Carrie Gillon: Hi, and welcome to the Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.
Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa.
Carrie: I’m Carrie Gillon.
Megan: Hi, Carrie
Carrie: Hi, and welcome back.
Megan: I know. I’m very tired. I was just in Miami to watch the first presidential debate.
Carrie: How was it actually, like being in the room, I mean, because I watched that whole debate, but it’s different when you’re watching on TV.
Megan: It was amazing. But especially since it’s like, you see all the behind-the-scenes things where they’re like trying to make everything like, go well because there was a mic situation, right? There’s like a hot mic and so they try to like laugh it off. But it’s like, wow, these people they take it very seriously.
Carrie: Of course, as they should.
Megan: Right. But yeah, so being in the room was really interesting because you got to hear all the people sighing or like not getting jiving with the people, the candidates or like really jiving with the people. It was unreal, but I didn’t expect it to be so linguistically relevant.
Carrie: Yes. I mean, okay, I guess I could have predicted that there would be some Spanish spoken just given the fact that it’s in Miami, that it was a co…
Megan: Yes. Telemundo, which actually we sat next to like the Telemundo and a lot of people from Telemundo, and they were so happy every time he spoke. It was kind of telling because it’s like, “Wow, we do not allow these people in these spaces as often as we should.”
Carrie: Yes. Right.
Megan: Yeah, there’s that. Also kind of side note, “Wow, Miami, Spanish is everywhere.” I know that Tucson has a huge Latinx population, but oh, my gosh, the Spanish is not as prevalent as it is in Miami.
Carrie: No. Yeah, I’ve never been to Miami, but that was definitely my impression of it. I remember in Dexter, there was even some mocking of people who didn’t speak any Spanish at all, because it’s like, how did you grow up in Miami and not learn any Spanish? I thought that was kind of an interesting peek into what it must be like to live there.
Megan: Yeah. No, like so interacting with anyone like at a coffee shop or something like there is just kind of like they use Spanish and like you can use it back or like there’s this assumption that like at least there’s a good chance that whoever you’re talking to might speak Spanish and everyone was so kind. I don’t know if that gets set up. I love that experience. I hated the weather. But anyway, back to Spanish.
Carrie: Yeah. Fair enough.
Megan: I don’t know how anyone speaks anything and they’re not just melting on the floor at all times. But yeah, and again, I was sitting next to Telemundo, so they weren’t like impressed at all about like Beto coming right out the gate and talking Spanish. I know that he grew up in El Paso and liked around the community, but there was something immediately gross and icky like he wasn’t addressed in Spanish, you know?
Carrie: Yeah. If he’d been addressed in Spanish first, like what happened the next night with Buttigieg, it would have felt more natural.
Megan: Right. Yeah. Buttigieg, I had no icky feelings about that. For some reason, it just Beto really felt more gross and icky than Cory Booker even. But Cory wasn’t addressed in Spanish either. I don’t know what it is about maybe because Cory gave the greatest side eye to Beto when he was talking in Spanish that I was like, “Well…” But then I was like later, I was like because at the time, “Yeah, it was amazing.” But later I was like, “Well, maybe he was just mad that he didn’t get to do it first.”
Carrie: Yeah. I don’t know who tweeted it, but they’re like when someone brings up the point that you wanted to bring up before you got the chance kind of thing. Yeah, it’s a good possibility. That’s what it was.
Megan: I mean, I don’t know. Kind of came up in my mind.
Carrie: Neither one of them. I don’t think I haven’t heard them address the Spanish years…
Megan: No, me either. But I haven’t looked for it either. I don’t want to be like, “They didn’t address it.” I don’t know.
Carrie: Right. But then and so again, like in the room, no one cares that these two men are speaking Spanish. Then when William Castro used it at the end, there was just cheering in the room because I mean, I think it’s almost fair to say that not everyone in the room knew who he was before.
Megan: Definitely.
Carrie: Yeah. But there was still authenticity to his use of Spanish that was really poignant in the room and I think a lot of people thought so, too. That’s what I was reading on Twitter is like, “No hate…” Well, except I saw some hate. People were saying his Spanish was basic. I’m like, “Oh, my God, I can’t even engage with this right now. Like, this is so exhausting.”
Megan: Yeah. I mean, I did understand him. But like, is that a bad thing?
Carrie: Right? I mean, I think we’ve talked so much on this podcast about like, why would we even begin to complain about language that we can understand when it’s about communicating with your interlocutors or who you’re speaking with? That’s why it’s so terrible when people like correct grammar, when like, you know what that person said. There was no miscommunication. You’re just being an asshole.
Megan: Right. That reminds me of something that I posted on The Fries a couple of days ago, or maybe yesterday about like, I was sat versus I was sitting and how people were just totally shitting on the Iowa sat construction, which is very normal in the UK.
Carrie: Yeah, I saw that. I know.
Megan: I mean, like, I think I’ve mentioned before that, like, my mom’s past tense of sit is set. It’s just like there’s just so many ways that people, I mean, it’s frustrating. It’s there’s not only one way to say anything ever. That’s one of the things that make human language, human language, and amazing.
Carrie: Right. What I find interesting about it is it kind of like because you’re using different, what linguists call aspect, but like it’s just a different form of the verb in each case. Like the I was sat, it’s more like you’re focusing on the total event. Like there was you sat down and then you were sitting there for a long time but you were sat versus I was sitting like you’re like in the middle of the sit thing. Do you know what I mean?
Megan: Definitely
Carrie: I found that really fascinating, interesting difference. Both are obviously acceptable and people should get over themselves.
Megan: Yeah, but it’s just like, I don’t know, we should be celebrating how amazing these things are instead of being mad at it.
Carrie: Instead of insisting on one way to talk that’s false and how boring is that?
Megan: So boring.
Carrie: Why do you want everybody to talk the same way?
Megan: How obvious does it make that that’s not about language ultimately, you?
Carrie: Right. Yes. You’re right. It’s absolutely not about that. But the interesting thing about is that I was sat in the UK, it’s very standard now. Like it was regional and it’s spread and people are still shitting on it because, in their heads, they’re still associating with a certain region.
Megan: Yeah. One more thing from the Spanish situation, I did get to meet Julian after it. Once I mentioned, I was like, “As far as I’m concerned, you were the only Texan on stage at a little jab at Beto.” But then he brought up him talking about if I noticed he didn’t feel the need to speak Spanish until the very end. This is something that he was thinking about, too. It’s going back to like the authenticity thing or poignancy that he grew up in a bilingual, bicultural home. I was listening to an interview with him, a past interview, and it was with Maria Hinojosa of Latino USMegan: She basically says, “What do you say to people when they say you don’t speak Spanish?” He’s like, “Whoa, Maria it’s not zero to 100 here, you know?”
Carrie: Right.
Megan: He was saying that like, “I may not be fluent in it, but I do speak some and I understand it.” It’s one of those things that I struggle with, too. Where I’m like, “I don’t want to give myself any credit for the Spanish that I do know. It’s just because there’s just so many like deeply foundational values that I learn because of like assimilation that’s expected on like Latinos and all of this.” It’s something that’s like I think a lot of Mexican-Americans will feel very connected to that whole “Wait, it’s not zero to 100. It’s…” and I hope we embrace that more than saying, “I don’t speak Spanish or I do speak Spanish.” Like, it’s not zero to 100 [inaudible].
Carrie: That’s true for any language.
Megan: Yeah, absolutely.
Carrie: Yeah. I know it’s really complicated when you’re when it’s your community language and you’re not fluent, but you have enough language to speak some like it’s a complicated identity thing.
Megan: Yeah. For someone like Maria Hinojosa, who is Mexican, and for her to be like, “What do you say those people say you don’t speak Spanish? She was also accusing him of not speaking Spanish with that question.” It was like, “I’m glad he stood up for himself, basically, that is the moral of that story.” Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. Spoke up for all people who speak a language to a different degree than some other people. I don’t even know how to say it.
Megan: Right. Yeah. I know, because you know what? It’s going to be some people within your own community that are going to be the meanest.
Carrie: Yeah, that’s really the problem. There’s a lot of policing like we’ve talked about before internally to the community.
Megan: It’s toxic. It’s been toxic. But I think linguists are trying, educational linguists and anthropologists and all these people are trying really hard to get out there and get their message out saying, “Don’t be an asshole.”
Carrie: Right.
Megan: About this spectrum of bilingual or multilingualism. Well, anyway, that was a great experience. I am exhausted still. I am a very delicate flower.
Carrie: A delicate flower that got transported all the way to Miami and back. That’s pretty cool.
Megan: My body doesn’t know what to do with 96% humanity.
Carrie: I know. It’s gross.
Megan: Anyway, so we had a fun episode because we talked to some of our couple of our friends, yeah.
Carrie: Yes. A good friend, Jeff and Andrew, who are both…Dr. Jeff and Dr. but, you know?
Megan: Yes, Dr’s. Jeff and Andrew.
Carrie: I love it. But yeah, we get to talk about what language change would be like in space [inaudible] love it.
Megan: Yes. Let me just say, I was not the nerdiest person in the room by far. I was the coolest.
Carrie: Yes, you’re definitely the coolest. Are you usually the nerdiest person?
Megan: No. This is the kind of like nerdy stuff that I’m not usually partaking in, but was happy to be in the room where it happened.
Carrie: Nice. Yeah, I mean, it was super fun. Although somehow I was the one with the most pop culture sci-fi knowledge, which is not normal. Those two guys are way nerdier than me.
Megan: Yeah. You heard it here first.
Carrie: But we also have to warn you, so unfortunately Jeff at the very end just disappears and he doesn’t say goodbye or anything, but he was there. He was saying those things, and his audio did not work.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: It’s unfortunate because he said some really great things actually during that time.
Megan: Yeah, he did. It’s too bad. But we got the majority of his conversation.
Carrie: Yes, we did, and he wasn’t being an asshole. We just had some tech issues.
Megan: Yeah, I know.
Carrie: It’s a very interesting conversation, even if you’re not a nerd, again, I don’t usually talk about space, although I mean, everyone loves space, right? Just the fascination of what’s like, holy shit, right?
Megan: Right. The final frontier.
Carrie: Yeah, so it’s very interesting. It’s very relevant to what’s happening on… I mean, obviously, we have to take from what’s happening here to kind of inform what would be happening if there was a settlement in space. Yeah.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Nerd out.
Man: Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission is to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, and to boldly go where no one has gone before.
Megan: We have Jeffrey Punske, who is an assistant professor and a director of undergraduate studies and linguistics at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He specializes in morphosyntax, especially in the framework of distributed morphology. He also works on linguistic pedagogy and public outreach through constructed languages and is a graduate of the University of Arizona, where I also got my degree. That’s fun.
Carrie: We also have Andrew McKenzie, who is an associate professor of linguistics and an affiliate professor in indigenous studies at the University of Kansas. He specializes in formal semantics and linguistic fieldwork with a focus on Native American languages, especially Kiowa. Welcome both of you.
Jeffrey Punske: Thank you.
Andrew Mckenzie: Thank you for having us.
Megan: Actually, well, we know you outside of this first meeting. This is not our first meeting.
Andrew: Right.
Megan: Definitely not. Years and years and years and years. I think it might be a decade.
Andrew: Maybe. Yeah.
Megan: Well, for you, Andrew?
Andrew: Yeah. I’m old, actually.
Carrie: I was going to say, I wasn’t even born a decade ago [inaudible].
Andrew: Yeah. [inaudible].
Jeffrey: [inaudible] Megan, a decade ago?
Megan: Yes.
Carrie: You were in my Native American languages class [inaudible].
Megan: Yeah, [inaudible]
Jeffrey: As a newborn.
Andrew: That was…
Megan: As a newborn.
Andrew: No, I…
Megan: Yeah, I guess about then I was constructing my own language, which is, yeah, all of you have done that as, like a course, construct your languages?
Andrew: Yeah. No.
Jeffrey: I don’t think–
Andrew: I haven’t, no.
Megan: You haven’t?
Andrew: I guess taught in one course that was offered on them when I was in grad school. That’s as close as I’ve gotten. Yeah.
Megan: Okay. Well, yeah, since we knew you, maybe I would have done this with someone else, but we always have a good document for our interviews, and I named it NerdFest 2019.
Andrew: Nice.
Megan: Which made me Google. I saw that.
Jeffrey: It seems fairly accurate.
Andrew: Yeah. I like how out of all of your interviews, this is the NerdFest.
Megan: [inaudible].
Carrie: Yeah. Well, in some ways, it might be the nerdiest topic yet.
Megan: It truly is, in my humble opinion.
Carrie: Because we’re going to be talking about language in space. Why language in space? Why did you guys want to come and talk to us about that?
Andrew: Why did we want to come and talk? We were invited. That’s how I came. I don’t know. No.
Megan: [inaudible].
Andrew: But why did I not turn down the invitation? Okay. Yeah. Sorry.
Carrie: Why didn’t you?
Andrew: Let me turn off my semanticist brain for a moment.
Megan: No, I heard it and I was like, “Someone’s going to be offended by that.”
Andrew: Yeah. [inaudible]. One of the things that this project kind of surprised me about is that it’s a way of really getting linguistics out into the world beyond linguistics. Our field is relatively small, it’s relatively new, and it often gets overlooked amongst other different social, behavioral, and cognitive sciences. We got this note from someone at the European Space Agency who was asking, “Hey, do you want to speculate on what happens if we send a vessel out for a long, long time? What happens to language on such a voyage?” It was an interesting question and I think it’s something that is worth sharing since the whole point was to get linguistics out, then coming on to different podcasts or other media and getting the word out kind of follows from that.
Jeffrey: I also think a sort of natural question is why me and Andrew would be the people to ask and answer this question. I think because we have a formal semanticist and a formal syntactician trying to answer this question about long-term language change and maybe that’s a weird thing. It is, but it also kind of stems from our work on linguistic pedagogy and linguistic outreach. The sort of more direct connection comes from our work on gamification and gaming and linguistics and directly from this game called Dialects made by Thorny Games. Because they actually have in this scenario about sort of language in space and this sort of isolation and the sort of decay and loss of language in this sort of role-playing scenario. It was the sort of gamification aspect of that that sort of first tied us into the connection and then throughout the project, we started to do some really substantial science in a speculative way, but trying to again branch out into linguistics and show off what we are as a field as well.
Megan: Is Dialect available to the masses?
Jeffrey: Absolutely.
Megan: I’ve never heard of it. What is it for your computer?
Carrie: No, it’s a physical game.
Jeffrey: It’s a physical game. It’s a role-playing game. It takes about three hours, I would say, to play through it. You can get it in a hardback edition, I think, and also as a PDF download. It’s super fun. You don’t need any linguistic background to play it. I’ve played it with students, not so much in the classroom setting because it’s a little bit. It takes a little bit longer to play in a physical classroom.
Megan: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah.
Jeffrey: Though when I was traveling recently for a conference, I actually had some graduate students run the game over the course of a week in my invented language class, and it worked pretty well. But I’ve done it at gaming conventions and stuff like that with people who are just totally off the street. It’s a great way to introduce linguistics because it gives you the opportunity to talk about the importance of language and culture and the loss of language. I don’t want to say language death, but language.
Andrew: Dormancy?
Jeffrey: What’s the term? Dormancy. Yeah, language shift and language dormancy. Those are the terms I’m looking for. It’s just a great way to start those conversations. Thorny Games actually specializes in games surrounding language. They’re a great resource. and I have also been developing some games. We presented about this at the Linguistics Society of America that are more focused on particular topics that are really only designed to be used in a particular linguistics classroom. That’s how we got into this world of, strangely, the European Space Agency, which is something I’d never really imagined I would be presenting at. I mean, maybe when I was a kid, I dreamed about doing something like that. But I never really thought when I was getting my PhD in linguistics that my next stop was the space agency.
Andrew: Right.
Megan: Right.
Carrie: You know, that’s interesting. When I was still in high school, I thought I was going to go into engineering because I wanted to build spaceships. Now, I’m totally not doing anything related at all.
Jeffrey: Well, today’s the day you’re talking about space.
Carrie: [inaudible].
Andrew: [inaudible].
Megan: It was all leading to 2019, right?
Andrew: Exactly.
Carrie: I know. [inaudible].
Megan: [inaudible] to this day in May and it’s like space is the great equalizer. Everyone thinks space is fucking cool. Like, it’s cool.
Andrew: It’s cool.
Carrie: It is cool.
Jeffrey: It is cool.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s true. You have to meet someone who’s like, “Space, whatever.”
Megan: Right.
Jeffrey: I guess maybe some flat earthers who are like the space isn’t real.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: Yeah. Okay.
Carrie: But they still think space is real, right?
Andrew: Yeah, but even then, space is cool and it’s unreality, right? I mean…
Carrie: You’re going to the interstellar workshop, right?
Jeffrey: Yes.
Carrie: Tell us about that. What are you going to be talking about?
Jeffrey: We’re going to be talking about how language may change over the course of a multi-generational trip, presumably for interstellar settlements. Obviously, this is something that is to a degree speculation, but we try to tie…
Andrew: Small degree [inaudible].
Jeffrey: To a small degree speculative, you know? We don’t have the ability to forecast the future. But we try to look at some examples from past human exploration and settlements and the ways in which language has shifted in those periods and changed. Also the failures of linguistic prediction, historical prediction, like glottal chronology and stuff like that, to just say that we can talk about ways in which language may change, but there’s no model you can apply. Be like, “Yes, if you put people on a ship for 200 years, language will change by 72%.”
Andrew: Right.
Megan: Right.
Carrie: Right.
Jeffrey: Because there is no means by which language will change. I really think fundamentally the social and political construct of these ships is going to matter so much more to the organization of the outcome of the language that may come out of this, so much is unknowable.
Andrew: Right.
Megan: Yeah, I’m thinking I wanted to compare it to an immigrant situation, but that’s not the case because there’s not going to be a language already there.
Jeffrey: Exactly.
Andrew: Well, as far as we know, right? That’s…
Megan: Right. I wish. That would be fantastic. But yeah.
Carrie: So more like migration, the original migrations patterns.
Andrew: Yeah.
Megan: Yes.
Jeffrey: Yeah. One of the things we look at is the oceanic settlements. In the settlements in the Pacific, like Polynesia, we look at the Malagasy migration into Madagascar and so forth. We just talk about how we can learn lessons about long-term settlement patterns and language changes of these types. That’s one type of lesson we can talk about, but there are a lot of other types of lessons that we’ve tried to draw on in the paper and in the presentation that we’re giving.
Andrew: One of the key points in that is that for each of these settlements, you get different kinds of changes. The only thing where we can be certain of is that the languages and dialects at the end of the trip aren’t going to be the same as they were at the beginning. Even if there is contact in between, and so, it’s something that anyone who’s developing one of these missions is going to have to keep in mind.
Megan: Right. Before we go too far along that track, I do want to go back to glottocrinology. Can one of you explain to our listeners what that actually is?
Carrie: And explain to Megan.
Andrew: Okay. In the 1950s, there were some anthropological linguists, most notably one named Morris Swadesh, who’s well known for a lot of other things in linguistics. They were trying to develop a way of essentially modeling the time that languages change across. To see how if there was a way to tell given two languages, how far apart they diverged. Then that helps us understand their prehistory and gets into that question of people’s origins that historical linguistics has always had on the back burner. The idea was to model it based on the way that based on radioactive decay, which is a very regular process. Let’s say carbon 14 or something, you can date things very precisely. If you look at, say, how phonemes change over time, could you do something similar for language change? It turns out no.
Carrie: [inaudible]. I mean…
Megan: It’s too complicated for that. Yeah.
Carrie: Right? Okay.
Andrew: Yeah. Biological systems don’t work that way. They don’t for other human or animal systems and so forth. Even looking at genetics, you can’t really do anything that way. But that was the idea. Glottal for language and chronology for time and ideas. See if we could get anything precise and scientific about these divergences. Then so and it goes into that notion that conversely, if we’re looking forward, we cannot predict how quickly two languages will diverge from each other. For a project like this, there’s no way to make solid predictions. It’s just physically impossible. We have to do very broad predictions of the sort of just highlighting things that have happened in the past and with the implicature that these could happen again in the future. But we have no idea which ones will happen and which ones will.
Jeffrey: We also try to comment a little bit about some of the changes that have happened sort of societally and technologically between the past and the present and presumably the future, because it’s not like we’re preparing to launch these multi-general relationships tomorrow. But there are changes in the way that we have our educational system organized. There are changes in the ways that we record language and so forth. All of this has an impact on the means by which language is transmitted and language does indeed change. All of this impacts the way in which this multi-generational ship may, again, all of this is may that language may shift.
Megan: Okay, let’s talk about some of the factors. Then you said education as one of them. Do you think that’s one of the biggest ones?
Andrew: Yeah, the fact is we divided them into things that speed up divergence, like isolation and that sort of thing. Then things that slow it down. Education policy is one, right? If you make everyone speak Old Earth English, for instance, that will slow things down.
Carrie: Old Earth English.
Andrew: Well, the sad thing is that Earth English is going to change as well, right? It’s not even going to be the same. But education is a major one and we can see that in history. It has a major role in promoting particular dialects or languages at the expense of others. Especially when education is universal and compulsory. Throughout history, we see in basically every developed country that I’m aware of, at least the major ones, you see this, especially with the rise of nationalism, that the education system gets turned into a vehicle for a language nationalism essentially.
Megan: Yeah. Well, I’m just thinking I am such a big proponent of public schools. But unfortunately, they aren’t really the great equalizer that we want them to be. Especially when they’re kind of like great marginalizers when it comes to communities of kids that come to school without those “standard dialects” of a language.
Andrew: Right. Or without that language at all. Yeah.
Megan: Yeah, exactly. Of course, that’s going to happen because you’re taking the same human people who are going to take that kind of stuff with them to space.
Andrew: Right. Yeah.
Jeffrey: Some of the story because there’s a paper version of this as well. We had to make some tough choices about what to include and what not to include. But one of the examples we thought about that didn’t make it into the final version, but we had toyed around with including the examples of the boarding schools, the Native American boarding schools, and the North American context. As both a means of education and a means of causing language shift. We can talk about it as slowing down language change, but also as a means of speeding it up.
Megan: Yeah. [inaudible]
Jeffrey: Again, this comes down to policy. Part of what Andrew and I view our role in this is we’re trying to help people make informed policy about if these multigenerational ships are to be built, it’s that they should have some sort of informed policy about what is the linguistic, linguistic context of these ships. What is the linguistic policy going to be going forward?
Megan: Well, and it doesn’t have to look as… I mean, I think we all agree that boarding schools are fucking terrible.
Jeffrey: Yes.
Megan: But it doesn’t have to look that terrible from the outside because we’re doing this inside public schools.
Jeffrey: Absolutely.
Megan: We were doing this to Spanish-speaking kids way back when and we’re doing it still today in more subtle ways.
Jeffrey: I mean, as Andrew pointed out, it’s not even to speakers of other languages. We do it for speakers of non-dominant dialects. If you’re a speaker of a variety of African American English, you receive the same style of corrective treatment in the public school setting.
Megan: Right.
Andrew: More to the European aspect of it, European countries did the same kinds of as you say, corrective measures in their public school systems.
In France, for instance, it was a very major effort to stamp out regional languages. They would even give students a list of things not to do with their mouths, like spitting and eating their erasers, and speaking [inaudible], right? It really built a sense of shame and filthiness into the languages. That social sense endured even after those policies were officially stopped. We see that and we see that in other European countries as well we are seeing it now in Asian countries. It’s a very widespread phenomenon. Then if you’re going to put people on a vessel for a long time, is that what you want, or is this something you want to avoid given changes in attitudes toward these policies that we’ve seen in the last 20, 30 years?
Carrie: Right.
Megan: I guess it’s kind of like a warning like these are going to be the type of things you’ll want to do with language kind of like. I guess you’d have to say why this happens and it’s power. You have to talk also about power, right? Who’s going to be in charge of this ship? What’s that power structure going to look like?
Andrew: Some of the other talks at this conference will be about those kinds of issues. The social, social constructions, ethics, and that sort of thing. Yeah.
Megan: Cool.
Jeffrey: I’m really hoping that this will be a really productive time to talk about exactly this type of relationship and we can really tie in the linguistics to the the social power and the social construction. Yeah, I think it also is going to a big part is going to be just how large is the crew. How is there going to be a social stratification among the crew? Because that will certainly be so much of this is unknowable right now. But certainly, you might see this sort of breakdown among linguistically across If you have a very clear command class versus a labor class in these ships, that could really lead to some really divisive linguistic situations as well.
Andrew: Right. What if you make people wear red shirts, for instance?
Carrie: I was just going to go there.
Andrew: [inaudible] joke?
Megan: Is this a nerdy reference? I don’t get.
Carrie: [inaudible], yes.
Andrew: It is a Star Trek reference. Have you not watched Star Trek, Megan?
Megan: No.
Carrie: I don’t understand how you haven’t seen Star Trek. But anyway, that’s another issue.
Andrew: [inaudible].
Megan: Wow. You all should see the faces they’re making at me on Skype.
Jeffrey: In the original Star Trek, everyone who wore a red shirt would die on the away missions.
Megan: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah.
Jeffrey: It was like the symbol that they were the expendable extras that would die in the episode.
Carrie: Their expendable. Yeah.
Andrew: The main crew would wear yellow or blue. Then, yeah, the red shirts were doomed.
Megan: Was that like a production before the show kind of joke to the audience kind of thing? Or is that like they really were expendable, like you wanted people to know?
Carrie: What do you mean by joked with the audience?
Megan: I mean, kind of like how Mary Tyler more like pulled her ear like high.
Carrie: No, this is the 60s.
Megan: Okay.
Carrie: It’s not…
Jeffrey: Yeah, it was just poor planning.
Megan: [inaudible].
Carrie: Okay.
Megan: Yeah.
Andrew: Or not poor planning. It was just, I don’t know. Yeah.
Megan: That’s what I mean. Was it planned by?
Carrie: I think it was sort of an act like it became a plan over time. I might be guessing. I mean, I’m guessing. But so like the command people, you don’t want them to die and you don’t want your scientists to die. But the engineering types, it’s all right if they die.
Megan: Oh, my gosh. Engineering sounds important on a ship.
Carrie: Of course, it is.
Andrew: But not as important as language policy tho.
Carrie: Not as important as the communication specialist.
Andrew: Exactly. Now, yeah, the red shirts, I mean, you kind of see it on other Star Trek series where they don’t have that quite a blatant division. But just as part of the storytelling, we’re focused on the high command and the people who run the ship. All the hoi polloi who are who get blown up when the ship gets hit, we never really see anything about them.
Megan: Yeah. But so the point I was going to make is that you don’t really see a linguistic distinction in Star Trek, but you might expect it if it were more realistic.
Andrew: Yeah.
Megan: Speaking of sci-fi and more realistic. Have you guys seen The Expanse?
Andrew: No.
Jeffrey: I have not. I’m sorry.
Megan: Okay. Well, so there’s a creole that they don’t fully use on the show. Like they use the light version. They have a linguist who created three versions of this creole, one that’s like full creole, one that’s sort of medium. Then the light version and the light version are basically very accented English with like a few things that are not super English grammar. Anyway, I think it’s a really fascinating show for a variety of reasons, but you should just check it out for linguistic reasons, at least.
Jeffrey: Excellent.
Andrew: Okay. What…I was going to say channel, but what…? Yeah.
Carrie: Service.
Andrew: Yeah, or whatever people say these days.
Megan: Let me…
Jeffrey: How does one come about this?
Megan: Yeah. You can watch it on Netflix, it looks like.
Jeffrey: Okay.
Megan: We’ve watched it on DVDs and then I don’t remember where we watched it. But anyway, yes, I recommend it. It’s because it’s a linguist, it really does have like seems more coherent than just a random choice.
Andrew: You know like Firefly.
Megan: He looked to Haitian Creole for inspiration about how to create it. But it’s more interesting to talk about if you actually know it.
Andrew: Yeah.
Megan: I’m thinking about okay, so if there is going to be this like social stratification and like there’s going to be people that are actually driving the ship or whatever you do, do you steer it? I don’t know. I’ve not seen Star Trek.
Carrie: [inaudible]
Megan: But like so are they going to be more important? Okay, so just imagine that they’ve decided that some people are more important than others. There’s this labor class. What happens between a labor force and then like whatever the scientists and stuff? They are going to possibly have some language change that is slowed down, maybe.
Jeffrey: I think what we would see in that context is the sort of Lebovian-style social construction through language change. If you look at the Martha’s Vineyard study where you’re going to find an example of a certain linguistic feature that is a marker of a certain type of social identity becoming more and more pronounced as a means of social identification. This is even possible, I think if there is a strong identification with ship identity and there is maintenance of two-way communication somehow with the home planet. But like those on the ship developed like a really strong ship-based identity that you may find that this sort of like the types of features that Lebov identified where you get like certain linguistic features just become more and more pronounced as a means of encoding the social identity.
Megan: Interesting. Okay.
Andrew: You would see that inside the ship as well. If there was a division to be made, it wouldn’t be driven by isolation but more by deliberate social isolation, if you will. Yes.
Megan: Yes, the deliberate social isolation. Okay. Cool. I mean, must there be social stratification if we are?
Andrew: No.
Jeffrey: No.
Andrew: Right. Again, all of this may happen.
Megan: Right.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Carrie: Right? It might depend on the crew. Then this gets into the ethics and the kind of crew you select for and the kind of education system you put onto the ship and that sort of thing.
Jeffrey: The kind of structure that you establish within the ship like, and I think these are all things that this is why I think they’re wanting to organize this conference now and have these start these conversations now is that if you can…I mean, again, we’re not close to having… I mean, I don’t know how far we are, but it’s not like we’re about to build and launch the ship tomorrow. But by having these conversations early, they can start thinking about the actual structures and ideal sizes and types of things that are really necessary to do this type of mission. Mission success, I think, really is going to need more than just like we need X type of technology. It really has to think about the humanist, behaviorist, and social sides of things for these things to be successful.
Megan: Is there an ideal size to send into space like this?
Jeffrey: That is a great question. I have no idea.
Andrew: I don’t either.
Megan: Me neither.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s hard to tell. I mean, historical examples aren’t always useful because they’re they might involve between 50 and a few hundred people. But then going into the past, into colonial eras, we also had different kinds of social stratification already in place. It’s kind of hard to compare. I’m sure the engineers and food specialists would have ended up having a more determining say on the size of the crew. But for linguistic purposes, it’s hard to say. I mean, oftentimes a smaller community can isolate itself more easily. Then that might lead to quicker language change. But yeah, and then you might get this kind of founder effect if other ships arrive after them. You get the sort of Mayflower family stratification. Yeah, I mean, another question is how many crews do you send? Do you just send one? Do you send two at a time? Do you send one after another? Each of these will have different effects on various issues, but including language development. If you have two different crews who can communicate with each other as they hurdle through space, then that will decrease their isolation, each crew’s isolation.
Megan: Are we assuming one language?
Andrew: That’s it. Well, we’re not.
Jeffrey: We’re not.
Andrew: The paper largely focuses on what happens in English, but that’s mainly just for expository convenience. It’s just we’re writing in English. Everyone reading this paper can read English. We talk about English, but this would apply no matter which language we are involved in. Then if we involve multiple languages, then it gets…
Megan: In different modes?
Andrew: Yeah, we point out actually that one of the things that we can actually be certain about is that over time there will be congenitally non-hearing passengers on board. It will probably be incumbent on any crew or any mission of this sort to involve at least a signed language alongside any spoken language. In that case, there will always at least be some multilingualism. The question of how many languages actually get sent onto this vessel, that’s always going to be a thorny one. In a modern era where a lot of educated people are multilingual anyway, it might not be such a thorny issue. But then there’s that question of do you pick a lingua franca a common language that everyone can use even when they’re not using their native language, which would probably be English just given the state of things, but which might not be. It depends on the crew as well. We see this for the space station now, where for parts of the mission, everyone speaks Russian when they’re getting up to the space station. Then in the space station, they tend to use English. It turns out that there have been issues of miscommunication that resulted from this because there’s not a clear policy. It just kind of emerged this way where, “Okay, well, while we’re in Russia, let’s use the Russian. We have all the machines in Russia and everything. We’ll just use Russian.” But there’s not an official policy. One of the proposals that we make is that whatever this mission ends up being, the planners need to set out a language policy. They need to equip the crew with enough linguistic awareness to maintain this policy or to adapt when things don’t follow according to plan.
Megan: Well, I have to say as a linguist, I never thought about any of this and how it would be complicated. But of course, it is.
Jeffrey: Just to build off of what Andrew said a little bit, I mean, there’s also been sort of related to this, a push for obviously having genetic diversity in any sort of crew. This is in some related previous work. One of the appeals we make in just the conclusion is that if that is something that is important, we said that it may also be incumbent upon us to attempt to have linguistic diversity for the maintenance of our sort of shared culture and history. Just even if we do have a lingua franca we shouldn’t just say the language will be French, the language will be Russian, the language will be English, or whatever but we should also at least attempt to have some version of linguistic diversity as a component of the crew selection.
Carrie: Which will be determined partially by how many crew you’re allowed to have.
Andrew: Right.
Jeffrey: It would be. Yeah. I mean, of course, if you’re only going to say, yeah, we’re going to have linguistic diversity and we’re going to send one Navajo speaker in this crew, well, that’s going to be pointless long term if for a multi-generational ship.
Andrew: You need three at least.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Carrie: You’re right.
Andrew: Yeah. I don’t see why we should privilege Navajo with Kiowa. That’s [inaudible].
Carrie: I agree.
Jeffrey: I mean, fair enough, Andrew.
Carrie: To Kiowa. Let’s go back a little bit to compare what happened in the past. What does the Polynesian case tell us about what might happen in space?
Jeffrey: What we look at with the Polynesian case is largely the fact that we see the movement of the Polynesian people to sort of diverse Pacific islands, which are spread out from each other, covering large geographic space and providing a long time span. We see sort of this slow drift of the language. What’s interesting also about the Polynesian case is there’s sort of this sort of cultural idea to a lot of people that are aware of the Polynesian case that the Polynesian was sort of settled by a fleet of ships that went out and never came back. There’s considerable evidence that Polynesians were involved sort of some form of repeated contact. What we can see from that is sort of like we have this idea of the movement of this group of humans coming from Earth to, I don’t know, Alpha Centauri.
Megan: I don’t get it.
Jeffrey: That is the closest planetary system to us, Megan.
Megan: Okay.
Andrew: Are there planets on Alpha Centauri? I mean, it’s the nearest star to Earth or to the Sun, I should say. The Sun is the nearest star to Earth, but the nearest star after that is Alpha Centauri. Yeah.
Jeffrey: Yeah. I have no idea if there are planets there.
Andrew: If there are planets, it’s only four light-years away. Hopefully, there’s something there we could send a mission to. It would take many hundreds of years.
Megan: Thank you.
Andrew: That’s our neighbor. [inaudible].
Jeffrey: I just picked it because it’s close. Yeah, it’s got a great name.
Megan: I just pretended like I didn’t know what you were talking about just in case the listeners didn’t know.
Jeffrey: Right. Of course.
Andrew: Yeah. [inaudible].
Jeffrey: [inaudible], Megan.
Megan: Thank you. What are you here for?
Jeffrey: But anyway, we talk about the types of shifts that happened in Polynesia just in a really general sense just to talk about the phonological, the lexical changes that can occur over these as examples of types of language change. But then also just the fact that there is this kind of constant or maybe not constant, but this continual interaction of the languages that is something that we might see given a sort of technological connection between Earth and this ship. There is an analogy between these two. We might see this slow drift of the language following the same types of patterns as the ship moves away over these hundreds of years as it drifts towards Alpha Centauri.
Andrew: Yeah. The Polynesian case was also informative because where the Polynesians settled there typically were no other humans.
Jeffrey: Yes. That’s [inaudible].
Megan: I was about to ask, what about…? Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah. You contrast that to the Malagasy case where you have Austronesians who are linguistically distant cousins of Polynesians move to a place where there are other people. Then you get, and there’s a long history of linguistic interaction and effects on, it affects the change. Malagasy adopted a number of features from Bantu that none of the related languages have. That’s something that we often see in situations where you go to a place and there are already people there.
Jeffrey: Even in Malagasy’s case, it wasn’t necessarily that there were sort of disputes whether or not there were people in Madagascar. It’s really not critical for us. It doesn’t matter. But they were close enough to the Bantu speakers, whether or not they were in Southern Africa or in Madagascar, which they probably weren’t, but who cares? They were close enough to interact, which is very different than what was happening in the Pacific, where there were no people. That’s a great point, Andrew.
Andrew: We can trust that even to what happens in more recent immigrant situations. There’s a good study for New Zealand English that Troy Jill made where within a short period of English speakers moving from different places to New Zealand, the relative isolation wasn’t complete or anything. Relative isolation from other English speakers and also from any native Maori led to this formation of a dialect and not a lot of time, just a few generations. Even now today, the New Zealand dialect is still fairly distinct. Then we contrast that to a case. There are a number of cases you could pick, but the one I picked was Texas-German, simply because one of my heritages is Texas-German, so it’s partial to it. That’s a well-documented case where a lot of settlers came from different parts of Germany in the 1840s and 50s and developed communities in Texas where they spoke German almost all the time, right up until World War I. We talked about older immigrants coming here and learning English, and they did not. The Germans did not. They didn’t have to unless they were going to go to college or interact with state authorities or something. They might have learned English in school, but they grew up speaking German, went to church in German, went to work in German, and so forth. Over those generations, there developed a kind of dialect of Texas-German. It is distinct from other kinds of German, but it didn’t quite coalesce the way that the New Zealand English did. It seems to be, in large part, because these communities were surrounded, essentially, by English-speaking communities. There was this interaction, and there was this pressure through the education system for this other language as well. Yeah, it’s kind of what happens when you go somewhere and you’re relatively isolated versus what happens when you go somewhere and you’re not. If we send people to Alpha Centauri, and there are no life forms there who speak a language, we might expect a dialect, if, let’s say, there are English speakers, we might expect a new dialect to coalesce and to become quite distinct. If there are speakers of Alpha Centauri language or something, we’ll see a difference in the way that it changes.
Megan: I guess we could learn lessons too, since this is multigenerational like we’re trying to think multigenerational, from Earth, is that with immigrants, they speak the language from their homeland, imagine, and then they have kids and their kids are bilingual, and then those kids have kids and those kids have lost the language from the homeland. Then these grandchildren want to reclaim. We could possibly see that in space.
Andrew: Yeah.
Jeffrey: Yeah. That’s actually something we didn’t think about, but I think that’s probably true, that you would see sort of this re-identification at some point with Earth. I mean, we talk a little bit about sort of somewhat related to this, this idea of ritualized language coming into play, especially if the technology, as the ship moves further and further away, you’re going to have presumably a sort of disconnect with Earth communications, where the time span is just going to be slower and slower. Yeah, so you might be able to still communicate, but not in a direct means. The language that you use in those communications may become more ritualized, in a sense, and fossilized in Old Earth English or Old Earth French or something like that. I think, yeah, these fourth-generation space dwellers may start to identify more with that ritualized language as well and try to reclaim that.
Megan: Or the opposite.
Jeffrey: Or the opposite, sure.
Andrew: Yeah, and we see that in a lot of communities that are reclaiming language. They often start with ritualistic language that ties directly into elements of culture they’re also trying to reclaim, like religious speech, songs, or particular formulations. Yeah, and like you said, sometimes people kind of have the opposite reaction, where they don’t want anything to do with it.
Carrie: Well, especially if you’re in space, you might hate Earthers, right? Because we have such a much cozier lifestyle than they do, right?
Andrew: Yeah.
Carrie: I mean, that’s actually another thing in the expanse. The Belters hate the Martians and the Earth.
Andrew: [inaudible]
Carrie: The Belters.
Andrew: The Belters. Okay.
Carrie: Like they live in the Belts.
Megan: [inaudible]
Andrew: I see. Yeah, I was thinking like from Buzz Berger. I was imagining them on this mission, and I’m like, “That makes total sense.”
Carrie: Oh my gosh.
Megan: We should really send the Belters.
Carrie: Woodwatch. But yeah, so the Belters live in the Belts, and so they have like a much worse lifestyle than the people who live on Mars and the people who live on Earth. They kind of hate both of those groups, and those groups also hate each other. Like, there’s actually a drive away from the Earth languages and more towards this creole that they have created out of many different languages, including English.
Megan: We’re going to see both of that. Like, both of those things are going to happen, I predict.
Carrie: Too bad we probably won’t see it.
Andrew: I think [inaudible]. I know, yeah. Where is the crazy billionaire when you need them, you know?
Carrie: Did you see what Jeff Bezos wants to do?
Andrew: I saw it, yeah.
Carrie: Space, right? Now, he wants to do something with Mars.
Andrew: I think he needs to keep a lid on the information in his own company before he starts doing these other things.
Carrie: Like he just wants to put like zoos in space and like a human place in space and like just have like all these separate things.
Andrew: Space hotel.
Jeffrey: All right.
Carrie: Like kind of like that.
Jeffrey: I missed that somehow.
Carrie: [inaudible].
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: It was like yesterday or the day before.
Andrew: It just came out, yeah.
Carrie: It’s really weird. It’s a really weird idea.
Andrew: Yeah.
Carrie: Anyway.
Andrew: But is there a language policy? That’s the crucial question.
Carrie: Maybe we should try to talk to Bezos.
Andrew: I think that’s really where you get serious, whether you can tell a proposal is serious or not is when they’ve started to consider these human issues.
Carrie: That’s true.
Andrew: In sci-fi, they usually just hand wave out of it, right? On Star Trek, they have universal translators. You put it in your ear and it will instantly translate anything.
Jeffrey: Yeah. That’s why Star Trek doesn’t need a language policy because everything just gets translated for them.
Andrew: Right. Exactly.
Carrie: Right.
Andrew: Although that’s got to be, it’s got to be weird. Yeah. We do put a small mention in this paper that that kind of technology is…Well, the polite way to say it is we politely indicate that it’s a pipe dream. Because it is, I mean, there’s no way to really, language is too creative for one thing for that to work. It’s so complicated in the sense that there’s so much pragmatics and context and so forth. Now, there’s as much content in what we’re not saying as there is in what we are saying. How is a machine going to translate that?
Carrie: Right. Yeah, I have such huge problems with that, but that’s another whole other issue.
Andrew: Right. I mean, I hate to burst your listeners’ bubbles.
Jeffrey: I mean, maybe Alpha Centauri will discover Douglas Adams’ Babelfish.
Megan: Right. Yes.
Andrew: See that, I don’t know [inaudible]
Megan: [inaudible].
Carrie: What?
Megan: I don’t know.
Jeffrey: Oh my God.
Carrie: I’m shocked. Megan, I’m not shocked by you. I knew you wouldn’t know because you’re not a nerd like we are, but I’m shocked that Andrew doesn’t.
Megan: Isn’t Hitchhiker’s Guide?
Jeffrey: It’s Hitchhiker’s Guide. Yeah.
Andrew: See, I haven’t either read that book or seen the movie. Yeah.
Carrie: Or the TV show.
Andrew: See, I didn’t know [inaudible].
Jeffrey: Or the radio.
Carrie: The original radio play.
Jeffrey: [inaudible] Podcast.
Megan: Are they really shaming you?
Andrew: [inaudible].
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: We have all this nerd cred. Okay. I guess there are probably many, many more questions I could ask, but I’ll just ask one more, and Megan, if you have others, you can too. But sort of more on the linguistic side, what vocabulary is more likely to be stable, what vocabulary do you think is going to disappear potentially, and what’s just going to change?
Andrew: I think the vocabulary that is required to operate machinery will be stable.
Jeffrey: Yeah. The jargon definitely will.
Andrew: The jargon. If only just to read the instruction manuals. In communications with Earth, as you get further away, and it starts taking days and weeks for messages to even get back to Earth, you’re not going to spend a lot of time doing any back-and-forth talking. You’re just going to be sending messages. Eventually, as the people you knew on Earth stop sending messages because they’re dying of old age, then it’s going to come down to just technical messages and the content of those messages will endure. Then a lot of the basic words. I mentioned Swadesh, more of Swadesh earlier. One of his contributions was trying to come up with a list of vocabulary that tends not to change across languages. The idea was that when you first encounter a language, you could ask for these vocabulary items to get a kind of sense of what sort of native words, words that weren’t borrowed over time.
Carrie: The Swadesh list.
Andrew: Yeah. That’s called the Swadesh list. Right.
Jeffrey: That’s actually what you were supposed to calculate the glottocrinology against.
Andrew: Exactly. It’s supposed to feed the chronology.
Carrie: Coming back full circle.
Andrew: It’s a linguistically problematic list because a lot of it has some things that are nouns, but then in the language you ask, the verbs.
Carrie: Sure, yeah.
Andrew: It goes downhill really quickly. But I find it’s a good way to start, say, a field methods course. Then start introducing stitions to the difficulties of linguistic field methods. But typically, the words are on that list because they tend not to be borrowed and they tend not to change a lot. I suspect that those words probably won’t change that much either.
Carrie: I’ll post that as well.
Jeffrey: But I mean, I think one of the key things is language change is at some level unpredictable. We can try to predict it, and we can make speculation based on the way language behaves sort of based on history. But at the end of the day, languages do things, especially when they’re changing in unpredictable ways. But so even we find examples where things that are not supposed to change, especially in a context situation, will undergo massive changes. We can look at the, going back to cases of English, where the old English, old Norse borrowing situation where we get massive borrowings of pronouns and things like that.
Andrew: Right.
Carrie: Which is unusual. It’s not expected.
Jeffrey: Yeah, it’s not expected. We don’t anticipate these types of changes, but fundamentally language change can make speculative predictions based on the way languages change in a general sense.
Carrie: Anything goes out.
Jeffrey: Anything goes. Almost.
Andrew: Yeah, we know what change will happen. We know what kinds of changes tend to happen, but we cannot predict what will happen or how much it will happen.
Megan: What do you think then is the most important thing that history has taught us?
Carrie: About language change?
Megan: About language. But no, about, yeah. What can we take to space that you think history is saying, “This is the most important thing, you assholes. Don’t do this or…” you know?
Jeffrey: I would say, I mean, the motto of your podcast, don’t be an asshole.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. All right. Okay.
Megan: It’s a good life lesson.
Carrie: It is. Yeah.
Jeffrey: It’s a good life lesson. But it’s also like, it’s really important when it comes to language change and language policy. Like that is like, I think when we’re looking at the ways in which languages have been shaped in terms of education policy, the ways that language is shaped in terms of language policy, like give languages space to breathe, give language, give speakers space to speak their languages. That’s what we that’s what we’re looking for. When we’re looking at these societies, freer societies tend to have better linguistic outcomes. I think that’s what we’re going to go to this meeting saying, like when we’re looking at this structure of this crew, it’s really important for the linguistic outcome for there to be a free social structure within this obviously that you need to have a command structure for a ship, but one that has an element of freedom within it, a loose social structure.
Andrew: Right. Yeah. Probably just make sure that any hierarchies that develop are practical in nature and not social in nature [inaudible].
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, and that’s always easier said than done [inaudible].
Carrie: Exactly.
Andrew: But I think, yeah, not being an asshole is for in your language policy, of course, presupposes that there is a language policy.
Jeffrey: Yeah.
Andrew: I think our one proposal really is more linguistics in space. The initial crew should be trained. They should have some linguistic background and in the education system on board, they should have linguistic education as well. That will help them understand why these policies are helpful. It would also help them do some linguistics, right? Because as they go on this voyage, they’re part of a natural experiment and there’s going to be a lot of science going on, studying what happens to the people on this vessel. Linguistics would fit right into that. You’ll need people who can do it, so you need linguistics on board as well.
Megan: Plus if you do come across an alien that has a language that we can somehow interpret, it’ll be helpful to have linguists.
Andrew: Yeah. We didn’t even get into the aliens part of the paper.
Megan: No, of course not. Because that’s even more speculative.
Andrew: Right. Yeah.
Jeffrey: That’s actually my work with Bridget Samuels. I have a different set of papers. I don’t know how, literally have no idea how I fell into this.
Andrew: [inaudible].
Megan: Space.
Jeffrey: Two and a half years ago, I was just chugging along doing some morphosyntax. Now, suddenly I’m off doing a bunch of work in space.
Carrie:. That’s awesome. Goals, man.
Megan: Well, then I think that the last question I have is why is it so important that linguists do outreach?
Carrie: That’s a good question.
Jeffrey: That is a great question. I mean, I think it’s important that all academics do outreach, but linguists especially. Like as a, as like we look at the just the state of science and just education in the world and especially in the, in the US right now. We are in not a very good place in terms of scientific literacy, and educational literacy and we as academics, do a very bad job transmitting our fields to the popular world. We just flat out. The expectation seems to be, “Well, the people don’t understand us. That’s their fault, not ours.” That is a bullshit response.
Megan: Yes, it is.
Jeffrey: Because it’s not the people’s fault. It is our fault. One of the reasons is that we don’t really try to capture their imagination. We don’t really try to engage with people in a way that works. I think it really is important for us to capture, and find ways to engage with the broader imagination. In linguistics, there are a lot of ways to do that because linguistics covers so many different domains, cover so many different interdisciplinary ideas and space is one of them. I mean, space is interesting to literally everyone as we established earlier.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Once again, full circle.
Megan: Yes. That’s what I live for.
Jeffrey: Yeah. I mean, as Andrew pointed out earlier, we’re a young field. We’re a field that also has, I think, a lot still to prove. Like we’re a field where it’s not uncommon for an engineer to say, “I can just do your field with a computer program that I made in 30 minutes in my garage,” which is not true.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: Nope. But they believe it.
Jeffrey: They believe it and part of the reason is because we don’t go out and articulate what we do well enough. I think opportunities like this, where we can talk to the scientific community and hopefully also get some traction in the popular community are really great opportunities for us to show who we are and show what we do. I really think that’s important.
Andrew: To get into sort of why, why is it important to talk about like work to get the public aware of linguistics? Not just as a field, but just to under, just to get people more in touch with language. I mean, language is probably the most important aspect of our lives that differentiates us from the other animalistic aspects of our lives. It permeates almost everything we do. Even, even aspects of our lives that don’t really require a language, we add language to them anyway. We can’t really help it. It’s like birds fly and humans language, right? At the same time, we know very little about language as a phenomenon. In linguistics we know quite a bit, right? But I tell my students after an intro course, just one semester that they know more about how language works than statistically a hundred percent of the humans who’ve ever lived. I feel like this ignorance, if you permit the word, ignorance about how language works really negatively shapes how people interact with language because language is actually really cool. It’s an amazing set of systems that interact with each other in ridiculously complicated ways. Our linguistic knowledge is probably the most complicated knowledge any of us has. We figure it out before we even go to school, right? I like to tell people that a child can master its vowels before it masters its bowels.
Carrie: I love it.
Andrew: It’s almost ridiculous that that even happens, right? Because you would think the digestive system is a bit more crucial, but something else we’ve evolved to be otherwise. I mean, and yeah, these language systems are really interesting when you compare them to each other, when you see how they change over time when you see how they’re used in different domains of life. But the way that people interact with language now, especially through this kind of education and this prescriptive, let’s say bullshit when it comes to how language is thought to work makes people scared of language. It makes people feel bad about language and feel bad about themselves linguistically. The fact is they shouldn’t, the things that they know how to do as language speakers are really impressive and they’re really intricate. People should feel better about that because not just because feeling better is better, but it’s more realistic. If we can be more realistic and healthier then we should be doing that and outreach is how we start to do that. As Jeff points out, outreach helps people understand what our mission is. But I find that with linguistics because we people know so little about language, it really helps people understand themselves better. That helps in a lot of ways. I think that will help inspire people to really get into linguistics as well.
Megan: Yeah. If you can just walk away from someone and like, the only thing they learn is my language is not bad. I mean, I feel like that’s a huge victory.
Andrew: Yeah.
Megan: Yeah. It’s kind of sad that that’s such a low bar. Your language is not bad.
Andrew: Right. You’re not bad for using it.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yes. I mean, how many people have you come across who, when you tell that you’re a linguist, they’re like, “You don’t want to hear about, hear me speak at my language is bad.”
Megan: About 50% of the people that I meet, if I tell them that I’m a linguist.
Carrie: Yeah.
Megan: It’s really upsetting.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. If I told them how much I’m listening to how they talk, they’d think I was a creep.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Yeah. But you can’t help it. You can’t turn it off. Once you have the analytical tools, you’re like, “Ohh.”
Megan: Yes.
Andrew: Yeah. It’s like, “Hmm.” Yeah. That was an interesting use of it. Even like the other day, this was on the internet and someone was like, so the verb gaslight when you gaslight someone, right? What is the past tense of that?
Megan: For me, it’s gaslit.
Carrie: Gaslighted.
Andrew: Jeff?
Carrie: I put ED on everything.
Andrew: I put gaslighted. I like Gaslighted better. Yeah. It sounds weird to say like, “Yeah. My boss gaslit me for a week.” That’s kind of weird.
Carrie: See, it’s totally fine for me.
Andrew: Yeah. I’m all in favor of more strong verbs and English inflection, but yeah, just for me, I like gaslighted better, but I feel like that’s it’s an area where there’s variation, right?
Carrie: Yeah. I have, I have some really strange past tense verbs though. Like knit for the past tense is knit for me and not knitted.
Andrew: Okay.
Carrie: Very cool. Well, thank you guys so much for coming on and talking about this. This was so fun.
Megan: It was a lot of fun. I had no idea what the fuck was going to happen or what I was getting into.
Andrew: Well, if you were more of a nerd, this would have been.
Megan: Yeah.
Carrie: Also, they gave you two papers to read.
Megan: I did read them. I still didn’t know what I was getting into.
Carrie: Okay.
Andrew: I mean, to be fair, we, when we started this, we didn’t either.
Carrie: Yeah. Fair.
Andrew: It was just like, “Yeah, let’s check it and think about it.” Then the more we thought about it, the more issues came up, and yeah. I mean, who knows what we’ve even left out? I’d like to get some more linguistic feedback.
Megan: Definitely. I mean, it opens up even more questions when you even figure out something, if you can say it’s figuring out something, so language. That’s how it does.
Andrew: That’s right.
Megan: Well, we leave our listeners with the final message. Don’t be an asshole.
Carrie: Don’t be an asshole. The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillan, for Half Tone Audio, theme music by Nick Granham. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Vocal Fries Pod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.
[END]
The Vocal Fries Pod 