Episode 40: Beyoncé, Hoodies and Obama Linguistics Shownotes

The Vocal Fries Podcast

Date: February 11, 2019

Episode: 40

Title: Beyoncé, Hoodies and Obama Linguistics

Show Link: https://radiopublic.com/the-vocal-fries-GOoXdO/ep/s1!195be

In this episode of the Vocal Fries, we talk with Dr. Nicole Holliday, Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College about Black English, biracial language, vocal fry, intonation, and the field of Obama linguistics.

If you are a new listener to the Vocal Fries Podcast (or even if you’ve been listening to us since the beginning), we would love to hear from you.  Please email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and let us know how we can help you today!

In this episode, we discuss:

  • Barack and Michele Obama’s English/Obama linguistics
  • Key and Peele
  • Black English
  • Biracial language
  • Vocal fry
  • Intonation

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You can find more information about Dr. Holliday on her website, and you can follow her on Twitter @mixedlinguist.

Become a Patron!

We’re an indie podcast with limited resources, so we could really use your support. You can set up a monthly recurring donation at patreon.com. The $5 a month level gives you access to our monthly bonus episode, as well as a new Vocal Fries sticker every three months and a shout out on the podcast! But you can contribute as little as $1 a month and have our undying gratitude!

Check Out Some Other Lingpods

  • En Clair – a podcast about forensic linguistics (super interesting and fun!)
  • Talk the Talk – a podcast about all things linguistics (and we even have a bonus episode where we interview them)
  • Lingthusiasm – the podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics (we interview them on a regular episode)
  • Accentricity – a podcast about accents and other linguistic features
  • The Troublesome Terps – a podcast about interpreters and interpreting (we interview each other on a regular episode)

Feel free to suggest more to add to this list!

Need a Presenter?

  • Carrie can talk about indigenous languages of North America (particularly Salish, Inuit and Algonquian), semantics, syntax or the mathy side of language
  • Megan can talk about child language acquisition, bilingual language acquisition and Spanish/Spanglish
  • Both of the Vocal Fries can talk about all things linguistic discrimination, particularly vocal fry

 

Episode 41: On the Basis of Voice Shownotes

The Vocal Fries Podcast

Date: February 25, 2019

Episode: 41

Title: On the Basis of Voice

Show Link: https://radiopublic.com/the-vocal-fries-GOoXdO/ep/s1!a8ddb

In this episode On the Basis of Voice, we talk with Kelly Wright, PhD student at the University of Michigan, about housing discrimination via dialect discrimination.

If you are a new listener to the Vocal Fries Podcast (or even if you’ve been listening to us since the beginning), we would love to hear from you.  Please email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and let us know how we can help you today!

In this episode, we discuss:

  • Housing discrimination
  • Dialect discrimination
  • Having multiple accents/voices
  • City vs. rural rentals

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Explore these Resources

You can find more information about Kelly on her website, and you can follow her on Twitter @raciolinguistic.

Become a Patron!

We’re an indie podcast with limited resources, so we could really use your support. You can set up a monthly recurring donation at patreon.com. The $5 a month level gives you access to our monthly bonus episode, as well as a new Vocal Fries sticker every three months and a shout out on the podcast! But you can contribute as little as $1 a month and have our undying gratitude!

Check Out Some Other Lingpods

  • En Clair – a podcast about forensic linguistics (super interesting and fun!)
  • Talk the Talk – a podcast about all things linguistics (and we even have a bonus episode where we interview them)
  • Lingthusiasm – the podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics (we interview them on a regular episode)
  • Accentricity – a podcast about accents and other linguistic features
  • The Troublesome Terps – a podcast about interpreters and interpreting (we interview each other on a regular episode)

Feel free to suggest more to add to this list!

Need a Presenter?

  • Carrie can talk about indigenous languages of North America (particularly Salish, Inuit and Algonquian), semantics, syntax or the mathy side of language
  • Megan can talk about child language acquisition, bilingual language acquisition and Spanish/Spanglish
  • Both of the Vocal Fries can talk about all things linguistic discrimination, particularly vocal fry

 

Books we have discussed on the pod

This list will be updated as we go.

Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language by Amanda Montell. We like this one because it highlights all the many ways English is subtly sexist – and how its speakers can be extremely sexist. We briefly discuss this on Episode 41: On the Basis of Voice

Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race by Dr. Jonathan Rosa. We like this one because it highlights the importance of linguistic discrimination within the education system. We talk with Dr. Rosa about it in Episode 38: Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Podcast

Discourse-Pragmatic Variation in Context: 800 Years of Like by Dr. Alex D’Arcy. We like this one because it shows how old “like” is, who uses it (not just women and girls!), and how many different uses of “like” there are. It’s academic, but if you’re up for the challenge, we recommend it! We talk with Dr. D’Arcy about “like” on Episode 21: Learning to Love Like

The Dictionary of Difficult Words by Jane Solomon. We like this one because it is super accessible for children and the illustrations are just so great. Perfect for any children in your life. We talk with Jane Solomon in an upcoming episode. (Keep your eyes open!)

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, which helps us continue to make the pod.

Episode 42: Water is Life Shownotes

The Vocal Fries Podcast

Date: March 11, 2019

Episode: 42

Title: Water is Life

Show Link: https://radiopublic.com/the-vocal-fries-GOoXdO/ep/s1!c143f

In this episode of Water is Life, we talk with Nicole Horseherder about Diné Bizaad (aka Navajo), water and bilingual education.

If you are a new listener to the Vocal Fries Podcast (or even if you’ve been listening to us since the beginning), we would love to hear from you.  Please email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and let us know how we can help you today!

In this episode, we discuss:

  • Diné Bizaad (Navajo)
  • Water
  • Bilingual education
  • The Diné verb

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In this episode, we discussed the complexity of the Diné verb. Carrie wrote an addendum about it, but if you’re really interested in it, here are some books on the topic (which you might be able to find in bookstores other than Amazon or in university libraries; hit us up if you need help locating them)

Nicole Horseherder talks more about the importance of water in this short documentary:

Become a Patron!

We’re an indie podcast with limited resources, so we could really use your support. You can set up a monthly recurring donation at patreon.com. The $5 a month level gives you access to our monthly bonus episode, as well as a new Vocal Fries sticker every three months and a shout out on the podcast! But you can contribute as little as $1 a month and have our undying gratitude!

Check Out Some Other Lingpods

  • En Clair – a podcast about forensic linguistics (super interesting and fun!)
  • Talk the Talk – a podcast about all things linguistics (and we even have a bonus episode where we interview them)
  • Lingthusiasm – the podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics (we interview them on a regular episode)
  • Accentricity – a podcast about accents and other linguistic features
  • The Troublesome Terps – a podcast about interpreters and interpreting (we interview each other on a regular episode)

Feel free to suggest more to add to this list!

Need a Presenter?

  • Carrie can talk about indigenous languages of North America (particularly Salish, Inuit and Algonquian), semantics, syntax or the mathy side of language
  • Megan can talk about child language acquisition, bilingual language acquisition and Spanish/Spanglish
  • Both of the Vocal Fries can talk about all things linguistic discrimination, particularly vocal fry

 

Water is Life Addendum: The Diné Bizaad (Navajo) Verb

As noted on Episode 42: Water is Life, the verb in Diné Bizaad is quite complicated. For example:

ch’íshidiniɫdazh

‘someone jerked me outdoors’

This verb is made up of a stem (-dazh) and a bunch of prefixes (things attached to the front of something).

                                                                                                         verb stem

ch’í                             shi       di                       ni          ɫ                     dazh

out horizontally     me       arms and legs  modal  causative    move in a jerky manner

You can see from this example that verbs can be internally very complicated. Young and Morgan (1987) provide us with a template* with up to 17 slots:

Screenshot 2019-03-13 12.08.05

However, the maximum number of prefixes on a stem appears to be 8 (so 9 slots).

Does this template make your eyes cross? Mine too, and I’ve looked at it for over 20 years. It’s not very transparent. Which is maybe why the Japanese were unable to crack Navajo Code.

One thing to remember is that Diné verbs must be at least two syllables long, and so the verb stem on its own is not enough, but the verb stem doesn’t need every slot to be filled.

For example:

yishcha

ish-cha

I-cry

‘I cry.’

 

yishdzįįs**

ish-dzįįs

I-drag/tow

‘I’m dragging or towing it along.’

Our first example had 5 prefixes, and 6 is easy to find as well

ch’íshidiniɫdazh

ch’í-shi-di-ni-ɫ-dazh

out-me-arms/legs-modal-causative-move.jerkily

‘someone jerked me outdoors’

 

bíbiniissįįh**

bí-bi-ni-i-ish-ɫ-sįįh

against-him-endpoint-transitive-I-causative-stand

‘I lean him standing against it.’

You get the point. It’s complicated! Which is all the more reason to love Diné (and all Athabaskan languages).

* There are non-templatic ways to analyze the Diné verb, but I don’t know enough about them to even attempt to describe them.

** WordPress is messing up the tone on nasalized vowels, so this data is not quite right.

Carrie

Second Addendum: “Injun” English

In our latest episode (On the Basis of Voice), we read an email from a listener, Ed Evanson. He sent us the paper he wrote on “Injun” English. Abstract below. If you’d like to email him for a copy of the paper, you can do so at ed.evanson96 AT gmail.com

THE CIVILISABLE PRINCESS AND HOLLYWOOD INJUN ENGLISH

INTRODUCTION

Academic interest in the media’s misrepresentation of Native American people has analysed gender discrimination (Oshana, 1981; Deloria, 1998; Adams, Keene & Koella, 2011; Coward, 2014) and linguistic discrimination (Meek, 2006) though never their intersection. Meek analyses Hollywood Injun English (HIE) as a linguistic simulacrum, i.e. a variety of English meant to imitate (though inaccurately) the speech of Native people. Her work further shows, that HIE has particular features which are used to index certain stereotypes ideologically associated with Native people in the United States. Table 1 lists the correspondence between the features and the themes. She shows that HIE is thereby a tool to maintain and reproduce certain ideologies about Native People that exist in dominant-produced media (Hall, 1980). I conducted a constructionist, theoretical thematic analysis in order to answer my research question: How do Native women engage with HIE in western films pre-Red power? My analysis attempts to expose how ideologies about Native women as old as the 1850s at least (Coward, 2014) have been maintained and reproduced as late as 1960. Since HIE is regularly used in modern media as well (Meek, 2006), it is crucial we understand its role in the fight against discriminatory ideologies about Native women.

——
Carrie

Addendum: On the Basis of Voice

On the latest episode of The Vocal Fries, Megan and Carrie talk with Kelly Wright, PhD student at the University of Michigan, about housing discrimination via dialect discrimination.

You can find more information about Kelly on her website, and you can follow her on Twitter @raciolinguistic.

Listen to her speak about accent and advancement in the American workplace on BBC World Service Weekend Program in August 2018 here.

Watch her 5-minute Linguist breakdown of Covert Segregation: Dialect Discrimination in the Housing Market (She starts at 29:40!)

Here are her slides for her talk about the same topic at the Chicago Linguistics Society.

Finally, here is a link to the results of her survey about attitudes toward African American and Standard American English.

She has shared some book recommendations with us:

Raciolinguistics (Alim Editor)

The Everyday Language of White Racism (Jane H. Hill)

Talkin’ and Testifyin’ (Geneva Smitherman)

Articulate While Black (Smitherman and Alim)

 

_______________

Megan