For decades, forensic linguists have been pushing back on harmful language ideologies, and fighting for better representation for linguistic minorities in the legal domain. We’re talking to legendary linguists Helen Fraser, Georgina Heydon, and Diana Eades, who have written the definitive record of how the discipline has developed in Australia.
Also: Seán Roberts and Steph Rennick have made the largest corpus of RPG video game dialogue ever, and they’re looking at gender bias. They’ve come on the show to tell us about their findings.
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Become a Patron!Show notes
Fraser Island no more: K’gari’s official name change corrects a historic wrong
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jun/07/fraser-island-no-more-kgaris-official-name-change-corrects-a-historic-wrong
First Contact: Global team simulates message from extraterrestrial intelligence to Earth
https://www.seti.org/press-release/first-contact-global-team-simulates-message-extraterrestrial-intelligence-earth
The Fermi Paradox | SETI Institute
https://www.seti.org/fermi-paradox-0
Children of Time: Adrian Tchaikovsky
https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/adrian-tchaikovsky/children-of-time/9781447273301
Rennick et al. (2023) Gender bias in video game dialogue
https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.221095
Explainer video
https://youtu.be/uezg7hfg_Gc
Explainer video game
https://correlation-machine.com/VideoGameDialogueCorpus/VGDCGame.html
Bechdel Test Movie List
https://bechdeltest.com
Fraser, Heydon, and Eades (2023): Forensic Linguistics in Australia: Origins, Progress and Prospects
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009168090
Kate Haworth: Research Outputs
https://research.aston.ac.uk/en/persons/kate-haworth/publications/
‘No birds’ car rental branding under fire over ‘sexist stereotyping’ of women
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-26/no-birds-slogan-questioned-sexist-stereotyping-women/102254484
What Are ‘Beige Flags’ When It Comes to Dating and Relationships?
https://www.intheknow.com/post/beige-flag-tiktok-meaning/
Transcript
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]
DANIEL: I’ll save that one.
BEN: [TYPING NOISES] ♫ opennnns the run sheet ♫
DANIEL: How shall I introduce you?
BEN: Oh, don’t tell me, whatever you do.
DANIEL: I don’t know.
BEN: Spit it raw, Daniel.
DANIEL: Okay, here I go.
BEN: This is like a rap battle.
[BECAUSE LANGUAGE THEME MUSIC]
DANIEL: Hello, and welcome to Because Language. A show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Midgley, and with me now… it’s a human. And it’s Ben Ainslie.
BEN: Bad. Really bad.
DANIEL: I had a really elaborate introduction written for you and Hedvig, but Hedvig is not with us, and now I’ve got to come up with something…
BEN: As in one part worked off the other part?
DANIEL: Well, kind of, yeah.
BEN: But do it anyway. Just do it anyway, and then we will shame her for not being here.
DANIEL: All right. No, because Hedvig is first, and the joke won’t make sense now, and I want to save it, so I’m saving it.
BEN: Fair enough. Fair enough.
DANIEL: Ben, thank you for being here.
BEN: You’re very welcome. We’re missing Hedvig today, unfortunately, but she shall return to the fated shores that is Because Language very soon.
DANIEL: Yes, she will. Hey, we got a big episode this time, Ben.
BEN: I’m pumped. Who’s our person in the chair today?
DANIEL: Well, we’ve got news. We’ve got words. We’ve got our favourite game, but we’ve also got an interview with our old pal, Seán Roberts, and our new pal, Steph Rennick. They’re going to be telling us about dialogue in video games and gender bias.
BEN: Love it. Love it! This is, like, the nexus of the things that I like, languagey things and videogame things.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. So, what they were studying was whether male-identified characters or female-identified characters get more dialogue. And I think it’s not hard to guess that the male characters get more, but can you guess by how much?
BEN: Well, I would want to know some sort of parameters to this. Right? Like, so, for instance, first of all, there’s different games have different amounts of dialogue. Like for a really story-heavy kind of RPG type thing, like a Horizon: Zero Dawn or something versus, I don’t know, like Doom Eternal, which might have 50 lines in the entire game, most of which are, like, “Die, demon scum.” or whatever.
DANIEL: Right. [LAUGHS]
BEN: But having said that, if we were just doing analysis of all games from the last 10 years…
DANIEL: A couple hundred of them, yeah.
BEN: …I would assume that male dialogue lines outnumber female dialogue lines at least 2-1, possibly 3-1.
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
BEN: That’s my guess. That’s my guess. 2.5-1.
DANIEL: Okay. Well, we’re going to find out if you’re correct. We’ll be talking Seán Roberts and Steph Rennick very shortly. But also, there’s a new book in the Cambridge Elements series. It’s called Forensic Linguistics in Australia. Forensic linguistics, Ben, what would that be? Any…?
BEN: Okay, this is fun. Uh… Ben Ainslie, the person who doesn’t have a linguistics degree of any kind is going to say that it is the study of… or the investigation of… it is a group of people who are trying to figure out what languages used to be like and don’t have hard evidence to go by. Obviously, recordings are a fairly relatively new thing, but even like writing or anything like that.
DANIEL: Well, I think you’re describing historical linguistics. That’s a bit different.
BEN: Oh, damn! Okay.
DANIEL: Are you thinking of like authorship and things?
BEN: I wasn’t, actually, no. I was literally like: What would Aramaic in the time of Jesus have sounded like? And stuff like that. So, that’s historical linguistics.
DANIEL: Yeah. Forensic linguistics is the intersection of language and the law.
BEN: Oh, it’s like actual forensic. Not like in a metaphorical sense, but in, like, a literal sense.
DANIEL: Precisely.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: This book is kind of an introduction to the field of forensic linguistics in Australia. Kind of like: Here’s where we are now and here’s where we’re going in the future. And we have not one, but all three of the authors, and two of them have been guests on the show before. We have Dr Helen Fraser of the University of Melbourne, Dr Georgina Heydon of RMIT, and a new one for our show for the first time, Dr Diana Eades of the University of New England. They are all legendary linguists, and I’m getting all three of them together, talk about their work, and what it was like to put the book together.
BEN: On this show? Today?
DANIEL: On this show, today.
BEN: In addition to the other people that we’ve talked to as well? You’re mad, sir. Madness! How much could you possibly put into a show? Too much, Daniel. Too much.
DANIEL: Yes. I’m really excited about this interview. It’s going to be a great show. But just to start off with, though. Remember, we’re able to do this show and make our regular episodes free for everyone because of… who is it, Ben? Who makes it all work?
BEN: Patrons.
DANIEL: Yup. Every month, our patrons donate some money to keep the show going, and we try to make it worth their while.
BEN: We just recently recorded a live episode. When we say live, people were able to join the online space where we were conducting our show with our guests, and we probably had what, Daniel, like 20 something people in there just kind of hanging out. They had the opportunity to ask questions of our guests. Our guests were, as they always are, incredibly cool, interesting, intelligent people from the fields of linguistics.
DANIEL: It was really good, wasn’t it?
BEN: It was, ah, so good.
DANIEL: It was fun!
BEN: If you haven’t gone back and listened to that show, it’s the episode before this one. It was really, really good. And if you are a patron, then you get to be one of those happy-go-lucky scamps who hung out and got to hear cool things and ask cool things and just generally be deadset legends.
DANIEL: Yeah. We have bonus episodes, live episodes, mailouts, shoutouts depending on your level, but every patron gets to hang out with us on our Discord server. We chat, we share ideas, we post our small Wordle victories and pictures of pets.
BEN: I was about to say: and our small furry victories as well.
DANIEL: Yeah. So, come join us for as little as one paltry simoleon per month. You’ll be supporting the show and keeping us going. That’s patreon.com/becauselangpod.
BEN: All righty, shameless plug out of the way.
DANIEL: Done.
BEN: Let’s talk about some news.
DANIEL: This story was suggested to us by PharaohKatt. Are you familiar with the island formerly known as Fraser Island in Queensland?
BEN: The largest sand island in the world, I believe, Daniel.
DANIEL: Sand island.
BEN: I believe so. Hold on, let me just quickly…
DANIEL: That’s amazing.
BEN: Hey [COMPUTER], is Fraser Island the largest sand island in the world? So, cool. Ben was right. That always feels good for everyone, I’m sure. But more importantly, ugh, it’s already updated.
DANIEL: That’s… Wait a minute. What was the update?
BEN: I don’t know if you noticed, but that lady, my little computer lady, didn’t call it Fraser Island.
DANIEL: What did she call it?
BEN: K’gari!
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Which I realise is unfortunately a mispronunciation, but… But! That was in the news very recently, and Google Answers has already shifted to the traditional name. That’s big.
DANIEL: Nice.
BEN: That’s really cool.
DANIEL: Eden Gillespie is writing in the Guardian about this. We’ll have a link up on our website, becauselanguage.com. But the story is that there is an island, a sand island. It’s massive. It’s off the coast of Queensland in Australia.
BEN: A very popular holiday spot. We should probably establish that. Like, it gets many thousands of tourists.
DANIEL: Okay. It’s called K’gari [gʊɹi]. I know that it looks like K apostrophe G-A-R-I which made me think it was Kagari, but it’s actually Gurri [gʊɹi]. The K isn’t enunciated at all. It used to be called Fraser Island because white folks named it after a Scotswoman who ended up shipwrecked there in the 1830s. Her name was Eliza Fraser. She met up with Aboriginal people and then she told huge fake stories about how she was held captive by them and that they were monsters and horrible and mistreated her, and people believed her. And it really contributed to some really bad colonial narratives among British folks about Aboriginal people. But to the Butchulla people of Queensland, that island was always called K’gari. And for a while the two names coexisted. But this week, they finally dropped the name of that Scottish interloper and it’s just K’gari now.
BEN: That’s really cool. I’m assuming, Daniel, that there have been a whole bunch of purple-faced white folk who are just like, “WAUUGH, you can’t take my island’s name.”
DANIEL: Yeah, there’s always that and then they always fade away for some reason.
BEN: It’s true, isn’t it?
DANIEL: After a little while, it’s no big deal.
BEN: That’s really really cool news, and I’m really glad that has happened.
DANIEL: Thanks, PharaohKatt, for that story. This one, Hedvig sent us this one, unfortunately, not here right now, but this one’s about SETI. S-E-T-I.
BEN and DANIEL: ~The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.~
DANIEL: What do you know about this project?
BEN: Only what I remember from the beginning of Independence Day, which is that there’s a bunch of very photogenic nerds sitting in places listening to a device that goes [MIMICKING RADIO SIGNAL] when there’s an alien signal. No, look, I know that there’s large arrays of radio telescopes all over the world that are basically just listening to the universe, hoping to discern some kind of radio signal that would suggest intelligent life somewhere out there in the universe.
DANIEL: That’s right. And so, this signal… we don’t know what kind of form this signal would take, but it would be something like narrowband radio frequencies that are different from just the normal cosmic background radiation that we’re always hearing all the time.
BEN: That would be the [MIMICKING RADIO SIGNAL] from the beginning of Independence Day.
DANIEL: And then… How long has it been since I watched Independence Day? I don’t even remember that scene.
BEN: I’ve got a real soft spot in my heart for Independence Day. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I remember it being a good bit of fun, bit America-centric, but…
BEN: Yeah. It’s rah-rah Americana through and through. The day was saved by a drunk, mediocre white guy pilot. Like, literally all of humanity was saved by a drop kick ne’er-do-well. If ever there was a true American folk hero, that’s the narrative.
DANIEL: And Will Smith.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Sorry. Yes. And Will Smith.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: And a very sexy Jeff Goldblum.
DANIEL: A very sexy Jeff Goldblum. In his sexy prime, I would say.
BEN: Yeah, he was peak Gold. Yes.
DANIEL: Speaking of prime, another way that this alien message could come is by them broadcasting sequences of prime numbers or something recognisably mathematical that if you’re in a society that’s gotten that far, you would know what that was.
BEN: Right.
DANIEL: Well, what’s been happening lately is that the European Space Agency has a project called ExoMars, and their Trace Gas Orbiter is in orbit around Mars, and they are going to beam out a signal to Earth or anywhere in the universe to simulate — this is like a test run — to simulate an alien message to see if we can get it and how it looks.
BEN: So that SETI can sort of suss it out.
DANIEL: We don’t have any messages, so we’re trying to make them up!
BEN: No, but what I also love is that we’ve unintentionally created prank phone calls for the rest of the universe. So, we’re sending out not real alien messages so some poor alien race might hear us millions of years from now and be like, “Oh my god!” and then slowly burrow through what’s going on. And at a certain point, realise that were just being absolute numpties and sending fake alien phone calls to ourselves to see if we could pick up the… [LAUGHS] Just, arrgh! Humans are so dumb. It’s really cool though. I don’t want to take away from what these people are doing. It sounds really interesting and really fun and really cool. And the science fiction nerd inside me is always going to have a real space in my heart for listening out for da aliens. So, yeah. Cool. Wicked.
DANIEL: I know. Do you have answer that you have arrived at to the Fermi paradox?
BEN: Oh, yeah. No, I…
DANIEL: Let me explain what that is.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: There are billions of galaxies, trillions of planets. Some of them are in the habitable zone. Life must be somewhere.
BEN: Yep. It is a mathematical impossibility that there could be no complex life anywhere but this one rock in this one galaxy in the universe. So, why can’t we hear all of the people? Because we should be! We should be hearing lots and lots and lots of them.
DANIEL: Where is everybody?
BEN: That’s the Fermi paradox, right?
DANIEL: Mm-hmm.
BEN: My answer is a really grim one.
DANIEL: Oh, a scary one, huh?
BEN: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s just a univ… much like gravity, I think it is a universal law that an intelligence’s capacity to innovate technologically will always be faster than its capacity to innovate morally and ethically. And so, all species develop the means to annihilate themselves before they develop the capacity to want to not annihilate themselves.
DANIEL: So, this is the Great Filter idea. The idea that there’s a Great Filter and we haven’t gotten up to it yet, but we’re gonna, and it’s…
BEN: Yeah, we are before.
DANIEL: It’s going to be bad.
BEN: I mean, look, I will say this. I’m as amazed as anyone that we’ve had the capacity to wipe out life on Earth for, like, eight decades, and we haven’t used it many times, yet.
DANIEL: I know.
BEN: I’m surprised there haven’t been more bioweapons, to be perfectly honest.
DANIEL: I’m always amazed that people don’t smash the windows of my house and come in. It’s just that nobody wants to. I think there’s a different answer.
BEN: Okay, what’s your… give me just a dollop of your optimism, Daniel.
DANIEL: I think that life is everywhere, that there are aliens. That’s a really loaded word, isn’t it? We’re going to have to come to grips with that. I think that there are extraterrestrial inhabitants everywhere. We’re just really, really bad at detecting them.
BEN: Okay. Yeah. Like, as in we have this idea of alienness that is so rooted in a human experience that we just genuinely do not possess the perceptive faculties to detect other life forms.
DANIEL: Yeah, radio waves? Come on. What are we doing? That’s a terrible tool.
BEN: There is a tremendous book series by Adrian Tchaikovsky called… the first book is called Children of Time, which explores this issue a little bit. The premise is: human beings send out a whole bunch of terraforming crews and the ability to foster intelligent life so that when we arrive at certain planets millions of years later, there will be take a homebrew hominid species that has kind of evolved to be our servants, kind of? Or something like that. Anyway, it all goes wrong. And when we arrive at one of these planets, ’twas the spiders who developed intelligence, [DANIEL LAUGHS] and it’s great. It’s a really, really good book. Children of Time, if you have not already yummied down on it, do so because it’s tremendous. And there’s some really, really interesting linguistic stuff at work there as well around spiders, language, the sort of how linguistics would work in nonhuman cognitions and things like that.
DANIEL: Sounds delicious.
BEN: It is truly good.
DANIEL: Another possibility is that the distances involved are just too vast. We’re sending out messages, and even if they did intercept them, it would take them a super-duper long time to get here.
BEN: I really, really enjoyed that… Speaking of this, that bit from Futurama where the aliens of Omicron Persei 8 or 9 — I forget which one — are just now a thousand… because they’re a thousand light years away, are just now getting Friends.
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: So, they’re sitting there being like, “Ugh, it’s a Joey-heavy episode.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Oh, no. Let’s move on to this chat about video game dialogue and gender bias. We were talking to Dr Stephanie Rennick, a philosopher at the University of Glasgow. She works on time travel tropes in video games. It’s her first time on the show. We’re also talking to our old pal, Dr Seán Roberts, evolutionary psychologist at Cardiff University. He was on our episode for Talk the Talk 317, With Big Data Comes Big Responsibility. Steph and Seán, thanks for coming on the show and talking to us.
STEPH: Thanks for having us.
SEÁN: Yeah, it’s great to be here.
DANIEL: You published a paper, Gender Bias in Video Game Dialogue. It’s been published in the Royal Society Open Science. Let’s just start out by talking about the scene here. This is a whole area that I’m not really aware of because I’m not a big gamer. But whenever I run across this area, it kind of makes me angry and sad. Makes me sangry. So, could you just lay out the scene here? What’s the deal with gender and gaming? And Hedvig, bust on in because you’ve got more knowledge than I do as well.
HEDVIG: I think maybe that’s a very wide net to throw, and we don’t need to do a full Gamergate recap.
SEÁN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: I mean, is it relevant or not?
SEÁN: I’ve thought about this. Here’s what I think. A long time ago, video games were designed mainly for teenage boys, and that’s just not the case anymore. Video games are a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide. Most people in many countries play some kind of video game, and about half of the people who play video games are women. And actually, most of the people who play video games are over 20 and 25. So, our perception of who is playing games, who they’re for, and how important they are in media has radically changed over the last 30 years to the point where, I think, it’s very important to understand representation in games. Who is being allowed to speak? What are they doing? What roles are they being given? That should be as important as those kind of studies in literature and film and television. But it turns out that there hasn’t been that much work in the kind of stuff that we’ve been trying to do on video games.
And so, we wanted to create a resource for people to start doing that kind of work on the linguistic representations in games. And then, also try and address some of these imbalances that we know are present in games in a more sort of direct and objective way.
DANIEL: Steph, what’s your perspective on this? Where are you coming from?
STEPH: Well, I think it’s worth saying as well that players and game makers are clamoring for better representation in games, but it’s been difficult to work out how best to do that. So, some of the tools that industry have proposed or some of the measures, trying to have more strong female protagonists and the like, don’t seem to be fully addressing the problem. So, I think there’s a real space here for academics to help shine a light on some of the issues that might not be obvious from within the studio. But I mean, I really like to play games, and I’m a woman, and I’d quite like to see more representation. [LAUGHTER] I can’t speak for everybody.
HEDVIG: Yeah, no, same. I sort of saw this paper as sort of in a similar vein to… Daniel, you’re familiar with the Bechdel test for movies?
DANIEL: I am familiar with the Bechdel test.
HEDVIG: So the Bechdel test, for those listeners, maybe who haven’t heard about it before, is there are two women in the script that are named. Women characters, they speak to each other, and they speak to each other about something that isn’t a man. And a lot of movies don’t clear this bar. And that’s not to say that all movies need to clear this bar that like, I don’t know, Inglourious Basterds probably doesn’t clear it, but for good reason. That’s not really a focus of the movie. But I took your paper as a similar temperature metre. So, sometimes people do, like, how many movies that won an Oscar cleared the Bechdel test? And this is like, in a sample of 188 roleplaying games, how many of them have so and so many women speaking and so and so many different women speaking. It’s not specifically about the content. You have some sentiment analysis, but it’s mainly about how much they’re speaking. And how many women are speaking how much.
STEPH: The big findings are, so the big quantitative findings are about who speaks and who do they get to speak to. And then we did some smaller qualitative work on what do they get to say and what do they use language to do. Because addressing just who gets to speak, as we saw with some very clear examples, for instance, one character in an original version of a video game gets about 30 lines of dialogue and that gets beefed up 10 times in the remake. But actually, what she’s saying changes drastically. So, she goes from using a fair chunk of her dialogue to show expertise, and a lot of that gets reduced to her flirting in the remake. [DANIEL and HEDVIG REACT, HEDVIG SNORTS] So actually, I think both of those are really important. We want the big picture, we want the… yet, as you say, take the temperature, how have things changed? What direction are they heading in?
But I think those qualitative examples make some of the issues really vivid. And then from that, game makers can make some decisions about whether they think what kinds of games do they want to make and do they want to make games that perpetuate these patterns, or do they want to make games that subvert them?
HEDVIG: Right. And Seán was saying earlier that half of people who play video games are women. I play video games, but I don’t play roleplaying games, which is the ones you’ve zeroed in on. So, roleplaying games are typically ones, right, where you are one little person and you’re running around the worlds — like, think World of Warcraft, I guess — and you can interact with other people and go on missions and do stuff. And for some reason, my brain is just wired, like I can’t deal with avatars, like I have to be God. So, I play like Crusader Kings and City Skylines and Planet Zoo and things where I’m an omnipotent meta creature. So, is that the case for other women? How is the gender bias when it comes to players, for specifically RPGs? Does anyone know?
SEÁN: Yeah. The work on this for a long time, well, although it’s 50:50 for most video games, when it comes to what people call sort of AAA games or very violent games or roleplaying games, it’s mainly men who are playing those games. Whereas women are associated with… the term that people use is “casual gamer,” which refers to…
HEDVIG: Oh, I am not casual! [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s me, I’m totally casual. [LAUGHTER]
SEÁN: So one of the interesting things is when I talked to people about this, I went to a high school recently and I talked about this project and we’re talking to some of the girls, then I asked them, “Do you play video games?” And they said, “No, no. I don’t play video games.” And I was like, “What, you don’t play any video games? You don’t have games on your phone, you don’t play games at home?” And they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I spend my entire life playing video games.” [LAUGHTER] So, there’s this perception that women are not supposed to play video games, and if they are, there’s a certain kind of video game they have to play, or that there’s a certain kind of video game that’s like a proper, real video game. And that’s been kind of affected by the sort of legacy of who’s been playing video games in the past.
SEÁN: But a study was released this year and it was done in Poland, and there about 50:50 men and women play video games, but for RPGs, it’s also about 50:50.
HEDVIG: Oh, really?
And that’s really relatively recent change, it seems like. And there’s all kinds of really… the study is really cool, sort of the demographics of gaming is interesting.
HEDVIG: ‘Cause yeah, I was gonna say that… I bet a common critique you’d get because of the study you’ve made on specific RPGs is that like, “Oh, of course it’s less women speaking in them because less women play RPGs.” But I was curious, like if it was 50:50 or maybe it was like 60:40 or something, I know other women who play these third-person avatar RPG type games. Like, I know that they exist.
STEPH: I’m one, if that helps. Again, sample size one. [LAUGHTER]
SEÁN: And we were interested in RPGs particularly because dialogue is a really important part of those games. And, you know, sort of as a linguist, that’s kind of what we were interested in studying. So, that genre seemed to be an interesting place to start.
STEPH: They’re also important for exactly the reason that you say: that you get to choose an avatar. Not all RPGs allow you to choose the character, but many of them allow you to make decisions for the character, whether that’s decisions in the world or decisions about how the character gets built, what skills they have. So, there is a real embodying oneself in the game, if you like. And so, we might think that representation is particularly important for that reason too.
HEDVIG: That’s what I can’t do. I don’t know why, I just can’t. My brain doesn’t work like that. I’m God or I can’t do it. I notice in your paper that you said that only 11 games out of the 188 you sampled allows the player to choose the gender of their player character. That’s really low, right?
STEPH: We sampled 50. It was 50 games, not 188.
HEDVIG: Oh, sorry.
STEPH: That’s okay. I mean, there is definitely two different sort of styles in RPG world when it comes to this kind of approach. So, one where what matters is that you get to make these fundamental storytelling choices for your character. And often that goes alongside being able to pick which character you play as including their gender. Versus games where there is a story surrounding a preset character waiting to be told that then unfolds and you maybe make some choices in terms of how that goes or how that player interacts with the world. But who they are is already set.
HEDVIG: Mm, right. You’re James Bond, you’re Link…
STEPH: Precisely. Yeah.
DANIEL: Okay. So as a filthy casual, I’ve got to ask, gathering the data, how did you find out who says what? Is there a script? Has somebody cataloged all the dialogue exhaustively for all these games?
STEPH: It was an immense challenge, and Seán did phenomenal technical work. And then I spent a lot of time on YouTube. So, we used a mixture of game data and fan transcripts. Fans have spent a lot of time online recording the dialogue. But for some games, that wasn’t enough. I mean, we had to do a lot of error checking of that. Some games, we extracted the data, but that wasn’t technically straightforward. So, Seán wrote Python parsers for each game that we used to parse the script and put it in a format, in JSON so that we could read it, machines could read it. And then, we went through and identified, in some cases, lines were already paired to the person speaking, but there was a lot of fixes. I think there were more than 20,000 manual fixes to who speaks across the data.
DANIEL: Yikes. Okay. Wow, that’s a lot of work.
SEÁN: I’d like just to say: Steph did… it was basically a kind of digital detective. So, there would be like a shop owner who has one line of dialogue, and she would have to sort of hunt down this person just to try and understand what their gender was. And that’s one of the really big contributions of this, that over 13,000 characters is manually coded. When we started, Steph and I were talking about this before, I kind of said, “Oh, yeah, we’ll just do a little study. We’ll just have a spreadsheet or something and just code characters for male and female. That’s going to be easy, isn’t it?” [LAUGHTER] And Steph really showed me that it’s a much more of a challenge identifying gender in a virtual world with virtual characters and fictional characters. That’s a challenge. I’m not sure that has really been addressed in this kind of way before.
HEDVIG: Yeah, some creatures are not male or female at all, right? And some are a bit like… we mostly think of Link in the Zelda enterprises as male, but I’ve heard some of the game creators say: Meh, meh. Neutral little adventurer.
STEPH: That’s right. So, it’s worth saying that it was really important to us that we weren’t just trying to capture characters as being men or women, although a lot of the paper talks about men and women because there were so few nonbinary characters or genderless characters or characters that had kind of minority gender identities.
DANIEL: How many?
STEPH: I think we found 30.
DANIEL: Out of 13,000?
STEPH: Ah, yeah. That doesn’t include trans binary characters. So, trans men and trans women were counted as men and women, but it does count explicitly nonbinary characters. There were also characters that didn’t get a gender coding. So, what we decided to track, we had a big discussion about what… because one can mean different things by gender, obviously. One could mean what oneself identifies as, one could mean what the designers intended the gender to be. There are kind of various accounts, and I think some of the literature kind of isn’t always super clear about what’s being tracked. And it was really important to us that it was. So, we’re tracking something called conferred gender, which is essentially the gender that you’re treated as being.
So, what we’re trying to track is the average player’s experience… some of that’s culturally relative, so the average British players — let’s say — ‘s experience of the character having played the game. So, all the clues that the player will encounter and what they’re likely to treat the gender as, as a result. So, the pronouns that other people use for the character, how the character describes themselves: “I’m a man of my word.” That kind of thing. What they look like, maybe their name, their title, sometimes their voice acting. And we’re looking for agreement from as many of those clues as possible. And in some cases, there just isn’t evidence.
And in others, it’s really game specific. So, there might be like alien races that don’t have obvious gender signifiers from the perspective of our world. But in that game, all the women wear particular clothes, and all the men wear particular clothes, let’s say. So, it was all very context specific.
DANIEL: Wow. Okay, I’m impressed.
HEDVIG: Wow.
DANIEL: Well, let’s talk about some of the results. I was trying to think of what you would find. I purposely didn’t read the results, and I imagined that the word gap would be something like the gender pay gap. So, for every 100 words spoken by men, you’d have 77 or 75 words spoken by women. Am I close?
SEÁN: That’s a good guess. And one of the papers that covered this called our study the Gender Play Gap, which was quite nice, I thought. But we found about 35% of words were spoken by female characters in total. So, it would be more like 150. [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay. Twice as many from men.
SEÁN: Yeah. Which on the one hand, we knew that it was going to be that women were going to speak less overall. That was just our expected thing. We didn’t quite expect it to be that severe. But then, the other question we asked was how many games had more than 50% female dialogue? So, how skewed is the sample, out of 50 games?
DANIEL: Out of 50 games. I’m not going to say that… some. I would say maybe to 10% or 15% of those would have more than 50% dialogue from women. Am I close?
SEÁN: Yeah. I think that was something like our expectation as well, that the mean would be lower, but there would be this sort of wider spread. But actually, it’s 6%.
STEPH: Three games. Three games out of 50. And two of them are from the ’80s.
SEÁN: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: Ah. Right, okay.
HEDVIG: And they’re also from the same enterprise. They’re both King’s Quest.
STEPH: That’s right, yes.
HEDVIG: One of them is called King’s Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella. That sounds like there is a female character called Rosella who speaks a lot.
STEPH: It does. But funnily enough, Rosella, she’s the lead, but she doesn’t speak the most. The top four characters in The Perils of Rosella like in terms of how much they speak, are all women. I think Rosella comes in third.
HEDVIG: Oh!
STEPH: But that game also doesn’t have an awful lot of dialogue. It’s got about 2,000 words or something like that. It’s not a huge amount, maybe 2,000 lines. Compared to something like Oblivion that has 700,000 words. So, you know. it’s…
HEDVIG: Wow.
SEÁN: And I think a lot of people sort of have expectations about who the main character is and that’s going to affect the game. But in the King’s Quest game that I played when I was growing up, King’s Quest VII, which has two female protagonists and a female antagonist, and that has less than 50% female dialogue. Final Fantasy X-2 has three female protagonists and a female antagonist and has just under 50% female dialogue. So, there’s kind of something else going on, and part of what we wanted to figure out in this study is, can we look at those overall patterns and try and understand a little bit more about why is that? Why are things different from how we expect?
DANIEL: So, why is this happening? Why are we not seeing as many women talking? Is it because by default, lots of protagonists are male?
STEPH: It seems to be a few different things. So the one thing that we found which was maybe more surprising to us, but doesn’t seem to have been so surprising to everybody online, is that there are far fewer… we expected some fewer, but far fewer female characters, women characters across the board. So, in terms of main characters through to minor characters, there are far fewer of them. About a third of the characters in the corpus are women. Which means that women on average, like individually, aren’t speaking a lot less, although they are… there are a lot less of them speaking. But also, women don’t speak to women as much as you would expect, and men speak to men more. Everyone’s more likely to speak to a man than you would expect if things were kind of randomly assigned.
So, some of it seems to be about what roles women are thought of for fulfilling. Like, often all of the guards or all the soldiers or all of the kind of disposable humanoid enemies are men, which obviously is a problem for men, not just a problem for women.
DANIEL: Yeah, thatt’s true.
STEPH: So there are some issues about what roles women are in. There seems to just be an overall issue about how many of them there are.
HEDVIG: Is that because… One of the reasons I’m bad at RPGs is because I’m bad at fighting. Someone told me that the game I should get into if I should get into an RPG to get my spatial awareness more aligned with these kinds of games, is Breath of the Wild. So, I tried that but you still have to fight ogres sometimes, and I’m really bad at it. Are there any RPGs in your sample that aren’t fighty? And did they have more women speaking?
STEPH: It depends what you mean by fighty. So, if you mean I need to press a button to control the sword in a given way…
HEDVIG: Yeah. Sure, yeah.
STEPH: RPGs, historically, a lot of them were turn based. So, essentially, just like you would in a strategy game, you tell your units what to do. You say, “You attack that one. You attack that one. You use a potion. You do this.” And a lot of the games in our sample were like that.
HEDVIG: Oh, okay. Sort of like DnD or Magic: The Gathering. Okay.
STEPH: Yeah, I much prefer RPGs where I don’t have to control… Action RPGs are not my bag. So maybe I just like to be mini god to your mega god of controlling my small party. Most of the big RPGs have violence be some sort of a mechanic, although by no means the only or the most important mechanic. For example, the Persona games, part of it is that you fight demon monsters from another realm, but a whole part of it is like a dating and social sim.
HEDVIG: Yeah, I’ve heard.
STEPH: So, yeah, there are kind of different things going on.
HEDVIG: Mm, okay.
SEÁN: It’s kind of surprising to me because as linguists, aren’t you interested in conversations? In having conversations and seeing what people… because it’s a way that you can finally say all the things you’re not really supposed to say in real life. You can choose to be rude or test politeness theories or see what people know. You can just walk up to anyone and talk to them. Isn’t that the kind of linguist’s dream?
HEDVIG: No, I kind of like that! No, no, I like that part. It’s just that all these games, sooner or later, there’s some sort of spatial awareness thing that I can’t deal with. Like, I tried also to play… what’s that game that everyone’s hyping last year? Death Stranding.
STEPH: Oh, the walking sim.
HEDVIG: The walking sim. Turns out I’m really bad at walking.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: So, whenever it came to difficult walking, I had to be like, “Ste, come help me walk! Because I want to walk up to this person and talk to them and figure out what the situation is. But I can’t walk.” So, I’m only talk, no walking. So, maybe those kinds of mystery ones where you just walk up to people and you try and find out a mystery, that probably works for me.
STEPH: Yeah, you might like Disco Elysium. We’re adding that to the corpus. We’re in the process of that.
HEDVIG: I tried Disco Elysium. Yeah, I’m stuck at the old man with the bull. I think I’ve hit a dead end. I need to be more imaginative about. But, yeah, I’ve tried Disco Elysium, and I like it. It’s depressing, but I like it.
SEÁN: So, my favourite games are the Monkey Island series where all you do is sort of go around and talk to people. And those are kind of fascinating. I love them, but they turned out to be some of the games with the least amount of female dialogue and they failed the Bechdel test. But it’s interesting to me as a linguist to be able to go back to those games that I love and spend time with them and find out all their secrets and find out what the ending is because I’m terrible at video games and I can’t really complete them, and think about like, “Oh, there are positive things here. There are amazing things. And there are also things that maybe I’d rather not see so much of in the world.”
STEPH: Yeah.
HEDVIG: But there can be outliers. Like, you did this study, getting back to the start of the conversation, as a temperature check of the whole thing. Like, there are good movies where there are no female characters. I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan. They famously barely passed the Bechdel test at all. You know? And that game can be really good. If almost every game everyone puts out, if the temperature of the entire industry, then it’s like, what are we doing?
STEPH: That’s right. Just on that, at no point was our point to criticise individual games. One of the lovely things about games is that they can tell a multitude of different kinds of stories. But what the current state of play suggests is that there’s a bunch of stories not being told because so many of them fall into this pattern. And that seems exciting! That means there’s opportunity.
HEDVIG: Oh, yeah. That’s a good note to strike. What is your advice for game developers next? Whats kind of things…? You said earlier, Steph, that the industry has been trying to put more powerful women hero characters. Personally, I would like to see some not-that as well. I want to see some slimy, backstabby characters. I want to see some useless shop owner. I want to see, like, all the shades of women. Not all of us are Amazon [LAUGHS] superheroes.
STEPH: I think one thing from speaking to game makers that’s helpful about this kind of study is that by shining light on the big patterns, it gives people some ammunition when they go into writing rooms and development rooms to say, “This is the state of play.” Hopefully, what this does is allow people to have their ammunition to have difficult conversations about what characters should be in certain kinds of roles or if they have certain roles in mind. A lot of the patterns that we found wouldn’t have been obvious from just looking at individual games, but we did in the paper — and I’ll hand over to Seán to talk about some particular ways that makers might approach these issues.
SEÁN: Yeah, one of the insights we found that the imbalance in dialogue distribution across genders exists in the main characters and in the minor characters. And in fact, although fewer words overall are given to women, the average female character doesn’t say particularly more or less than the average male character, apart from in a few games. So, one simple fix might just be to add more female characters to the game. If you do that, then maybe the amount of dialogue might just increase.
But there are other things as well. So obviously, we found evidence that characters are given particular roles. Oblivion, for example, is a nice example because each line of dialogue is paired with an emotion and that emotion is sent to the script that animates the face. So, if it’s tagged with HAPPY, then they start smiling and stuff. And that’s a really interesting dataset then, because you can tell, “Okay, well, what kind of emotions are given to which types of gender?” We found that women are more likely to be given neutral emotions and men are more likely to be given sort of any extreme emotion, particularly anger and things. So, there’s clearly biases in what they are saying as well.
There are various suggestions for how game makers can overcome these biases that we all have about the types of people who do types of things. One of them is writing a character, for example, as a man, and then gender flipping them into a woman in the final product. And that’s actually happened with a couple of characters in games. At the last moment, their character animation and their art and their voicing has been changed from a man to a woman. And we had an interesting idea recently of writing women by default. So, when you have to come up with a village full of characters and you have to write some dialogue for the blacksmith, by default you would start with them thinking about them as a woman and then try and think, “Okay, well…” maybe that can change. Not everyone has to be a woman, but what’s the justification or what kind of patterns or tropes might we be challenging or feeding into by doing this kind of thing.
DANIEL: And again, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to make a good game if more characters are women. Just like if a movie passes the Bechdel test, doesn’t mean it’s automatically a good movie, but it does mean that if we’re not seeing a lot of women being represented, well, we need to think about that. We need to, as they say, interrogate that.
HEDVIG: And also, most of these RPGs are somehow fantastical. Very few of them strive to be super realistic, right? So, even if there weren’t that many female blacksmiths in 1930s, in European Medieval times, you also have dragons. Like, you don’t have to care, like, we don’t have to care. I noticed you pointed out one game, Daggerfall, where the characters are chosen randomly, except if they’re a guard. So, do you think that’s a good… just randomise them entirely? Do you think that’s a good path?
SEÁN: Yeah. This is a procedural approach and people are getting very interested now in not just random stuff, but stuff that’s generated by AI. And the interesting thing in this project is we can go into the code and see how the world is created. When a character in that, in Daggerfall, is created, you flip a coin to decide their gender. But before that step, it’s decided whether or not they’re a guard, and if they’re a guard, then they’re a man. So, there are very slightly more men in the world than women, just because of that decision of which way round the choice is made and the decision to make guards only men. So, those kind of choices can at least be challenged. Like you said, these games should be free to explore kinds of different worlds that are different from ours, perhaps more aspirational than ours, and there’s a lot of room for more sort of variation and different kinds of games.
DANIEL: Has the response been encouraging, do you find?
STEPH: I find it encouraging. We’ve done quite a lot of talking about this to each other. I mean, we got the usual, “How dare you write about this? How dare you exist in the world as a woman?” type response.
[LAUGHTER]
HEDVIG: I shouldn’t laugh. YEAH.
STEPH: But a lot of people have… especially the people that really engaged, you know, that read the paper or the abstract or read the newspaper articles start to finish, have been, I think, really quite positive. My favourite set of comments — I think this is true of Seán as well — were from the BBC’s children’s coverage. So, there were kids commenting and a lot of them were like, “Yeah, we need more women dialogue. I don’t understand why women don’t get to speak as much as men! This is ridiculous.” And that was really nice.
HEDVIG: That’s really nice, because I did see that you also got the regular treatment by the Daily Mail, who wanted to talk about you pointing out sexist video games, which is not the angle, like we discussed, it’s not the angle you want to strike.
SEÁN: But it’s a clever strategy by the Daily Mail, maybe a reason this is kind of seen as a right-wing newspaper. So, their article was titled, “Are these the most SEXIST video games?” And then just took the games with the least amount of female dialogue and said, “These games are the most sexist games ever.” Which is interesting. So, it has two effects.
First of all, it makes us seem really judgmental about particular things, which is not the point. We don’t want to judge any particular game. We’re interested in the overall patterns. And it makes the game, or the studies, seem obviously wrong because there are way more sexist games in the world than King’s Quest or something. So, it means that when readers see that, they feel, “Oh, I know more about this study than the people doing the study. And therefore, I can comment on it, and I can say how terrible this is.” So, there was a lot of engagement from there. That’s the kind of aim of that article, I would guess.
HEDVIG: Yeah.
SEÁN: Yeah, it’s just kind of interesting to see that kind of corruption of the message that we were trying to get out there.
DANIEL: Happens all the time.
HEDVIG: Yeah, and readers would read it as well and be like, “Oh, they’re only judging sexist by how many lines. We should also care about how big the boobs are, or what the clothes are.”
DANIEL: The outfits.
HEDVIG: And this wasn’t what your paper was about. I’m sorry.
SEÁN: But I think it was also interesting because I think Steph and I both knew that from the start, the harshest critics would be the general public, that a lot of our decisions weren’t written to try and convince an academic reviewer to publish our paper. It was to try and convince the people who play games and who make games that this was a serious study, that we knew what we were doing and that informed things like… well, so all of our data is as open source as it can be. So, you can go and see all of the code, all of the decisions we made about what gender characters have, about what games we sampled, and you can actually go and get the text of the games for yourself. It meant that we tried to collect… So, this corpus is way bigger than existing corpora. And that’s because we wanted to try and get a big sample to try and convince people. We sampled across 30 years, and we picked different game series and then tried to get the data for all of the games within that series, to try and avoid claims of cherry picking and so on. And still we get all of those responses back because people read the articles.
Steph is right, there were lots of positive comments and it is very a brave thing to do, an effortful thing to do for someone to type in a comment and stand up to people who have this knee jerk reaction. But from my perspective, I’d also be interested in trying to understand, how do we as linguists get our message across to the general public? Particularly in these cases where… and one of the posts put this in a nice way, that this is a study that’s easy to identify the imbalance we’re pointing to. Everybody knows that games have a problem with gender representation, but it’s really hard to quantify that bias in an objective way.
DANIEL: And now you have. And now, this can open the way for better conversations.
SEÁN: Yeah. We hope that people take this data and are able to do these kind of studies that were before much… It’s just hard to get that data before, and now this gives a resource for linguists and lots of other different researchers to find those interesting patterns that we can challenge and game makers can suddenly recognise, and it’s like, “Oh, that’s a trope that I’m writing. Maybe I want to write something different.”
HEDVIG: Besides the topics that you’re interested in because you’ve made this corpora open access, it means anyone can use it for any other project. So, for example, I think we have a fair amount of listeners who take linguistics courses at uni, and if they wanted to analyse this corpora for something completely out of your wheelhouse, just like making parse trees and seeing if there is more passive sentences or whatever they want to do in different games or over years, like this is a bundle of text and most of the corpora we have of language online are usually newspapers or novels or blog posts… are the most text collection… or like Wikipedia.
SEÁN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: So, I think this is really cool also for that.
SEÁN: Yeah, it’s interesting in lots of directions. And we have to point out that me and Steph led this project, but the other authors are our masters students. So, we had a project where we gave the data to them and they did some of the qualitative studies that go into this thing.
HEDVIG: Very nice.
SEÁN: So it’s really valuable to have a range of skills and abilities to analyse this stuff.
HEDVIG: That’s so cool. And you invited them as coauthors, and you included what they did into the paper. This is really good.
SEÁN: Yeah. These projects I think — and as Hedvig will know — would take a lot of people and a lot of effort and a lot of organisation to materialise. Me and Steph were talking about this. I don’t think we would have started the project if we’d known how much work it was going to be.
[LAUGHTER]
STEPH: Ignorance is bliss because it’s on top of our actual jobs.
SEÁN: Yeah.
HEDVIG: That is my favourite thing you guys have said so far.
DANIEL: You know what they say? We do these things not because they are easy… but because we thought they would be easy.
[LAUGHTER]
SEÁN: That’s right. We also have a massive debt to the fans who’ve taken time to transcribe this work.
STEPH: Hugely.
SEÁN: For instance, some of the games, the source code is no longer available. Or actually, in some of the games, you can see they’ve been stuck together at a rapid pace in the code. So, you’d think that every game has some kind of transcript with who is speaking and what they’re saying, but very often that’s not the case. And some of the times, we’ve had to take all the game data and simulate the game and figure out, “Okay, so when this word is being spoken, this polygon’s lips is sort of moving. And therefore, if we sort of link that mass of polygons to this character, then we can kind of figure out who is who.” [DANIEL AND HEDVIG REACT] These games are not designed to be interrogated in this way.
And making that available to people, I think, is an important thing because what we want to see is people studying games and treating them in the same way as they might study films or literature or any other type of art because increasingly, and especially with younger people, this is the stuff that they’re seeing and the way that they’re understanding sort of the world and things that they’re interested in talking about offline and the culture that’s based around them. We should be studying them as linguists.
STEPH: Completely, yeah. I’m interested in the stories that people tell generally, and video games are increasingly the medium through which people tell stories. And I think academia engaging with it gives scope to shape and tell new stories, and that’s an important thing. It’s no good us being trapped in our ivory towers.
DANIEL: The paper is “Gender bias in video game dialogue.” It is open access, so you can read it right now. And it’s published in Royal Society Open Science. We’ll paste a link up on our website, becauselanguage.com. We’ve been talking to Dr Steph Rennick and Dr Seán Roberts. Steph and Seán, thanks so much for hanging out with us and talking about your work today.
STEPH: Thank you.
SEÁN: Thank you.
DANIEL: All right, Ben. It’s time for the game. The game where we try to figure out…
BEN: Ooh. Hang on.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: We’ve got to figure out how accurate I was. So, I guessed 2.5 times more dialogue for men than the ladies. Where did we land?
DANIEL: You were closer than I was. I said that maybe it was the same as the pay gap. So, 77 words by women to every 100 words for men.
BEN: Oh, Daniel, no! [LAUGHS] You are undershooting, my friend.
DANIEL: You were right or a little overshooting. It was 2-1, men’s words versus women’s words. So, yep, you were quite correct.
BEN: Well, I am sad to have been right.
DANIEL: It’s time to play Related or Not. I give you a couple of words, and you figure out whether the similarity between them is etymologically related or if it’s just coincidental. This one’s brought to us by our pal Laura, on Discord.
BEN: Where all the cool kids hang.
DANIEL: They really do.
BEN: Or at least the cool kids who are into our show, anyway.
DANIEL: The two words are CARNAGE and CARNIVAL.
BEN: [GASPS] I was guessing CARNIVAL in my head.
DANIEL: Were you? Okay.
BEN: CARNAGE and CARNIVAL.
DANIEL: Now, in response to Hedvig’s well-founded concerns raised in our last episode, I will clarify the question.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: The words CARNAGE and CARNIVAL both have CARN- in them. Are both of these appearances of CARN from the same word, or is the similarity merely coincidental?
BEN: Okay, I am going to go related. What did you guess? Because you guess before you check it up.
DANIEL: I guessed related. I did guess before I check.
BEN: I’m going to guess that you guessed for the same reason that I guessed, which is meat. Did you guess for meat? Okay.
DANIEL: Meat did figure in my answer.
BEN: Okay. So, I’m thinking carnage, obviously, is just cut up flesh. Right? Carn-age, like meatage, essentially.
DANIEL: Meatage. You lay waste to an area, turning everything into meat.
BEN: And even if it wasn’t that, even if it was just butchery, and it was like a term for like a side of beef was like carnage or something like that. Carnival, I am imagining, is at some kind of animal circus, like a “carniseum” kind of thing, like a big activity, full of a whole bunch of animals doing stuff, in the same way that a hippodrome was a thing and all that kind of stuff.
DANIEL: Oh, right. The horsey drome. Okay. I think I knew this one. I think I remembered from somewhere that carnivals happen because you’re about to head into Lent and so you’ve got to get rid of all the meat before it goes bad. So, you just go wild.
BEN: You go hog-crazy, pun intended.
DANIEL: Hog-wild. Pun intended. And maybe you have Pancake Day because you need to get rid of all of the milk and all of your egg and like that.
BEN: Oh, okay. Shrove Tuesday.
DANIEL: Yes, that’s the one. So, if I remember correctly, the CARN- is meat, and the -VAL is something like “putting away.” So, you’re putting away the meat because you can’t eat it during Lent, so you have one big bash, and that’s a carnival. So, I say related.
BEN: That was your guess or that was the answer?
DANIEL: That was my guess. And it turns out that… oh, should we make a guess for Hedvig? Do you have a coin or a die that we can flip or toss?
BEN: Hedvig is taking the opposite position to me, so she is guessing that they are not related so if I win, I get to beat her.
DANIEL: Well, it turns out that we both beat Random Hedvig.
BEN: Yes!
DANIEL: Latin CARO- is flesh, not meat. I kind of got that a bit wrong. Although meat and flesh are very similar.
BEN: Semantically. Like, if were playing Semantle, that would be like a very high number.
DANIEL: Precisely. CARNAGE is from old Italian “carnagio,” which is slaughter or murder. So, that’s the CARN- there. And in carnival, the -VAL is “levare,” to lighten or raise or to remove or to put it away from yourself.
BEN: Okay. So yes, related. There we go.
DANIEL: We win. I think the reason I remember this one is that I once read Tom Robbins’s book, Jitterbug Perfume.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: And I think that was where he advanced a rather dubious etymology that in fact CARNIVAL comes from “carrus navalis,” that there were these big rollicking boats that people would be partying on, and that was the origin of CARNIVAL. But that’s a disputed etymology. It’s probably… [CROSSTALK]
BEN: Sounds like a good time, even if it isn’t a true time.
DANIEL: Well, hey, why don’t we just go ahead and do that? We should have party boats.
BEN: [CHUCKLES] I don’t know. Daniel, have you actually been on a party boat? They’re pretty heinous.
DANIEL: Oh, sounds terrible.
BEN: Think… like, in a perfect world if a party boat was filled with all of the wonderful people that you know in your immediate circle, that’s wicked. But the reality is, of course, that’s not when we find ourselves on party boats. We find ourselves on party boats when your brother-in-law’s friend is having a thing, and then you’re around a bunch of gross people you don’t know, and then there’s a stripper, and it’s all just gross and yuck.
DANIEL: Somebody falls overboard.
BEN: Yeah. Or if not falls overboard, does the like, “Ooh, I’m falling overboard.” And everyone’s like, [FAKE LAUGHS] and you just sit there being like, “I just wish I had a book.”
DANIEL: Okay, that sounds pretty…
BEN: Sorry, I got a bit too real, a bit too personal.
DANIEL: Sounds terrible. But you know, I’ve never been on a party boat, but I’ve also never been to a carnival as well.
BEN: Ever?
DANIEL: Not a real one.
BEN: Like a fair, like nothing?
DANIEL: Yeah, I’ve been to a fair.
BEN: Have you ever… surely, hang on, you’ve been to the Royal Show or something, surely?
DANIEL: To be honest, I’ve never been to the Royal Show, but I’ve also never been to one of these Brazilian-style carnivals. That’s what I really think of.
BEN: Okay, hold on, let’s be clear. A carnival /kaːnɪvəl/ and carnivàle /kaːnəvæl/ are entirely different things.
DANIEL: Now that you say it, I can hear the difference. That’s true.
BEN: That’s like saying… what’s a good example here?
DANIEL: There’s slightly more clothing at a carnival, isn’t there?
BEN: Well, I mean, I suppose it depends on your geographical region, but I’m just trying to think of a good metaphor. That’s like saying that me and three friends sitting around and drinking beers is a party, and that Coachella is a party and they’re both the same kind of party. They’re not the same kind of party!
DANIEL: One is a partay.
BEN: Yeah, okay, fair enough. You got me there. Okay, cool.
DANIEL: Thanks to Laura for that game. You can send us a Related or Not question if you want. We’ve got a lot, but we’ll take on yours. Just go ahead and send that to hello@becauselanguage.com.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: I’m here with not one, but three linguists and authors whose work I have admired for a long time. I’m talking to Dr Helen Fraser of the University of Melbourne, Dr Georgina Heydon of RMIT University, and Dr Diana Eades from the University of New England. Hello and thank you for being here.
DIANA EADES: Hi, Daniel.
HELEN FRASER AND GEORGINA HEYDON: Hello.
DANIEL: Let’s take it one by one. Helen, we had an interview back in the Talk the Talk days called There’s No Enhance Button, where we talked about the problems with using audio in courts, but also the problems of using transcripts. This is your area?
HELEN: Yes, it is indeed.
DANIEL: Still what you’re doing?
HELEN: Yes. Never goes away, unfortunately. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Have things progressed? Our last interview was in the Before Times, 2019. Have things changed or gotten better or are people getting the message? Has there been any progress in what you’re doing?
HELEN: Yeah, there has, amazingly. We’ve got sort of two strands of research that we’re working on. One is working towards law reform. So I’ll just quickly mention what the problem is. The problem is if the police suspect you of a crime, they’ll very likely record you one way or another without you knowing. Maybe by bugging your house or your car or getting a friend to wear a body wire or something like that. Sometimes, the audio is very poor quality and it’s difficult to hear. And our current law allows the police to transcribe the audio and then provide that transcript as assistance to the court in understanding what is said.
So, what my work over the years has been is that police don’t really have the independence or the expertise to provide a reliable transcript. And the law says, “Well, that’s all right because we check the transcript,” and then I say, “No, but when you check a transcript against the audio, the transcript itself influences your hearing of the audio.” So, that’s the problem in a nutshell.
DANIEL: Yeah. And even if you reject what you’re prompted to hear, a trace of that suspicion lingers.
HELEN: Yeah, it’s amazing. Even if you say, “I didn’t hear those words,” or, “I heard it differently,” the fact that you’ve heard it, you can do experiments and show that very often it does influence people. Anyway, so we’re trying to get them to change the law that allows police to do that and also get more reliable ways of producing transcripts. And we’ve had a bit of progress in both of them, which no doubt we’ll get to later on, after you’ve heard from the others.
DANIEL: Excellent. Georgina. Our episode was Lies, All Lies, where we talked about the problems with telling when somebody is lying. We’ve had shows since about deception and disinformation. What’s been going on in the field since we talked way back when?
GEORGINA: Yeah. Look, I think there’s been a lot more focus on working… so, I work mainly in the area of police interviewing and interrogation, as listeners might recall. And so, that’s where, of course, lie detection comes up quite a lot. And I think there’s just been a continued focus in the UK and Europe on better questioning to bring out more detail and identify inconsistencies and so take a more evidence-based approach to potential lies, rather than behavioural or linguistic cues to lying, which is still kind of the focus in the US. The Reid method has never really moved away from that.
However, there have also been… the last Investigative Interviewing Research Group conference I went to, which is the main forum where people talk about these things for the purposes of improving investigative interviewing worldwide, there were a lot of papers from psychologists looking at was there some kind of meaningful association between language and deception? I didn’t see anything that really had a definitive answer. There were lots of very micro level cues, but that would be very, very difficult to actually use in a live face-to-face, or indeed virtual interview as it’s happening. So, maybe there were some things that if you recorded an interview and played it back and did a micro level analysis and then did statistical analysis of those data, you might be able to come up with something. But that’s not the reality of police work. So, you know, it’s still the case that you basically can’t tell when someone’s lying. You might have your suspicions, and we’re still waiting for that magical cue.
DANIEL: Mm. What we came up with was that lying might not be linguistic, but it might be contextual. You know when someone’s lying because you know them so well and you know their context.
GEORGINA: That’s exactly right. And people will often say that they can tell when their partner’s lying. Well, yeah, they probably can because they know an awful lot about what their partner is doing and their schedule. So, they can probably pick out what’s inconsistent.
DANIEL: “I know that look.”
GEORGINA: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: All right. And Diana Eades from the University of New England. We haven’t spoken before. I first ran across your work with the book, Aboriginal Ways of Using English, a long time ago. And I’ve spoken about it with linguistics classes many, many times, and it really opened my mind to the way in which language and culture can really change things. You’ve worked for a long time for adequate legal representation for Aboriginal Australians. It’s been fascinating to me to see not just how language barriers, but cultural barriers cause a lot of difficulty.
DIANA: Yeah, so, just a slight correction to what you said, you mentioned that I’d worked for a long time for legal representation for Aboriginal people. That’s not quite right because legal representation is the purview of lawyers and legal services, and the Aboriginal legal services around Australia, the Indigenous legal services around Australia, that’s a fantastic and amazing and very underresourced job that they do. So what I’ve worked for is for a greater understanding within the legal process at all levels and by all participants about the way that those cultural and linguistic differences that you referred to generally before, about the way those differences can impact the way that a person can participate in the legal process and the way that they’re assessed and evaluated in the legal process. So, my thing very much is that we take for granted the way that language and conversation works. We all do. Everybody around the world takes for granted the way it works. And we think it works the way it works best for us.
But there are lots of things that we take for granted without even questioning, that are culturally specific. And if you didn’t grow up learning to subconsciously mostly to communicate in that way, then learning to do that in a very formal and jargon-bound system is just a huge issue, and many people are disadvantaged because of that. That’s clear.
DANIEL: The thing that sticks with me is the idea that… the job of information getting. When I was a child at school, teachers would ask questions and I would respond, and I learned that style of discourse. When you go to a big building, there might be somebody sitting there at a desk whose job is to give information. Anybody can walk up to that person and ask for information, and their job is to give information. It just works like that. But then in many societies, the job of getting information is much different. It’s much more collaborative. You might not have the right to have that kind of information. So then, you drop somebody into a courtroom who doesn’t share those cultural norms, and how on earth could they get a fair hearing?
DIANA: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And there are issues that I’ve been working on for… Ooh, I hate to say how long now, since the late ’80s, in trying to explain and elucidate some of those issues. And the good thing is that I think there’s a much greater awareness now among legal professionals. And there have been legal professionals from the beginning who’ve totally got it and who’ve understood it, and people as elevated within our legal system as a fairly recent high court judge, Justice Robert French, he cut his teeth in the law in the early days in Perth, actually, when the Aboriginal Legal Services was being established, he was one of the young, overworked, underpaid Aboriginal legal service lawyers helping in the establishment of this organisation. It’s an Aboriginal organisation. And he knew from the very start that communication was a whole different issue. So, people like him have had their ears open and their eyes open and haven’t necessarily understood what’s going on because their focus has been on the legal aspects but have been very keen to find out and to learn about it and to tell other people. So, that’s been a really important part of this process.
DANIEL: I’m so glad to hear that there’s been some movement since in the last… of course, that is largely due to the three of you in many ways, because of your decades of hard work and experience.
DIANA: I think we’d like to say there are other people involved too, Daniel!
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: There are.
DIANA: And the wonderful thing now is all these people who are coming to the law with linguistics, or coming to linguistics as lawyers, what a great… and none of the three of us share that double training and experience.
DANIEL: That is fantastic.
DIANA: And they’re key to the development of this field.
DANIEL: I’ve often thought about the field of forensic linguistics… so I know that forensic linguistics is about language and the law, how those intersect. I kind of feel like it also involves the word “really.” A lot of the questions that you do in forensic linguistics involve the word “really,” like, “Who really wrote this?” “What did they really say?” “Did this person really understand their rights?” “Where is this person really from?” But often, the answer to those “really” questions is, we don’t know. And if you think you do know, you’re probably doing something wrong. And you mentioned this in your book, I should mention that the book is Forensic Linguistics in Australia: Origins, Progress and Prospects. It’s in the Cambridge Elements series. You spend a lot of time in the book correcting a lot of mistakes. Is that how it feels?
DIANA: Absolutely. But someone else can talk now. I’ve just said quite a bit. I think you’re “really” correct.
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Okay, I’m opening this to everybody. Is forensic linguistics the discipline that says no?
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGINA: Go on, Helen. You know you want to say yes.
HELEN: Well, it says no to when things are wrong, and we shouldn’t pretend to be more certain than we are, than we reasonably and justifiably are. But yeah, I wouldn’t really like to characterise it that way, because forensic science more generally, forensic linguistics, there is a branch of it that looks to find out: what can we say from linguistic evidence in court, for example? And sometimes, being able to say something that is right can either get somebody off when they’re innocent or get somebody locked up when they’re guilty, and both of those are really good things to do. The only thing that’s really bad is to do the opposite, let them off when they’re guilty or lock them up when they’re innocent.
I personally do feel that I do work towards trying to develop accountable, evidence-based methods of, for example, transcribing indistinct audio and other such things. And I think it is possible to find such methods. Where it’s not possible, we shouldn’t allow that kind of evidence in. But I don’t see any reason to think that it’s not possible in principle. I think it’s very worthwhile to find good ways of doing it. Having said all that, it’s the first time anybody’s ever asked me that question, so that’s very much a top-of-the-head thought. Others might disagree.
DANIEL: Yay! What do you think, Georgina?
GEORGINA: Look, I agree with what Helen’s saying. It’s incredibly important that we are able to demonstrate when things are being done appropriately or inappropriately with regard to language analysis. And I think there is a particular problem with language that does make us look like Negative Nellies, which is that people do feel that they have more expert knowledge about language than they really have. And this is particularly true of people who work in the legal profession, because they do have expertise with language, it’s just not linguistics. They have expertise in rhetorical use of language and oratory and argument, and often a very extensive knowledge of legal terms, Latin, all kinds of things that relate to language and aspects of communication. But of course, they don’t… unless they have gone and got a linguistics degree, they don’t have the technical knowledge of how language works that a linguist has.
And so, inevitably, there are some problematic beliefs which can expand into ideologies or which can be led by ideology. So, if you have a particular ideological view about the way people behave because of their background, that can be exacerbated by inappropriate or just incorrect beliefs about language. And so, we see problematic decisions being made about whether or not to allow an interpreter for somebody who doesn’t speak English as a first language, for instance.
DANIEL: Yikes. That seems like a slam dunk to me. Why would we think that wouldn’t be okay?
HELEN: Well, you know, there’s all kinds of arguments about that. It’s giving some kind of advantage to someone who maybe partially speaks English… has knowledge of both English and another language but prefers to use an interpreter. Well, that’s seen to be by some as giving an advantage, that they might have more time to consider questions that are put to them, for example.
DANIEL: Okay.
DIANA: And that relates to one of the ideologies that we talk about quite a bit in the book, which is… it rears its ugly head all over the place in all kinds of places in countries like Australia, and that’s the monolingual language ideology. So, there is a very widespread view in countries like Australia that things work best when you’re only operating in one language. And guess what the language is? It’s English. And that’s just not the reality, you would go back to your word “really”, Daniel. It’s not the reality of how 21st century Australia is actually working. But a lot of people who are monolingual and who haven’t learnt to operate partially in a second language have got no idea of what it means to speak, for instance, quite well about the football and the weather and your kids and be totally unable to use that second language to answer complicated questions with complicated grammatical structures.
For example, like in cross examination. “Well, when you saw that at the time, did you think he would have known that you had already blahdy blah?”, that’s a completely different thing from being able to talk about your kids and football. But a lot of people with that monolingual language ideology think that it’s all or nothing. So, you either need an interpreter or you don’t. And that’s one issue that some of the great work of forensic linguists in Australia, like Sandra Hale, Michael Cook, people like that, who’ve been working on interpreting, here’s some of the issues that they’ve dealt with and some very good research and lots of practical applications.
DANIEL: Courtroom English is just this weird register that I, as someone who learned English as my first language, even I would have to do some learning to be able to work it out. So, I don’t see how other people would have a chance. Okay.
DIANA: [LAUGHS] Okay!
DANIEL: So the monolingual language ideology is something that people need to know more about.
HELEN: Daniel, I heard an amazing example of it not long ago on another podcast. I don’t remember what podcast it was, but somebody was interviewing Simon Winchester, who’s a very famous author who’s written a lot about all sorts of historical and contemporary things. And he’s written a new book called Are We Risking Our Ability to Think?
DANIEL: Uh-oh.
HELEN: And it was a long interview, but at one point, he said — and I don’t remember the exact context, but the comment really struck me — He was talking about ancient Greece, and he was saying, “Oh, things were so much better back then. They just spoke one language, Greek, and they didn’t have to clutter up their minds with all sorts of other languages the way people do today.”
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Oh, no! Simonnnnn.
HELEN: That was an incredible weird thing to say from such a well-educated, intelligent polymath of every kind to come out with such a double-whammy nonsense statement that, first of all, they were highly monolingual back then! And second of all, other languages don’t clutter up your brain. Hope you don’t mind me interrupting with that little example.
DANIEL: That’s a great example. I’m so glad you brought that up. And it reminds me of something that people say in connection with language death or language murder or colonisation is that, “Well, if everyone just speaks one language, then they can participate more fully on the world stage.” And by the way, it just happens to be…
DIANA: English.
DANIEL: No points for guessing which language I’m talking about. Human brains are good at doing language, and there’s room for more than one in there.
DIANA: Mm, exactly. And so many people are really disadvantaged in the legal process. People who are monolingual speakers of English are disadvantaged, of course, as you mentioned, Daniel, not just by the words that are used, but by the assumptions. So, for example, if you, as a monolingual English speaker, go to court as a witness and you’re going to tell your story about something that you observed that happened, and you might be very clear in your own mind what that story is. But you can’t tell it the way you would tell someone at home or someone on a podcast. You have to only give tiny little snippets in answer to questions that keep interrupting you all the time and directing your telling of the story in the way that particular lawyer, whether it’s the one who’s called you as their own witness or the one who’s cross-examining you, to show that you can’t be trusted.
So, even down to those very basic things, even monolingual people have trouble and are disadvantaged unless they’ve been trained, legally trained, really, and trained and experienced in that way of communicating and telling a story.
DANIEL: Okay, do we have anything more to say about the monolingual language ideology? Certainly something we need to fight.
DIANA: There’s heaps more, but that’s enough for this, I think.
DANIEL: Let me go on to another problematic language ideology, and that’s the written language ideology. I noticed that one pop up. What’s going on there?
DIANA: Do you want to talk about that, Helen?
HELEN: I can start us off if you like.
DANIEL: I think this is for you, Helen. Yeah, I think so.
HELEN: Okay. I guess the written language ideology, well, it’s got lots of different dimensions just like the monolingual ideology does, but it has lots of different parts. And one of them is that once something’s written down in black and white, it’s kind of more true or more real than it was while it was just some speech waves floating around in the air. And another one, I suppose, is that spoken language is structurally similar to written language. So, that’s where in my field, transcripts come in. There’s a lot of sort of predisposition in the law to believe that a transcript of a recording is basically equivalent to the recording itself. And in linguistics, I’m sure many of your listeners, if they’ve studied any linguistics at all, would know that spoken language and written language are fundamentally different things. So, there’s a couple of aspects of the written language ideology.
DANIEL: I really feel this in our transcripts because the good people at SpeechDocs take our spoken English and turn it into words on a page, and it is so different. And I can really feel for them having to wrestle the tone and the prosody and the feeling. And even… I can hear facial expressions that I can’t see in the transcript, and those all contribute to the meaning.
DIANA: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
HELEN: Indeed. I can mention the work of one of our colleagues in England, which is Kate Haworth at Aston University and Aston Institute of Forensic Linguistics. She’s another person who works on transcripts. I work mainly on transcripts of covert recordings, but she works on the transcripts of police interviews. And she has some great papers really documenting this really strong misconception that the transcript is equivalent to the audio.
So with covert recordings they do at least play the audio in court. There’s all kinds of problems with the way the transcript can influence perception, but they do at least play the audio with the interviews. Often, they don’t play the audio in court because the transcript is there, and it would just take up time to have the audio. And Kate documents some amazing cases where instead of playing the audio, the barristers or the lawyers, they choose among themselves and they kind of read out the parts like the script of a play and as you say, the intonation and their voice quality and all sorts of things play into the meaning of that very strongly.
I had a very disturbing case once quite a few years ago, where it wasn’t an interview, it was a covert recording, but the words on the page, if you read down the page, you thought, “Wow, this person is confessing.” But when you listened to the audio it was more like, [SARCASTIC TONE] “Oh, yeah, so of course it was me that did it. I was the one that did such and such.” In that kind of tone of voice, if you just read the transcript, you get a completely false impression of what the material is. So I guess those are all aspects of the written language ideology that if you’ve written it down and you’ve looked at it, you’ve pretty much got it.
DANIEL: I notice also that we know that the transcript is a representation of what we’re trying to find out about. That’s also true for interpreters. Over and over again in the book, you challenge the idea that an interpreter simply acts as some kind of conduit to transmit meaning, like a pipe, or like a transparent piece of glass. What’s wrong with this idea?
HELEN: Must be your turn, Georgina.
DANIEL: I think it’s Georgina’s turn.
GEORGINA: [LAUGHS] Well, the problem with it is that you can’t make an exact translation from one language to another. Languages differ in their structure and form. So, meaning is transmitted both through the words, the lexical items, but it’s also transmitted through grammatical structures. And sometimes, meanings that are available in one language are simply not available in another language. So, that can pose some difficulties. But also, there can be discrepancies between homophones and homonyms and words that might sound or be spelled the same but have different meanings. So, it can be unclear which of those meanings is intended. So, all kinds of ambiguities in one language that don’t exist in another. And there might be a range of terms that are available for use in one language but not in another.
And this is absolutely critical in a legal context when you’re trying to identify, for example, in cases involving sexual violence, very specifically what happened and what actions were taken. And if you don’t have equivalent terminology from one language to another, for example, the word RAPE might have a broader meaning in one language than another, then that of course, is hugely problematic. And it can be overcome but it might mean that an interpreter needs to engage in some clarification process. And so, if an interpreter needs to ask a question of the court and there’s an ideology that the interpreter is just there as a conduit, then sometimes either that question will be dismissed or they won’t have the opportunity to ask that clarification, or they might be engaged in a clarification with the person who they’re interpreting for, the client. And, of course, they have to explain that clarification process to the court and there can be intolerance for those kinds of exchanges in a courtroom or indeed in a police interview.
I mean, yeah, it does create a lot of problems. There’s also… difficulties arise when somebody speaks English and another language and wishes to move between those languages when they’re communicating but that works best for them. And there’s a sense often from the courtroom that a person, if they have an interpreter there, they must use the interpreter and they must stick to using the interpreter and so therefore always communicate in their chosen language other than English, if we’re talking about an English language courtroom.
But I will way that I think — and this is moving slightly away from your question — but I think that one of the reasons why we’ve been able to do so much work on this in Australia with the cooperation of many institutions across the justice system, or the legal system, I should say, because it doesn’t always deal out justice, does it? I think one of the reasons we’ve been able to make some progress and at least people are willing to listen, is that we have First Nations communities who… I would like to think that our migrant communities who speak languages other than English are also seen as having a right to those languages, but unfortunately, the ideologies get in the way. But one thing that is mostly agreed upon around Australia is that First Nations people who speak languages other than English have many, many reasons for wanting to maintain those languages, and we’re protective of those languages and respectful towards those languages. And I think the research that I’ve done with the Aboriginal Interpreter Service in the Northern Territory, for example, has demonstrated that when we’re talking about First Nations communities’ languages, there’s much more of an effort to create a professional body of interpreters. There’s respect for the work that the interpreters do. In my experience, the judicial officers that I’ve spoken to in the Northern Territory have a deep respect and understanding of what it is that the interpreters are doing and the way they’re working with the speakers of those First Nation languages.
So I think that’s maybe one of the reasons why we’ve been able to get some traction with the legal community in Australia and take a more critical approach to the way we do forensic linguistics in that aspect of language of law and access to justice for multilingual communities, when I compare that to other jurisdictions overseas, for instance, perhaps with the exception of New Zealand. But yeah, many other jurisdictions, I feel, are still grappling with even getting the legal institutions to engage at all.
DANIEL: I want to pivot to Diana on this one. Same sort of question. Do you find that there are these encouraging signs? Would you agree with that assessment for Aboriginal Australians?
DIANA: Oh, absolutely. And one of the things, if I can just go back briefly to what Georgina was saying, I agree with everything she was saying. Another really important thing is that particular individuals within our field, and I’ll mention Sandra Hale, who’s Professor of Translation and Interpreting at University of New South Wales. She was the first person to have a professorship in translation and interpreting in Australia, and she has been working with judicial officer training for a few decades now, I think. And she was very influential in working with other interpreters and judicial officers, and particularly Justice Dean Mildren from the Northern Territory in developing the recommended national standards for working with interpreters and translators in courts and tribunals in Australia. And that is very influential now. So, that’s setting out best practice and guidelines, guidelines for court officials, guidelines for judges and magistrates, guidelines for interpreters, guidelines for lawyers, all about the way that interpreters work.
So, that’s a really promising sign in the area of interpreting those recommended national standards. And they go across the board for all interpreting areas. As Georgina says, the organisation of just only a few particular Aboriginal interpreter services has been really important and a lot more is to be done with that.
But also, with the area I work in, and my own research is with Aboriginal people who speak varieties of English as their first language. So, I’m particularly interested in how the subtle sociolinguistic and cultural issues affect the way that English is used and interpreted. But I find that there is a great openness among many judicial officers punctuated with a shocking [CHUCKLES] unwillingness to hear anything about it by some others. So, every time I start feeling really comfortable and — well, not comfortable, that’d be too strong a word — but feeling like there’s headway, then I hear about some really unenlightened lawyer or judicial officer who is unwilling to listen and accept these things. Also, when you think about it, particularly in the criminal justice area, lawyers and judicial officers in Australia know only too well that we are failing Indigenous, particularly Aboriginal people, in the criminal justice system. The system hasn’t worked out how to adequately communicate with Aboriginal people particularly, but it is working on it.
But yeah, there have been some very important judicial decisions, and that’s one aspect. There’s been a fair bit of judicial training. A highlight, I think, is the Supreme Court of the Northern Territory in 2012, 2015, and 2019, it’s organised three Language and the Law conferences. To my knowledge, no other court in Australia organises a conference at which judicial officers are only part of the intended participants. So, those conferences that they’ve organised have brought together judicial officers, lawyers, lots and lots of interpreters, a few academics, including Georgina and myself and Sandra Hale, and just a few police officers have accepted the invitations to come along.
But they have been great and enlightening and very well-organised conferences that enable people from all those different professions to participate in different kinds of ways and really sit down and listen to each other and learn from each other. And I think that’s one of the most encouraging things that I’ve seen. And you get that synergistic effect when people with different experiences and expertises get together and talk about shared problems. It is a real synergy and yeah, it’s a great sign of hope, I think.
DANIEL: Wow, fantastic.
HELEN: Daniel, of course, I agree wholeheartedly with everything both of the others have said. It’s not my personal area, but I have so much admiration for the great work that’s been done in relation to improving the interpreting in courts and interviews and all sorts of places. But I also want to mention a sort of paradoxical thing about translators and interpreters in relation to language in evidence, which is typically recorded speech from one source or another. And we’ve spoken a bit about, especially in the past, but still a little bit, there isn’t always enough recognition of the expertise that goes into translation. It is sometimes just seen as: just look up the dictionary and substitute the words of one language to the another.
DANIEL: A computer could do that.
HELEN: Anybody could do that if they had enough time or something. But the paradoxical thing is that while the law and others, not just the law, all of these ideologies and misconceptions, we talk about them in relation to the law and it sounds like it’s just them that are the baddies. These are things that pervade the whole of society. But paradoxically, while thinking that translation is simple and interpreters and translators don’t need specific skill, high-level skills to do their job of translating, interpreting, the law also gives them a much higher level of expertise than it should in relation to identifying voices and profiling speakers and recognising people’s accents or saying, “Is this the same speaker as that speaker?” in a recording. All of that sort of thing.
And it’s a bit of a shame because sometimes interpreters and translators themselves have a little overconfidence in that area. I mean, most people do. Everybody thinks they can recognise voices or identify if somebody comes from the north of the country or the south of the country, or how educated they are and all of that sort of thing, but we’re often wrong.
So, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to work with AUSIT, the Australian Institute for Interpreters and Translators at the end of the year to create some sort of statement from that organisation to just remind interpreters and translators that really in order to do that sort of work, you actually need a whole another set of skills and a whole another type of expertise in speaker comparison and accent recognition and all of that sort of thing.
So, I just thought it’s worth balancing out the other things that were said with that other topic that has a little less awareness, but hopefully will gain some more awareness.
DANIEL: Totally agree. And I just wanted to expand on that a little bit because in the book, you mentioned LADO, L-A-D-O, Language Analysis for the Determination of the Origin of asylum seekers, which is another group that faces some real challenges in this domain. Somebody comes to Australia without any papers and for a while there, people were saying, “Okay, let’s figure out where they’re really from.” And they use this technique called LADO, and it’s like, “Oh, no, you don’t really sound like you’re from Egypt. So, you’re not from there.” But they’ve been in a camp for two years talking to everybody. Of course, they’re not going to sound like they did at the beginning of that period. What’s the status? Is that just junk science and is it still being used?
DIANA: [LAUGHS] Good question.
HELEN: I think we’ll get Diana to talk about that one.
DIANA: Okay.
DANIEL: Evil laughter. Okay.
DIANA: Yeah, look, the good thing is, to our knowledge, it’s not being used in Australia or very rarely being used in Australia. Helen and I and three other Australians worked on this issue when a lawyer drew our attention to it at the beginning of this century. So, we worked on exposing how bad some of that stuff was in a paper that we published in 2003, in a report, of course, that we first sent to the Immigration Department who, to my knowledge, actually never replied. But anyway, sorry, that’s a bit of an aside. It is still happening in countries overseas. However, there’s a greater awareness of the problematic nature of the way some of that work is being done, and some of the work is being done much more carefully. The issue is not resolved. There are several problems. One problem is the monolingual language ideology and its accompaniments, which means if you come from this part of Afghanistan, then you should say this word, not that word. And as you mentioned, Daniel, what if you’ve been in a camp? What if other family members came from somewhere else? etc.
DANIEL: What if language variation?
DIANA: Yes, exactly. Well, they’re supposed to get experts to understand the language variation, but they don’t always, and there aren’t always enough experts anyway. So, there are those issues.
But the other issue is that some linguists who do this kind of work don’t really understand the forensic aspects of it, and they don’t really have a very good hold on what they should be looking at and how to be looking at it, if I can say that in general terms. So, it is a difficult thing, and no one should be rushing into that area unless they’re very well qualified on the particular language in case or the language varieties in case at hand, and they have a good understanding of the questions that they’re being asked. So, again, this is a problem where, oftentimes, there’s an oversimplistic approach. And then, people can claim an expertise that they don’t really have. So, we’re very relieved that that’s not being used in Australia.
DANIEL: Yeah.
HELEN: I do want to just clarify. Again, I totally agree with everything Diana’s just said. And I want to give credit to Diana, she said Helen and I, but it was really Diana that started all that, and she’s very well known for having brought that all forward in Australia to very good effect. I just want to clarify that what I was talking about before, that’s happening in criminal law in Australia. LADO is specifically to do with immigration law, and it affects asylum seekers.
DANIEL: That’s right.
HELEN: And, of course, asylum seekers are specifically disadvantaged in the most awful ways. If we had our colleague, Laura Smith-Khan, here, she would tell you about how the cards are really stacked against them in so many linguistic and legal ways.
DANIEL: Oof.
HELEN: But I was talking more about in our everyday criminal law. That doesn’t necessarily only affect disadvantaged people. Obviously, people who come from disadvantaged groups are extra disadvantaged in those ways. But a lot of the problems in the way language is used as evidence really affect everybody, and it stems from misconceptions in the law about what language is and how language works, all the things that we’ve been talking about, and this idea that if you speak a foreign language, you must be very, very clever and you must be able to do all sorts of other amazing things, like recognising voices and identifying accents and things like that. I don’t know if there’s a specific ideology associated with that. If there isn’t, there should because that is part of it, I suppose.
DANIEL: You’ve all been working together for a long time. What was it like getting this book together?
GEORGINA: It’s funny you say we’ve been working together because actually we realised that, although we know each other very well and we have worked on projects like some of the ones that we’ve mentioned, we’ve never written anything together.
DANIEL: Oh!
GEORGINA: And, yeah! I know, right?
DIANA: Actually, no, qualifications we were doing.
GEORGINA: You and Helen might have, but the three of us.
DIANA: Helen and I did, but the three of us haven’t.
GEORGINA: The three of us together haven’t written anything together, and we haven’t engaged in co-investigators on a research project together. But yeah, it was actually a real pleasure. I mean, for me especially, because my good colleagues are up there in sunny New South Wales, so I don’t often get to see them. So, it was really lovely to have these regular catchup and discussions and work through these issues. It was such a pleasure.
DIANA: And we learned so much from each other.
DANIEL: Yeah, like what?
DIANA: It was really good.
HELEN: I think we all went into it thinking, “Oh, this will be easy. We’ll just write down what we know.” And we all knew each other, so I thought, “Oh, yeah, I know what Diana thinks. I know what Georgina, and I’ll write my bit.” But then when we started actually writing it, and then each one was saying, “Oh, hang on, you can’t use that word in that way,” and blah, blah, blah.
[LAUGHTER]
HELEN: And then, we just discovered it was a lot more work than we expected, but it was also a lot more interesting and educational than I personally expected.
DIANA: Yeah, what both of you have said is absolutely true. I mean, there was no way… I was actually asked to do it originally by Cambridge, and I thought, “Oh, what a great idea, to have something that brings together everything about forensic linguistics in Australia. We better do it soon before there’s too much to write about.” But I said, “I can’t do it on my own. I need to ask Helen and Georgina.” And I knew that from the start, that we needed to put the three heads together, but I hadn’t realised yet just how much we needed each other and also how much richer even the bits that I knew were from Helen and Georgina critiquing it, etc. So, it was a very collaborative thing, and we have all three of us been over every sentence many, many times, haven’t we?
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Well, it is a ripping read. Let me just ask one final question. I’m sure that we’ll be talking again sometimes, if you are willing, but what’s the work that you want people to think of when they think of you? When they think about what you’ve done, what do you think stands out?
GEORGINA: I mean, collectively, I would hope that we’ve created a really strong foundation for the upcoming generation of forensic linguistic scholars to be able to stand up with pride and say: Yes, I belong to the forensic linguistics community in Australia, and that’s a strong community, and I have a community, and I have a sense of belonging. Because as scholars, I think we all started off feeling very lonely and not really having a sense of community, feeling like forensic linguistics was perhaps something that was done elsewhere, and there were stronger communities overseas, and we’ve all engaged very strongly with those international communities. But in the time that I’ve been involved in this world since the 1990s, what I’ve seen is that there’s a real passion for and talent for forensic linguistics in Australia, despite the fact it’s a very niche field. I think we punch above our weight, if I can use that rather ugly metaphor, on the world stage.
And I think that is absolutely down to the foundational work that Diana did very early on and then following that up with the incredible engagement that both Diana and Helen have done in the field and the many other people. And I want to say one of the things we’ve been paranoid about is that we’ve not mentioned somebody’s work, and we’ve really tried to delve very deeply into the field to make sure that we have represented as many people as possible in this, and the fabulous contributions that everybody’s made.
DANIEL: How about you, Helen? What do you think?
HELEN: Well, I’d echo everything that Georgina has said, and I think one of themes of the book… or the Element, it’s not really a book, it’s just very little… if any, of your listeners are thinking, “Oh, I don’t have time to read a whole book.” Don’t worry, it’s a very, very little book.
DIANA: It’s somewhere between a book and a booklet.
HELEN: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: It’s a quick read, but it’s very deep, you know. There’s a lot in there.
HELEN: But I think one of themes in the booklet [ALL CHUCKLE] was about a feature of Australian forensic linguistics really is the engagement between the linguists and the lawyers and the judiciary. And obviously, that comes partly from the linguist. We put ourselves out there and spoke truth to power and all that sort of stuff as much as we could. But I think it also speaks very highly of the judiciary that we have in Australia and that they are… obviously, they’re not all angels by any means, but there is a very substantial number of them that genuinely do care about justice and are interested in hearing other points of view and questioning things and engaging back. So, yeah, I think that’s an important thing.
So that’s a theme in the book. So, there’s loads about that in there going back quite a few decades, even before our time, and then starting with Diana’s establishment of… not really establishment of the field, but she really played a big role in bringing about what Georgina was talking about, having a community that called itself forensic linguistics and had workshops and stuff like that. That’s all quite good stuff, I think! Something to feel good about.
DANIEL: I think so too. What do you reckon, Diana?
DIANA: Well, I’ll second or third what Georgina and Helen have said. Thank you. Thank you for exaggerating my contribution. It’s definitely been a collaborative effort bringing this element together about forensic linguistics in Australia, and it’s definitely been a collaborative effort with linguists and legal professionals and judicial officers, as Helen was pointing out, in making some kind of contribution to understanding the role of language in justice and in injustice in Australia.
So, I guess, yeah, I’d like people to think that, yeah, I was part of that process where the law got to understand more about how language works and doesn’t work in the legal process. And how linguists who started off being fascinated with perhaps academic topics or a particular sort of thing that they’d learnt in their undergraduate linguistics, how we’ve then learnt about the law, enough we hope, to be able to make a contribution. And in that regard then, as we say at the end of the book, we’re very encouraged by the new generation in our field, many of whom bring together both training and experience in language and law. And who we know we will just take this work in this field much further, and we look forward to being the beneficiaries of that too.
HELEN: Can I just add one little thing? It’s not about what will be remembered for or anything like that, it’s just more about the writing process.
DANIEL: Sure.
HELEN: I think all of us were very keenly aware of how much input we had from other colleagues who…
DIANA: Definitely.
HELEN: …aren’t authors, but we all consulted widely with our other colleagues. But I in particular, I did the section on their history of forensic phonetics, or specifically forensic speaker identification, or voice comparison, as it’s called now, but basically figuring out who the speakers are. And I just thought I knew about that. A lot of it, I lived through, but I ended up learning a great deal about that and benefited a lot from my colleagues in forensic speech science, especially Phil Rose, formerly of ANU. And some of the real old timers from the Australian Speech Science and Technology Association way back in the early ’90s were starting off the Forensic Speech Science Standards Committee and getting all that kind of thing started. And going back even further right to the 1970s, where there was a gentleman who’s well retired now, called Alex Jones, who started doing… one of the first people, first person to do forensic speaker identification work in Australia in an absolutely amazing case, which you can read about in the Element. So, I’d like to just thank all of those people very much for all their contributions to the book and also for their contributions to forensic speech science.
DANIEL: The book or booklet or Element is Forensic Linguistics in Australia: Origins, Progress and Prospects. It’s available from Cambridge University Press. And I’ve been talking to the authors, Dr Helen Fraser, Dr Georgina Heydon, and Dr… I should be saying professor at some point. Who wants to be professor? Who’s professor?
[LAUGHTER]
GEORGINA: I’m a professor.
DIANA: We can all be professor, and we can all be a doctor.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: And Dr Diana Eades. It’s been an absolute honour to have you all three of you on our show for this discussion. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for being available and coming on and chatting.
GEORGINA: Thank you, Daniel.
DIANA: Thanks, Daniel.
HELEN: [CROSSTALK] …don’t have to fix anybody’s ingrown toenails.
GEORGINA: [LAUGHS]
DIANA: Thanks very much.
GEORGINA: Thanks.
DANIEL: Sorry, what was that about ingrown toenails? I missed that.
HELEN: You can call us doctors as long as we don’t have to fix anybody’s ingrown toenails.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Sounds good.
DIANA: Agreed! Agreed.
[TRANSITIONAL MUSIC]
DANIEL: And now, let’s head over to Words of the Week. We’ve got a lot of them here.
BEN: Oh, we do. I’m not looking. I’m not looking.
DANIEL: Okay, first one comes from Jill, via email. “Hope you’re having a great week. In case no one else has already mentioned this one, I wanted to suggest RAINBOW CAPITALISM for Word of the Week.” By the way, Ben…
BEN: I think I can guess this one.
DANIEL: Yeah, this one’s easy. Oh, by the way, Happy Pride. Didn’t mention.
BEN: Thank you, to you as well.
DANIEL: Thank you. Rainbow capitalism, what do you reckon?
BEN: Yeah, I’m assuming it’s the sort of the somewhat — not entirely — somewhat modern phenomenon of sort of, I’m using air quotes here, “pandering” to the gay dollar during Pride and just generally, I guess.
DANIEL: Yes.
BEN: I’ve also heard extremely cynical takes on, like, the PINK DOLLAR is female spending, the RAINBOW DOLLAR is gay spending, the BLACK DOLLAR is black spending, the YELLOW DOLLAR is Asian spending.
DANIEL: Okay, interesting.
BEN: Awful, awful, gross. The kind of thing that only white advertisers would engage in. But it’s certainly a thing that unfortunately I have heard of and am aware of.
DANIEL: Yep. Jill continues, “This one popped up in my Instagram feed a few times this week after incidents with major US retailers like Target taking Pride products off their shelves after customers complained about them. Basically, profiting off queer and trans people and abandoning them as soon as it affects their bottom line.”
BEN: That is a bit unu… I’m a little surprised to hear that because for the most part, what I’ve seen is companies being like, “Yup, gays, fine.” They’ll do some sort of relatively tokenistic sexual diversity campaign or something like that, and then there’ll be backlash. But they’ll just… Mostly what I’ve observed is like Nike or whatever being like, “Shut up and go away.” But yeah, okay, I’m sad to hear that. I’m wondering if it’s a thing of just… in a vertically integrated enterprise like Target… I’m going to be reductive here, if a whole bunch of people jump up and down in Alabama and some local store manager is then just going to go, “All right, well, I’m just going to pull this product off this store’s shelves,” kind of thing.
DANIEL: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I was really disheartened to see some of the Pride stuff being walked back and that’s not what we’re trying to do.
BEN: Yeah, it seems a bit dumb. Look, which is not to say that there haven’t been some really dumb pro-Pride, some really tone deaf, “Oh, if I just say this right collection of queer adjacent words in a marketing campaign, everyone will love me”, right? There has been a fair bit of that going on, which is really unfortunate, right? Like, if you want to do something that is oriented towards a particular group of people, the very least you can do is get members of that community into your brainstorming sessions to be like, “How do we address this community?”
DANIEL: Oh, yeah. The best take that I’ve seen on RAINBOW CAPITALISM comes from Charles Oberonn posting on Tumblr. This is from… You know Aperture Science?
BEN: No.
DANIEL: The game.
BEN: No.
DANIEL: Is it Portal? Who does Portal? Is it Aperture?
BEN: Oh, sorry. Portal, yes. Sorry. Yes.
DANIEL: Okay, so Aperture is funny. They got a really funny sort of vibe about their games. I’m not sure if this is genuinely from Aperture or if it’s satire, but I’ll just read this.
BEN: So, so… hold on. Before you make yourself look silly. [TYPING RAPIDLY]
DANIEL: Yes, please.
BEN: I think that Aperture Science is the… yes, is an in-game company.
DANIEL: That’s right. Okay.
BEN: So, Aperture is not a real thing. It is like a fictitious company that exists within the Half-Life and Portal games.
DANIEL: That’s it. Okay, cool. Got it. And I have even played Portal a little bit, but okay. Aperture Science announcement voice, “Congratulations, homosexual! Your existence has been deemed profitable in the following regions North America, Western Europe, and Australia. [BEN CHUCKLES] To celebrate the occasion, we have temporarily recolored all Aperture Science appliances in these regions to your favourite flavor of gay. For further pandering on a wider area, please continue fighting for basic human dignities, and Aperture Science will be right there to celebrate your victory with you. Afterwards.”
BEN: Now, you know who’s the announcer’s voice is, don’t you?
DANIEL: I don’t.
BEN: I want everyone to imagine all of that in J. K. Simmons’ voice.
DANIEL: [EXHALES] Okay, you know how I’m kind of removed from pop culture and you’re the explainer?
BEN: [SIGHS] Oh, Daniel, really? J. K. Simmons.
DANIEL: Just sort it out for me.
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: I’m thinking of Gene Simmons, the actress?
BEN: No, no, J. K. Simmons is the guy… he famously is Jonah Jameson from everything Spider Man for the last 20 years.
DANIEL: Oh, that guy. Okay, so what I’ve got to do is like, [IN SIMMONS’ VOICE] “This kind of thing.”
BEN: But he’s also been in like a billion other things. He’s the Whiplash antagonist. How’s that?
DANIEL: Yes, yes, I got him. Okay. Well, as a straight guy, I don’t have any stake in this discussion.
BEN: Sure.
DANIEL: I do like seeing corporate support of Pride and queer stuff.
BEN: Argh. I’m going to be Hedvig in her stead because I can absolutely imagine the good sort of European comrade sort of chiming in here and being like, “Capitalism is not the vehicle for emancipation.”
DANIEL: No, it’s not. But people often do express themselves in terms of the companies they support, and I think companies themselves…
BEN: And I get that. Look, we exist within a system and so we’ve got to work… short of, like, full tilt anarcho sort of revolution, right? we have to in some way or another exist within the system. It’s just every time we talk about, “a company doing a nice thing for gay people,” I always just sort of button that moment with like: But don’t forget, the profit motive will always fuck you eventually.
DANIEL: Well, though I understand companies’ impulse to try to be supportive in some way, I can see also how this rings very hollow for people with an actual stake in this discussion.
BEN: Yeah. Especially, it’s all well and good for me to criticise the fact that corporate behavior is not a road to emancipation, but I will admit that it’s even worse when it’s, like, hollow, half-intended, not-followed-through corporate behavior.
DANIEL: Buckles at the first sign of a boycott.
BEN: “Oh, no. Someone said a mean thing on WhatsApp, better pull all the products.”
DANIEL: What sucks is low-paid employees are having to bear the brunt of people’s wrath about these kinds of displays.
BEN: Yeah. I just refer to my previous point. It’s almost like the corporate methodology is super fucked.
DANIEL: On our Discord, people are calling it RAINBOW WASHING.
BEN: Oh, yeah.
DANIEL: So, I went through and looked at all of our shows to see where we’ve also mentioned WASHING. And one is GREEN WASHING, about the environment. PINK WASHING, when companies make a display of supporting cancer research while still selling carcinogenic products. HUMANE WASHING, which is about animal research or animal products. And then, MATH WASHING, which is about seeming to be objective in your research because you’re using math and therefore, some…
BEN: Right! Look: numbers!
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] See, that’s math washing.
BEN: “My words have numbers in them. I can’t be lying.”
DANIEL: “How can that not be good?” All right, let’s go to the next one. This one was suggested by Ben, Not the Host One on our Discord server. You are aware of in Perth — and I understand in Sydney as well — there’s a company called Bayswater Car Rental?
BEN: Mm-hmm.
DANIEL: And their slogan?
BEN: “No birds.”
DANIEL: “No birds.”
BEN: It’s very bizarre. It’s almost entered very micro pop culture lore. Like different people have theories on what the nonsense slogan means, all that kind of stuff.
DANIEL: And do you have an understanding of why their slogan is “No Birds”?
BEN: My understanding has always been that their official line is that it’s not a sexist thing. Like, it had nothing to do with women’s anything. It was more to do with… Look, I don’t believe them…
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Right. I’m surprised they would try to…
BEN: I want to be clear! But I have heard them say many a time, “Oh, no, we don’t mean women. That’s not why we have that saying.” And then, someone goes, “Well, why do you have the saying?” And they’re like, “I don’t know.”
DANIEL: Why were they running for years and years and years, ads… like, page-three style ads featuring a woman that appeared to be topless — just the shoulders — with that little speech balloon, “No Birds.” Just that’s odd that they would say it’s not related to women at all. Here’s the real story. In Perth, circa 1950s, when you hired a car, they would sometimes send a young lady driver to deliver it to you.
BEN: …Oh!
DANIEL: So, Bayswater Car Rental…
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: …didn’t do that. They would not send a young woman to deliver the car to you. And so, they would say, “Well, we’re not using women. No birds.” So, we’re not paying extra for that service. And that means that our service is cheaper.
BEN: Right. It was like, no frills, what you see is what you get, kind of vibe. Right.
DANIEL: That’s it. And I had no idea that was the origin until I read the ABC article. It’s going to be on our website.
BEN: Wow. Imagine the days when renting a car meant it got, like, delivered to you. How did these girls get home? That’s what I want to know.
DANIEL: I do not know the answer to that question. It seems that the company does exist in Sydney, and it’s not called Bayswater, it’s called No Birds Car Rental.
BEN: Yeah, right. Okay.
DANIEL: So, the controversy is, will they be rebranding? Would it be too difficult for them to change?
BEN: So, it’s like another Cheer Cheese scenario type thing?
DANIEL: Precisely. And it seems like it’s going to be a lot of work for them to rebrand, but some pressure is existing. A lot of people are saying, “Why is this still a thing? Why is this still having this name?” So, I thought that was an interesting little slice of pop culture from Perth and Australia.
BEN: So, why do we call women birds? I know it’s a very British thing.
DANIEL: It is. Bird has meant a lot of things. So, I checked out Green’s Dictionary of Slang and they have a lot of definitions. One is a girl. One is a man who’s always in trouble.
BEN: Oh, like a jail bird or something like that.
DANIEL: I guess so, that seems to make sense. Another one is the penis.
BEN: Classic.
DANIEL: What else?
BEN: Which word doesn’t really have an associated meaning for penis?
DANIEL: Or women, for that matter. So, the women as birds, that dates back to the 1300s, and I think it’s just metaphorical. You could call someone a pig or you could call someone a bird, and that means they’re pretty and they fly around and the association is very strong.
BEN: There we go.
DANIEL: Next one suggested by Diego on our Discord server, BEIGE FLAGS, have you run across this one?
BEN: Yeah, I’ve come across this one. I really like this, and I feel like this is one of those things that I knew about but didn’t have a good word for. And then it came along, and I was… one of those great situations where you’re like, “Yeah, I’ve needed a word for that.”
DANIEL: So, a red flag is a warning sign, obviously, but a beige flag?
BEN: It is a warning, but it’s not a danger warning. It’s a boring warning.
DANIEL: A boring warning.
BEN: Right, so my… How about this, Daniel? What are some of your… when I say your beige flags, what are some beige flags you would look out for in a potential romantic partner?
DANIEL: Having a really strong stand on the Oxford comma, as a proxy for your personality.
BEN: I would go… so okay, in terms of bifurcating choices, mine is just having a strong opinion on pineapple on pizza.
DANIEL: Yeah. Okay.
BEN: You like it, you don’t like it, who the fuck cares? It’s boring. It’s a boring thing to talk about. The idea that someone would be like, “Oh, do you like pineapple on pizza?” “Yeah, I do.” “Whaaat?”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS]
BEN: Wow. That is a level of emotion that this interaction does not require.
DANIEL: Or like, “Good job, man. Fist bump. Team Pineapple.”
BEN: Yeah, yeah, yeah! ~Team Pineapple, let’s go!~
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] Fine.
BEN: So, that’s a beige flag for me. Another one, I’m sorry to say it, and I’m probably going to piss some people off: liking reality television.
DANIEL: Just liking Friends. I think liking Friends is a beige flag.
BEN: Oh, okay!
DANIEL: Since we’re cheesing people off here.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Let’s just make enemies willy-nilly.
DANIEL: Why not?
BEN: One more from each of us. Another beige flag.
DANIEL: I don’t think I can think of one. This is a concept that I haven’t really…
BEN: Oh, oh, oh.
DANIEL: I don’t know if you know, but I’ve been out of the dating scene for quite a while, Ben.
BEN: Yeah, but I mean, you can imagine. Um… Another one for me is… oh, this is a thing, this was not, like, a romantic partner, but I just remember thinking when this person said this to me, like, “Whoa, that’s really boring.” Someone who just flat out is like: I don’t enjoy animation. Like, the entire form.
DANIEL: Oh! That’s a pretty broad category.
BEN: And when you query them, they’re like, “Yeah, I’m not a kid. I don’t watch kids’ things.” And I’m just like, [SHOCKED GROAN]
DANIEL: Okay, I do know a beige flag. I said, “Man, I love this book. Every time I read it, I sort of pick out new…” And she said, “Why would you read a book again?”
BEN: Oh! [SHOCKED LAUGH] Oh, no.
DANIEL: That’s a big beige flag.
BEN: That’s a borderline red flag. That’s like a red-tinged beige flag.
DANIEL: A maroon flag. [LAUGHS] Okay, but, Ben, the thing that you’re describing, this definition of beige flag is kind of the v1 iteration of beige flag. It’s changed.
BEN: Oh. Do tell please. Please go on.
DANIEL: People are now on TikTok especially, talking about beige flags as: in a relationship, a kind of a weird, interesting quirk that your partner has. It’s a little different.
BEN: Okay. I’ve seen this sort of semantic shift happen a little bit. I’ve also seen this overlap… The intersection Venn diagram with this is TOXIC TRAIT. So, toxic trait obviously is, in its OG form, like people exhibiting genuinely harmful destructive behaviors. But I’ve seen a lot of people start saying, like: My toxic trait is…
DANIEL: Oh, right.
BEN: I open up a pack of chips when the other pack of chips has already been opened, or something like that.
DANIEL: [CHUCKLES] Right.
BEN: And I’m noticing that beige flag is sort of doing a similar thing someone like: My partner’s beige flag is…. And then, they’ll describe something that’s kind of mildly annoying, but also kind of indicative of a person just being probably quite nice and nondescript.
DANIEL: Yeah. Um, I asked my young son about this one, and he named being afraid of heaters as potentially a beige flag because just, like…
BEN: Being afraid of heaters, items that heat a room.
DANIEL: That’s what I asked. Items that heat things. He says, “The fact that they have potential to make things too hot.” That’s a beige flag. It’s just some little quirky thing that your partner has, and it’s a beige flag. Thank you, Diego, for that one.
BEN: Next.
DANIEL: This one’s suggested by new patron, Keith.
BEN: Hello, Keith.
DANIEL: Hello, Keith. PLAYING WITH THEIR FOOD.
BEN: Okay, I’m assuming there’s a new meaning other than the one I’m familiar with.
DANIEL: I think that you’ll probably be aware of this one. Keith sent this message before the second indictment of a certain former US President. [LAUGHTER] I won’t be too specific, because wait, no, there’s only one that’s been indicted. He says, “This isn’t a new phrase, but it’s popping up in a new context. As we here in the States await indictments…” — again, we’re no longer awaiting but — “in several potential cases against former President Trump, the talking heads on cable news have jumped on the phrase ‘prosecutors like to play with their food’ as a way of cautioning us not to be surprised or disappointed if those indictments don’t come as quickly as we might hope or expect them to.”
BEN: I have not come across this phrase used in this way. Not at all.
DANIEL: No, I haven’t either. Although… And Keith goes on, “The image that comes to my mind is of a cat tormenting a mouse before pouncing on it.” And I know that’s something that cats do.
BEN: Oh, okay. I… see, my connotation to this is a kid playing… There’s nothing predatory involved. It’s like the annoying messiness of a baby.
DANIEL: I don’t think of this as playing with their food or either tormenting someone or just wasting time moving food around. I think that they do take their time to make a case, which is why DOJ has this massive conviction rate. They’re very successful.
BEN: Is it not the case that the talking heads who might be using this phrase are the ones who might not have a particularly flattering base position on the DOJ, full stop?
DANIEL: Ah. Good question. I could still see somebody using it if they wanted to say, “Hey, now, we sometimes do take a while for these things to happen. So, if you’re really excited about it, maybe calm your… calm your farm.”
BEN: I guess it is a strange usage, I have to say.
DANIEL: I think so. And Keith finishes, “As always thanks for a consistently entertaining and informative show. It’s always a good day when a new episode drops into my feed.” Thanks, Keith.
BEN: No, Keith. It’s always a good day when someone called Keith brings us cool, interesting information.
DANIEL: And becomes a patron. Ben, happy indictment day two.
BEN: [LAUGHS] Second indictment day. The Indictenering.
DANIEL: Indictment 2: Treason Boogaloo. I feel like Boogaloo is ruined for me, but maybe that’s thematic.
BEN: Yeah, probably. Indictment 2: Treason at 30,000 Feet.
DANIEL: Oh, nice.
BEN: Treason in the Bathroom, Eh? Because the image of his bathroom has been doing… Treason Indictment 2: Toilet Chandelier.
DANIEL: I like it.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: Treason in the Bathroom just makes me think of that English Beat song, so I can’t.
BEN: Okay. Last one?
DANIEL: Let’s go with the last one. Andy from Logophilius has given us this one. “I saw this today for the first time: SYNTHESPIAN.”
BEN: A synthetic thespian?
DANIEL: Yes, it is.
BEN: I’m going to guess this is to do with ChatGPT being used to make plays.
DANIEL: No, not this time.
BEN: Oh, okay.
DANIEL: This one is more visual. A computer-generated three-dimensional character either in a wholly animated film or in one that is a mixture of live action and computer animation. Andy says, “I hate it. Get your newfangled words off my lawn. But I don’t have a good replacement. Maybe CGP, computer-generated personality or MEGABIT PLAYER.”
BEN: Oh, no, that’s a hard pass on the last one for me. Sorry, Andy.
DANIEL: I like that. I like that. [LAUGHS]
BEN: Are we talking Jar Jar Binks?
DANIEL: That would be an example, yes, of a synthespian. That doesn’t hit right. I’m not a fan of this one either.
BEN: Okay. So, like, Gollum is another one.
DANIEL: Babs Bunny in Space Jam. No, wait. That’s not CG. It’s got to be CG.
BEN: Does it?
DANIEL: Yeah.
BEN: Why does it have to be computer generated? Why can it not be Roger Rabbit?
DANIEL: If it’s Roger Rabbit, then it’s something different. It’s just a traditional animated character.
BEN: Why is that different? We just use computers! Does all math that has involved a computer now get called not-math? Is it like compumath? No, we still just call it math.
DANIEL: You’re right. Maybe we are giving it…
BEN: We’re just animating things with different tools.
DANIEL: We’re giving it too much primacy if it’s a computer thing. Yeah, we’re doing it…
BEN: I think so. For no other reason, that it’s not like they didn’t have to artificially make Roger Rabbit and paint him onto those cels of film like they did.
DANIEL: Yeah, they did. Maybe we need to rethink this.
BEN: Anyway. I’ve zeroed in on the wrong part of this. I apologise.
DANIEL: No, I think this is valid. I think we all go, “Why do we need a word for this thing? Why do we need to say it’s specifically computer?” It doesn’t have to be.
BEN: I think we could potentially use a word for non-live action…. Yeah, I don’t know. A computer-generated three-dimensional character, either in a wholly animated… why would you call it not just CHARACTER?
DANIEL: CHARACTER. There we go.
BEN: Look, perhaps… I think maybe what Andy might be trying to zero in on here is you can’t really say… like, I recently saw the new Spider Man film. I can’t say, “Oh, I thought Miles Morales’s performance was bad.” Right? Because he’s a fake thing. He’s been animated. Then, I would say, “Oh, I really loved the character’s physicality. Just that the use of physical comedy with Miles’ character was tremendous.” I don’t feel like I need to be like, “Oh, that synthespian was tremendous.” [LAUGHS] I can just talk about the character.
DANIEL: Every once in a while, I’ll see a tweet or I’ll see a message saying, “We need a word for X.” And the thing that I always think now is: if we really needed a word for X, we would darn well have a word for it already.
BEN: Yeah. We have words for all the things we need words for.
DANIEL: If there’s not a word for it, I don’t know, maybe we don’t need a word for that thing.
BEN: That’s just linguistics!
DANIEL: We would probably do it! We’re pretty good!
BEN: But to be fair, to give a fair shake of the stick on that one, new words come from somewhere. So, before the new word comes along, we had a need for it, which is what gave… Like the Great Filter, right? there is such a thing as being on the before time of…
DANIEL: Back to that.
BEN: ≤a word needing to exist. There’s a crossover period, but I’m going to rule on this one. SYNTHESPIAN, not it. Not it.
DANIEL: And I’m sure that Andy from Logophilius would agree with us. But now it’s out there. If you have an idea as to whether we need a term for a synthetic character or what it should be, I would love to hear it. Why don’t you get those to us, hello@becauselanguage.com. But for now, RAINBOW CAPITALISM or RAINBOW WASHING, BIRDS for women, BEIGE FLAGS, PLAYING WITH THEIR FOOD, and SYNTHESPIAN, our Words of the Week.
BEN: [SHUDDERS] I agree with Andy. Get off my lawn.
DANIEL: Let’s get some comments. This one’s from Ditte. “Listening to the episode number 76 now and got to the Danes don’t say HUH? part.” People who speak Danish don’t seem to say HUH, instead they say HVA. Dita says, “I would like to disagree. I say HVA, certainly. But I definitely do also say not HUH exactly, but some sort of hmm-ish sound, especially if I’m kind of still not super focused on the conversation and I’m fairly sure I hear other Danes do it too. Might be more common in younger people who also use and hear a fair bit of English. And in writing it down, I’m sure it would get changed to HVA, but I feel very confident that a HUH like sound is not nonexistent, however much I would love for us to be the weird kid once again.”
BEN: [LAUGHS] Danes, you cads.
DANIEL: Ditte, that would have been a great SpeakPipe comment. Head over to our website, becauselanguage.com. What’s the next one?
BEN: We should probably talk about SpeakPipe at the beginning of the episodes, I reckon, because I think there’s a lot of people who don’t listen to this bit.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Our next one comes from Alesio on mastodon@becauselangpod. “Wanted to give you my two cents re propaganda v. fake news.” I presume were talking about this on a show?
DANIEL: We were. Hedvig and I were talking about how PROPAGANDA seems to be used to promote a thing, and you know what the source is, “Oh, it’s the Propaganda Ministry.” Whereas FAKE NEWS can be used for a multitude of different purposes, not just promotion, and sometimes you don’t even know who’s doing it.
BEN: Hm. So, Alesio goes on to say, “I feel like the difference is about who commissioned it. If a government gets newspapers to spin the truth or spread outright lies that serve the government’s purpose, it’s propaganda. E.g., the news scares people into fearing asylum seekers versus fake news can be spread by anyone without being prompted by anyone else. E.g., Big Oil spreading fake news about the importance of individual responsibility regarding climate change as a way to obfuscate the responsibility of large players like oil companies.”
DANIEL: Big Oil. I think that’s right. I think that sounds pretty good. What do you think?
BEN: So this is… this… to be perfectly honest, this is my wheelhouse. I spend most of my working life talking about media to students. I think what’s happening here is PROPAGANDA is an old word. I’m going to go as far as to say it’s kind of a fossil word.
DANIEL: Okay.
BEN: Not many people really genuinely use PROPAGANDA much anymore, as in use the word PROPAGANDA much anymore and instances of its use in the way that the word originally sort of was associated… Sorry, I’m saying this very wrong. Essentially, like, there’s North Korea and a tiny handful of other places that are still engaging in full-tilt old-school propagandising. And otherwise, it’s largely shifted into other domains. Which is not to say, and I want to be really clear here, [CHUCKLES] there aren’t people lying all the time in the media. That is definitely a thing. It definitely happens.
I think what everyone seems to be circling around is just a different take on what has happened in — and I hate this word — in new media landscapes. In the same way that journalism over the last 30 years has had to take stock and reassess the role of the Fourth Estate and how journalism can coexist in a world where everyone can make things with the magical rectangles in their pockets, so too has propaganda as a social phenomenon had to… not take stock, but all of the same forces that are at work on traditional responsible media enterprises are still forces that exist on traditional irresponsible media enterprises. So, in the same way that journalism has had to shift towards, like, citizen journalism and that sort of stuff, so too has propaganda shifted towards things like fake news because you can just have anyone making anything.
I would agree broadly with Alesio though. If it is a government actively harassing and proselytising for their own ends, I would still call that propaganda. We don’t see that much of it anymore. Instead, we see disinformation, misinformation, and weaponised fake news used far more often.
DANIEL: So, in other words, back when we had established gatekeepers like governments and TV networks, which we still have, that was when we used propaganda because it was coming from a gatekeeper. But now that the gates have been broken wide open and media is coming from everywhere, fake news is coming from everywhere as well. And so, we don’t see as much propaganda as we used to because the gatekeepers have been sort of broken down a little bit.
BEN: Look, to be perfectly honest, I would argue that we still see heaps of stuff that I think when people use the word PROPAGANDA is what they mean, which is to say shit that’s supposed to make you fear things or mobilise against a group of people or whatever. That stuff is all still happening. I just think the word PROPAGANDA just isn’t that useful anymore because it triggers an idea in people’s minds about a thing that just doesn’t really work that way anymore.
Having said that, having said all of that, with the amount of noise that is out there, with the amount of fake news and misinformation and disinformation, actors can still achieve exactly the same goals and outcomes as propagandists did 50 years ago. They just do it a different way, that’s all. It’s all still happening. I don’t want to finish this by being like: Oh, propaganda is not a thing anymore. It absolutely is. I just don’t know if that particular word is particularly useful anymore because the lying is lying in different ways, but it’s all the same shit. It’s still achieving the same outcomes.
DANIEL: All right, thanks for that. Last one. This is about the word DAX, or perhaps the nonword DAX because I’ve mentioned a whole bunch of stories in child language acquisition where they give children made-up words that they haven’t heard before so that the kids will have to figure out what the word means brand new. They won’t know the meaning because they’ve heard it before. So, DAX is often used as a made-up word and I’ve seen it in a number of projects, D-A-X. This message comes from our good pals at SpeechDocs.
BEN: [CHUCKLES]
DANIEL: They do all of the transcripts for us and transcribe every word and it comes from, ah-heh!, Dax. Dax says, And also, children, when they have a made-up word like DAX. Dax says: “Hit me in the feels, man! 😄” Sorry, Dax.
BEN: I like to imagine that it’s Dax Shepard who’s just low key working in SpeechDocs right now.
DANIEL: Are you Dax Shepard?
BEN: [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: That’s all right if you’re not.
BEN: Just lie to us, Dax. It’s fine.
DANIEL: But sorry, Dax. I didn’t mean to imply that your name was entirely made up. And we love your work. Big thanks to Dr Helen Fraser, Dr Georgina Heydon, Dr Diana Eades, Dr Seán Roberts and Dr Steph Rennick for the chat about their work. Thanks also to everyone who gave us ideas for the show. The team from SpeechDocs who transcribes all the words that we say, and most of all, our patrons who support us, help us do what we love to do and keep the show going. If you would like to help us, there are lots of ways you can do that. Number one, send us ideas and feedback. But how? There are many ways. Follow us on the socials. We’re @becauselangpod just about everywhere. Leave us a message with a question or an idea using SpeakPipe on our website, becauselanguage.com. You can send us an email, hello@becauselanguage.com. We get a lot of messages that way.
Another thing you can do is tell a friend about us or leave us a review. If it’s a good review or well worded, we’ll read it on the show. But it’s really important that word of mouth keeps going. If you love the show, tell someone about us.
You can also become a patron. And that means that you’ll get bonus episodes, you can come to our live episodes, hang out with us on Discord. And by giving us a little bit of money, you’ll be making it possible for SpeechDocs to keep transcribing the words that we say. That means that you can read our shows and you can search our shows, so you can find out: What was every instance of talking about WASHING? Well, now you can find out.
BEN: To this day, the very favourite thing we’ve ever done on the show is when you got all of the instances of was it ee-ther and ei-ther.
DANIEL: And nee-ther and nei-ther.
BEN: And nee-ther and nei-ther. I have never been tickled so thoroughly by a thing. So with that in mind, that thing that was my very favourite thing, that was only achievable because of patrons. So, a big shoutout to our top patrons, Iztin, Termy, Elías, Matt, Whitney, Helen, Jack, PharaohKatt, LordMortis, gramaryen, Larry, Kristofer, Andy, James, Nigel, Meredith, Kate, Nasrin, Joanna, Ayesha, Steele, Margareth, Manú, Rodger, Rhian, Colleen, Ignacio, Sonic Snejhog, Kevin, Jeff, Andy from Logophilius, who chipped in a comment today.
DANIEL: Sure did.
BEN: Word of the Week or… Yeah, no, a comment.
DANIEL: It was a Word of the Week.
BEN: Oh, it was, yeah. Stan, Kathy, Rach, Cheyenne, Felicity, Amir, Canny Archer, O Tim, Alyssa, Chris, Laurie, Aengery Balls with an A-E like Dæmon from His Dark Materials trilogy.
DANIEL: I suppose so.
BEN: Tadgh, and new this time, Keith. G’day, Keith. Coming in strong, becoming a patron and throwing a comment our way. Love that. Thank you to all our splendiferous patrons.
DANIEL: Our theme music has been written and performed by Drew Krapljanov, who’s a member of Ryan Beno and of Didion’s Bible. Both very good listens. Thanks for listening. We’ll catch you next time. Because Language.
BEN: Pew, pew, pew.
DANIEL: And that’s another show.
[BEEP]
DANIEL: So, yesterday, my partner is at work and she says, “The TVs here at work are showing that The Wizard of Oz is on television right now.”
BEN: Okay.
DANIEL: So, I turned over to it because I had the girls at home, and we got to watch The Wizard of Oz for the first time.
BEN: Okay. I genuinely don’t think Ellis has ever seen it, and I would say it has been [INHALES AND EXHALES] at least 25 years since I’ve seen it.
DANIEL: It’s interesting.
BEN: Beyond seeing your typical pop culture excerpts that everyone has seen. Like, the transition to color as she comes through the door and all that kind of stuff.
DANIEL: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” Everyone says that.
BEN: So, how was that experience?
DANIEL: Ohh, they were pretty freaked out by the witch. While the commercials were on, and my oldest daughter says, “What’s a commercial?”
[LAUGHTER]
BEN: Oh, no.
DANIEL: Yeah. The first experience with commercials: This is boring!
BEN: Yeah, “This sucks.” It’s like, “Yep, sweetheart, this was our lives.”
DANIEL: Yes, it was. And if you missed it, you had to wait till it came around again. There was nothing on demand. You couldn’t demand anything from the television.
BEN: I saw a great thing online that was: Today’s sort of youth will never know the terror of hearing a sibling from across the house yelling, “It’s coming baaack!” as you’ve been furiously trying to get snacks in a commercial break and just hightailing it across the house to get back in time.
DANIEL: “It’s on again!” So, they were kind of freaked out. So during the commercial, I pulled up the video of Mr Rogers — Fred Rogers — interviewing Margaret Hamilton, who played the Wicked Witch of the West.
BEN: Glinda… no, that was the Good Witch, wasn’t it?
DANIEL: Glinda was the good witch unless you’re talking about Wicked, but anyway. Yeah, it was the actor, and she was just saying, “Yes, when I was young, I always liked to pretend I was a witch, and it was a job for me, and I got to pretend, and it was really fun, but it was a lot of work too.” And so, seeing the scary witch and then seeing the person, I think that calmed them down a little bit. And I just had to be a good explainer because they get very tense around scary scenes. They’re very young children still. They need support.
BEN: I think it’s quite adorable that… an associate of mine who had little kids at the time that Tangled came out, just recounted to me that, like, yeah, for his daughter, Mother Gothel was just like an absolute nope-button, hard-pass moment. And look, fair enough, kudos to that girl for sort of picking up at a very young age what abusive coercive behavior looks like.
DANIEL: She’s easily the greatest villain that Disney ever made, because she’s so real.
BEN: The realest villain.
DANIEL: The realest villain.
BEN: Yeah, because every one of us has a family member who is borderline the way she is. Or at least I certainly do.
DANIEL: Well, even though I wouldn’t say any of my family members match Mother Gothel, I would still say that I was in a scenario a lot like Rapunzel, where they tried to make you afraid of the Scary World. And when you get out of the Scary World, you really do have that back-and-forth whiplash of emotions that Rapunzel had. ~This is so awesome!~
BEN: [LAUGHS] That was such a great encapsulation of teenage girlhood as well. ~This is amazing. I’m the worst person.~
DANIEL: I’m the worst. [LAUGHS]
DANIEL: Really good.
[BOOP]
SEÁN: Congratulations though, Hedvig, on the Grambank being out. That’s amazing.
DANIEL: It’s huge. It’s huge.
SEÁN: Great achievement.
HEDVIG: Thanks. I just want to do science now.
[LAUGHTER]
SEÁN: No, you have more data! You didn’t get all the data. There’s one person.
HEDVIG: No, we are still collecting data. We are actually. So, I’m still doing that as well.
DANIEL: So, you do have French but not Spanish?
HEDVIG: Right. So, we do have… So Grambank v1 doesn’t have German, and… like, standard German and standard Spanish in it. And it also doesn’t have lots of other languages. But those are the only two that people email me about.
[LAUGHTER]
DANIEL: But people be like, “Hey, why don’t you represent us? How is this establishing our place in the hierarchy?” And you’re all like, “Eh.”
[CHUCKLES]
HEDVIG: I just try and diplomatically be like, “We just haven’t been that interested in you yet.”
DANIEL: [LAUGHS] “We’ll get to you eventually. Right after Yapese.”
SEÁN: [LAUGHS] In some parallels here, we got the same responses with some video games, basically.
HEDVIG: Oh, really?
DANIEL: Oh, interesting.
SEÁN: How dare you not study this video game?
[BOOP]
BEN: Hey [‘GOOGLE’ OMITTED SO AS NOT TO SET OFF LISTENER DEVICES], is Fraser Island the largest sand island in the world?
DANIEL: Hey, ChatGPT, why is Fraser Island made entirely of whipped cream?
[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]