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Speaker 2: Oh hello, it's all dad word and I am sick
Speaker 2: as hell. It is Monday, the Monday after Thanksgiving twenty nineteen,
Speaker 2: and I had a new episode for y'all, And then
Speaker 2: I got a little sidetracked by sweating and shivering and
Speaker 2: holding my head and asking my pillow.
Speaker 3: Why why? Why me? Why why?
Speaker 2: I'm a human being? So I told myself I would
Speaker 2: take it easy this week and give you all an
Speaker 2: Encore presentation. There's so much people who have not heard
Speaker 2: this episode, So if you happen to sleep on it
Speaker 2: last summer when it first went up, get into it.
Speaker 2: Now this ology doesn't roll off the tongue easily, but
Speaker 2: it's all about tongues and dialects and the way that
Speaker 2: we hear language. It is so good. So enjoy this
Speaker 2: week's episode. I'll be back next week with a brand
Speaker 2: new one and a diminished viral load hopefully. Okay, here
Speaker 2: we go.
Speaker 4: Oh hi, Hi, it's your weird coworker, the one who
Speaker 4: brings in lemons from their tree but also sometimes microwaves
Speaker 4: fish alley board for another episode of oologies.
Speaker 2: Okay, so guess I'm dare right now. I'm using a
Speaker 2: big glob of fat in nerves that I keep in
Speaker 2: a bone bowl behind my eyes to make noises to
Speaker 2: represent my thoughts, and then I beam those grunts to
Speaker 2: a satellite using invisible data transmission, and then your nervy
Speaker 2: fat glob is like, hmm, totally yeah, I get it.
Speaker 2: So my brain to your brain. It's magic, people. So
Speaker 2: today we're gonna be speaking about speaking. I'm pumped as
Speaker 2: heck about it, but first let's grunt about you. Thank
Speaker 2: you to everyone who's out there in the world strutting
Speaker 2: about in wars. From ologiesmerch dot Com, where you can
Speaker 2: go if you want a twenty dollars science t shirt.
Speaker 2: A tip of the cap to all of the patrons
Speaker 2: who submit questions for the podcast and support the podcast
Speaker 2: for as little as twenty five cents an episode. I'm
Speaker 2: my Heart is that cheap. Twenty five cents an episode
Speaker 2: gets you into that club. And thanks to everyone who
Speaker 2: tosses some free love my way just by tweeting or
Speaker 2: gramming about the podcast and getting the word out, and
Speaker 2: for subscribing and rating on iTunes and Stitcher, which is
Speaker 2: super important and helps so much in getting the show seen.
Speaker 2: Are you guys ready for this? So this week ologies
Speaker 2: number six on the iTunes Science charts, like up there
Speaker 2: with like Invisibilia and Radio Lab and Hidden Brain, all
Speaker 2: like respectable podcasts, ones that don't use the F word
Speaker 2: about neuroscience or talk about duc dicks as much. So
Speaker 2: thank you so much for the reviews. I creep them all.
Speaker 2: I read every single one, and to prove it each
Speaker 2: week I read one aloud. So this week I'm going
Speaker 2: to say thanks Brooke Bissone for saying Ali, thanks so
Speaker 2: much for making a podcast that makes scientists seem like
Speaker 2: rock stars. Your interviews are fun and interesting and go
Speaker 2: into the science while still managing to remain a little goofy.
Speaker 2: I think she's being generous with that. But okay, let's
Speaker 2: get into this topic. So intenational phonology, what do those
Speaker 2: sounds together even mean? So it has nothing to do
Speaker 2: with international telecommunications. So phonology is a branch of linguistics
Speaker 2: that deals with sounds. So what our emotional word grunts
Speaker 2: sound like? And intenational means the pitches we use to
Speaker 2: convey different things like ask a question or be sarcastic.
Speaker 2: So this week we are taking something that you do
Speaker 2: every day, which is talk with all the hidden cues
Speaker 2: and meanings and signifiers, and we're breaking it down a
Speaker 2: little bit. So how do things like gender identity and
Speaker 2: racial background play a role in how we signal and
Speaker 2: bond and communicate with other people? It turns out it's
Speaker 2: fascinating and so complex. So this ologist has both a
Speaker 2: bachelor's and a master's in linguistics and has studied the
Speaker 2: nuances of speech in everyone from pop stars to professors
Speaker 2: and people in both politics and prisons. Which I feel
Speaker 2: like there's a Venn diagram. Those things are just getting
Speaker 2: closer and closer together. She got a PhD from NYU
Speaker 2: with a dissertation entitled Intonational Variation, Linguistic Style and the
Speaker 2: Black Biracial Experience. She's now an assistant professor of linguistics
Speaker 2: at Pomona College and we set a date for me
Speaker 2: to come out to her office on campus. It's about
Speaker 2: thirty five minutes away from where I live, and because
Speaker 2: I am very smart and also responsible, I gave myself
Speaker 2: an hour and a half to get there. I started
Speaker 2: out driving, all was well, and then my GPS just
Speaker 2: kept tacking on more minutes. It was horrifying. Suddenly, you're
Speaker 2: going to be four minutes late. I was like shit.
Speaker 2: I sent her a message. I was like I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2: A few miles down the road, my GPS is like, nah,
Speaker 2: you're gonna be fifteen minutes late. I was like what,
Speaker 2: And then twenty minutes late. And I just kept sending
Speaker 2: her emails from stop and go traffic, being like, dude,
Speaker 2: I don't like maybe there's like a dinosaur in the
Speaker 2: road or a tanker truck exploded. Anyway. I hadn't realized
Speaker 2: that the Friday evening Los Angeles traffic on Memorial Day
Speaker 2: weekend would start before noon. So I was in the
Speaker 2: car for over two hours to go thirty miles, and
Speaker 2: I was just sweating in so many places. So by
Speaker 2: the time I arrived, I was one hour late. I
Speaker 2: was the most mortified ever, and I just I was
Speaker 2: wishing I had been fitted with a catheter for the drive.
Speaker 2: So I started rolling tape in the car and just
Speaker 2: ran into her office. I'm proud to report I went
Speaker 2: the whole interview without having a potty accident. But this
Speaker 2: ologist was as gracious as a human being could have been,
Speaker 2: and in the forty five minutes we had to talk,
Speaker 2: she gave me one of the most frank and enthralling
Speaker 2: interviews I could ever hope for. I had about ten
Speaker 2: hours worth of questions to ask her. But I've included
Speaker 2: more info on her work at the end of this
Speaker 2: because we had limited time, and it's also up on
Speaker 2: my website, So feel free to tenderly stalk her to
Speaker 2: continue learning about this field. Also, if there's anything language
Speaker 2: wise I can improve on, feel free to reach out
Speaker 2: to me. I really wanted to learn more about this
Speaker 2: work because I knew nothing about it, and I wanted
Speaker 2: to kind of open up the discussion and just get
Speaker 2: people thinking about these experiences. Both their own and others.
Speaker 2: So in this episode, we cover the origins of our
Speaker 2: own voices through socialization, code switching, Obama's voice, Twitter grammar,
Speaker 2: questions that linguistics hate getting, and how difficult it is
Speaker 2: to change your identity to fit in. Also what not
Speaker 2: to wear in Paris, and how I'm a shape shifting
Speaker 2: lizard member of the Illuminati. So tell your brain glob
Speaker 2: to please listen up to the significant and brilliant word
Speaker 2: machinations of international phonologist doctor Nicole Holiday. Oh god, this
Speaker 2: is the nightmare. All right, I've arrived at the college.
Speaker 2: I'm an hour late. This is my nightmare. Oh god,
Speaker 2: I'm so every everything is a red zone.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 2: I'm parking in some parking lot. It doesn't say I can't,
Speaker 2: so I'm doing it Friday afternoon and holiday weekends. I
Speaker 2: have to pee so fucking bad. Two hours in the car.
Speaker 2: I am over an hour late to this interview. This
Speaker 2: doctor is like, hmm, it's waiting in her office for
Speaker 2: me on a holiday weekends.
Speaker 3: Okay, heavy breathing.
Speaker 2: S. Building is empty, Doctor Holiday. I'm already rolling. I'm
Speaker 2: like ready to go.
Speaker 3: Why how are you good? How are you? I'm so sorry?
Speaker 3: That you had such a traffic.
Speaker 2: O. My god, this is so embarrassing.
Speaker 5: I'm just so.
Speaker 2: I was like, I started running it in the car.
Speaker 2: I was like, I'm going to roll in there. I'm
Speaker 2: so excited to talk. I'm glad you made it.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry the traffic.
Speaker 2: No, it's me. I should have left yesterday. I should
Speaker 2: have left in camp. We should have.
Speaker 3: Thought about the fact that it was Friday.
Speaker 2: We really didn't even think about that or the holiday weekend.
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, my gosh. So, first off,
Speaker 2: so now you are a linguistics professor here now, right, Yes,
Speaker 2: I am. Now you've been a linguistics professor here pretty recently, right.
Speaker 5: This is I Actually I was a post doc for
Speaker 5: one year here and then I just finished my first
Speaker 5: year as faculty, so like a baby professor.
Speaker 2: That's so exciting.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, I understand that you started studying Spanish in high school, right.
Speaker 2: Can you tell me a little bit about when you
Speaker 2: started becoming so interested in language.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So I was always a kid that was like super
Speaker 5: interested in maps and geography, and then I think when
Speaker 5: I was in fifth grade, we had like three weeks.
Speaker 3: Of French or something, and I was like this is
Speaker 3: so cool.
Speaker 5: But like you know, in the US, kids don't really
Speaker 5: learn second languages. So it wasn't until you know, I
Speaker 5: get to high school, basically eighth grade when I started
Speaker 5: taking Spanish, and I had was a kid that was
Speaker 5: good at school, but I wasn't like super good at
Speaker 5: anything in particular until we started doing Spanish, and it
Speaker 5: was like, oh, this is the easiest thing for me,
Speaker 5: Like this must be the thing.
Speaker 2: Side note, I'm learning Spanish on dual Lingo in case
Speaker 2: anyone wants to be my friend on it. I'm not
Speaker 2: very good at it, which.
Speaker 3: Means I cheated and made the computer say this.
Speaker 5: So when I went to college, I was like, I'm
Speaker 5: just gonna study a bunch of languages. I'm gonna study
Speaker 5: Spanish and Arabic and whatever. So I got into it
Speaker 5: and I was studying Arabic and it was harder than Spanish.
Speaker 3: Obviously for an English speaker.
Speaker 2: Quick question, how much harder is Arabic than English? I
Speaker 2: was curious from everything I just read about it. It
Speaker 2: is hella fucking hard. So though there are twenty eight
Speaker 2: characters in the Arabic alphabet, the vowels are totally left
Speaker 2: out or represented as these wee little dots and swishes
Speaker 2: around the consonants. So in one study, neuropsychologists found that
Speaker 2: the left hemisphere of the brain, which handles like linear
Speaker 2: reasoning like grammar, tends to analyze these intricate little letter
Speaker 2: freckles and swoops of Arabic writing. So learning other languages
Speaker 2: with simpler alphabets, like English or Hebrew, the left and
Speaker 2: the right brain both helped you decipher the meaning and
Speaker 2: the emphasis. But in Arabic, even native speakers, the left
Speaker 2: brain kind of rolls up its sleeves and is like,
Speaker 2: oh man, this shit is complex, I gotta analyze this. Also,
Speaker 2: arab has a bunch of pronunciations that are unfamiliar to
Speaker 2: English speakers. It's got some next level grammar, not to
Speaker 2: mention tons of regional dialects. So if you can read
Speaker 2: or speak Arabic, please accept my robust, cosmic high fives.
Speaker 2: That is life in the fast lane linguistically. So Nicole
Speaker 2: was studying that, and then and then.
Speaker 5: Somebody suggested my friend's dad suggested I should take Introduction
Speaker 5: to linguistics, thought I would like it, and I took it,
Speaker 5: and I got to day one and I was like, yeah,
Speaker 5: this is the thing. Like, it was never the languages.
Speaker 5: It was like the theory beneath.
Speaker 3: The languages that I was interested in.
Speaker 5: But I didn't really have a way to talk about that,
Speaker 5: because who learns about linguistics in high school, right, Like
Speaker 5: almost no one, zero people.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's never It's not something that's thought of, even
Speaker 2: though it's something that we do all day every day.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And the way that we teach this kind of anything allied,
Speaker 5: right is like we teach grammar, which everyone hates because
Speaker 5: we teach it so poorly and it's so prescriptive. There's
Speaker 5: so many rules and so many limitations, and so people
Speaker 5: are just like, oh, sentence structure. I want to run
Speaker 5: away from that. So even when people do hear about linguistics,
Speaker 5: they're like, oh, you're just diagramming sentences. It must be horrible.
Speaker 3: I'm like, no, I don't do that at all. I'm
Speaker 3: actually horrible at that.
Speaker 2: Now tell me what about it did you love so much?
Speaker 2: Is it because you love communication? Is it because you
Speaker 2: love how thought is shaped by language?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: So I like the structure.
Speaker 5: So some one of my students last semester describe linguistics
Speaker 5: as like language plus math.
Speaker 3: So there's a lot of there's a lot.
Speaker 5: Of like procedure and theory and like ways that you
Speaker 5: go We do problem sets right when we're teaching students,
Speaker 5: so there's like a very orderly way about going about
Speaker 5: analyzing this thing that doesn't necessarily seem really like rule
Speaker 5: governed to us. Just as people who are walking around
Speaker 5: speaking you don't think about like all of the things
Speaker 5: that you have to know in your mind sort of
Speaker 5: cognitively to be able to use your first or second language,
Speaker 5: I know, but also socially. Right, So we teach it's
Speaker 5: a subfield of linguistics called pragmatics that I teach about,
Speaker 5: you know, when I teach introductory level classes, and I
Speaker 5: will just say things that strike the students as absurd.
Speaker 5: So I told that, Like one of the examples is,
Speaker 5: like what happens if I walk in here and I'm like,
Speaker 5: Drake is the greatest rapper of all time. It's like
Speaker 5: the first thing I say in class today, like what?
Speaker 3: And they laugh?
Speaker 5: Right, And I said, why is it funny? They're like, oh,
Speaker 5: it's like not appropriate. I'm like, but why do you know?
Speaker 5: Like why, like you know all these social things that
Speaker 5: make you know that this is not like a thing
Speaker 5: that you can do right, right, but nobody ever taught
Speaker 5: you that.
Speaker 2: Do you ask them why? Do you ask them their
Speaker 2: opinions on why was that not appropriate? Like what are
Speaker 2: what are some of the responses that they.
Speaker 5: Get, right, So they get well, it's not the theme
Speaker 5: of the class, right, Okay, so they know what class
Speaker 5: they're in. It's not what they would expect from me
Speaker 5: as a professor to like come in and talk about
Speaker 5: hip hop. I guess right, So all of these and
Speaker 5: also like it's a formal setting, right, We're in a classroom,
Speaker 5: so it's like not the type of thing that you
Speaker 5: expect here from a professor in a classroom. So that's
Speaker 5: why it's comical, right, because all of these things are unexpected.
Speaker 3: They expect me to come in and say today, class,
Speaker 3: we're can I do you know? Whatever they need?
Speaker 5: And also it's weird because it's the first thing like
Speaker 5: we don't make statements apropos of nothing usually, and when
Speaker 5: we do, we apologize like, oh, sorry, I was just
Speaker 5: thinking about right, we have to kind of couch.
Speaker 2: It, right, And then it does a discussion follow of
Speaker 2: who the greatest rapper of all time really is? And
Speaker 2: do you ever settle on that.
Speaker 5: No, No, they have a lot of opinions. People used
Speaker 5: to say Nas, but he's like on the Blacklist now.
Speaker 2: So it's really okay, it's not good. Okay, so perhaps
Speaker 2: not Nas. Yeah, okay, I had to look this up.
Speaker 2: I was like, huh. So Nas was married to Kalise,
Speaker 2: a hip hop artist and a chef, two talents which
Speaker 2: blended beautifully in one of her hits that we've all
Speaker 2: sang despite our personal lactose intolerances.
Speaker 3: Shake brings all the voice they got.
Speaker 2: So Nas and Caalise divorced in two thousand and nine,
Speaker 2: but just a few months ago she divulged that they
Speaker 2: had a terrible physically and mentally abusive relationship. So Na's
Speaker 2: not good. So who is the greatest rapper? I was like,
Speaker 2: I gotta know what is the consensus? So I did
Speaker 2: some digging and I got lost down to very deep
Speaker 2: tunnel of opinion, an abyss of thoughts, and a lot
Speaker 2: of people say Kendrick Lamar. And then I found a
Speaker 2: list on MSN of the top twenty rappers of all times.
Speaker 2: I was like, I wonder what they say, just so
Speaker 2: you know how much I love you all. It was
Speaker 2: a click through article twenty slides to get to number
Speaker 2: one with ads in between, but I still clicked all
Speaker 2: the way through and it named NAS's number three, Biggie
Speaker 2: Small's runner up and at the top. Tupac now, Rickim
Speaker 2: and jay Z were also in the top five. But
Speaker 2: according to MTV's Top MC's in the Game, Nicki Minaj
Speaker 2: by the way, only female rapper to ever appear on it,
Speaker 2: Kanye and Drake frequently hover in first and second place
Speaker 2: on that list, although some people, especially Push a Tea
Speaker 2: Right Now, may dispute Drake's ranking. Also one more thing,
Speaker 2: if you love beautiful pastries and frosting calligraphy of hip
Speaker 2: hop lyrics, I highly suggest following the Instagram account Drake
Speaker 2: on a Cake by the Wonderful joy the Baker. I
Speaker 2: love it so much. But any husles bestrapper, big debate
Speaker 2: not something you would expect your professor to profess straight
Speaker 2: out of the gate before laying down the syllabus. Is
Speaker 2: the point here when you really started to go down
Speaker 2: the line and get your PhD in this, By the way,
Speaker 2: I congratulation, thank you, Like, how did you choose what
Speaker 2: your dissertation subject was?
Speaker 5: Like?
Speaker 2: Essentially, steer your boat.
Speaker 5: I think I have an unusual story because I remember
Speaker 5: the moment when I figured out my dissertation topic, and
Speaker 5: it was when I was in college. I wasn't even
Speaker 5: I think I had just decided on my linguistics major,
Speaker 5: and I was.
Speaker 3: I grew up in Ohio.
Speaker 5: I was undergrad at Ohio State, and I had been
Speaker 5: in Peru studying abroad. I was initially kind of interested
Speaker 5: in the language rights of indigenous people in India and
Speaker 5: South America, and I do some research on that too,
Speaker 5: like Peru and Bolivia.
Speaker 3: So i'd come back.
Speaker 5: But I started to have all these thoughts about like
Speaker 5: language rights in the United States, right, like who gets
Speaker 5: discriminated against right, and particularly like being black, thinking about
Speaker 5: the ways in which that kind of contributes to racism.
Speaker 5: So I came back and I wanted to This was
Speaker 5: two thousand and eight, and I wanted to volunteer in
Speaker 5: the Obama campaign. So I walked to the Obama field
Speaker 5: office and they told me to like sit down, and
Speaker 5: some guy was going to come talk to me. So
Speaker 5: I'm watching this guy who reads to me is by Rachel,
Speaker 5: which he was right like me too, and he's on
Speaker 5: the phone presumably with some you know, wealthy donor, presumably
Speaker 5: like a white guy. He's like, excuse me, sir, like
Speaker 5: we really need you. Obama really could use your support,
Speaker 5: and the Senator is counting on folks like you to
Speaker 5: contribute rate this very formal kind of register. And I
Speaker 5: guess the guy gave him money so he hung up.
Speaker 5: Five seconds later, like a young black guy teenager comes
Speaker 5: in and he's like, what up, dog Like, yeah, yeah, Obama,
Speaker 5: you know, he could really use your support. We're looking for.
Speaker 3: Volunteers to go knock out some doors.
Speaker 5: And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa. And
Speaker 5: I said, somebody has to like know about this, like
Speaker 5: there has to I need to read about it, like,
Speaker 5: because it just was so clear to.
Speaker 2: Me, right, what a moment. And also in terms of
Speaker 2: the Obama campaign, I think a lot of people observe
Speaker 2: that Obama is really dead with that as well, Right,
Speaker 2: does that click for you as well?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: And I have maybe not exactly at that point, but
Speaker 5: I have a few papers about Obama because Obama is
Speaker 5: also one of my research interests.
Speaker 2: So I'm just casually in a hotel room perusing doctor
Speaker 2: Nicole Holidays one hundred and eighty five page PhD dissertation
Speaker 2: I found online. I was super tickled to see the
Speaker 2: forty fourth president mentioned right in the opening paragraph. She
Speaker 2: notes up top that Barack Obama is a masterful code
Speaker 2: switcher between mainstream US English and African American language. Aar
Speaker 2: So some of doctor Holliday's other papers who they're great
Speaker 2: influence of supra sigmental features on perceived ethnicity of American politicians.
Speaker 2: Super a segmental features, by the way, are things like loudness, pitch,
Speaker 2: length of vowels, et cetera. So she also wrote a
Speaker 2: paper examining Barack and Michelle Obama's rates of CSD and CSD.
Speaker 2: Of course I look that up. No, I did not
Speaker 2: know what it meant at first. It stands for coronal
Speaker 2: stop deletion or leaving off the hard D or T
Speaker 2: at the end of words like didn't or hard. Now,
Speaker 2: if I were to attempt to give a rundown of
Speaker 2: phonological features of African American language, which some scholars on
Speaker 2: the subject have also called African American Vernacular English, this
Speaker 2: episode would stretch like into next week. So Nicole's work
Speaker 2: involves changing the perceptions and fostering appreciation for a dialect
Speaker 2: of American English that has a super complex and very
Speaker 2: specific set of grammatical rules as well as a bunch
Speaker 2: of social and socio linguistic functions. There are so many
Speaker 2: nuances to it that the seminal reference book on the
Speaker 2: matter is called the Oxford Handbook of African American Language,
Speaker 2: was published in twenty fifteen. It weighs in at a
Speaker 2: hefty nine hundred and forty four pages. So the study
Speaker 2: of the dialect isn't just about coronal stop deletion or
Speaker 2: dropping a G at the end of a word. She
Speaker 2: does a lot of research on code switching. And this
Speaker 2: is a term that originated almost seventy years ago from
Speaker 2: a study of Norwegian villages, and it means to switch
Speaker 2: into different conversational tones depending on who you're speaking to
Speaker 2: or to whom you're speaking, and it applies to so
Speaker 2: many different cultures and languages. I hadn't heard of the
Speaker 2: term until recently when my bilingual Latina friend Dalen told
Speaker 2: me about it, and she was like, yeah, dude, of
Speaker 2: course this happens all the time. And while I'm in Detroit,
Speaker 2: I met up with some ologies listeners and I told him.
Speaker 2: I was working on this episode and one listener Paul
Speaker 2: was raised in England but came to America during grade school,
Speaker 2: and he says he switches back and forth between a
Speaker 2: British accent when he talks to his parents versus his
Speaker 2: American friends just boo bob boop. And another ologite, Ron
Speaker 2: grew up in Detroit and said, of course he switches
Speaker 2: tones if he's talking to his friends he grew up with,
Speaker 2: or people in business settings. So it happens all the time,
Speaker 2: but the pressure within ethnically diverse communities is particularly heavy.
Speaker 2: So either you've never considered this before or you're like,
Speaker 2: duh jir, Yeah, this is daily life for me.
Speaker 5: I am, you know, sort of very interested in this
Speaker 5: idea of what it means to sound black, sort of
Speaker 5: from the perspective of something that you can perform as
Speaker 5: part of your identity, but also when people make that judgment,
Speaker 5: like what are they hearing? And so a lot of
Speaker 5: the work that I do, sort of the quantitative work
Speaker 5: that I do, looks at what people are attuned to
Speaker 5: when they're making those kind of social judgments about race.
Speaker 2: And what did you what conclusions did you come to?
Speaker 2: If someone asks you in a nutshell, Explain your work,
Speaker 2: Explain your findings.
Speaker 3: Where do you start?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so I study intonation. So it's not exactly anology.
Speaker 2: Sorry, international phonology.
Speaker 5: Total international phonology is anology. We'll use that one. And
Speaker 5: so a lot of times when I talk to just
Speaker 5: people that don't know as much about linguistics, when I
Speaker 5: ask them like, oh, what do you think makes somebody
Speaker 5: your ability to judge somebody black? If they if you
Speaker 5: can't see them, like, why would you make that judgment?
Speaker 5: And they usually say they think about the grammar, and
Speaker 5: you know, there's a stereotype like vill say that it's
Speaker 5: bad grammar or like bad English or something. Even black
Speaker 5: people will say that, really yeah, there's the racism runs
Speaker 5: deep and it's really entwined with language in complex ways.
Speaker 5: But so they'll say that, and I said, yeah, but
Speaker 5: you know what about somebody like Obama? What about somebody
Speaker 5: like even L. Sharpton, right, like they're not they're people
Speaker 5: that are known as using actually a very standard kind
Speaker 5: of grammar, but still like UNRECOGNI like unmistakably black. Right
Speaker 5: if you hear L. Sharpton's voice, you've never seen them
Speaker 5: in your life, you know, You're like, that is a
Speaker 5: black eye, so it must be something else. But when
Speaker 5: I started to look into the literature about this, we
Speaker 5: don't actually know.
Speaker 3: Much about the voice.
Speaker 5: What it is about the voice and the tone and
Speaker 5: the way that the pitch of the voice goes up
Speaker 5: and down, this kind of movement that causes this kind
Speaker 5: of judgment. So that is primarily what my research focus
Speaker 5: is on.
Speaker 2: Really, So is it so there? I imagine there's two
Speaker 2: different ways of looking at it. It's the actual physiology
Speaker 2: of why people's voices sound a certain way, the actual
Speaker 2: voice box, and then it's also how how much it's used, right,
Speaker 2: So how do you separate that when you are studying?
Speaker 5: So the social things are kind of more what we're
Speaker 5: interested in, right, So there's always going to be individual
Speaker 5: level variation, and our minds are really good at that.
Speaker 5: Like when we hear a child and an adult say
Speaker 5: the same thing, we can process the same information even
Speaker 5: though they're vastly different sizes. Right, Their vocal tract is
Speaker 5: actually similar shape, but the scale is really different.
Speaker 3: So what I'm.
Speaker 5: Interested in is the ways in which these patterns are socialized.
Speaker 5: So one thing, for example, like if we look at
Speaker 5: pitch just the numbers don't matter. But like, the average
Speaker 5: man in the United States has a pitch that's like
Speaker 5: around between one hundred and one hundred and fifty hertz,
Speaker 5: and the average woman has one that's between like two
Speaker 5: hundred and two hundred and fifty herts. But only half
Speaker 5: of that variation can be explained by physiology.
Speaker 3: Really, and what's really.
Speaker 5: Shocking is like, if you look at kids like four
Speaker 5: year olds, right, four year old boys and four year
Speaker 5: old girls, their vocal tract is physiologically the same, right
Speaker 5: before puberty.
Speaker 3: They have the same sort.
Speaker 5: Of voice, and they're the same size too, Right, the
Speaker 5: girls have already learned been socialized into raising their voice
Speaker 5: and the boys have already been socialized into lowering it.
Speaker 5: Even though there's no physiological differences, you can tell the
Speaker 5: difference between a four year old boy and a four
Speaker 5: year old girl because they've already been socialized into it.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh. So intonations are picked up socially. Of course,
Speaker 2: the very purpose of language is to communicate within a
Speaker 2: social system, and evidently younger folks and women tend to
Speaker 2: be the drivers of linguistic trends. So like uptalk started
Speaker 2: in California, but it's now spread geographically and to men,
Speaker 2: although they don't like to admit it, And the purpose
Speaker 2: it may serve conversationally is to convey empathy, just to
Speaker 2: make sure you're being understood. So, as Nicole said in
Speaker 2: a previous interview, I found just said, you can go
Speaker 2: anywhere in the world and ask who speaks the quote
Speaker 2: bad version of the language, and invariably it's the people
Speaker 2: who are marginalized, who are rural poor, or belong to
Speaker 2: religious minorities. And now maybe more marginalized groups use nuanced
Speaker 2: language to bond and communicate for social survival, and then
Speaker 2: later it spreads to less marginalized parts of the population
Speaker 2: of just theorizing. Now, if you're like me, you may
Speaker 2: be thinking, wait ooh, what is the big diff between
Speaker 2: a dialect and an accent? Well, I looked it up,
Speaker 2: as I do, and a dialect has its own unique vocabulary,
Speaker 2: words and grammatical rules as well as pronunciations, but an
Speaker 2: accent is just the variation in pronunciation. Now, if you're
Speaker 2: also like me, you just ate a huge bag of
Speaker 2: halapeno cheese potato chips for dinner and hotel room. No, okay,
Speaker 2: that's fine too. Whatever, Now, is that a little bit
Speaker 2: where creaky voice is coming from. I understand that, like
Speaker 2: the modern like kind of Kardashian like creaky voice in
Speaker 2: vocal fry is a way of getting our voices lower.
Speaker 3: You did a really good vocal fry.
Speaker 5: Yeah, happens when we have creaky voice or vocal fry
Speaker 5: is our vocal folds.
Speaker 3: We don't call it.
Speaker 5: They're not actually chords or yeah, they're folds. So they
Speaker 5: kind of vibrate together, and they vibrate together periodically, sort
Speaker 5: of like a wave. Right, But when we do creaky voice,
Speaker 5: they vibrate a periodically, and so what happens is the
Speaker 5: pitch actually drops out, so we get to the bottom
Speaker 5: of our range when we do that. And lots of languages.
Speaker 5: Some languages use creaky voice to do actual like grammatical
Speaker 5: encoding information, but in English it's stylistic variable. And so
Speaker 5: recently it has been sort of associated with young women,
Speaker 5: like modern young women. But people have had creaky voice
Speaker 5: on and off, and actually men do it. Most of
Speaker 5: the studies show that men do it as much as women.
Speaker 5: It's just stereotyped is being associated with women, and so
Speaker 5: when women are really creaky, they get this sort of
Speaker 5: social association that it's a particular style.
Speaker 2: So we get kind of a bad rap for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, true, and we shouldn't anyway.
Speaker 5: It's just like a way of moving your vocal folds
Speaker 5: like that doesn't mean that you're more or less intelligent,
Speaker 5: all right?
Speaker 2: Quick aside to address what might be driving the increased
Speaker 2: prevalence for vocal fry the last few decades, So it
Speaker 2: may be a way for women to lower the register
Speaker 2: of their voice, as lower voices are perceived to be
Speaker 2: more authoritative. So given that women weren't allowed to wear
Speaker 2: pants on the Senate floor into like the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 2: we're just we're doing what we can. We're pulling out
Speaker 2: all the stops. It's like, what do we need to
Speaker 2: do for you to treat people equally? Now? A study
Speaker 2: by Caitlin Lee at the University of Kentucky found that
Speaker 2: participants also rated male and female speakers totally differently. So
Speaker 2: I'm just going to casually repeat Nicole's statement quote, you
Speaker 2: can go anywhere in the world and ask who speaks
Speaker 2: the bad version of the language, and invariably it's the
Speaker 2: people who are marginalized, who are rural, poor, or belong
Speaker 2: to religious minorities. I mean, until of course it spreads
Speaker 2: and then it's do you think that the way people
Speaker 2: have changed as it goes through trends like that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 5: So there's it's very complicated, but basically we language is
Speaker 5: like social contagion, So we always talk like the people
Speaker 5: that we talk to.
Speaker 3: You might have noticed this, like people will.
Speaker 5: Say this to me, like, oh, I went to the South,
Speaker 5: and like, now I sound like the people in this
Speaker 5: when I'm in the South, I sound like the people
Speaker 5: in the South. Yes, yes, right, because we do. Actually,
Speaker 5: this is a thing called speech accommodation theory. We do
Speaker 5: actually accommodate to the people around us. We converge towards
Speaker 5: them if we like them. If we don't like them,
Speaker 5: we diverge away from them.
Speaker 2: No way.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So like it's contagious, right, So as you see communities
Speaker 5: in contact with each other that maybe weren't before, like,
Speaker 5: they're going to start to converge and diverge based on
Speaker 5: the way that people those communities interact with each other.
Speaker 5: So one example of this is thinking about like the
Speaker 5: California like the creaky voice thing that you're saying. People
Speaker 5: will talk about like the Valley Girl thing as aspirational,
Speaker 5: particularly in the eighties.
Speaker 2: Like oh my God, like totally ps. I just went
Speaker 2: into the wayback machine and I listened to portions of
Speaker 2: this song, which is supposed to be comedic, but it's
Speaker 2: incredibly viciously homophobic, and it made me very, very sad.
Speaker 2: And it also made me reflect on how important social
Speaker 2: progress and empathy and tolerance are and that it's a
Speaker 2: battle worth fighting to have a more loving society. Anyway,
Speaker 2: so you.
Speaker 5: Had these girls in the Midwest that were like trying
Speaker 5: to approximate a California identity because they like it.
Speaker 3: So they started to.
Speaker 5: Sound like California because they were It was a style
Speaker 5: that was now available to them, right, because they could
Speaker 5: see it, they could hear it. People were traveling more,
Speaker 5: they were interacting more, and so they started to change
Speaker 5: the style.
Speaker 2: I imagine that must be true too, for like transcontinental
Speaker 2: like the old movie boys, like that was an aspirational
Speaker 2: kind of dialect as well. Right, yeah, it was.
Speaker 3: I mean it's really funny because no one ever really.
Speaker 5: Talked that way, right, it was nobody's like first dialect.
Speaker 5: But it is definitely like a st It's funny when
Speaker 5: they were talking about Kevin Spacey's character on House of Cards.
Speaker 5: He has this kind of like weird, aspirational Old South
Speaker 5: thing that nobody really sounds like, but it's an idea
Speaker 5: of what somebody like that is supposed to sound like.
Speaker 2: And so when you're looking at this, because I know
Speaker 2: that you've you've obviously studied a lot of people doing this,
Speaker 2: do you find that there might be kind of aspirational
Speaker 2: tones depending on who they're talking to. I started telling
Speaker 2: Nicole a story I had heard the day before from
Speaker 2: Michael Yo, a comedian who's biracial. He's Korean and African American,
Speaker 2: and he was about to interview a very famous rapper
Speaker 2: on the radio, and apparently the musician right before he
Speaker 2: was like, hey, nice to meet you, dada, and then
Speaker 2: as soon as he got on the air for a
Speaker 2: radio station, he had a completely different voice. Is that
Speaker 2: aspirational as well? Depending on kind of who you want
Speaker 2: to connect with?
Speaker 5: Yeah, so we all have you know, everybody has styles, right,
Speaker 5: So you're not going to talk to your doctor and
Speaker 5: your priest and your mom and your best friend the
Speaker 5: same way, right, right?
Speaker 2: Hey Mom, Hey Dad? Sorry I say that F word
Speaker 2: on this podcast Sometimes I know it's uncomfortable for you.
Speaker 5: But for some people that have to negotiate moving in
Speaker 5: between this, like mainstream and not mainstream, or like these
Speaker 5: different racialized groups, communities, whatever, the difference can be sort
Speaker 5: of more contrastive. So I'm presently working on a project
Speaker 5: with Laurence Squire's who she teaches English at Ohio State,
Speaker 5: and we've been interviewing black students there about their experiences
Speaker 5: on campus with linguistic discrimination and linguistic insecurity there. So
Speaker 5: like maybe they don't feel comfortable speaking up in class, right,
Speaker 5: this was where we started, and the students will sort
Speaker 5: of overwhelmingly talk about like the way that they talk
Speaker 5: in class, which is this kind of way that they
Speaker 5: deem acceptable to white people, and the way that they
Speaker 5: actually talk, or the way they talk with their friends
Speaker 5: or they talk at home. So in this way, this
Speaker 5: kind of commanding of different styles is a social survival
Speaker 5: strategy for people that have to move between worlds that
Speaker 5: they see as very different and sometimes incompatible.
Speaker 2: It's interesting how many layers of adaptability you have to
Speaker 2: have in your speech every day. Was on the phone
Speaker 2: with someone at a bank today and my friend was
Speaker 2: in the room, and I was so self conscious because
Speaker 2: the way I was speaking to this banker was like, yeah, fantastic,
Speaker 2: I'll go ahead and compile the profit and law statement
Speaker 2: for my es corp. And then I'll circle back and
Speaker 2: ping you with the figures for the underwriting team. Oh so,
Speaker 2: speaking in the font of mortgage lender conference call and
Speaker 2: walking on linguistic eggshells just to be in this like
Speaker 2: constant high stakes shape shifting mode is so unpleasant. I
Speaker 2: got off the phone. I was like, I'm sorry, I'm
Speaker 2: a lizard person. That was weird, And I was like,
Speaker 2: who am I? But if you find in like in
Speaker 2: biracial and black communities, how it must be difficult? I
Speaker 2: imagine because it's part of your identity. There must be
Speaker 2: a huge struggle between wanting to hang on to that
Speaker 2: identity in community but also having to adapt socially. How
Speaker 2: do you propose navigating that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really hard.
Speaker 5: So one of the things that I teach a lot
Speaker 5: is about African American English and linguistic discrimination. So you know,
Speaker 5: Black children are much more likely to be labeled as
Speaker 5: learning disabled and reading and one of the reasons for
Speaker 5: that that is not that they're learning disabled, but the
Speaker 5: materials are not designed for them.
Speaker 3: They're designed for.
Speaker 5: Middle class white kids who speak standard some kind of
Speaker 5: approximation of a standard English. So it's not that black
Speaker 5: children can't read, it's that when they are evaluated by
Speaker 5: white teachers in a system designed for middle class white kids,
Speaker 5: of course they're not going to perform as well.
Speaker 3: It's not made for them.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So a lot of the movements from teachers sort
Speaker 5: of especially back in the day, where okay, well we
Speaker 5: need to transition them away from this, we need to
Speaker 5: teach them standard English. And it's still a controversy because
Speaker 5: everybody knows, like, if you want to get more economic success,
Speaker 5: like you do need to command standard English. But you're
Speaker 5: asking a lot of those kids, right, So the white
Speaker 5: kids get to speak the same way at home and
Speaker 5: at school, and now all the black kids have to
Speaker 5: command two varieties.
Speaker 3: One for home and one for school.
Speaker 5: And by the way, the one that they speak at
Speaker 5: home is constantly devalued every other place in their life.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 3: So I have students ask me this.
Speaker 5: Sometimes they're like, well, if African American English is so stigmatized,
Speaker 5: why does the community hold on to it, Like, why
Speaker 5: hasn't the language just died and I'm like, because it
Speaker 5: means something, right, because it establishes solidarity, because it establishes
Speaker 5: in group, because it tells a historical narrative of the
Speaker 5: history of black people in the United States. Like, it's
Speaker 5: not something that people really want to get rid of,
Speaker 5: as much as they know that it's stigmatized.
Speaker 2: Do you find historically that it has roots or it
Speaker 2: has connections from a tonal level closer to Southern American English?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So African American English started in the South. So
Speaker 5: there's actually a lot of similarities between Southern white and
Speaker 5: Southern black varieties.
Speaker 3: It is harder for listeners. People have done studies on this.
Speaker 5: It's harder for listeners to tell the difference between rural
Speaker 5: black people and rural white people.
Speaker 3: In the South. Really yeah, so, and it's.
Speaker 5: Because they're kind of more similar, but also because people
Speaker 5: have these stereotyped expectations going in, like the if you
Speaker 5: sound roal, it's white, yeah, right, even though there's lots
Speaker 5: of real black people.
Speaker 2: Rightt you picture a farmer and overalls who's like an
Speaker 2: old white guy with a straw hat or something.
Speaker 5: Yes, exactly, like the ideas that people have going in
Speaker 5: and so yeah, like all of the black people in
Speaker 5: the United States were originally brought to this out because
Speaker 5: we were enslaved, right.
Speaker 2: So side note, if you're like I could become better
Speaker 2: educated on the history of American slavery, which I'll wager
Speaker 2: many Americans fit this category. There are so many good
Speaker 2: books and resources. There's one HBO documentary, Readings from the
Speaker 2: Slave Narratives, which features transcripts of first person accounts and
Speaker 2: they're read by actors like Samuel Jackson and Angela Bassett
Speaker 2: and Don Cheedle and Oprah Winfrey. It's on YouTube, just
Speaker 2: there for you, waiting to be watched.
Speaker 5: We only really got out of the South in big
Speaker 5: numbers in the last hundred years, right, with great migration,
Speaker 5: and even then only got out of sort of very
Speaker 5: dramatic segregated ethnic enclaves even more recently than that. And
Speaker 5: you could argue that we're not even out of them,
Speaker 5: right because like, look at whatghborhoods look like, not diverse,
Speaker 5: and so for that reason, it actually has the effect
Speaker 5: of keeping the language more insulated, right, because you talk
Speaker 5: like the people you talk to. Well, if you live
Speaker 5: in a segregated community, you're gonna sound like the people
Speaker 5: in your community.
Speaker 3: Right right exactly.
Speaker 5: So it's it's kind of an interesting like you can
Speaker 5: look at the language evolution as like the rings of a.
Speaker 2: Tree see the Dendrology episode on trees that.
Speaker 5: Tell the like you cut the tree open and you
Speaker 5: can see like every layer of the history. Like you
Speaker 5: can see that in the language too.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: I'm so curious what you think of how, especially with
Speaker 2: social media, how social media has changed, uh maybe spread
Speaker 2: or appropriated African American English, because I feel like with
Speaker 2: There's I hear that there's Black Twitter is a different thing.
Speaker 2: If you have not heard of black Twitter, by the way,
Speaker 2: it has its own Wikipedia page, and to paraphrase that,
Speaker 2: it's a cultural identity focused on issues and experience of
Speaker 2: intro to the African American community. So issues of social
Speaker 2: justice are brought to light and amplified with these powerful
Speaker 2: hashtags like hashtag if they've gunned me down, black Lives Matter,
Speaker 2: Oscar's so white you may remember. And the community also
Speaker 2: generates some really great jokes and memes. And I feel
Speaker 2: like I see white people maybe try to borrow this
Speaker 2: style and it's and I feel like it's it's almost
Speaker 2: appropriated by comedians or for comedic casual effect and how
Speaker 2: do you feel about that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's really interesting. So there is this thing that's
Speaker 5: like online imagined Black English. So there is a way
Speaker 5: that black people, like on Black Twitter for example, communicate
Speaker 5: their norms of.
Speaker 3: The community, like just with any community.
Speaker 5: But also there is a way in which like that
Speaker 5: is appropriated by the white gaze.
Speaker 3: So like what people think, people think is going on.
Speaker 5: And it's really funny because whenever someone makes the arguing
Speaker 5: like go, African American English is just poor grammar, I
Speaker 5: try to explain to them that they don't understand the grammar.
Speaker 5: Those people if you ask them like okay, well what
Speaker 5: does it sound like, like make a sentence for me,
Speaker 5: they will always be wrong.
Speaker 3: Because they don't understand the ramadical rule.
Speaker 5: And so like you know, people that are on black Twitter,
Speaker 5: like in the community or whatever can tell when when
Speaker 5: it's a parody, because people will break rules that they
Speaker 5: don't know about.
Speaker 2: Oh tell me everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So like it's even hard for me to do.
Speaker 5: But there's there's a thing in African American English it's
Speaker 5: optional called zero copula. So if you think about like
Speaker 5: Kanye whatever like that that ishkra right, you don't need
Speaker 5: an is.
Speaker 3: There, and that's fine, but you can't just do that
Speaker 3: with every subject.
Speaker 5: Like you can do it with a third singular like that,
Speaker 5: but you can't really do it with a first person.
Speaker 5: So you can't say like ikray. When you get white
Speaker 5: people like mocking this, they'll say things like ikra, and
Speaker 5: you're like, no, no one, no speaker of African American
Speaker 5: English would ever say that.
Speaker 2: I was curious about people imitating African American language grammar,
Speaker 2: and sure enough I found a tweet posted seven hours
Speaker 2: ago about someone homesteading chickens with the words I cray. Now.
Speaker 2: The user, according to her bio, is a blonde, holistic
Speaker 2: doula from Michigan who gardens. So yeah, Nicole kind of
Speaker 2: nailed it. I'll see it appropriated and I'll cringe a bit.
Speaker 2: I guess, what are the differences between written and spoken
Speaker 2: African American English?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's hard, right, So, actually, white people have been
Speaker 5: appropriating African American English since forever, right, So, like the
Speaker 5: word cool comes from African American English, like over one
Speaker 5: hundred years ago, right.
Speaker 2: So I started reading up on this topic and I
Speaker 2: came across an Oxford Dictionaries blog titled quote when is
Speaker 2: lexical innovation cultural appropriation? It was a fascinating read and
Speaker 2: it was addressing the use of words like shade and
Speaker 2: yes and woke. And I scrolled down to see, like
Speaker 2: who wrote this amazing piece, and the guest blogger was
Speaker 2: doctor Nicole Holiday. Of course she is the coolest.
Speaker 3: I mean, we're cooler, so they take things her mess
Speaker 3: is fine.
Speaker 5: I meaned in a certain way, right, but I mean
Speaker 5: it's also a lot of pressure to always be cool
Speaker 5: by so you know, this is a well established, like
Speaker 5: long term trend. It's interesting with the Internet because you
Speaker 5: can't see people or hear them in the same way,
Speaker 5: so you can't you don't actually know if the speaker
Speaker 5: is black. Sometimes, especially on Twitter, right, you read a
Speaker 5: tweet and you're like, who.
Speaker 3: Is that from?
Speaker 5: And you have to do like a deep investigation into
Speaker 5: like are they black? I don't know, because is it
Speaker 5: appropriate for them to like I have.
Speaker 3: This problem on Twitter?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: So that's one way in which social media is like
Speaker 5: really throwing people for a loop because you can't you
Speaker 5: can't contextualize.
Speaker 3: People online the way that you can in real life.
Speaker 5: Or at least make educated guesses about them the way
Speaker 5: that you can when you see them in person. But
Speaker 5: I also think, like, yeah, there is some kind of
Speaker 5: cool cachet, like teenagers are cool, right, But teenagers are
Speaker 5: all in a certain way, like more free to violate
Speaker 5: like mainstream language norms because we expect it from them,
Speaker 5: because they don't have to use their language as a
Speaker 5: commodity to make money in the same way, so they
Speaker 5: have to use in school for that kind of economic advancement,
Speaker 5: but they're a little bit more free to actually sound
Speaker 5: how they sound. Adults, right, who are once in a
Speaker 5: working world, particularly black folks who have to work in
Speaker 5: majority white communities all day, right and then raise kids
Speaker 5: who they want to have like a kind of standard style,
Speaker 5: are always under this pressure to sound respectable.
Speaker 3: But teenagers don't have that. And all of this stuff.
Speaker 5: On the internet is jaw is driven by young people, right,
Speaker 5: So there is this kind of freshness, this coolness that
Speaker 5: gets adapted. But I do think that, you know, just
Speaker 5: like with every other kind of appropriation, people in the
Speaker 5: community get frustrated, particularly with people using things wrong. So
Speaker 5: I was talking to a reporter from NPR a couple
Speaker 5: weeks ago. I don't know she ever ended up writing
Speaker 5: this but she was talking about thirst trap okay, and
Speaker 5: like the meaning of thirst chop okay. So originally what
Speaker 5: it meant is like a picture that you would put
Speaker 5: up to like kind of get comments like that you
Speaker 5: were sexy or seductive or whatever. Right, So that's it's
Speaker 5: a particular type of photo that you put up like
Speaker 5: for that reason.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Also just see Instagram in general.
Speaker 5: You could have a whole Instagram account that's a thirst job,
Speaker 5: I guess. But what she was saying is like somebody
Speaker 5: had written a thing about James Comy in the interview
Speaker 5: that he was giving and was like, James Comy is
Speaker 5: a thirst chap right now, because he was like seeking
Speaker 5: attention for in these interviews. Ooh, it's really transformed meaning.
Speaker 5: And as a linguist, it's funny because I'm like, well,
Speaker 5: words are allowed to change meaning, like especially online they
Speaker 5: change meeting really quickly.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 5: But also like that very clearly came like from African
Speaker 5: American English, like from you know, black Twitter, black communities online,
Speaker 5: and now you've just ruined.
Speaker 2: It, right, I think is do you think urban dictionary
Speaker 2: ruins all of the good, like all of the good
Speaker 2: kind of like insular terminology, I.
Speaker 5: Mean by the time it gets to urban dictionary, people
Speaker 5: aren't using it though, Like that's the thing. So we're
Speaker 5: thinking about this as sort of as adults, like if
Speaker 5: you have to look it up in urban dictionary, like
Speaker 5: it's already over.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah right yeah. If you're ever on urban dictionary,
Speaker 2: which I have been, it's like you, there's nothing more
Speaker 2: embarrassing being like than taking your your for me, like
Speaker 2: my old white ass to urban dictionary, be like what
Speaker 2: does this mean? Bye the bye? I looked up Urban
Speaker 2: Dictionaries history and it was created by some white guys
Speaker 2: and they don't moderate super racist and sexist stuff on there,
Speaker 2: so that's awful and fuck them very much. I feel
Speaker 2: like when you get older, you look to cues from
Speaker 2: the younger people to be like what is everyone talking about?
Speaker 5: Yeah, And it's like it's hard for me because like,
Speaker 5: first of all, I'm a linguistics professor, but I'm also
Speaker 5: pretty young and black, so I'm like I'm cool, like
Speaker 5: I should know, right, and the students here say stuff
Speaker 5: to me that I'm like, oh my god, I have
Speaker 5: no idea, like like I have to look it up
Speaker 5: in Urban Dictionary and like, yeah, thirty years old in
Speaker 5: the world of slag is ancient. Yeah, like I haven't
Speaker 5: been qualified to speak on it in like seven or
Speaker 5: eight years probably.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. And how has it changed since you
Speaker 2: started studying linguistics, because you at thirty, which is super
Speaker 2: young to have a PhD and be a professor, but
Speaker 2: you've been studying it for a number of years. Have
Speaker 2: you seen terminology change even in how we talk about it?
Speaker 2: I feel like ebonics was a word people used for
Speaker 2: a while, and I feel like that is not an
Speaker 2: okay word these days.
Speaker 3: People will still use it, but it does seem like
Speaker 3: antiquated to me.
Speaker 2: How is the conversation changing and how shouldn't we talk
Speaker 2: about it? Or how or what or what things are
Speaker 2: already ancient?
Speaker 5: And yeah're sing Ebonics actually was a word invented in
Speaker 5: like sixties seventies, and.
Speaker 3: It's actually a cool word.
Speaker 5: It's ebony plus phonics, but linguists don't use it. We
Speaker 5: stopped using it like in the nineties because it had
Speaker 5: such a bad connotation. So now we say all African
Speaker 5: American English, right, which is not as much fun to
Speaker 5: say as a bonyx. It does give it sort of
Speaker 5: a more like ray. We have a scientific I think
Speaker 5: this idea of code switching is much more wide. People
Speaker 5: know about it more than they did even you know
Speaker 5: when I started studying like ten years ago, maybe when
Speaker 5: I was in college, when I started studying linguistics, people
Speaker 5: that I talk to out in the world that are
Speaker 5: not linguists will talk about code switching in a way
Speaker 5: that's like very informed, And I don't think that people
Speaker 5: had to kind of meta awareness of it before. So
Speaker 5: that is good, right, people having this awareness that they
Speaker 5: command different styles and that they have to do the
Speaker 5: work of it right, and also just being able to
Speaker 5: talk about kind of what I was explaining to you,
Speaker 5: like we're asking so much of these kids to command
Speaker 5: two styles.
Speaker 3: We ask that of some kids but not others.
Speaker 5: Yeah, right, I think definitely in the realm of education,
Speaker 5: teacher training, I've had met so many teachers that now
Speaker 5: have had some linguistic training, like in their master's degree
Speaker 5: or something like that, which obviously makes it more equitable
Speaker 5: for their black students in the classroom, and I mean
Speaker 5: other students too. But that's definitely a positive thing. The
Speaker 5: Internet is really interesting because you do get all of
Speaker 5: this like moral panic about like the kids are ruining English,
Speaker 5: but they were saying that in the sixteen hundreds, people
Speaker 5: have been saying the kids are ruining English since the
Speaker 5: you know, invention of English. So no, like there's no
Speaker 5: you know for linguists, Like there is no ruining. Like
Speaker 5: language is alive and it moves and changes. It's like
Speaker 5: saying like you're ruining the galaxy, Like you're not. Like,
Speaker 5: it's just a thing that exists and we describe it right,
Speaker 5: and it's going to change, and that's a natural part
Speaker 5: of it. And it changes in response to social stimula.
Speaker 5: I know, like when it changes because of oppression, Like
Speaker 5: we have a problem with that, but it's not because
Speaker 5: of the language change, it's because of the oppression. So
Speaker 5: my sort of hope going forward is that people will
Speaker 5: learn to be like more linguistically tolerant in the way
Speaker 5: that they are allegedly learning to be more like tolerant
Speaker 5: of variation and race and gender.
Speaker 3: But those things are connected, right.
Speaker 2: How does it? How should curriculum change?
Speaker 5: Yeah, well it's hard at this sort of you know,
Speaker 5: fifth grade level. When we're talking about teaching kids to read.
Speaker 3: I'm not qualified on that exactly.
Speaker 5: But I think when we teach grammar quote unquote as
Speaker 5: such like in you know, middle school or whenever, fourth grade.
Speaker 5: Whenever people have that they should learn it as linguistics,
Speaker 5: like kids in other countries, like the when I studied
Speaker 5: abroad in Peru, like the Peruvian kids that I was
Speaker 5: studying with had learned some basic linguistic stuff when they
Speaker 5: were in elementary school. So one of the very first
Speaker 5: things that my students learn in day one is like,
Speaker 5: language has variation, Variation is conditioned by social factors. It
Speaker 5: is not a problem. Like variation is not a problem.
Speaker 5: Variation is a feature.
Speaker 2: Just to emphasize that again, variation is not a problem.
Speaker 2: Variation is a feature, and language, of course is elastic.
Speaker 5: But we teach kids in school right now like this
Speaker 5: is proper English, everything else is bad. And by the way,
Speaker 5: not only is everything else bad, it's a sign of
Speaker 5: like a moral failing if somebody uses aint like Heaven forbid,
Speaker 5: right right, But then we're so hypocritical because then we
Speaker 5: go on Twitter and we say ain't for stylistic reasons
Speaker 5: and whatever. So I think we could be less dogmatic.
Speaker 5: But I also think we could teach kids the science
Speaker 5: of how language works, as opposed to just a set
Speaker 5: of rules that scare them into conforming linguistically.
Speaker 2: And if you had to break down the difference between
Speaker 2: grammar and linguistics in a nutshell for someone who is
Speaker 2: not not schooled in it, what is the difference.
Speaker 5: So we talk about linguistics as descriptive rather than prescriptive.
Speaker 5: So sometimes like I'll go to a party or something
Speaker 5: and I'll tell people that I'm a linguist and they're like,
Speaker 5: oh my god, I have to watch my grammar around you.
Speaker 5: I'm like, actually, I am the person that you least
Speaker 5: need to watch your grammar around.
Speaker 3: Because I'm not here to judge, Like I understand rach.
Speaker 5: I aim you know, I've been socialized here just like
Speaker 5: everybody else. But I aim to be like more understanding
Speaker 5: of the variation that I encounter, rather than jumping to
Speaker 5: the conclusion like oh, somebody said, ain't like they must
Speaker 5: not be.
Speaker 3: Educated, right.
Speaker 5: That's the prescriptive thing, and that's the thing that we
Speaker 5: teach people, like, you know, you must follow this set
Speaker 5: of rules. Don't end a sentence with a preposition, which
Speaker 5: is like everyone does anyway, like one does.
Speaker 2: We all do, and it's.
Speaker 3: Weird when you don't it. Sometimes, I know that is
Speaker 3: a thing up with which I will not put like.
Speaker 2: No, not and we're gonna look back and be like
Speaker 2: people spoke like that, like no one. I think we
Speaker 2: look back on on on ancient texts or and we
Speaker 2: look at it we're like this is so awkward. And
Speaker 2: so I mean, yeah, a language is elastic, so it's
Speaker 2: going to change and it changes as we use it.
Speaker 3: But like, why can't that be okay?
Speaker 5: Like why do we have these crusades about like, no,
Speaker 5: we have to preserve this, you know, like we're still
Speaker 5: spelling through th h R o U g H.
Speaker 3: There is no reason for that.
Speaker 2: No reason for it. It's true.
Speaker 3: Yeah, don't even get me started.
Speaker 5: So linguists are really interested in speech, but like, don't
Speaker 5: even get me started on writing, because like the writing
Speaker 5: system of English is at nightmare.
Speaker 2: It's I imagine it makes it a harder, harder language
Speaker 2: to master as well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, in terms of writing, right, So actually people think,
Speaker 5: oh English is so hard to learn. It depends on
Speaker 5: the language you're coming from. So your first language determines
Speaker 5: the difficulty of the second language, the relationship between the
Speaker 5: first and second, So sort of the farther away, the
Speaker 5: harder it might be for you. But also the writing
Speaker 5: system is really bad, right, So French is also very
Speaker 5: hard to learn to write in, like for the same
Speaker 5: reason Spanish is so easy to learn to write in,
Speaker 5: because like there's a sound and letter correspondence, so like
Speaker 5: you don't get this thing in Spanish where like oh,
Speaker 5: could be eight hundred vowels.
Speaker 2: Like that's a good point. Yeah, you see an e
Speaker 2: and an i in the same word. You don't know
Speaker 2: what's going on? Yeah? Yeah, And so are there any
Speaker 2: I always ask this of all the ologists, are there
Speaker 2: any anything in media that addresses what you do that
Speaker 2: you really like or you really think? Missus the mark,
Speaker 2: I always think about that Key and Peel sketch, one
Speaker 2: of the first Key and Pel sketches I ever saw.
Speaker 2: I was like, oh my god.
Speaker 3: Is it when they're on the phone and past each other?
Speaker 5: Yeah? Okay, So for everybody listening out there, yeah, I
Speaker 5: teach with Key and Peel a lot because I'm interested
Speaker 5: in biracial people and they're.
Speaker 3: Just so on the market.
Speaker 5: Right, So this is this is a skit in which
Speaker 5: Key is like on one side of a street and
Speaker 5: Peels on the other, and they're like walking towards each
Speaker 5: other about to pass each other, and each of them
Speaker 5: is on the phone and they don't know each other.
Speaker 3: Because you're my wife and you love the theater and
Speaker 3: it's your birthday.
Speaker 5: Great, and they're talking in a very sort of standard
Speaker 5: way like yes, okay, I'm gonna go to Whole Foods later.
Speaker 5: Like each of them is talking like this, and as
Speaker 5: they get closer, they speak more African American English.
Speaker 3: So then he's like.
Speaker 2: The orchestra is already filled up, but they do have
Speaker 2: seats that are still left in the dress circle.
Speaker 1: So if you want to me to get them theater
Speaker 1: tickets right now, we'll do a right stuff dog about
Speaker 1: five minutes a work. Yeah, okay, yeah cool.
Speaker 3: No, they all go singers, they all go singer song.
Speaker 1: No, man, I'm about I'm telling you man, I'm about
Speaker 1: to cross the study.
Speaker 3: I think Peele gets to the other side, he's like,
Speaker 3: oh my gosh, Christian, I almost totally just got mugged
Speaker 3: right now.
Speaker 5: Oh so they were so standard and then they felt
Speaker 5: this need to like perform African American English when they
Speaker 5: passed each other. But then he bought into like all
Speaker 5: of these white ideologies, like at the it's crazy.
Speaker 2: Are there any questions that you cringe when you get
Speaker 2: asked in what you do, like.
Speaker 3: How many languages do you speak? Never ask a linguist
Speaker 3: how many languages do you speak?
Speaker 2: Really you're like a few though, to be fair.
Speaker 5: I know, but it's like not important, like I could,
Speaker 5: you know, sometimes I joke with people like zero, Like, clearly,
Speaker 5: English is my first language, and I studied Spanish.
Speaker 3: For a long time.
Speaker 5: I have to agree in Spanish, and I studied Bolivian
Speaker 5: Quechua for a while, in Arabic for a while, but
Speaker 5: I don't speak super well.
Speaker 2: Right, So in asking Nicole her least favorite question, I
Speaker 2: asked Nicole her least favorite question. I am the worst.
Speaker 5: I know a lot of things about a lot of languages,
Speaker 5: but that's not what linguists do. Like sometimes people think
Speaker 5: we just go around collecting languages like their stamps or something. Yeah,
Speaker 5: and like we don't, Like we care a lot about
Speaker 5: the structure of the thing. And I'm associate linguist by training,
Speaker 5: and so like I care a lot about the people, right,
Speaker 5: I care about the language and as much as I
Speaker 5: need to understand it to be able to understand what's
Speaker 5: going on with the people there. So all of this
Speaker 5: stuff about inequality that I mentioned earlier, like when I
Speaker 5: went to Peru, Well, I needed to know some Quechua
Speaker 5: to be able to see the ways in which this
Speaker 5: prejudice like operates. Right, I need to know something about
Speaker 5: African American English because I need to be able to
Speaker 5: see the ways in which this operates. And of course,
Speaker 5: like these are my first this is my first language,
Speaker 5: so it's fine. But like when we talk about studying
Speaker 5: other languages, we are often using them to answer our
Speaker 5: scientific questions, not to be like especially communicative. Right, So
Speaker 5: if you're hanging out with a linguist that you know
Speaker 5: has studied French, like, that doesn't mean that they're going
Speaker 5: to help you in Paris. They'll tell you all about
Speaker 5: like the structure of old French, but they will not
Speaker 5: be able to help you order a coffee.
Speaker 2: You're like, don't don't get subway directions from them?
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, don't do it.
Speaker 2: So I note if you ever go to Paris, two things,
Speaker 2: let old uncle Ali help you out. Don't wear athletic
Speaker 2: sneakers unless you are actively participating in a triathlon. Also,
Speaker 2: just learn how to apologize in French. It's literally the
Speaker 2: most useful linguistic tool. To have in your pocket, just groveling,
Speaker 2: ashamed to be American ness, and then everyone's so nice
Speaker 2: to you. They're like, oh, you're cute. You are like
Speaker 2: a sad dog. And do you find yourself from on
Speaker 2: a personal level, do you find yourself code switching? Do
Speaker 2: you do you? Are you more aware of that in
Speaker 2: your own life and in your friend's life.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I can't even like control it. It's hard to
Speaker 5: It takes a lot of cognitive load to be able
Speaker 5: to understand what you're doing at the same time as
Speaker 5: you're doing it. So when I interview people, they're like, yeah,
Speaker 5: I code switch, And I'm like, what do you change?
Speaker 5: And they're like, I don't know. And I feel the
Speaker 5: same way, Like I know the things that people change,
Speaker 5: like because I'm a scientist. But if it's like I
Speaker 5: have my voice right that I use with my grandma,
Speaker 5: or like I'm gonna historically black sorority skiwa storms and
Speaker 5: when I'm there, like I have a style right, and
Speaker 5: it's different than the style that I have like with
Speaker 5: you know, my white students, or like with my white
Speaker 5: mother or you know, things like that.
Speaker 3: But to say exactly what.
Speaker 5: It is, like, yes, it's in the intonation probably, but
Speaker 5: I can't even really tell.
Speaker 3: You what is.
Speaker 2: And I normally I run through listener questions, but because traffic,
Speaker 2: I'm going to run through the most popular one I got.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we have ten minutes.
Speaker 2: Good, But before we you get to your Patreon questions,
Speaker 2: we're going to hear a little bit about sponsors who
Speaker 2: make it possible for us to donate to a different
Speaker 2: organization or charity each week. We didn't get to do
Speaker 2: this the first time around with Nicole Holidays. So I
Speaker 2: texted her this morning and I said, Hey, we get
Speaker 2: to donate to a charity. What do you choose? And
Speaker 2: she said awesome, and she chose Initiate Justice. Initiate Justice
Speaker 2: dot org is an organization that partners community members and
Speaker 2: the formerly incarcerated to address mass incarceration in California. Their
Speaker 2: mission is to end mass incarceration by activating the power
Speaker 2: of the people directly impacts. So they organize members both
Speaker 2: inside and outside of prisons to advocate for their well
Speaker 2: being and change criminal justice policy in California.
Speaker 3: And that is Initiate Justice dot org.
Speaker 2: So a donation went to them this week thanks to
Speaker 2: sponsors that you might hear about right now get value.
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Speaker 2: Okay, back to your questions. I think the most popular
Speaker 2: question I got because we had a lot of questions,
Speaker 2: but is what happens to me when my accent comes
Speaker 2: out when I'm drunk? What is going on there?
Speaker 5: I love that as a question. That's the most popular question. Yeah,
Speaker 5: what happens when you're drunk? A couple things. There's some lowered.
Speaker 3: Inhibitions that happen with alcohol. Right, So say that.
Speaker 5: You are a speaker of a stigmatized variety, like you
Speaker 5: are from the South and you sound southern, and you
Speaker 5: are in California. You probably do some work in your mind,
Speaker 5: maybe not even consciously, to sound less Southern, because you
Speaker 5: get tired of people either making fun of you or
Speaker 5: just commenting on it. Even you're like, no, I'm just
Speaker 5: gonna sound like a California and so I can like
Speaker 5: order my stupid coffee and I have to like have
Speaker 5: a conversation about where I'm from, right, people do that,
Speaker 5: But when you drink, your cognitive abilities decline so that
Speaker 5: you actually can't necessarily manage that at the same level
Speaker 5: that you would if you were sober. Like your brain
Speaker 5: is slower, right, so you can't do it as well.
Speaker 5: The other thing is your brain is slower, but also
Speaker 5: like you might just not care anymore, right.
Speaker 3: Whatever, I'm from the South, and I'm just gonna do.
Speaker 2: It, right, I am this way with chancing and karaoke.
Speaker 2: But it's not all mental.
Speaker 5: There's another thing, sort of physiologically, right, So alcohol can
Speaker 5: cause sort of a loosening of some of the pieces
Speaker 5: of your vocal check. So that's why you get sword speech, right,
Speaker 5: You lose some control. So if your speech is kind
Speaker 5: of slurring or something like that because you're really drunk,
Speaker 5: then you'll sound different.
Speaker 2: I tried to find a good movie clip with a
Speaker 2: drunk Southerner here. But I just started going down rabbit
Speaker 2: holes of drunk people like barfing on YouTube and started
Speaker 2: making me sad. Anyway, I wanted to ask her so
Speaker 2: many more questions, but she had a heart out and
Speaker 2: la Memorial Day traffic is the Devil's evening board game.
Speaker 2: And I'm so sorry. What do you think? My last
Speaker 2: two questions are always the thing that you hate the
Speaker 2: most about your job? What do you hate about it?
Speaker 2: Is it? Is it commute or ours or certain prejudices
Speaker 2: you face? Like what irks you the most about what
Speaker 2: you do?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's really hard to be an expert on language
Speaker 5: because language is a thing that everybody has, right, So
Speaker 5: if I was like a geologist, I always dream of
Speaker 5: like my alternate world in which I'm a geologist and
Speaker 5: I study rocks and people leave me alone.
Speaker 3: They don't ask me how many rocks I have from
Speaker 3: how many language speaking?
Speaker 5: But people assume that you're an expert, right, They're like, oh,
Speaker 5: you know way more about rocks than me. So like
Speaker 5: when you come across rocks in the wild, they're like, hey, geologists,
Speaker 5: tell me about this rock, and you're like, cool, I
Speaker 5: will because I'm an expert. When you're a linguist, everyone
Speaker 5: wants to tell you about the thing that you're wrong about.
Speaker 3: And I'm like, I am actually an expert in this thing.
Speaker 5: And what's maddening is every native speaker is an expert
Speaker 5: about their language. Like, people know things about language that
Speaker 5: I don't know. But I do have some scientrific training that,
Speaker 5: you know. I wish people would like give me credit for.
Speaker 5: So I have had people like straight fight me when
Speaker 5: I say, like, African American English is rule governed.
Speaker 3: They're like, no, it's just bad grammar. I'm like, I
Speaker 3: have a PhD. O my god, and so that is
Speaker 3: the thing.
Speaker 2: And you to get that PhD that must have required
Speaker 2: so much data collection? And did you have to do
Speaker 2: sentence structuring? I mean did you did you have to
Speaker 2: come out with formulas?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: So I spent five years in grad school, which is
Speaker 5: not even that many comparatively.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Side note, average time to get a PhD. Looked it
Speaker 2: up eight point two years. Now, the average length of
Speaker 2: an American marriage eight point two years. So someone please
Speaker 2: write a dissertation on how long a person can withstand
Speaker 2: something difficult yet illuminating.
Speaker 5: And I had to study every aspect of linguistic analysis,
Speaker 5: So like I study tone and social factors, but like
Speaker 5: I had to study the way that sounds are put together,
Speaker 5: the way that words are put together, the way that
Speaker 5: sentences are put together, like meaning in a logic theory.
Speaker 3: Kind of context.
Speaker 5: Like, I just study so many things about the nature
Speaker 5: of language that I don't necessarily use every day now
Speaker 5: except for what I'm teaching, but also just thinking really
Speaker 5: deeply about the nature of sound, which is the thing
Speaker 5: that I do, and the nature of like how language
Speaker 5: works to do social things, like we use it to
Speaker 5: accomplish social things.
Speaker 2: Yeah. True.
Speaker 3: So even if you.
Speaker 5: Know it's not necessarily that, like having the PhD is
Speaker 5: the big thing. The thing is that I've spent like
Speaker 5: years and years reading and thinking and talking and writing
Speaker 5: about these things, so I feel, you know, somewhat qualified
Speaker 5: to speak on them.
Speaker 2: It's great that you're talking about talking talking.
Speaker 3: Yeah, talking about how we do is talk about talking.
Speaker 2: And then what's your favorite thing about it? What just
Speaker 2: like gives you butterflies?
Speaker 5: I really like teaching students. So you know, I teach
Speaker 5: in a liberal arts college and it's undergrads, and people
Speaker 5: are like oh, you don't want grad students and like,
Speaker 5: crad students are a pain. Have you ever met a
Speaker 5: grad student? I was the worst grad student. I don't
Speaker 5: want people like me. I love teaching undergrads because I
Speaker 5: will walk in to like day one of intro to
Speaker 5: linguistics and be like, I am about to blow your
Speaker 5: mind just with even some of the things that have
Speaker 5: come up here about like you know what happens in
Speaker 5: the educational system, like the ways in which language is prejudice,
Speaker 5: the ways in which people that are trying to mock
Speaker 5: African American English get it's so wrong, right, the physiology stuff,
Speaker 5: the things about like kids exaggerating gender differences, like the
Speaker 5: way that the vocal tract works. Like I am a
Speaker 5: big nerd, but all of this stuff is super cool
Speaker 5: to me, and it tells us a lot about the
Speaker 5: social world that we inhabit. So my favorite thing is
Speaker 5: just like watching the eyes light up and be like,
Speaker 5: no way, whoa, You're.
Speaker 2: Just seeing like light bulbs go off, like illuminating, right,
Speaker 2: so exciting because that's you've had so many light bulb
Speaker 2: moments like that coming to do what you do, Yeah,
Speaker 2: oh my gosh. And then is there anything you think
Speaker 2: people who are more curious about this, like anywhere to
Speaker 2: see your writing or any any resources you think people
Speaker 2: should look down, anything people should do or be more
Speaker 2: aware of, because I could sit here and ask you
Speaker 2: questions for ten hours, like I'm so pissed at traffic
Speaker 2: right now because this is so fascinating. But anything anything
Speaker 2: you can point to any doser don't.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I will say if you like podcasts, which
Speaker 5: you might, there's one that's called Enthusiasm.
Speaker 3: It's really good.
Speaker 5: It's got a lot of sort of introductory topics on linguistics.
Speaker 3: There's a few language podcasts.
Speaker 5: There's also one Lexicon Valley, which is hosted by John
Speaker 5: mccorder at Columbia Universities linguistics professor.
Speaker 2: So I'll put links to those on my website ali
Speaker 2: war dot com slash ologies, as well as links to
Speaker 2: some books Nicole recommends about linguistics and discrimination.
Speaker 5: I recommend a book called English with an Accent by
Speaker 5: Rosina Lippy Green a lot about sort of language and
Speaker 5: social social issues and social justice.
Speaker 3: I teach with it in my linguistic discrimination class.
Speaker 5: Cool. But there's a lot of good stuff out there.
Speaker 5: So those are some beginning recommendations and.
Speaker 2: Where can people find you.
Speaker 5: I'm on Twitter, regular Twitter and black Twitter, both twitters.
Speaker 5: I'm mixed linguist on social media, and i like to
Speaker 5: respond to inquiries from you know people, so get at
Speaker 5: me on the interwebs.
Speaker 2: I guess cool and well awesome, We'll get you out
Speaker 2: of here. Thank you so much, welcome.
Speaker 3: It is really fun.
Speaker 2: Oh my god. So to continue learning about and exploring
Speaker 2: intonational phonology, you can look into doctor Nicole Holiday's work.
Speaker 2: She's just brilliant and I want her to give like
Speaker 2: fifty ted talks. And for links to books and documentaries
Speaker 2: that we talked about, you can go to aliward dot
Speaker 2: com slash ologies. I'll put a bunch of links there.
Speaker 2: You can also join up in the Ologies podcast Facebook group.
Speaker 2: And thank you to my dear sisters Hannah Liippo and
Speaker 2: Aaron Talbert for being admins of that. Ology is on
Speaker 2: Twitter and Instagram as Ologies, and I'm on Instagram and
Speaker 2: average white Lady Twitter as Ali Ward with one L.
Speaker 2: And thank you as always to the patrons who support
Speaker 2: the show. You allow me to pay my wonderful editor,
Speaker 2: Stephen Ray Morris to chop this all together. Hi, Stephen
Speaker 2: and thank you if you'd like an Ology shirt or
Speaker 2: a pin or a tope bag. Ologiesmerch dot Com has
Speaker 2: you so covered. Thank you Shannon Feltus and Bonnie Dutch
Speaker 2: for managing that. The Ologies theme song was written and
Speaker 2: performed by Nick Thorburn of the band Islands. And if
Speaker 2: you listen to the end of the episode, have you
Speaker 2: guys been doing that? Do you know that? You know?
Speaker 2: I tell a secret at the end, and this week
Speaker 2: the secret is that my face was like, Hey, I
Speaker 2: know you have some shoots this week. What if do
Speaker 2: you want a big blemish on your face? On your chin?
Speaker 2: And I was like, that sounds great. I read somewhere
Speaker 2: that you can use hemorrhoid cream to decrease the size
Speaker 2: of under eyebags or a blemish. And I didn't research
Speaker 2: it ahead of time. I just happened to be at
Speaker 2: the drug store and I purchased some and then I
Speaker 2: put it on my face. And now I'll research whether
Speaker 2: or not that was a bad idea. But I want
Speaker 2: you to know, as I recorded all these asides in
Speaker 2: this hotel room in Michigan, I have butt cream on
Speaker 2: my face. I'll let you know how it goes. Okay,
Speaker 2: Bryebye pacadermatology, homeology, ordo, zoology, lithology, Yeah, ninology, meteorology, paratology, ethology, ceriology, selinology.
Speaker 2: Oh my god, I just saw a squirrel. It doesn't
Speaker 2: have a tail. Well that was worth the drey.
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