Episode 13: We’re Ghana Talk English Transcript

Carrie Gillon: Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Megan Figueroa: I’m Megan Figueroa.

Carrie Gillon: And I’m Carrie Gillon. Just a few housekeeping things before we begin. Just a reminder that we have a Patreon now and at different levels you get different rewards. So at the one dollar level you just get our thanks at the three dollar level you get mentioned on this podcast and also you get one of our stickers.

Megan Figueroa: Which are adorable.

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Addendum: Bilingualism isn’t just for white kids

This week we chat with Dr. Abby Bajuniemi about Heritage language speakers. Dr. Bajuniemi has a PhD in Hispanic linguistics from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. She is a former professor who has worked directly with heritage language speakers and we were thrilled to have her on the show.

Dr. Bajuniemi shared some resources with us that you might find helpful/educational, whether or not you work directly with heritage language speakers.

Dr. Bajuniemi especially recommends the work of Dr. Kim Potowski, Professor of Hispanic linguistics. Dr. Potowski has a list of helpful resources.

Make sure to check out Dr. Bajuniemi’s website for more information on her work. You can also find her on twitter @AbsP. Finally, she has a book coming out in 2019! It’s on designing and researching natural language interactions for digital products, with a focus on sociolinguistics/sociophonetics/conversation analysis and ethics of working with language. When more information is available, you can find it here.

And please remember that labels are complicated and messy and “heritage language speaker” will have different connotations for different people and those connotations are dependent on a myriad of historical and personal factors. But we should all remember that bilingualism isn’t just for white kids and everyone’s language is valid and important.

Happy New Year!

-Megan

Episode 14: They Them Theirs Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi and welcome to the Vocal Fries podcast. The podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan Figueroa: And I’m Megan Figueroa. Carrie you just tweeted something amazing from our Vocal Fries Twitter.

Carrie Gillon: Might be one of my favorite tweets of all time. So I don’t know who this is but someone tweeted about how they’re in this all day meeting and someone just didn’t want to say quote Get your shit together. And so he said Get your poop in a group.

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