ARIS: And the great thing about it is that there’s a lot of great people that are doing work to show that even natural and physical sciences can be done from biased perspective because, again, that base understanding that the questions that we ask are the things that guide the science. Right? And that we are only able to formulate questions from our own experiences, from our own embodied experiences, from what we’ve read. So, there’s this kind of myth that the question itself just materializes out of need or out of physical need, or these needs in society. When actually, the questions themselves are things that we get to decide.
And so, I spend a lot of time in my work talking about what actions we can take to ensure that the questions that we’re asking are actually representative of what people want to know, what people need to know around us, right? Especially coming from those populations who have traditionally been studied and been talked about without actually being the people who are doing the studying and doing the work, right? And so, what does it look like to not study someone? What does it look like to study yourself? What does it look like? How come… what traditions have made us say, “Actually, it’s not very scientific or theoretical to study yourself. You have to have an observer’s position.” So, I talk a lot about the observers and the observer’s paradox, and I talk a lot about the ways that we can integrate people into our own research methodologies in our conversations. [PAUSE] Yeah, sealion.
[CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Someone has made a reference to… Oh, Ariaflame has made a reference to sealioning, which is that cartoon, it’s a Wondermark cartoon. Maybe it’s not relevant here, but we are talking about how a lot of questioning that happens is actually insincere questioning. It pretends to be questioning but it’s actually very pointed toward a certain view.
BEN: So, I’ve been reading…
HEDVIG: I can really recommend…
RIKKER: Or it’s upholding…
HEDVIG: Oh.
BEN: I yield.
CAITLIN: [LAUGHS]
RIKKER: I was just going to say, or it’s upholding, like, the basically standard view of what is science, who gets to do science, and who doesn’t. And so, it’s all very sort of in defense of objectivity, when it’s not actually objective which questions get to get asked.
CAITLIN: We have a bias towards the status quo. And so, things that are defending the structures that already exist — even though those structures might not be justified by any real-world factors — if they already exist, we tend to see that as the neutral position. And so, it makes us feel like what we’re looking at is objectivity when what we’re actually looking at is a hegemonic ideology. And I always make my students giggle because I take cheap shots. But I will say ideologies are like assholes. Everybody’s got one. And if you want to pretend that you don’t have one, then you’re basically just like deciding to pretend that. Right? It’s not real. You’re not actually in a better position to describe reality. You’re actually in a worse position because you’re not thinking about what is biasing your judgments.
BEN: Also, I feel like I’ve just got to just take that metaphor to the final completion. You’re also full of shit.
CAITLIN: That’s right, yeah.
[LAUGHTER]
ARIS: And I have to say, Caitlin, I use that moment in my class to do some work of really explaining what cognitive dissonance is. Right? [CHUCKLES] This is a thing that happens when we pretend that we don’t have assholes. [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Right. And when you really go into the bathroom with the hand mirror and try to figure it out, you’re not going to have an easy time. You’re going to feel kind of awful.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: But you have to do it. [LAUGHS]
BEN: I’ve been — before we move on or maybe just as a button to that sort of set of thoughts — I’ve been recently sort of yummying down on a new, I guess you’d call it a genre, lit genre of solarpunk. Has anyone come across this recently? So, there’s cyberpunk, there’s biopunk, there’s steampunk, blah, blah, blah. Solarpunk is kind of a… Hedvig said this before, and I really agree with the statement. In the world of today, one of the most punk things you can be is hopeful. Or believe in a true path to a better future. And so solarpunk is kind of that. It’s these sorts of future visions where we go, “Hey, what if we don’t fuck everything up?” And I can just imagine in some sort of solarpunk, I don’t know, video game or short story or whatever, a whole bunch of scientists sitting around just in a circle on, I don’t know, pillows or something, and just all discussing their own locus of perception. Just openly sharing, “So this is my background, this is how I suspect that some of my attitudes and beliefs might swing in certain directions. But I’m super open to feedback from all of you.” And it’s sort of an understood practice within hard scientific communities. The very first and most important step is this deep, inward journey to take a strong inventory of everything that you are before you start going, “Okay, what about out there?”
ARIS: Ben, did you read my paper?
BEN: No, I haven’t. Sorry. [LAUGHS]
ARIS: That’s basically what I’m calling for! [LAUGHTER] That is exactly… when I say, “A-political linguistics doesn’t exist, and it shouldn’t,” I’m saying that I am calling for what I’m calling, like political transparency, you have to say who you are. You have to say who you are, where you’re coming from, and how you came up with your questions, how you came up with how you were going to approach your questions, who you talked to, who you privileged. And when you decided who you were going to privilege, who did that potentially silence? And so, you really have to take an introspective look at who you are in order to present your science to me because, again, I’m no longer reading people’s sciences without knowing who they are because I’m not able to fully interpret them. I don’t have enough information to interpret the science if I don’t know where you’re coming from.
BEN: Damn. It’s a world I want to live in.
HEDVIG: It’s actually a good part of the scientific method itself. Like, that is how good science should be made. We should know what the assumptions are. I’ve been taking this class on Statistical Rethinking by Richard Mcelreath, and he talks about the necessity of, like: if you have priors about what you think your data is going to look like — this is another level of it. But, like — don’t assume that your data is like… you know something about your data, you should put that into your model explicitly and not pretend that you start from a uniform prior or something. Like, you know stuff, you have expectations, that is part of science. Make that explicit, be transparent.
CAITLIN: I have to say, this process of working on these papers and also being active on Twitter has shown me how many people have really brilliant insights on language and who have a lot to offer the study of language, who are excluded from the academy, who just don’t have the resources or the status to get involved in language research. And it’s really cool that as an academic outsider myself — like, I’m a PhD holder, but then I left to pursue other things — that people are co-authoring with me, and I would like to see that a lot more for people who have really interesting and unique perspectives to share.
And then, I also wanted to say that this positionality thing and talking about where you’re coming from is really important. And it needs to come with a historical understanding of the colonial history of the academy, because you’re not necessarily going to be able to point to what is biased about your perspective until you understand how it comes from a bad seed, that this culture that we’ve built over the last few hundred years has come from a privileging of a certain kind of person, a privileging of a certain kind of way of thinking, and a deep-seated, learned belief that there are people who don’t think as well and whose way of thinking is not as good as ours.
DANIEL: It seems to me like this is important for the sciences, but this kind of thinking is especially important for linguistics, language being a social activity. And so, we do need to consider not just the physical world and the outside world, but we need to consider the social world. And we are all a part of the social world. That’s going to require an evaluation of the language communities that we’ve come from and the practices there and the norms.
So, how is this being received? Is it working out? Are we doing a better job of building toward a community or are we getting pushback from linguists?
ARIS: Uh, [CHUCKLES] Rikker? [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Yeah, actually, Rikker does a good job kind of understanding the responses.
DANIEL: Okay, maybe we’ll save that for the presentation that you both are doing. But it sounds like…
ARIS: I mean, I can say that I have to couch these comments in the fact that I’m not only existing as a linguist or as an academic, I am existing as a Black woman in the United States. Right? And so, none of the responses that I receive can be disentangled from that reality of who I am. I was recently called a Black supremacist, which is just a fabulous word, in my opinion. But I’m received with the kind of wonder of building community of people who are like: Actually, we need to defend the rights of people who have been systematically targeted by these systems, as well as those who are staunchly opposed to any kind of disassembling of these structures. And so, you very quickly, when you do this work, realize who wants to uphold and maintain the status quo and who does not.
CAITLIN: Yeah, I think Rikker and I have been shielded a little bit by our whiteness from the most vitriolic kind of responses. And, yeah, we’ve had some pushback, but we’ve also had people say, like, “Wow, this is really interesting,” and that really is nice to hear. But I think people are not going to be coming at me, calling me racialized names, because that’s just not where they’re coming from when they look at me.
RIKKER: Yeah, I mean, in a lot of ways, we’re still bracing for what the impact will be and what some of the backlash might be when they’re published-published. So, both these chapters come from volumes that are in press, and we just recently decided to start putting preprint copies up because we’re sort of waiting. In some ways, there’s a strength in numbers of, “Okay, these are, like, published works from Oxford University Press with important academics as editors.” So, there’s an importance there that you throw stuff out there and people… anyway, you may not know how folks will react. But, yeah, I’m always trying to keep in mind how a lot of what I don’t face just in terms of gendered reactions to what it is like to be an academic at all and how I look more like what people think of when they think of professor or what ChatGPT might think of as professor. The sort of thing that is encoded in the culture rather than the reality of what we want the field to be like.
DANIEL: Now, Aris, I’m not sure what your roadmap is for this one. Do you want to take some questions? Are we ready for questions, or do you want to drive toward your conclusion? How do you want to take it?
ARIS: Either way is fine. I’m always up for questions. [LAUGHS] I think I’ve said a lot of my points. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Okay, let’s let our patrons drive. If you want to, you can unmute and ask some questions of Dr Clemons.
BEN: Who’s brave? Is it going to be… ? There must be some.
DANIEL: We’ll give it a moment so that people can get themselves together.
ARIS: And I can just add the reason why I’m doing this work is because a lot of people didn’t want to let me do the kind of empirical work that I wanted to do. They didn’t want to let me ask the questions that I wanted to ask. And so, I thought, “Okay, well, now I need to theorize how you guys are allowing and understanding what is a scientific question and what is not a scientific question.” And so, I do spend a good amount of my time thinking about the formation of race and ethnicity through language. I work on the concepts of Afro-Latinidad. And so, in the United States, this concept of who is Latino is often built through the erasures of Black and Indigenous populations who exist in Latin America. And so, I spend a lot of time working on that through these and saying, “These are actually valid linguistic questions.”
I will spend a lot of my time post theorizing what is science. I will spend a lot of my time making the case that the ways that we have defined ethnolects has heavily relied on linguistic form and features and grammars and should probably rely a little bit more on social processes and processes in general. And so that has allowed me to do comparison work between cross linguistic families. So, African-American Vernacular English and Dominican Spanish — both stigmatized varieties of language in their respective spaces. And so, I’m like, “Okay, wait, how are they both stigmatized? Are those processes the same? And how do people respond to those stigmatizations in ways that forms and creates new language?” So creates innovative patterns of language. And actually, those innovative patterns are very similar — huh! That actually gives us information about the social structures.
BEN: I do have a question. Oh, sorry. No, Hedvig, I yield.
HEDVIG: I did too.
BEN: Okay, you go fast. Yours is probably wayyy smarter.
HEDVIG: No, I was just going to ask: you said that there were questions you wanted to ask that you felt that people didn’t allow you to ask empirically. What were they?
BEN: [EXCITED] That was going to be my question!
HEDVIG: [POKES OUT TONGUE] Mm!
BEN: [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: Dibs.
BEN: Yeah, fair enough.
ARIS: Yeah. Some of my questions were just simple questions of, how are language teachers involved in the social formation, identity formation of students? And people are like, “That’s not linguistics.”
HEDVIG: I’m kind of at the point now when people say that something is not linguistics, I’m like, “Okay, and therefore I should not be doing it? I don’t care if that’s what you think anymore.”
[LAUGHTER]
ARIS: Also, when you are raised in the academic system of the United States, and you’re the age that I am, you get a lot of, “Well, no, race is not a biological construct. It’s a social construct.” And I was like, “Yeah, but how?” [LAUGHS] Right? And so, people were like, “That’s also not a linguistic question.” I was like, “Yeah, it is because there had to be a tool to make the social formation.” And usually, it’s linguistic. And so, there’s a simple…
HEDVIG: And isn’t…
ARIS: Yeah, go on.
HEDVIG: I was just going to say, isn’t multidisciplinarity… ? If it’s not linguistics, at some point I don’t care. I’m like a researcher, and I want to ask questions about the things I’m interested in. Like, if you want to publish it in Journal of Linguistics or something else, whatever. And isn’t multidisciplinarity supposed to be, like, what we’re all supposed to be doing anyway?
ARIS: Oh, yeah. I engage with the myth of interdisciplinarity.
BEN: Is that the… kind of the buzz?
DANIEL: Mm. Mm.
ARIS: Right? Like, there’s this overarching, like, specter of interdisciplinarity where people are like, “You’re supposed to look at things from lots of disciplinary frames,” but then when it gets down to it, they’re like, “Actually, that’s not methodologically rigorous at all.” And I’m like, “Wait a minute. You just told me to create my own theoretical frames and methodologies drawing on these other sciences.” And so, when you ask, “Do you engage with philosophers of science as well as linguists?”, absolutely. Social scientists, philosophers of science, literary scholars. I look at archives. You know. So, I, for example, can look at the ways that ideologies about Haitian Creole speakers who are Dominican now from history, how their language has been stigmatized through poetry in archives from the 1500s. Right? Like, these are the kinds of things that can be integrated into linguistics that people were pushing back against and saying: Aris, this is not linguistics.
DANIEL: I see that Matthias and Amali have a question.
MATTHIAS: Yes. Can you hear us?
DANIEL: Yeah. You sound great.
MATTHIAS: Yeah. it might be an ignorant question, but I’m asking anyway. I’m a researcher in computer science. And in, I think, a lot of natural sciences, there’s anonymous paper refereeing. Is that ever a thing in linguistics? It seems like anonymous refereeing is not something that you can do in antiracism world where you really want to say who you are and where you’re coming from. So, can you say something about that?
ARIS: Yes, we do. We have blind peer reviews, is what we call them. Actually, I think almost all of the papers are blind peer reviews. And in that process, I often find that people are either with me or against me and you kind of know where it is. But in terms of the ways that we blind what we’re doing, we often have to mark our positionality in ways that are kind of broad and overarching before we get… And then, once we go through the peer review, we can add in details and different things like that to talk about who we are as people.
So hopefully, what will happen is that people will actually require… these are things that happen in other fields, so like in education, this is a field that has for a long time — and anthropology now — these are fields who have advocated for positionality statements. People are actually writing articles about how to write positionality statements that allow for this blind review process and all of these kinds of things. But yes, it’s definitely a model. Linguists have to do blind peer reviews. We don’t get to… uh, even these chapters that we wrote, even though they were written collaboratively and we took a different approach to putting together this volume, they were also sent out for a peer and blind review as well.
DANIEL: Okay, anybody else would like to ask a question?
ARIS: I will say that during the blind review process, one of the great things about being an antiracist scholar is people guess wrong. So, people will be like, “This is written by Ofelia García.” And I’m like, “Yeahhhh! You think I’m Ofelia!”
[LAUGHTER]
ARIS: Once you build community, you’re able to do this more effectively because people are able to say… or not able to kind of pinpoint who you are but pinpoint the community that you’re coming from.
DANIEL: So, having a bigger community really helps. So, I guess we are talking about building community here. Okay. Well, I’d like to just thank Dr Aris Clemons for her comments today. Thank you very much.
BEN: What a treat. Professor Clemons, please come back heaps more times. You’re really interesting and cool.
ARIS: I would love that.
BEN: Yesss…
DANIEL: All right.
BEN: Yes. If you do it three or more times, you just basically become an honorary cohost of the show. You don’t even get a choice.
DANIEL: Yep, you’re just in.
BEN: Wait, I think… is this Rikker’s…?
DANIEL: Nah. Number two.
BEN: Oh-kay. [LAUGHS] You dodged a bullet there, man.
DANIEL: That was close. That was close.
RIKKER: Where’s my punch card for a free sandwich?
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: At number three, I would like a jacket if I could have one. That would be really nice.
BEN: Ooh, yes.
DANIEL: This jacket? You’re not getting this jacket.
BEN: No no no, I think we should make a really nice 80s sort of like Nike kind of fluoro Because Language jacket. I’m feeling that.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay. Okay. Sleeves pushed up.
BEN: Pastel. Fluoro pastel. Is that even possible? Let’s find out.
DANIEL: But now…
CAITLIN: We’re going to do it.
DANIEL: Our favorite game is back. It’s time to play, everyone, Related or Not? I’m going to give you two words. And are these words etymologically related, or is the similarity merely coincidental? Today’s game comes from listener Jenna, via email hello@becauselanguage.com. Are you ready?
HEDVIG: Yeah.
DANIEL: And I get to play as well, because I wrote down my answers before I looked up the answer.
BEN: Okay, fair enough.
HEDVIG: Are we doing a poll?
DANIEL: Yes, we are.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: Of course! Always on our live episode.
HEDVIG: Everyone, clicking buttons ready.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Get the fingers prepped.
DANIEL: Jenna says, “Currently reading the excellent book, Moral Combat” — and I think it’s by R. Marie Griffith, I’m not sure, — “about America’s century plus fight with itself about the relative merits of conservative versus liberal sexual morality. In one chapter, the author notes that early disagreements about access to birth control were lumped together with opinions about women’s suffrage, that is to say, the right to vote. Which made me wonder, not for the first time, if the word SUFFRAGE, related to voting, is related to the word SUFFER, bad feelings.” So, your two words are SUFFRAGE meaning voting, and SUFFERING, feeling bad. Okay. Now, before we take the voting, I want to hear some opinions from Ben, Hedvig, and guests.
BEN: Okay. Well, I’m normally going up against one linguistic doctor, and I’m now going up against four.
DANIEL: Four. [LAUGHS]
BEN: So… [STRAINED CHEERING] Wheeeeeeeeee.
HEDVIG: [LAUGHS] But how many of us work on romance linguistics?
DANIEL: Well, exactly.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Also, I have to say I play along at home when you do this, and I have generally come away with, like, a gentleman’s D in terms of my performance.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s like that.
BEN: I’m just gonna be incredibly rude and inappropriate and get in before all of the people who have tertiary qualifications in this field.
HEDVIG: Go go go. Go.
BEN: I’m going to say related. And I’m going to guess this is one of those instances where a word flipped to a complete antonymic meaning at some point.
DANIEL: Interesting.
BEN: I reckon that SUFFRAGE as in the right to vote came from a time, it’s one of those fossil words that will just continue forever because we only use it in that one tiny little instance and nothing else. Once upon a time, that meant like a good thing. And since then, “to suffer” in a sort of vaguely different context has, like, flipped meanings. That’s my guess. So, they were related at one stage, and one of them flipped a meaning.
DANIEL: All right, next. Who’s next?
CAITLIN: I think something that could help us is the word SUFFER also means to allow or endure, right?
BEN: Oh, yes. It is an antonym, yeah, It’s an autoantonym, for sure.
ARIS: Caitlin, I was not gonna give them that cheat code!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: In the King James Bible, Jesus said, “Suffer the children to come unto me,” which means let them or allow them. If you know King James English. Okay, so there’s that.
HEDVIG: Who is it that says “I don’t suffer no fool”?
DANIEL: “I don’t suffer fools gladly.”
ARIS: That’s exactly what it is.
DANIEL: Okay. All right. Which means you don’t allow them…
HEDVIG: Who says that?
DANIEL: Well, it’s a very common phrase.
CAITLIN: I feel like maybe you’re thinking of “I pity the fool”, Mr T.
BEN: Yeah. Are you thinking, Mr T’s, “I pity the fool”?
DANIEL: No, we talked about suffering fools gladly.
BEN: Okay.
HEDVIG: No, I think they’re right. I’m mixing it all up in my head, anyway.
DANIEL: Okay. Caitlin.
HEDVIG: That sounds like Caitlin is thinking that they are related.
DANIEL: Caitlin, what do you reckon?
CAITLIN: I’m going to say related.
DANIEL: Okay. Did you have any issue with Ben’s description, or do you want to suggest a different path?
CAITLIN: I think it has to do with the meaning of ALLOW.
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: Okay. All right. Aris, what do you reckon?
ARIS: I was literally thinking of Caitlin’s cheat code and thinking of SUFFER as ‘to allow’, and so I also said that they were related in my head.
DANIEL: Okay. All right, we got three. This is turning out to be an easy one. Rikker?
RIKKER: I mean, I was following that same logic before Caitlin said it.
[LAUGHTER]
RIKKER: But then again, the fact that it’s asked in the game, maybe it’s a trick question. So, do I be contrary? Do I go with the crowd? All right, I’m going to say related because I think that seems plausible.
DANIEL: Hedvig.
HEDVIG: I secretly think that they are related, but I think it would be fun… Like, I want to be the one who get it right. So I’m going to say they’re not related.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I want to be the only one doing something.
BEN: The phoenix from the ashes.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Okay.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: And what did you guess, Daniel?
DANIEL: I guessed that they were totally related because first suffrage, you allow people to vote. For suffering, it’s a little more complicated. When you suffer someone to do something, you allow them to do it and you will take on the consequences. And sometimes the consequences are painful. Painful, suffering, that sort of thing. So, I said related. All right, so five relateds. Hedvig not. But now it’s time for you, dear listeners, to vote. Here we go. I can see the votes rolling in. Click.
BEN: I’m clicking.
DANIEL: There we go. They’re pouring in.
BEN: Remember, anyone who googles trivia during a competition makes a fairy lose its wings, okay? Like, it is so nasty.
DANIEL: I cannot guarantee your safety.
BEN: One of the few things…
HEDVIG: Rikker, I voted, so you vote.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Okay.
BEN: While we wait for them to come in, for the few who don’t know from our show and to our guests, I’m a high school teacher, and sometimes while people are just sort of quietly working, I’ll do some trivia questions. And one of the very few things that makes me genuinely angry as a high school teacher is when people cheat and just call it out and ruin it for everyone. I’m like, [ANGRILY] “You, what? Get out of here.” Makes me so angry. Sorry.
DANIEL: Let’s share those results, what people said. They said that… 73% of us said related. 27% of us said not related.
BEN: Got a few nos, a few nots.
CAITLIN: It was a good question.
DANIEL: What’s the answer? Okay. Answer, they are not related!
BEN: [SURPRISED] Oh.
DANIEL: [SHOCKED LAUGH] O ho ho!
BEN: Hail Mary pass over the line. Last minute upset. I love it.
DANIEL: I was so confident. To see why they’re not related, we have to go to Latin. In both of these words, the SUFF- part is actually SUB-, “under” for both words.
HEDVIG: Wait, so the first part in them are cognate?
DANIEL: Yes. Yes, they are. Those two parts of the word come from…
HEDVIG: That sounds like they’re rel…
ARIS: So I half win.
BEN: No, hang on, hang on. Prefixes go before, like, lots of words. That’s not the…
DANIEL: We’re not having to take it all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. You can take comfort in the prefix part but let me go through the description here.
HEDVIG: But ironically…
DANIEL: By the way, you won. Why are you arguing against yourself here?
HEDVIG: I like truth, whatever. Isn’t it ironic, by the way, that then it’s the same as the suffix?
DANIEL: Mm, it goes under.
HEDVIG: And those are all prefixes.
DANIEL: Mm, why was the one before and one under? Okay. Well, for suffering that is feeling bad, the SUB- is under, and the -FER is carry, to carry under. I suppose carrying something under something else is hard and difficult. For SUFFRAGE, for voting, the SUB- is also under, but the -FRAGE is something like FREGOR or to break. And we’re not sure why breaking something is relevant to voting, but there are two ideas. One is that when you vote, you shout out your vote, breaking the silence, that’s probably the best guess, but there’s another guess. When you vote, you record your vote on a piece of pottery that has been broken off. Well, either way, they are different words not related to each other. There’s SUFFER, to carry under and then SUFFRAGE, to break. So, they’re not related. I got it wrong. Just about everybody got it wrong, except for Hedvig and a bunch of you, dear patrons. How do you feel?
CAITLIN: I’m boycotting the English language.
HEDVIG: I don’t…
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] You think they are…
HEDVIG: I also… I think everyone should get half a point. I think this is the… Like, everyone should have a point.
BEN: No, no, no, no, no, no.
DANIEL: I guess what I was doing for this one is…
BEN: That’s like saying UNCONDITIONAL and UNCOMFORTABLE are like related words, and they’re not.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But COMFORTABLE is the thing.
ARIS: You can tell who is the high school teacher and who is not here, very clearly!
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: But, Ben, -FER is not a standalone word, and COMFORTABLE is.
DANIEL: No, but what I’m saying is…
BEN: Maybe it was in Latin a squajillion years ago. I don’t know.
DANIEL: Are they the same word? They’re not the same word. They’re not related to each other. They didn’t, like, evolve from the same proto word. Except for in the case of the suffix.
BEN: Take the win, sister, seriously!
HEDVIG: Also, it’s not a suffix, it’s more like what Nick Evans calls a propound! Like, it’s the first part of a compound. No, I don’t… I reject this.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Stop trying to be so punk. This is true punk though. “I reject anything that has winners and losers, bro. This is not part of a system that I endorse.”
DANIEL: Prefix, prefix. I meant to say prefix. Thank you. All right. Thanks to Jenna for that great game of Related or Not. Sure to get everyone fighting. You can send us words for a game of this if you want. Hit our Discord, email, and myriad other ways.
All right, Dr Caitlin Green and Dr Rikker Dockum are publishing the forthcoming chapter, “Toward a Big Tent Linguistics: Inclusion and the Myth of the Lone Genius.” It’s going to appear in the Oxford Collection on Inclusion in Linguistics. Rikker and Caitlin take it away. Blind us with science.
RIKKER: All right. So, I wanted to follow in Aris’ footsteps a bit and set the frame a little bit more about why this chapter exists. So, indulge me in this. To take it really, really far back, I was an undergraduate in the early 2000s, and so the second linguistic course I ever took was sociolinguistics with Anne Charity Hudley, who is one of the editors of these volumes I’m working on. And so, I got some really great training early on. And then, I was never in a program that had another sociolinguistics course offered until I got my PhD. At the time she was still finishing her PhD, was a guest visitor for that summer or year, I forget exactly how long. But even back then, it was not a core part of the curriculum. And so, this has been something that… it didn’t occur to me like Caitlin was saying, we’re sort of just minding our business, not really thinking about the field in these larger terms.
And so 2020 comes around and we started thinking about the field in a bigger picture. So, what Caitlin and I are going to do is, or what we’ve done in the chapter, is try to look at the field from a different perspective. And the paper that Aris mentioned, the sort of challenge of these… there was a paper from Charity Hudley, et al published in Language and subsequent work that really is just pushing people to look at the field, do some antiracist work, challenge these assumptions and the sort of frame the field has been sitting in for a long time. And so, we’re trying to provide concrete ideas of what can we do to improve the field. So, that’s where we sort of started with this big tent side of things. Caitlin, is there anything else you want to add in terms of just like general background before we jump in to talk about it?
CAITLIN: Yeah, so I come from a much more socio-heavy side. In undergrad, not so much, but I took like one Intro to Sociolinguistics. And then when I got into grad school, that is where I focused. And I was looking at language and gender as my specialty, and I was going to get like a special certificate and then I didn’t turn in the paperwork, so good job me. [LAUGHS] But in order to fulfill those requirements, I had to take a feminist theory and feminist methodologies course. And the second half of that two-part course was with a Black linguist, Amina Mama, who taught us about the colonial history and ideologies behind kind of western supremacist thought. And it kind of broke my brain a little bit because I’m like a middle-class white girl. I was lazy intellectually and just didn’t think about it. And then, I read these things and I was like: Oh, my god. It really does underpin the way that we treat each other, and it has got to stop.
And so, that stuck in my brain so hard that when things started to unfold in 2020 and this sort of wave of academic and online bullying hit the linguistics community, it completed my brain brokenness. And so, I got extremely devoted to the idea of standing up for the people who are getting bullied because I couldn’t take it. I was a new mom, I was a teacher, I was like, “This is unacceptable. I have to do something.”
And so, I started writing blog posts, which got shared around, and then I started working with other linguists, and I started doing work with Liberal Currents, which is a magazine that I work for. And that’s how I came to get involved in this. It’s almost like a mama bear response, that I just couldn’t handle the way that people were being treated and the way that their minds were being talked about.
RIKKER: Yeah, I would add to that, I guess I felt like I existed in a linguistics that was kind of built for me, built for the kind of questions I was interested in. And in many ways, I would have been happy to never look outside of my bubble. And so, it’s been a good chance to realize that everyone needs to do it. It shouldn’t just be the folks who are already feeling like they are excluded or not fully welcomed into the community, but even folks who need that challenge, who need to be challenged to look at those things directly and who might otherwise not have. I guess that’s part of the idea here. I mean, my linguistics work between now and then was Southeast Asian historical linguistics, so sound change in tonal languages and how to reconstructions of the past, it’s quite, quite different from the type of work we’re doing.
In this paper, Caitlin and I, we’re really problematizing gatekeeping in linguistics. We’re looking at the field as a whole, why are we sort of restricting what people are willing to call linguistics and are willing to allow into the field as linguistics? And point out some of those things. So, I don’t know, Caitlin, do we talk through each of those things one by one? Does that sound like a good plan?
CAITLIN: It’s great.
RIKKER: I really want to just encourage folks to jump in with questions and comments. I don’t want this to feel super presentationy. And we have a set of slides, which I can also… we’ll make sure to put in the show notes. But I’m pretty sure this will work if I just drop the link in chat. So, if you want to look at the nice slides we made, you’re welcome to do that. But I’d like to keep it conversational and bidirectional.
So, really, the first of the three things we talk about in the paper is this issue of exclusionary socialization. So, this is the idea that we are sort of trained to think about linguistics in a particular way. Right? We’re socialized into the idea that linguistics is this and is not that. Or it’s a set of choices. It’s one of these binaries. Either you’re doing this kind of linguistics, or you’re doing that kind of linguistics. So, I don’t know. You’ve probably heard of some of these things. Like, you’re either a formal linguistics, or you’re doing functional linguistics. Or you’re a theoretical linguist or an applied linguist. Or you work on P side, phonetics, phonology, or you work on S side, syntax, semantics. And then, there’s the whole, are you an academic or not, which is… as if that’s a hard line.
These are bad and wrong, and we shouldn’t look at the field in terms of a bunch of binaries, and we shouldn’t feel like anyone who doesn’t feel like they fit neatly into one category is not a linguist or doesn’t fit the mold. So, there was a question about… yeah, P side is phonetics, phonology. And so, that fits into this idea that they’re core linguistics, and then there’s everything else. And so, if you’re doing the core, you have the most prestige, you’re at the biggest name schools, you’re most likely to get a job at one of those schools and perpetuate the process. But yeah, it also feeds into this whole idea of: the way that we interact, who we think of as linguists. Caitlin, feel free to jump in.
CAITLIN: Yeah. What this goes back to is the history of linguistics, which Rikker knew about a little bit more than me, and then we dove deep into it. It does come from the structures that linguistics formed around. The universities that initially got attention and got funding were a specific kind of linguistics. They were the core linguistic stuff. And so, what you saw was that the people who were getting prestige and research funding were then educating the next generation and using their names and their reputations to help those students get a leg up and help their research become the stuff that people thought of as core, proper, real linguistics. And so, we’re only a few generations, if that, away from that start. So, we haven’t necessarily undone those perceptions.
RIKKER: Yeah. So this really goes back to the beginnings of linguistics. One of the things I’ve heard in feedback is that our paper sort of is too focused on the American side of things. And fair, that’s true. What we describe may be more true of American linguistics than other parts of the world. That’s not entirely that way though. But if you look at the origin of linguistics in the US, it really goes back to a handful of people who came from wealthy families, wealthy white families in the Northeast US basically. And then, that spreads over time. But yeah, the earliest linguistics classes in the US were only 150 years ago, 1870s, at Yale University. So, it has a very obvious origin point in some ways. And so, what was called linguistics then, they also thought about, right? So, this isn’t exactly a new thing, but in many ways, what we’re talking about mirrors debates that have been going on since then. But it was still a binary back then too, like: is linguistics social or is it biological? was a debate they were having in the late 1800s also.
But one of the things, the reason why we titled the paper or subtitled the paper, Inclusion and the Myth of the Lone Genius, is that so much of the way we train linguists nowadays is still based in this, like, you have to know about the big names, like, the major names, the major linguists. And that’s a pretty narrow set of points of view.
DANIEL: We had the same problem. We’re as much beholden to this as anybody, because in our “Together at Last” episode, Ben asked, “Is it possible to date epochs of linguistics?” And what did we do? Went straight for: oh, well, the names. Panini, Bloomfield, Jacobson, Chomsky, and then Labov. It’s so difficult to escape.
RIKKER: They’re really interesting.
CAITLIN: A lot of guys from the history of linguistics have been given the name the father of modern linguistics or the father of linguistics. And it’s like, we can’t have that many dads. That’s too many dads.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Where are the mothers?
CAITLIN: Yeah. First of all, where are the mothers? Second of all, why do all of these people need to have a paternalistic relationship to the field? It does put them on a pedestal, and it makes it hard to critique them. And in fact, we have done other work, and we will sometimes name some of these fathers of linguistics and talk about a culture that’s risen up around them, and it can make people feel really uncomfortable and really upset because they don’t want to hear bad things about great men.
RIKKER: Yeah. And there’s always this tendency that, well, okay, I need to cite someone for some basic background concept in a paper, and you want to cite the biggest name you can either because that’s easy, you already know the work, or because you feel like that will make the foundation. If I have to cite something for my paper, I want it to be based on a firm foundation and the names people know. So, you can see how that sort of feeds in about who gets cited, who gets lauded the most. And I’ll give you a very specific example. Not to… I won’t tell too much about the paper because it’s in the works, but working on a paper that is aimed at sort of industry computational folks, not necessarily linguists, but people who interface with linguists.
And so, you need to cite a concept as basic as “a pronoun in a sentence can be ambiguous” [CHUCKLES] “It can refer to…” Pronoun resolution. Like, if you say, you know, “John…” er… “Jose told Manuel that he was going to the store tomorrow.” In theory, he could refer to either of those. This is obvious, like, who do you cite for that? And yet, especially if you’re looking at outsiders, well, it’s a little bit too easy to just cite, “Well, okay, here’s a paper from Chomsky from 1960-something.” So, it’s very easy to do in very basic ways. So, there’s nothing wrong with that in some sense, but in aggregate, over time, if every time we need to refer to an example and every time we need to cite someone, we’re always citing the same handful, then that’s an issue.
DANIEL: Aris?
ARIS: Can I just jump in and say that what this results in, and this is also going to Matthias and Amelie’s comment about peer reviewing is that I don’t get to say regular sentences like: “Looking at students as if they’re coming from a deficit is dangerous” without somebody saying, “Well, who did you cite to evidence that?” And so, I looked at a recent paragraph that I wrote, but that had been reviewed so harshly that I literally had more citations — the words — there were more citation words than content words in the paragraph, because people were challenging every single thing that I said.
DANIEL: That’s exhausting.
RIKKER: There’s a funny effect that happens where if you try and do work that you want to problematize and do the research to show that some of these biases and issues exist in the field, and you’ll get told, “Well, where’s the research to show that this is true?”, like Aris is talking about, but then once you’re doing the research, you’ll also get told, “Well, this is really obvious. Everyone knows this. This isn’t novel, this isn’t important.” I’ve done a couple of different papers now on things like gender bias in different ways in the field. So, yeah, it’s a very double-edged thing where both of those approaches end up supporting the sort of status quo.
CAITLIN: Yeah, you can submit a paper and Reviewer One will say, “This is not novel. Everyone knows this. It’s common sense.” And Reviewer Two will say, “You didn’t support this well enough. I don’t believe it’s even true.”
HEDVIG: Do you think it’s getting any better with generations? Or is it equally bad, the having to cite every bloody thing?
RIKKER: I think it’s trending positive. It’s still… If we don’t work towards it, it’s not going to improve. If we don’t talk about it and sort of focus on this, then it would continue as it was. But I’m optimistic about it. I don’t know about others.
CAITLIN: [CHUCKLES] Yeah, I think we’re heading in a good direction just by the fact that, like, Oxford University Press want to make these two collections and that there’s other people doing this amazing kind of work that is getting published places. We still have a ways to go, I think.
DANIEL: You mentioned in the paper that there is pushback, that when you argue that different people need to be cited or that the pattern of citations need to change, this gets dismissed as divisive or as wokeism and so on.
CAITLIN: That’s right. And actually, the stuff that I’m working on right now, a lot of my other work is about discourses around free speech, academic freedom, and it always is the group of people who have status, who have the attention of the public, who have money, really exciting salaries that I would just faint if I saw their paycheck. Those people, they are looking to protect their brand, and they’re looking to protect their position as the proper arbiters of what’s real knowledge and what is good thinking and rationality. And in the course of protecting that brand, the discourses that they will recruit, like the strategies that they will recruit, are extremely grandiose at times. They will say that what we’re doing is actually dismantling Western Civilization, and is the same thing as, like, book burning or struggle sessions or Stalinism. They’ll bring out these kinds of big, scary, heady ideas to describe what is essentially a group of people just doing research and asking questions and talking to each other.
BEN: “Hey, you guys should look at this stuff.” “Burn the witch!”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Yeah, it honestly is. And there was this academic freedom conference that happened at Stanford last fall where a good number of the people who had been asked… their brief was, “Come speak about what youth consider to be the greatest threats to academic freedom in your institution.” And they didn’t talk about discrimination, they didn’t talk about sexual harassment, they didn’t talk about poverty. They talked about other people’s research. They would name papers that they thought were horrible. They would say, “I went to a conference, and all the talks were about gender. Eww!” Somebody named “The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn” as a threat to academic freedom. And it’s like, “Dude, that’s a paper.” [CHUCKLES]
RIKKER: Yeah. A big part of this is really upholding one very narrow view that has held sway for a long time as being, again, like we talked about at the very beginning, earlier, the objective view, the neutral view, like the set of questions that are allowed to be asked and so, this is kind of what linguistics became. This is another thing we talk about in the paper, is: linguistics without any modifier was intentionally narrowed. It was narrowed by what kind of linguistics got funding, what kind of linguistics was interesting to scholars who were at a handful of well-funded and prestigious linguistics departments. It’s not like we’re saying that there’s some evil mastermind in some way. But these things are a system that support each other, and so in… you don’t need to have that. This emerges from a society where white men are running it already, right? And so, linguistics of certain kinds became marginalized, and you have to have a modifier. So, you have to have applied linguistics. You can’t be linguistics. You have to have some other label. And then, you also aren’t included in departments that are just called linguistics departments. You end up in an English department or a “blank” studies, all kinds of different other departments.
DANIEL: I want to ask: I have a question here that I thought of earlier, and I think it applies. What happens if we do nothing? What does the future look like if we keep going?
CAITLIN: Yeah. So whatever patterns right now are reproducing inequity, if we do nothing, then they self-reproduce. It’s like you’ve set a course, and you’re off by a percentage of a degree. If you don’t course-correct, you’ll veer further and further away from your goal. So, what we’re hoping to do is avoid that situation and try to course-correct as quickly as we possibly can to make people behave a little bit differently in ways that will help reverse that off-course directionality.
RIKKER: Yeah. This is one of the things we’re looking at this summer with the study I mentioned on the history of hiring practices in linguistics and in linguistics departments specifically, is that a lot of people have the sense that some programs probably place more professors than others, and there’s different prestige. People sort of know this, but they don’t know the numbers behind it often. And so, there’s a study that is not quite published yet, but there was a poster at the LSA in 2020… January 2020, so it was actually in person that I saw, and really was another one of these things that the gears started turning in my head, which was by Haugen et al. Haugen, Margaris, and Calvo. And I believe they’re all at Oberlin. But anyway, it should be out soon. It’s finally been through peer review and is accepted for publication, but they looked at who has the linguistics jobs, and it turned out pretty stark that a quarter of all professors in linguistics departments in the United States and Canada graduated from three departments. Three departments. And fully 12.5% graduated from one department. And so they had something like 60 or 70 programs that they include in their study. This is only PhD-granting linguistics departments, so it’s about 70, is the number of departments in the US. Not huge, but it’s good to know how many there are. And if a quarter of the 700 or so professors at all of those schools graduated from three schools, then you’re really, really narrowing the scope of what is linguistics. So that was a shocking number.
CAITLIN: We’re living in an industry of knowledge production as academics and academic-affiliated persons like myself. And what we’re seeing is it’s almost like in Hollywood, if you only have a certain type of people that can produce or direct the films that everybody sees, you’re going to be stuck with just a few different types of story, just a few different types of idea that you get to see in your movies. Right? And then, you’re like, “Oh, god, it’s just another Antman? Okay.” So that’s what we’re doing with our knowledge production industry as well, is that the people who are guiding students, the people who are producing written works that get published, the people who get to go on the podcasts and go on the TV shows and be the talking head in the documentaries are just a certain kind of guy and not the kind of guy that represents all the various ways that linguistics can be and all the various people who are capable of making linguistics really amazing.
ARIS: I wanted to add on to say, because I think Caitlin had mentioned something about if we do nothing, then the course. I don’t know why, but I take a much more fatalistic approach to this. And I think if we do nothing, then we get Florida. If we do nothing, then it is opposite directioned, and it runs headlong into the opposite direction into the purposeful domination of one group over another, many groups of people to hold power. And so, I think course correction is great, but it’s actually like literally initiating a struggle against something that is much more insidious. And it is why, in reading Caitlin and Rikker’s work, I think about the fact that many of the examples that they’re using are not just… we’re not just talking about them as academics, because what happens is they become political figures. So, there’s a lot of chat going on in the chat right now about Chomsky. But there’s a reason why… you know, I just read something two days ago that said political theorist, it didn’t say linguist. It was not in any way, shape, or form a part of the identity that they have evoked for this figure.
RIKKER: Yeah.
CAITLIN: This is something that happens with the top figures, is that they will leverage their reputation as linguistics experts, which gives them this air of expertise, and people are ready to listen to them already, and then they will turn it to anything else that they really wanted to do ideologically. So, you’ve got Chomsky, who has created this brand as like a linguist and political theorist. And you’ve got Pinker, who’s writing books like Enlightenment Now and Rationality, which are not really about language anymore. They are more about this political project that he’s involved in. And that’s not by accident, because everybody is involved in a political project of some kind. Right? We all have goals for society, and we have things that we want people to hear and to believe about ourselves, about the world that we live in, about the things that we think should be happening. And so, they do become this larger-than-life brand that covers more than just their public works. And they’re using the public works as a foundation for: this is where my legitimacy comes from.
BEN: It feels almost anachronistic in a way, especially for someone as old as Chomsky, because he was leveraging that literally, like, 50 years ago, right? And it strikes me… maybe I’m just young enough to have only been smart enough to pay attention to it recently, but it strikes me as a very pervasive aspect of modern online life, where a person will get an audience, get notoriety, like your Joe Rogans, your Jordan Petersons, this sort of thing. And they look around themselves and go, “Wow, heaps of people are paying attention to me. I’m going to talk about more things.” And then, the guy who created PayPal is all of a sudden, in the pop culture conception, the savior of humanity/our new Zapp Brannigan or something? And it’s weird! It’s a weird social phenomena. And I think it’s really interesting that you pull out the fact that actually it’s not super new and some of these guys have been doing it, but we’ve just sort of robed them in this costume of incredible intellect and legitimacy.
RIKKER: And objectivity.
BEN: Yeah, crucially.
CAITLIN: We have these mechanisms in place now to create celebrities out of anybody. And what happens when somebody becomes a celebrity is they have fans. And if you upset the fans, you have just like a whole world of hell dumped on your head. And so, that is really antithetical to what we would like for the academic culture to be because we want to be able to be in conversation with each other, even the most powerful among us, and be working through each other’s work and each other’s research and be able to challenge each other and hear each other and work together to make the work better. And that does not work if you are standing in one place yelling to a celebrity, “Excuse me, I think that you need to change what you’re doing,” or just saying to the world at large, like, “Excuse me, I think that celebrity is misleading you.” That’s not going to work well for you. It’s not an equal footing. It’s not a community.
And so, what ends up happening is you get punished by this group of fans. And it’s why we had to get interested and look into things like brand management, like business theory, because that’s what we’re looking at with those top figures. And I’m trying to get something together that involves this image management theory, which I absolutely stole from Gabriella Licata, who’s an amazing linguist. She wrote a paper, and I was like, “That. That. I want that. I want to do that with my stuff.”
HEDVIG: And it’s so antithetical to what we outside portray science to be about. We’re like: science is about having good thoughts and doing transparent thing and having replication and criticising each other and being able to take critique and being humble and not make more strong claims than. But then at the same time we all get told by various people around, it’s like, “Oh, no. You need to make your paper more punchy. You need to make a closer stand. You need to change your slides to be this way because psychology shows that people pay more attention if you do this and this.” And I’m happy to do a little bit of that to just smooth communication pathways. But then at some point I’m like, “I don’t wanna… I want to sit in my cave and do… i wanna do my… I don’t want to have to manage my brand.” [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: We have things that we say about what these values are. But it turns out there are some people who are doing science who they’re operating as though they believe that science is about being a rockstar and getting the grants and getting the lab and having people under you that will have to do what you say. And what comes out of that is harassment, mistreatment, ethical violations, and a toxic atmosphere around them, and like a celebrity culture that just does not serve us.
HEDVIG: Not that I can comment on it in particulars, but just suffice to say there is an anthropology paper about… so I work at a Max Planck Institute, and Max Planck Institutes are very archaic and very hierarchical. And if you get a benevolent despot, you’re lucky. You might not. And every decision goes through that person and the society body above them. I’m thinking of what I can say while I’m still employed here! There is a paper about, like, why Max Planck societies are essentially… what’s it called? Feudalism. And it’s not far from the truth, and it’s exhausting, and really boring.
ARIS: Hedvig, I want to say livelihood is important, right? You brought up this point — and I think Rikker and Caitlin talk about this in their paper — I want to think of what I can say while I’m still employed here, is a method of keeping the structures exactly the same.
BEN: Yeah, 100%. Hundo.
CAITLIN: And Rikker also…
RIKKER: And one of the things that’s…
CAITLIN: I was going to say Rikker has to think about what it means to be linked with me because I do speak pretty plainly on Twitter and in my Liberal Currents articles and things. I don’t know if Rikker is worried about it, but I do worry that I’m, like, damaging his reputation.
RIKKER: Well, I mean, that’s why I make you let me edit all your tweets before you send them. No, just kidding. [LAUGHS]
CAITLIN: Actually, I was going to say: actually, all of my tweets represent the views of Rikker Dockum. [LAUGHS]
RIKKER: I’m Reviewer Two. Volunteer reviewer of your tweets. Yeah, no, it’s funny. When we’ve talked about this stuff, there’s a few things. Like, coming into all of this. I’ve written papers on or I’ve collaborated on papers, every single paper I’ve written in this area so far has been a collaboration, which I think, A, is a good model in general to get away from the idea that — which is still deeply entrenched — that work that’s important needs to be only you or you need to be the first and the most important thing. So, we already disincentivize collaboration and cutting across areas. But I feel in some ways like a great… I don’t know, it’s not quite imposter syndrome, but it is sort of like, who am I to come in and say anything about any of this? But at the same time, it’s the point of: if I’m not saying it, if everyone isn’t saying it, then we’re not talking about it. Or it becomes a sort of niche topic that only those type of linguists care about that issue, rather than the field cares.
And so, when Caitlin and I have presented on this stuff, people will ask, “Well, what do we do?” And I’m like, “I can’t tell you all the answers to that. It’s not really our job here necessarily to be able to tell you how to fix the field.” But part of this is making this a thing that we are all talking about. So we’re problematizing the exclusionary nature of the traditional mode of linguistics. And yeah, part of that does include, [LAUGHS] I also need to think about where I have a job.
ARIS: I’ll tell you how to fix it. Me and Anne and a couple of other scholars are like, “No, no, we have steps. You can take steps. You can fix this.” [LAUGHS]
RIKKER: Yeah, absolutely.
CAITLIN: And part of our chapter is just pointing at them and being like: “Look, look, look. They already wrote it down for you.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: I’m getting a lot of great suggestions for people who are already at work in knowledge creation. And so, the suggestions that I’m hearing are: change the way we think about collaboration, build community, watch out for who we cite, watch out for who we hire. Those are all great. Do you have any suggestions for public-facing linguists who maybe aren’t associated with academia, like podcasters?
CAITLIN: Yeah. Responsibility would be nice.
DANIEL: And also, maybe even just regular folks listening who just aren’t affiliated officially with linguistics, but they just dig language and they dig shows like this one. What’s for us?
CAITLIN: For regular people, and I include myself in that because I am for sure a consumer of other people’s thinking, and one thing that you can do is just be really critical about who you’re listening to and think about when they’re trying to sell you an idea or present you with an idea, just look for critiques of that person. Look for assumptions that you might share with them. Look for also how they treat people who are less important than they are. And that will help you be more discerning about whose content you’re consuming.
DANIEL: Who we’re getting for interviews, for instance.
CAITLIN: Yeah.
ARIS: Yeah. I was going to say something very, very similar and it’s something that I say in every single one of my classrooms because I think about my students as just like consumers of information that will go off and live their regular lives. Not many of them are going to become academics or linguists or things like that. And so, I ask my students to all interrogate where they got their ideas from, who they might potentially benefit and who they might harm. Every idea that you have, ask those questions. Where did I get this, who can it benefit, and who it might harm? And then go from there.
DANIEL: All right.
RIKKER: There’s really a large set of things you can say in response to this. There’s so many different things you can do. And so one of the things that we’ve also seen is that people all throughout the meaning of “linguists”, whether it’s people at the top of the food chain or people who are relatively senior in the academic area, down to students, it’s funny, it doesn’t matter how high up you get. You still feel like you’re a cog in the machine in some way because academia is driven by the need to publish. You got to get those cites. You got to get the next promotion. Maybe you have your sights on advancing to… some folks are into becoming an administrator, like a high-level administrator in some way. So, there’s different ways that people are existing in this world, but it’s driven by a lot of things that aren’t just the questions we ask.
And so all of these things, this big machine is, and not even to mention bringing industry and business into all that, they’re all operating, and so you’re just a tiny, tiny part in it. And yet, you can have an influence. Right? So whether you’re a student who is setting up a club at your school to get the linguistics nerds together and talk about language in a way that’s not just the way that you might have been taught in school, where prescriptivism is the accepted norm, where you can talk about linguistics in a more accepting and welcoming way. To, okay, if you are a senior academic, you have influence over hiring, you have influence over who to invite as speakers at big conferences, who to invite as editors, and what journals exist and what gets published in them. So, there’s a whole range of things all up and down.
And so, this is what I mean when I say I can’t tell you exactly because I haven’t been in all those positions. But you really just need to sort of look around you and figure out what is the sphere you have the ability to influence. And also I’ve wondered…
CAITLIN: Something you can do…
RIKKER: Oh, go ahead, Caitlin.
CAITLIN: Something you can do also is just in your day-to-day life, in conversations, you can push back against narratives that you know are not right. You know, things that like, the way that certain groups of people speak is not inferior to other, but also the cultural discourses around the university. And there’s this idea that people are really trying to push that the university is like this far-left revolutionary, anarchist place. And those of us who have worked in universities know that it is absolutely not that. The university as a whole is a very neoliberal capitalist entity and it’s rapidly privatizing and it’s actually using that perception of it as like, you know, a commie stranglehold to speed up that privatization and to further defund and weaken the institutions of the university.
I walk around in my life, and I hear people saying stuff like that all the time. And so, when you have a chance to push back on it and get people to really think about it, that’s a huge thing that you’re doing.
HEDVIG: Oh, my god, I was at a party one time and there was a guy trying to convince me that French is the only language you can do philosophy in.
[LAUGHTER]
CAITLIN: 🤮
BEN: Oh, god.
HEDVIG: And it’s just like I’m not sure I want to… Argh, do I have to?
CAITLIN: You hear something like that, and you’re like, “I don’t know that I have the strength.” [LAUGHS]
HEDVIG: I tried for a while, but then I was like, “Look, I want to go back to my drinks.” [LAUGHS] I’ve had enough!
ARIS: Yeah, I was about to say, you also have to recognize when you don’t have the energy to do that, and let people sit.
DANIEL: Self-care is a thing.
[CROSSTALK]
RIKKER: Maybe the person who was listening in, hearing that.
HEDVIG: I think the same guy also said that the reason that English was spreading so much is because it is a better language, like linguistically. And people are making a conscious decision to switch to it because it is better for talking and thinking. Anyway.
CAITLIN: And you’d just be like: Crack a book, please. One book.
HEDVIG: Yeah. So, take care of your mental health too. But I don’t know if this is in line with what Rikker and Caitlin were saying, but I would also say, like — going back to what we talked about earlier with SUFFER — don’t suffer mediocre people just because they are in a senior position. Sometimes, very senior people don’t put in the effort and then submit things that are not very good, and no one tells them and they need to be told.
RIKKER: This raises an interesting point. One of the other reactions that we’ve gotten in terms of pushback to this chapter is, “Well, you’re actually the intolerant ones.” So, this harks back to what Aris was saying: “You published some work about antiracism. Well, you’re the real racist.” I guess the line of thought is that, “Well, if you’re telling people that the way they do linguistics is bad and wrong, you’re the ones who need a lesson in tolerance.” But that’s not the point at all. The point is systems have supported a narrow set of things as being like real linguistics, better linguistics, rigorous linguistics. And I don’t mind… I’m happy to… I disagree with some people, their theories that I don’t like. All of these things are still true, but the thing is I’m not trying to say those aren’t linguistics and I’m not trying to push them out.
And so, simply coming in sometimes and saying, “Maybe just let people do the linguistics they want and let it be called linguistics and don’t tell them it’s not real and not valuable and not rigorous.” And that gets…
CAITLIN: So, yeah. It was suggested that we were saying that you could never disagree with somebody else’s theory or somebody else’s conclusions, and that is not what we’re saying at all. In fact, we would love to have room for disagreement, and we would love for people who have critiques that are normally overlooked to get those critiques heard. And all we want is for less gatekeeping around what counts as linguistics. Right? You still get to disagree about your theories. You still get to have the thing that you work on and think that that’s a correct theory and that a competing theory is not as explanatory as yours. That’s perfectly fine. What you should not be doing is saying, “This area of research is not legitimate.”
ARIS: And you should be saying why you’re doing it and how. Right? [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I would just like to take a moment and thank our speakers. I feel this has been a wonderful mini conference from which I’ve taken a lot of ideas. And I’d just like to thank you for helping us, the three of you, and Ben and Hedvig for helping us to build the kind of linguistic community that I want to be a part of and that we enjoy. Hey, and that cats can be a part of as well. We’re seeing all the cattums in the windows, [CHUCKLES] so thank you all.
BEN: Yeah, I was just going to add my thanks to our three guests today as just, you guys are the solarpunk linguists I want to see running things. Let’s make that happen. And you could just be wicked and in charge. And yeah, let’s do that.
DANIEL: Let’s do that.
BEN: Let’s do that.
DANIEL: I’d like to thank once again, Dr Aris Clemons, Dr Caitlin Green, and Dr Rikker Dockum for the chat about their work. Thanks to everyone who gave us ideas for the show, thanks to the team from SpeechDocs who transcribed all the words. And of course, you, our patrons who support the show and keep us going.
BEN: Thank you, patrons.
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: Can I ask something?
DANIEL: Oh, yes, please.
HEDVIG: You are all submitting writings to a journal, an edited volume. Can you tell us more about when it’s coming out and, like, how I can get it? Cause I only find them as a preprints.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
ARIS: Yeah, I can go ahead and take that because I’ve been working pretty closely with them. Yeah, there are two volumes. One is the Oxford Volume on Decolonizing Linguistics, and the second one is on Inclusion in Linguistics. They will both be out in the beginning of next year. We collectively organized and worked really hard across people who had institutional affiliations with resources to pull together a large sum of money to make these volumes open access. So, they will be open access. We were very, very interested in them not being held behind a paywall. So as soon as they come out, everybody will have access to the entirety of the volumes. So, we will share that information. So certain people have wanted to put out pre-prints, and we have a list of who those people are, but the entire volume will be open access.
And we will continue to do presentations in the academic circle about how to use these chapters as teaching tools for those who are interested in shifting the ways that they do linguistics in their departments and for those who are interested in talking about linguistics in different ways. So, how do we use these chapters to inform how we can make shifts in the whole field?
DANIEL: Amazing. Just before we let you go, just quickly, if you want people to find you and what you’re doing, what’s the best way to find you?
HEDVIG: Get on the bird app run by Elon.
[CHUCKLES]
CAITLIN: You could find me @caitlinmoriah on twitter. If you’re on Bluesky, I’m there under the same name, caitlinmoriah.bluesky.social.
DANIEL: Okay.
ARIS: I am @ClemonsAris on the bird app as well as ClemonsAris on Bluesky as well. I think one of the ways I post all of my videos and things on my website, which is amclemons.com. And, yeah.
RIKKER: And as Daniel said, I have the most googleable name in linguistics. I cannot hide. I can’t even leave a review of a product that I dislike without anyone being able to figure out I wrote it.
BEN: [LAUGHS]
RIKKER: RDockum, Rikker.D, both of those, can’t use either. Anyway. Yeah. So, I am actually @thai101 on the Twitter because back in 2009, I was writing a newspaper column with that name when I joined. And you can find me at rikkerdockum.com for more about my work. And yeah, easy to find me.
DANIEL: Well, thank you once again for being on our show. Okay, Ben, let’s take it to the reads.
BEN: Oh, I need to actually open up… I haven’t had the show notes once during this thing because I’ve just been too mesmerised by our guests. Hold on. Let me use my extremely clacky keyboard.
DANIEL: Or you could improvise it.
HEDVIG: Clack, clack, clack, clack.
BEN: No, I’m not going to improvise, thank you! That’s not how I do things.
DANIEL: It certainly is!
BEN: I don’t know what you’re talking about. And I would appreciate you not showing all of these people how the sausage is made, thank you very much.
DANIEL: It’s too late for that.
HEDVIG: Everyone’s seen the run sheet.
BEN: Dammit! We are very grateful for the many ways people help us to make this show, especially the people who are right here in this digital space, sharing it with us right now because this is a show that has been patroned, ha-ha, by our patrons, which has been really really cool. But you can do it in other ways as well. You can follow us, we are becauselangpod in all of the places. You can leave us a message with SpeakPipe, which means we can actually hear your voice on our wonderful show, the dulcet timbre. Or if you’re really, really old fashioned, you can send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. You can also tell a friend-o about our show-o, which is always a good thing to do, just generally.
And like I said, if you really wanted to, like all of the people who have been sort of observing us live during this live show, you can become a patron. You’ll get to participate in live shows like this one. You will also get to hang out on our Discord where only the coolest, smartest, and most physically attractive people hang out. Also, lots of pictures of cats, like a really quite high number of cats.
And you will be doing a wonderful thing, which is transcribing all of our shows because that’s what we spend a lot of the patron dollars on, is taking all of these shows and transcribing them so that people who can’t hear can participate in them. But also, so you can be like, “Oh, man, what was that one thing?”, and then you can just control-F it, which is just everyone loves Control-Fing something or Command-Fing something, truly.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
BEN: Over to Hedvig!
HEDVIG: If you do become a supporter on Patreon, you get something special, which is if you make it to the top tier, the cutoff. I forget exactly where the cutoff is, but then you get shoutout with your name on the show, which is what I’m going to do now. And we have a couple of the people here now, so I’m going to say names. I’m going to see if I can find the right people. Okay. Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, gramaryen… is that what we… that is how we say it.
DANIEL: That is correct.
HEDVIG: Should I do it from the top again because I must have… just do it all.
DANIEL: You’re fine.
HEDVIG: Okay. Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, who was both here a second ago at least…
DANIEL: Rhian’s here.
HEDVIG: And Rhian’s here. No, I lost my place in my… This is not working very well. Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, Laurie, and Aengry Balls. And new for this show we have Tate, Tad. No, that doesn’t…
DANIEL: Tadhg.
HEDVIG: Oh, it’s the other way around. The thing that I think it is is how you… Okay, Tadhg, new for the show we have Tadhg as a supporter. And our newest patrons at the Listener Level are Siena and Joseph. And as always, we like to thank our very patient friend Dustin from Sandman Stories, who, whenever people tweet and are like, “Tell me about a podcast!” I don’t understand people who ask this question on Twitter because you must be inundated with answers. But he’s always like, “You should listen to Because Language.” And we’re like, “Oh, thanks.” That’s very nice.
DANIEL: Thanks, Dustin. Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Thank you for listening, we’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: Bye, everybody.
HEDVIG: Hey, I have a…
DANIEL: Thank you.
HEDVIG: Ah, I… Oh, bye.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Hedvig, do you have a question?
[BOOP]
RIKKER: You know, you sort of have to fight with the autocorrect. It’s like, very corporate. I’m just talking about actual time machines and my iOS is just trying to capitalize it as like Apple Product Time Machine. [LAUGHTER] If you’re talking about Time Machine, you must be referring to our product. And I’m from Washington state. My family and I talk about apples a lot, and it’s always capitalizing our A, it’s like, “No, Apple, this is not about you. We just like honeycrisp.” [LAUGHS]
BEN: Pink lady, Rikker. I’ll die on that hill.
RIKKER: I actually… honeycrisp is inferior to many of its offshoots, but that’s a different podcast.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: You and I can get together and we can talk about it fruit genuses all the day.
RIKKER: My family is having an apple blind taste test at our reunion next month.
BEN: Oh, yum.
CAITLIN: Nice.
DANIEL: All right, well, I think that’s…
HEDVIG: That is really cute, actually. A good place to end.
DANIEL: Actually, the after conference chat is the best.
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]