#Murrinhpatha

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 30: Why do we gesture when we talk? 

When you describe to someone a ball bouncing down a hill, one of the easiest ways to make it really clear just how much the ball bounced would be to gesture the way that it made its way downwards. You might even do the gesture even if you’re talking to the other person on the telephone and they can’t see you. No matter what language you speak, you’re likely to gesture, but that doesn’t mean we all gesture the same. 

In Lingthusiasm’s very first video episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about gesture in a format where you can actually see what gestures we’re talking about! In particular, we talk about the kinds of gestures that we make at the same time as our words, even when no one can see us (Ever gesture on the phone? You’re not alone!) 

These gestures, called co-speech gestures, let us reinforce the rhythm of what we’re saying and indicate where or how something is moving. We also talk about how kids learn to gesture as they’re learning to speak, and how gestures differ in different languages. 

This episode is also available in the conventional podcast audio format, if you’re okay with imagining the gestures! Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements:

Massive thank you to our patrons for making this special video episode possible! Producing video is not a trivial task for a production team that’s used to audio-only, and your support on Patreon directly enabled us to film, edit, and caption this video, so everyone gets to learn about gesture linguistics without the frustration of not actually seeing what gestures we’re talking about! You’re stellar human beings and we appreciate you greatly. 

If you’d like to help Lingthusiasm keep producing regular ad-free episodes and cool additional features like this gesture video, become one of our patrons on Patreon. 

Plus, if you pledge $5 or more per month, you also get access to a monthly bonus episode and our entire archive of 25 bonus episodes right now. That’s so much Lingthusiasm you don’t wanna miss out on! 

The latest Patreon bonus episode asks, do you adjust the way you talk depending on who you’re talking to? There’s a word for that: linguistic accommodation. In Bonus 25, Gretchen talks with our producer Claire Gawne (yes, she’s Lauren’s sister) about how they’ve shifted their accents between Melbourne, Montreal, and Edinburgh. Plus, some behind-the-scenes on how Lingthusiasm gets made. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to listen to it!

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

Gesture, history of research (Wikipedia)

Pointing Out Directions in Murrinhpatha (paper by Joe Blythe)

The relationship between gesture and thinking/speaking

Changing your gestures to help your collaborators (Hostetter, Alibali & Schrager)

Blind people gesture (and why that’s a big deal)

Gesturing in your second language

Some of Lauren’s work on gesture in Nepal

Up yours: The gesture that divides America and the UK (Strong Language)

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our editorial producers are A.E. Prévost and Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[superlinguo]

All of the languages discussed and mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics

The list below outlines the languages that feature in Crash Course Linguistics (Nielsen 2020). For each episode we list both illustrative examples and other languages mentioned. We created a running list of languages used in the videos while writing, to help us actively move towards a greater diversity of language examples. This table might be of interest to you if you want to jump to a particular episode, or if you want to do some critical reflection on your own teaching or lingcomm work.

Looking at the episodes in a single table, I can see the ebb and flow of our focus. It’s much easier to talk about phonetics using a range of examples from different languages than it is to talk about semantics, where you’re focused on the nuance of meaning. I can also see the interests of various members of the production team show through in some example choices, which is why I appreciated working with a team on this project.

The introduction of every video also included an opening animation that had facts about language in English, but also some facts in French, Russian, Chinese, Arabic, German, Korean, Vietnamese and Klingon, reflecting the linguistic diversity and interests of the animation team.

We’ve made this table available as a document on FigShare as well:

Grieser, Jessi; Gawne, Lauren; McCulloch, Gretchen (2021): Languages mentioned in Crash Course Linguistics. La Trobe. Figure. https://doi.org/10.26181/61031a232e96e

See also:

Crash Course Linguistics full playlist on youtube

Crash Course Linguistics Mutual Intelligibility Resources

Crash Course Linguistics

Episode 00 - Preview On screen: Japanese, Auslan, Welsh, Swahili, Proto-Indo-European, Tzeltal, Basque, Xhosa, Arabic, English, Nicaraguan Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Inuktitut, Nahuatl

Episode 01 - Introduction Examples in: Spanish, Indonesian, ASL, Auslan, Swahili, English

Episode 02 - Morphology Examples in: English, Mandarin, Murrinhpatha, ASL, German, Malay, Old English, French, Arabic Mentioned: Hebrew

Episode 03 - Morphosyntax Examples in: English, Hindi, Irish, Latin, ASL Mentioned: Nahuatl, Portuguese, Malagasy, Czech, Tibetan, Korean, Hawaiian, Māori, Chatino, Turkish, Modern Greek, Yupik, South African Sign Language

Episode 04 - Syntax Examples in: English, Japanese

Episode 05 - Semantics Examples in: English, Polish, Portuguese, Norwegian

Episode 06 - Pragmatics Examples in: English, Malay, Mandarin, French, BSL, Mentioned: Tzeltal, Japanese, Lao, Danish

Episode 07 - Sociolinguistics Examples in: English (Appalachian English, African American English, Standardized American English) Mentioned: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, BSL, Auslan, NZSL, South African Sign Language, Spanish, ASL, French Sign Language, Irish Sign Language

Episode 08 - Phonetics, Consonants Examples in: ALS, English, Scottish, Spanish, Welsh Mentioned: Arabic, Basque, Navajo, Zulu, Xhosa Language families mentioned: Khoesan

Episode 09 - Phonetics, Vowels Examples in: French, English (General, Californian, Australian), Spanish, Italian, Mandarin Mentioned: German, Turkish, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Tamil, Arabic, Arabic, Japanese, Finnish Language families mentioned: Germanic languages, Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, Afro-Asiatic, Kam–Sui

Episode 10 - Phonology Examples in: English, Hindi, Spanish, Nepali, Taiwainese Sign Language, Auslan, Old English, ASL Mentioned: BSL, ASL

Episode 11 - Psycholinguistics Mentioned: English, Mandarin

Episode 12 - Language acquisition Examples in: English, Italian Mentioned: Malay, Russian, Spanish, Japanese

Episode 13 - Historical linguistics & language change Examples in: Old English, Middle English, Modern English, Iberian Spanish, South American Spanish, Dutch, Icelandic, German, Proto-Germanic, Latin, Sanskrit, Mentioned: Nicaraguan Sign Language, Hatian Creole, Kriol, Tok Pisin, French, Tibetan, English, Hindi, Nepali, Proto-Indo-European, Proto-Semitic, Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, Proto-Algonquian, Cree, Ojibwe, Massachusett, Proto-Austronesian, Javanese, Tagalog, Malagasy, Proto-Pama-Nyungan, Pama-Nyungan, Yolŋu, Kaurna, Dharug, Proto-Bantu, Swahili, Zulu, Shona, Basque, Ainu, Korean Language families mentioned: Khoesan, Bantu, Oceanic 

Episode 14 - Languages around the world Mentioned: Spanish, Latin, French, Italian, Greenlandic, Inuktitut, Tibetan, Nicaraguan Sign Language, French Sign Language, Kata Kolok, Central Taurus Sign Language, Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, Adamorobe Sign Language, ASL, Old French Sign Language, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, Hindi, Urdu, English (US, British), Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, Turung, Karbi and Runglo, Hebrew, Wampanoag, Maori, Hawaiian

Episode 15 - Computational linguistics Examples in: English, Turkish Mentioned: ASL, Greek

Episode 16 - Writing system Examples in: English, Middle English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Inuktitut, Cherokee, Korean Mentioned: English, Finnish, Vietnamese, Swahili, Bulgarian, Russian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, Sumerian, Egyptian, Phoenician, Olmec, Zapotec, Aztec, Mayan, Turkish

[localorganicrpmemes]

Untranslatable Starters

Send the word for a starter based around it~

[ Að redda ] (Icelandic) - To save someone or fix something in a time sensitive manner. [ Beau geste ] (French) - A graceful, noble or beautiful gesture (especially if it is futile or meaningless). [ Curglaff ] (Scottish) - The bracing, shocking and/or invigorating feeling of suddenly entering (e.g., diving into) cold water. [ Duende ] (Spanish) - A heightened state of emotion, spirit and passion, caused by experiencing a work of art. [ Elmosolyodni ] (Hungarian) - A micro-smile; the beginning of a full smile. [ Fernweh ] (German) - The ‘call of faraway places,’ homesickness for the unknown. [ Gigil ] (Tagalog) - The irresistible urge to pinch/squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished. [ Hrepenenje ] (Slovenian) - Nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened yet. [ Iktsuarpok ] (Inuktitut) - Anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, and keeps checking if they’re arriving. [ Jayus ] (Indonesian) - A joke so poor and unfunny that one cannot help but laugh. [ Koi no yokan ] (Japanese) - The feeling of knowing that you will soon fall in love with the person you have just met. [ Lè jí sheng bēi ] (Chinese) - Lit. joy’s zenith generates sadness; intense joy begets sorrow; after a peak of happiness, unhappiness inevitably follows. [ Mamihlapinatapai ] (Yagán) - A wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start. [ Mampemurruwurlmurruwurl ] (Murrinhpatha) - To make someone’s hair beautiful [ Nepakartojama ] (Lithuanian) - ‘Unable to repeat’; a perfect situation which will never happen again. [ Otkhodchivyi ] (Russian) - The quality of being quickly appeased after a surge or outburst of negativity, and/or not bearing grudges. [ Pretoogjes ] (Dutch) - Lit. ‘fun eyes’; the twinkling eyes of someone engaging in benign mischief or fun. [ Qarrtsiluni ] (Inuktitut) - Sitting together in the darkness, perhaps expectantly (e.g., waiting for something to happen or to ‘burst forth’); the strange quiet before a momentous event. [ Ryvok ] (Russian) - A final dash or acceleration; a fast movement or change (that is often associated with progress, but can also tear/disrupt things. [ Shěnměi píláo ] (Chinese) - Seeing so much beauty that one does not  appreciate it anymore, especially if that beauty happens to be one’s lover. [ Tizita ] (Amharic) - A bittersweet remembrance and longing for a time, person, thing gone by. [ Utepils ] (Norwegian) - To sit outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer. [ Verschlimmbessern ] (German) - A combination of the verbs ‘to make things worse’ and ‘to improve’; to make something worse in the attempt to improve it. [ Womba ] (Bakweri) - The smile of a sleeping child. [ Xenia ] (Greek) - Guest-friendship; the importance of offering hospitality and respect to strangers.

* nothing is truly untranslatable, but “rather specific words from other languages starters” just isn’t as pithy ** source: The Positive Lexicography

[must-hate-dogs]

Untranslatable Starters

Send the word for a starter based around it~

[ Að redda ] (Icelandic) - To save someone or fix something in a time sensitive manner. [ Beau geste ] (French) - A graceful, noble or beautiful gesture (especially if it is futile or meaningless). [ Curglaff ] (Scottish) - The bracing, shocking and/or invigorating feeling of suddenly entering (e.g., diving into) cold water. [ Duende ] (Spanish) - A heightened state of emotion, spirit and passion, caused by experiencing a work of art. [ Elmosolyodni ] (Hungarian) - A micro-smile; the beginning of a full smile. [ Fernweh ] (German) - The ‘call of faraway places,’ homesickness for the unknown. [ Gigil ] (Tagalog) - The irresistible urge to pinch/squeeze someone because they are loved or cherished. [ Hrepenenje ] (Slovenian) - Nostalgia for something that hasn’t happened yet. [ Iktsuarpok ] (Inuktitut) - Anticipation one feels when waiting for someone, and keeps checking if they're arriving. [ Jayus ] (Indonesian) - A joke so poor and unfunny that one cannot help but laugh. [ Koi no yokan ] (Japanese) - The feeling of knowing that you will soon fall in love with the person you have just met. [ Lè jí sheng bēi ] (Chinese) - Lit. joy’s zenith generates sadness; intense joy begets sorrow; after a peak of happiness, unhappiness inevitably follows.  [ Mamihlapinatapai ] (Yagán) - A wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but are both reluctant to start.  [ Mampemurruwurlmurruwurl ] (Murrinhpatha) - To make someone’s hair beautiful [ Nepakartojama ] (Lithuanian) - ‘Unable to repeat’; a perfect situation which will never happen again. [ Otkhodchivyi ] (Russian) - The quality of being quickly appeased after a surge or outburst of negativity, and/or not bearing grudges. [ Pretoogjes ] (Dutch) - Lit. 'fun eyes'; the twinkling eyes of someone engaging in benign mischief or fun.  [ Qarrtsiluni ] (Inuktitut) - Sitting together in the darkness, perhaps expectantly (e.g., waiting for something to happen or to ‘burst forth’); the strange quiet before a momentous event. [ Ryvok ] (Russian) - A final dash or acceleration; a fast movement or change (that is often associated with progress, but can also tear/disrupt things. [ Shěnměi píláo ] (Chinese) - Seeing so much beauty that one does not  appreciate it anymore, especially if that beauty happens to be one’s lover. [ Tizita ] (Amharic) - A bittersweet remembrance and longing for a time, person, thing gone by. [ Utepils ] (Norwegian) - To sit outside on a sunny day enjoying a beer. [ Verschlimmbessern ] (German) - A combination of the verbs ‘to make things worse’ and ‘to improve’; to make something worse in the attempt to improve it. [ Womba ] (Bakweri) - The smile of a sleeping child. [ Xenia ] (Greek) - Guest-friendship; the importance of offering hospitality and respect to strangers.

* nothing is truly untranslatable, but “rather specific words from other languages starters” just isn’t as pithy ** source: The Positive Lexicography

[artificiallyimplantedmemories]

@sevenbulletsavior asked: [ Mampemurruwurlmurruwurl ] (Murrinhpatha) - To make someone’s hair beautiful

meme: Untranslatable Starters (continuable)

     These days, Natasha stays out of the public eye. That doesn’t mean that she doesn’t occasionally need to blend in to public events to get information she requires, though. It’s one such gala (to which she has forcefully procured an invitation) that she invites Karen to come along. Not only will it help her to have someone to listen in and get information, but it’ll be good practice for the other woman as well. Nat has the art of being somewhere in plain sight and going unnoticed down to an art. She’s sure Karen will soon, as well. 

     She is, after all, a delightfully capable protègè. 

     She stands behind Karen at the vanity, carefully pulling the hair up into an intricate braided design. While beautiful, it also keeps the long hair out of reach of attackers, in case they try to grab something, and sits tight enough to the head that it’s not much of a handhold there either. The hair is wispy and straight, so it requires more than a few pins and a touch of hairspray to hold it in place, but when it’s done, it’s elegant and functional. 

     Natasha smiles at the result, and holds up a mirror so Karen can see it too. 

     “What do you think? Glam enough for tonight?”

[scentedbygunpowder]

[ Mampemurruwurlmurruwurl ] (Murrinhpatha) - To make someone’s hair beautiful //BeckyWithTheGoodAim

@beckywiththegoodaim

“You know you don’t have to do this, don’t you, Becca?” Riza said, although she obediently sat on the stool in front of the mirrored table. “I can go somewhere and get it done.”

She honestly didn’t think that her words would change the mind of her best friend and maid of honor, but she had to offer. While Riza didn’t mind Rebecca doing her hair for her, for her wedding, she also didn’t want Rebecca to feel like she had to.

Still, she had to admit that having her best friend here with her today was calming, which was something that Riza was surprised to find that she needed on her wedding day. She wanted to marry Roy, there was no doubt about that. But she was finding her nerves increasing as the day went on. She wasn’t sure if it was the idea of being in front of so many people now that Roy was such a public figure, or if it was her own fears and hang ups circling in her mind, but she was definitely growing more nervous.

Having Becca here, however was calming, or at least stabilizing, and the familiar feeling of Becca’s hands in her hair was reassuring. Her friend had insisted on dong her hair many times before, and Riza had given in and enjoyed a bit of “girl time” with her, something foreign to her before this friendship. It was a throwback to simpler times, and Riza enjoyed that.

“You have yourself to get ready too, you know. As much as I’ll be happy for you to do my hair today, you don’t have to.”

[datasoong47]

So, this is an interesting phenomenon.  The Aboriginal Australian language Murrinhpatha is agglutinative in its verbs.  Most verbs consist of two parts, a “classifier stem” and a “lexical stem”.  There are 38 classifier stems, some with clear meanings, such as “say” or “handle”, but some with no clear meaning which are simply referred to with numbers, since the verbs they are part of are, synchronically at least, seemingly arbitrary.  The classifier stems inflect for person and number of subject and for tense, in a single portmanteau form.  The full verb has several inflectional slots:

classifier-object pronoun/subject number-reciprocal/reflexive-incorporated body part/applicative-lexical stem-tense-argument number, adverbial-imperfective

Thus, the classifier stem and the lexical stem may be separated by other grammatical affixes.  Several of the classifier stems may be used on their own, without a lexical stem.  Also interesting to note is how tense and subject number are doubly-marked on both the classifier stem itself and in other suffixes

There is good reason to believe that this agglutinative structure is relatively recent, having evolved from a light verb construction, with univerbation having occurred possibly as recently as the early 20th century, with the classifier stem having originally been a small set of inflected verbs, with the lexical stems being nominal forms used with those verbs, with various clitics added to the verb phrase.  They’ve since merged into a single complex verb form

In the modern language, loan words cannot be incorporated into this structure (there’s a single known partial exception, tjigan “shake hands” is sometimes used as a lexical stem with a classifier meaning “handle” and the incorporated body part be “arm”; this appears to have been a very early loan, and thus may have preceded the univerbation).  Instead, a new light verb construction has developed, using one of four verbs (”do”, “sit”, “be”, “go”, all of which are classifier stems used without lexical stems) with a borrowed form, usually, but not always, placed immediately before the light verb.  The borrowed form is most commonly the base form of an English verb, but there are some cases of the -ing form or past tense form being borrowed, and a few cases of nouns being borrowed from English in this construction.  There are also some borrowings from Kriol which include the Kriol suffix -im/-it indicating transitivity, but which in these borrowings is a fossilized ending

There are a small number of inherited words with a similar pattern, but those are rare.  However, this construction with borrowed verbs has become very common in the modern language, especially as spoken by the younger generation (Murrinhpatha is one of the small number of Australian languages which remains in frequent use and continues to be learned by children)

Thus, in a relatively brief period of time, an old light verb construction has become an agglutinative verb complex, and then a new light verb construction has developed

[priest-iuput]

Nym Bandak, Ngakumarl painting (Murrinhpatha totemic landscape) c.1959–1960

[linguainfo]

Books: Murrinhpatha Morphology and Phonology

http://linguistlist.org/issues/30/30-1756.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[fla-news]

For the 2019 Federal Election, Australian Electoral Commission has developed videos in the 12 Aboriginal languages listed below. Follow these links to find the information in your language. Why it is important to enrol to vote - http://bit.ly/2Grcuxa The voting process - http://bit.ly/2IA0cUI Working at an election - http://bit.ly/2Gusu1z #Alyawarra #Anindilyakwa #Arrernte #Burarra #English #MurrinhPatha #Ndjebanna #PintupiLuritja #Pitjanjatjarra #Tiwi #Walpiri #YolnguMatha #firstlanguages #IYIL2019

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 30: Why do we gesture when we talk?

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 30: Why do we gesture when we talk? (Gestures are part of language). It’s been lightly edited for readability. For this special video episode, you can watch the video here. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 30 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I’m Lauren Gawne. And in today’s episode, we’re getting enthusiastic about the gestures that we make when we speak. But first, welcome to our first video episode.

Gretchen: Video!

Lauren: Very exciting. Thanks to our patrons, we reached a funding goal where we were able to pay for the extra production costs to have a video. And, of course, as soon as we decided that, I couldn’t help but hope that we would do a gesture episode. And so that is our first video episode.

Gretchen: So you can see the gestures. This is also being released as an audio episode in the normal feed, so if you’re hearing this, you can listen to it audio-only, but you will miss some of the gestures. So you can go to YouTube.com/lingthusiasm to see the full gesture-y version.

[Music]

Gretchen: And now gestures. Lauren, they’re really cool. You’ve done proper research on these.

Lauren: I have, yes.

Gretchen: How did you get into gestures?

Lauren: I did a Bachelor of Arts undergraduate and, like many people, kind of found linguistics in my first year of doing an undergraduate degree and thought, “This subject is so cool!” that I was still doing it, and I was majoring in it by the end of my third year. And in the last semester of third year, I thought linguistics was cool, but I really thought that I wanted to do further study in art history. And then in the final class, the final semester, I took a subject called “Language and Culture” with Barb Kelly, who I blame a lot of my –

Gretchen: Barb Kelly is great.

Lauren: – interests on. One week of this class on language and culture was about this topic of gesture studies that she’d done some work in. And by the time you get to third year of linguistics, you kind of know about sounds, and phonetics, and syntax, and sentence structure...

Gretchen: And you think you kind of know it all.

Lauren: Yeah, and you especially think you know it all by the end of third year, and that completely changes the more that you study and the less, you realise, you knew. And learning about gesture was one of those moments where I was just like “There’s this whole part of language that I’ve never thought of before.” And within about two weeks of that set of lectures, I had changed my major and changed my future study plans. I kind of jumped in deep.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: And I have not regretted it ever since.

Gretchen: I only really found out about gesture because of you and because we were talking about part of my book that looks at emoji, and you were like, “There’s actually some gesture stuff that’s relevant to this.”

Lauren: Yes, I’m so pleased that I managed to convince you to reference gesture even in the book on the internet where there’s technically no people around to gesture. We still found that gesture was relevant.

Gretchen: Well, and I had the same experience of just – this was more recently – just thinking I knew most of how linguistics works and then walking around being like “This is so cool.” I’m slightly spying on people in restaurants and around me. I’m like “They’re using gestures so much.”

Lauren: It’s true. Once you start paying attention to gesture, it’s really hard to stop. And I really apologise to all of you watching this video who are now gonna be analysing our gestures. I’m sure Gretchen’s gonna spend half the episode watching her own hands.

Gretchen: Yeah, this is what I was doing. I was typing with one hand [gestures one hand typing, one hand raised], and I was like “Okay, so if I do this [positions raised hand] …if I do this [repositions raised hand] …” with the other hand. It was very…

Lauren: You begin to see language as being a much bigger thing and used in a whole different way.

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. So that kind brings us to our first big idea in gesture, which is that it helps with thinking.

Lauren: Yeah, so I think the important thing to say is, as far as we know, everyone in every culture that we’ve come across, and speakers of all languages, gesture. In the way that we think of language as something that all humans have, gesture is part of that. We haven’t come across a speech community yet who don’t have gesture in their communicative, little toolkit. Even – I mean, not “even” – but that also includes signed languages. And, you know, admittedly, it’s a bit of a grey area for some of them because both the gesture and the sign component use the same materials. For speakers of spoken languages, you obviously have two different channels happening. You have the spoken channel and the hand channel for the gestures. But signed languages do have components that really should be analysed gesturally. I remember when I was learning – I was in an Auslan class. And our Auslan professor was showing us a story that someone was telling in Auslan. And then they asked us to kind of pick out the signs. He wanted us to tell him what vocabulary we got from the story. And there were a couple of items where we were like “He opens a can.” And the sign teacher was like “Oh, that’s not a sign, though. That’s just a gesture.” You could see people in the class were really like, kind of – not confused, but there is a boundary between what is a lexical item and what is just a gestural representation from the story.

Gretchen: So the kind of thing you might find in a signed dictionary that is specifically listing the signs and how they interact with each other grammatically? And you just decide to spontaneously do that because that’s how you’d interact with the world, or…?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: That’s what you’re trying to convey?

Lauren: So that’s kind of a good example. But all languages, regardless of whether they’re spoken or signed, also use gesture as part of their communicative skillset.

Gretchen: An important part of the communicative skillset because it helps do things like solve puzzles?

Lauren: Yes, it helps you do all kinds of cognitive things. If you are doing, particularly, spacial things – so if you’re talking about directions or the relationships between objects – you tend to gesture more frequently. If you are trying to solve – you know those rotation puzzles that they make you do in IQ tests, and memory tests, and that kind of stuff?

Gretchen: “Which of these figures is a rotation of the one up here?”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And people will imaginarily gesture them?

Lauren: [Gestures holding a round object and turning it different ways] If people gesture to kind of figure out the rotation, they tend to perform better. What’s really cool is the gesture seems to activate that kind of space-y part of the brain. And so if you tell people to do it for the first set of an experiment, if you get them to do the same kind of activity five minutes later, they’ll still remember – even if they’re not gesturing this time, their brain is more warmed up for the spatial stuff. They’ll still do better the second time around as well.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s really neat.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: There’s lots of great experiments. There’s a really great summary paper that I’ll link to in the show notes about that and some other experiments.

Gretchen: And I think when kids are learning how to do math, you can tell them to gesture, and count on their fingers, and stuff like that?

Lauren: There is a lot of work in the teaching space that gesture really helps with acquiring abstract, complex mathematical concepts.

Gretchen: And I think it’s probably worth mentioning here that we’re talking about the kinds of gestures you do at the same time as speech, and they happen very much in parallel with speech. [Makes a continuous chop-like gesture with her hand] So, as I’m saying each syllable, hey, look, I’m gesturing at the same time! Now it broke. I started laughing.

Lauren: And the thing is, it’s true. What’s really impressive about that is, if you think about – if [gestures the round object] you do the rotation task, I’m starting to move my hand at the [gestures the round object] “and you do” so that it’s ready for the rotation task bit, which means that my brain knows where I want to get to, to make this gesture happen at the same time as “rotation task.” So I’m starting to move before I’ve even said that bit. The gesture and speech are really closely timed there, and we can really mess this up for people. Some of the gesture experiments often sound a bit mean.

Gretchen: Oh, no!

Lauren: But we can really mess this up for people by putting headphones on and delaying their speech by just a fraction of a second.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: And if we delay the way someone speaks so they hear their own voice back a few milliseconds afterwards, it actually just completely disrupts their ability to gesture.

Gretchen: This sounds terrible.

Lauren: It’s really, really mean. Another thing that we can do is we can often make people more disfluent by preventing them from moving their hands while they talk.

Gretchen: Yeah, there’s this terrible, hilarious experiment where they get people, and they put them in chairs, and they say, “Actually, what we’re studying is the physiographical measurements of whether your skin is conducting electricity,” and so they strap them down, and they put fake electrodes on their skin.

Lauren: And so they get them sitting here, and then they ask them to tell a story, and it increases disfluency. It makes it harder to –

Gretchen: So they say more “um”’s and “ah”’s?

Lauren: They find it harder to remember words, and it’s usually more likely to be nouns. So there’s something about gesturing that helps us remain fluent. And I think it’s part of why there’s that public speaking training thing that trains people to use their gestures more because there is a link between fluently gesturing and fluently speaking.

Gretchen: Or trains people to do big, simple, bold gestures rather than putting your hand in pocket and jiggling with your coins, or tapping you pen, or something that can be a more distracting gesture because it adds audio. Although, I guess classically, you don’t really consider tapping a pen to be a gesture because you have an object, but…

Lauren: There’s a whole kind of relationship between what’s a gesture and what isn’t.

Gretchen: There’s a whole taxonomy. But you can substitute those kinds of repetitive movements for a proper gesture that makes you look more sophisticated as a speaker?

Lauren: Sure. And it may actually help you speak more fluently in more fluent sentences, which is a nice benefit as well.

Gretchen: I also really like the bit about when kids are learning words – so kids: They’re first learning words. And they go through this one-word stage, and they learn things like “doggy” and “mama” and “papa” and “water” and stuff like this, and then eventually they end up at this two-word stage. Before that…?

Lauren: There’s this really nice period in between where we have the – so gestures are kind of important for adults and in their ability to speak fluently. But when we look at children, we also see that between the one-word phase and the two-word phase is this phase that you may not even be paying attention to as a parent, but as a gesture-researcher, I’m paying a lot of attention to, which is the one-word plus one-gesture phase. And so you’ll often get things like [gestures straight, extended arm with fingers in a continues grabbing motion] “want,” or…

Gretchen: Or like [gestures the extended arm] “cookie” or something like this? Like, “I want the cookie.”

Lauren: Yes, well, [points to her right] we’ve got some over there. [Both gesture the extended arm toward the right] It’s “biscuit.”

Gretchen: “Bikky”?

Lauren: [Gestures the extended arm] My child will say “bikky” or “biscuit,” and they’ll do the grabbing, which means – it’s a complex little bit of language there. They’re not just saying, [generally gestures to the right with her hand] “Oh, there is a biscuit.”

Gretchen: “Lo, biscuit!”

Lauren: They are saying, “I would like that biscuit” or “I want biscuit.”

Gretchen: “Give me that biscuit” or “Eat the biscuit.”

Lauren: So they’re not saying, “Want biscuit,” which would be a nice two-word phase, they’re saying – or “Give me biscuit” or something – they’re saying, “biscuit,” and they’re doing this gesture. And the gesture acts like the verb-y bit of that sentence.

Gretchen: Or kind of classic [points center-right] “Doggy!”

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Like, “Look! A dog!”

Lauren: [Generally gestures center-right with both hands] “Mum, I am alerting you to the fact that there is a dog here,” which is a bit beyond most 18-month-olds, so…

Gretchen: If anyone could have it, it would be you.

Lauren: We have a really great, increasingly robust set of research that shows that the one-word, one-gesture phase is a really great predictor that two words are just around the corner!

Gretchen: Oooh, that’s great.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Gesture is also influenced by the grammatical structure of the language?

Lauren: Yes, so everyone does gesture across languages and across cultures. There is some amount of – there’s a lot of stereotypes about different cultures gesturing more or gesturing in particular ways. There is some evidence that some of that is true. But, actually, there’s so much variation between individual speakers in languages, and even for an individual speaker in different contexts, that a lot of those generalisations are actually quite hard to really quite capture. And that’s why I like gesture. There are so many more questions to ask, and we need to think of ways to ask them, compared to the corpus analysis you can do for spoken language.

Gretchen: And it’s a really new field, I think, definitely facilitated by the fact that we have easy access to video now. And it’s a lot easier to pause frame-by-frame than back when – even when video was film or when there was not video at all, and to go through and annotate for all the different gestures and these kinds of things.

Lauren: Even the idea of a large corpus to study in gesture is excitingly new. And being able to go back and see what people did and being able to share that with other people – it’s one thing to record it. It’s another thing to be able to pop it up on YouTube or something like that for other people to see.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, rather than mail VHS cassettes around the world? Oh, this sounds really painful.

Lauren: It was a thing that we had to do, so…

Gretchen: Or make line drawings so you can include them in your paper, rather than just saying, “The gestures for this can all be found at this nice URL.”

Lauren: Yeah, “Here’s a nice photographic still of it, and you can actually see all the videos,” is a really exciting development in gesture.

Gretchen: One of my favourite examples of gesture mirroring the structure of language is from a talk that I saw by Goldin-Meadow a couple years ago. She gives this example with English and Turkish, but it works in French as well. And I actually speak French, so I’m gonna use French for the example.

Lauren: Yeah, that’s fine. I won’t make you speak Turkish.

Gretchen: I know, like, a couple words in Turkish, but I couldn’t pronounce it with confidence so… So in English, if you ask English speakers to gesture [gestures a rolling motion with one hand] “The ball is rolling down the hill,” [Lauren gestures rolling motion with one finger moving toward her left] or even if you make them – [gestures drawing a circular path in the air with one finger]. Or if you make them do it without words alongside, you’ll often get something like [gestures a linear path going from her upper left to lower right] [Lauren gestures a linear path going from her upper left to lower right while indicating a rolling motion with one finger] “down,” like “rolling down the hill.” And then if you get Turkish speakers to do the gesture, or French speakers, in those languages, rather than have – so in English, the verb-part is “roll.” And then we have and additional bit that’s “down.” Whereas, in French, the verb part is “to descend,” “descendre” – “to go down.” And then you have to add on, separately, the “rolling” bit. So the [both gesture the linear path] directional gesture doesn’t necessarily have [gestures the linear, rolling path] “rolling down” at the same time – if I got that right?

Lauren: You did get that right. That is correct. Good work.

Gretchen: And so people reflect this grammatical structure difference in how they gesture about things doing these types of actions.

Lauren: And not just because I’m very well-trained, and going along with what Gretchen said, that people weren’t being called attention to for this, they would just watch – English speakers, and French speakers, or Turkish speakers would watch exactly the same video of a nice little tomato rolling down a hill. Or another study that’s very famous for this is Asli Özyürek and Sotaro Kita’s work, where they made people watch a Looney Tunes cartoon. One of the characters goes rolling across the screen. And, even though they watch exactly the same video, when they’re telling the story, their gestures align with the grammatical structure of the language. So a language like English where that way of rolling is really closely linked into the verb, [gestures the linear, rolling path] that will all be integrated. And then for Turkish or French, they're more interested in the path, [gestures the linear path] so that descent, and then [gestures a rolling motion with her finger] if there is rolling, it’s indicated separately. And so you see that the grammar of the language shape those particular gestures.

Gretchen: Which I always thought was cool because it’s not just ��rolling” and “down.” All of the verbs of manner like “rolling” and “jumping” and “bouncing” in English are verb-y. And I’d been like “Oh, yeah, in French, you have to say, ‘to descend while jumping’ or ‘to descend while rolling’ or ‘to ascend while jumping.’” And even in English, if you want to say this, you have to borrow these very French-y/Latin-y verbs to be able to do that.

Lauren: And we know that this is not just because English speakers watch each other all the time and learn these gestures by habit, or Turkish speakers watch each other all the time, because there was a follow-up study by some of the original authors that looked at what happens with people who are blind from birth. And even if you’ve never seen other people gesture – the fact that people still gesture if they’re blind from birth is quite interesting in and of itself. But the people who gestured, gestured pretty much the exact same way in terms of that [gestures linear, rolling path] “rolling down the hill” or [gestures the linear path, and then a rolling motion with her finger] “descending and rolling” than other people who speak the language. So it seems to be something deeply embedded cognitively and not something that we just learn by habit.

Gretchen: Yeah, so it’s not like we learn by seeing the gestures from other people, we learn it from the grammar of the language, and we gesture that way spontaneously.

Lauren: Another nice piece of evidence for that is some of those original authors also did a follow-up looking at what happens as Japanese speakers learn English.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: And the studies so far indicate that they do behave differently – they don’t behave exactly the same as English speakers, but when they’re speaking English, they behave more like the English speakers than their Japanese-speaking counterparts.

Gretchen: Okay, so they’ve acquired something of the gestural system as they acquire the language?

Lauren: Yeah, as they acquire the language it kind of re-shapes how they conceptualise the movement as well when they re-tell those activities.

Gretchen: I should volunteer for the French/English version of the study.

Lauren: There are increasingly some studies about what happens with your gesture in your second language, so you may be a participant in a future study.

Gretchen: All right, hit me up! I wanna do this.

Lauren: Excellent.

Gretchen: We’re kind of heading into there already. So gesture helps with thinking, and gesture also helps with communicating?

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: It’s not just “Okay, English – I gesture like an English speaker, and that’s just how I’m gonna gesture.” It’s also that I can convey certain things with gestures?

Lauren: Yes, so we can modify our gestures the way we modify our language to be helpful. And I think sometimes it’s good to think about gesture as being good for us in our own thinking as well as being good for communication. Some people try and make a claim that it’s more important for one or the other. I think that takes all the fun out of it.

Gretchen: It’s both.

Lauren: I think gestures are so great, they can do both.

Gretchen: As the gif goes [gestures a shrugging motion with hands and arms turned upward] “Why not both?”

Lauren: [gestures the same] “Why not both?” We see with communication – so maybe just to make you hypothesise, Gretchen…

Gretchen: Okay?

Lauren: If we had someone speaking into a telephone versus someone – they’re hands-free. We’ll give them their hands – someone speaking into a telephone versus someone in a face-to-face conversation, who would you imagine gestures more?

Gretchen: Probably the face-to-face conversation.

Lauren: Yeah, because…?

Gretchen: Because the other person can actually see the gestures, and they’re useful.

Lauren: Yeah, we can increase the frequency. Even if we’re speaking into a telephone versus speaking into a Dictaphone that we think no one will ever listen to again, we’re even less likely, for the Dictaphone, to gesture because we don’t think our communication is going to anyone, so we probably just don’t try as a hard to communicate at all.

Gretchen: What if you’re talking to yourself, and you’re not being recorded at all, do you still gesture?

Lauren: Yeah, people a lot of times gesture to themselves.

Gretchen: I mean, I guess you would. But would you gesture more because I can see myself when I’m talking to myself?

Lauren: We’ll have to run an experiment.

Gretchen: We’ll have to run this study.

Lauren: So, yeah, we do gesture. We do tend to gesture more if we’re in a face-to-face situation because we know that our gestures are gonna be helpful to the other person.

Gretchen: I really loved the follow-up study to this, which was – or not necessarily by the same people, but a similar vein – where people are cooperative or feeling un-cooperative.

Lauren: Ah, yeah, so this is – we gesture more if we’re face-to-face with someone and our gestures are gonna be interpreted as useful. But if we’re gesturing to someone competitively versus if we’re gesturing to someone who we’re cooperating with – this was a study where they had people playing a game. They taught one person the rules of the game. And then they said, “We’re gonna bring in someone else.” And for half the participants they said, “This person is your collaborator. If you work together, you’ll be able to earn more points and win.”

Gretchen: It’s one of those games where you have to set some objects in an area or something like this? Probably?

Lauren: Yeah. And then other half of the people, they said, “We’re gonna bring someone in, and you’re gonna teach this person the game, but then you’re gonna compete against each other in it.” And they found that people actually made the same number of gestures. So it’s not just about the frequency. What they found differed was the quality and size of the gestures.

Gretchen: Oh, so you make bad gestures to people you don’t like?

Lauren: You might still make all these gestures, but communicatively, you make them clearer to the person that you want to help more.

Gretchen: So instead of being like [leans over and points to a spot on the table in front of her] “Put this right here” you’re like [generally gestures toward the table with her hand, palm up] “Yeah, just put it over there.”

Lauren: Yeah, that’s what they found.

Gretchen: That’s so good.

Lauren: The communication – the fact that we’re face-to-face – makes us want to help people more, but only if we want to be helpful to them.

Gretchen: I really wanted to know how they got people to be mad. I thought they were told somebody – “Oh, this person’s been spreading rumours about your behind your back,” they just told them it was a competition. That’s very simple.

Lauren: They just told them it was a good old competition, so… Yeah, next time you’re teaching someone how to play a board game, make note of whether you’re going to be playing with them or against them and see –

Gretchen: Well, there are some games that are collaborative. Like Pandemic’s collaborative, so maybe people are gonna be more cooperative in their gestures, versus something like Risk where you’re also going around the world but trying to compete.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: We’ll have to do a study.

Lauren: Gestures are also useful communicatively because they can give information that’s not in the spoken channel. For those rolling gestures that we talked about before, some of the studies have gone back and looked at – they’ve just kind of quickly counted whether people gestured in the same direction as the original video that they watched.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: And people do this more than 90% of the time. If you watch a character go from one side [hold up left hand] of the screen [holds up right hand] to the other, you’ll represent those gestures [holds up left hand then right hand] in the same direction that you saw them.

Gretchen: In the same way, rather than spontaneously flipping it for no reason?

Lauren: Yeah, and you don’t say, “It rolled down the hill from the left top of the screen to the bottom right of the screen,” but your interlocuter – to use the fancy word – the person you’re talking to – to use the normal words – will also tend to remember that you gave that information, not consciously necessarily, but it’s part of the information – you get a slightly different set of information from gestures.

Gretchen: Does this work the same way for all languages? So, if not all languages have words for “left” and “right,” does it still do the same thing?

Lauren: It really depends on the interactional context. Again, I think this is a general thing we can say about gesture research is that there is just so much that hasn’t been done. The work that has been done has been done on a very small set of, usually European, languages. So for a lot of these things we can often say, “That’s a great question. Hopefully, someone will do this work.”

Gretchen: “Stay tuned for the next exciting three decades in gesture research.”

Lauren: Basically. And it’s part of why I get really excited about it. When my students ask questions, I say, “That is genuinely a good question, and we’d love to know.”

Gretchen: “No one has ever answered it yet.”

Lauren: “You might be the person who answers this question or helps us move slightly forward towards it.” Because we have some very narrow contexts in which we know different languages use different elements of gesture to help increase communication. There’s this lovely paper by Joe Blythe, that I’ll also link to along with everything else I’ve talked about so far, about a language called Murrinhpatha in the Northern Territory of Australia. This is a language that has relatively few directional words.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: But when you look at how people talk about different locations, they use so many really rich directional gestures that in many ways, if you were taking a very narrow frame of mind, you might say, “Well, this language is missing all these words.” But if you take a broader few of language and gesture, the language is completely capable of doing everything that English does, it just uses gestures for some of the things that English will use spoken words for.

Gretchen: So instead of saying, as much, “right” and “left,” and “north” and “south,” and stuff like that, they’ll more likely to use gestures for stuff like that?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And if people are retelling other people’s stories or something, they’ll do it the same – that information is passed along?

Lauren: That information can be retained, yeah. And there are some languages – so English is very – we remember things in terms of “north” and “south,” usually – [Gretchen gives Lauren a look] in terms of “left” and “right,” usually, definitely not in terms of “north” and “south.”

Gretchen: [holds up hands to either side of herself] You can see my confusing gesture there.

Lauren: For many people who have got themselves completely lost while trying to read a map. But for English speakers we kind of remember things as “left” or “right.” In other cultures – Murrinhpatha isn’t necessarily one of the ones that’s been well-studied for this – but other languages of Australia tend to do all their directions around “north,” “south,” “east,” and “west.” So I’d be sitting to the “north” of you. You’re sitting to the “south” of me. And then when you’re telling –

Gretchen: My south foot and my north foot?

Lauren: Yeah, and so whenever you’re telling a story, they’ll – instead of orienting it – not matter which direction I sit, I’m always gonna do that [gestures a sweeping motion from her left to right] left to right for “from you, to me.” Whereas, a speaker of one of these languages will always gesture from south to north, regardless of what direction they’re sitting in.

Gretchen: That’s so neat.

Lauren: Again, each time we gesture, we’re bringing extra information into the discourse that we might not have from speech, but that is also influenced by the culture and the language that we speak as well.

Gretchen: So we’ve mentioned that a lot of people have mostly studied European languages and gesture, but you have not. You have studied other languages beyond Europe in gesture.

Lauren: Yes, so I started – after that initial, like, “Wow! This field is really interesting,” the first thing I did was some work with English speakers, a little paper looking at just how likely people are to pay attention to particular gestures. So we’ve talked about the kinds of things you do to represent actions or movements in the real world, but there are all kinds of other gestures as well. We haven’t talked about pointing gestures very much. We haven’t talked about the very metaphoric gestures that are not grounded in the physical world. We haven’t even talked about the gestures that have really specific names and we all recognise like the “peace sign” or the “thumbs up.”

Gretchen: I mean, you teach a whole course on gesture, so I think we could do “17 hours later…”

Lauren: Yes, so we’ve just focused on this set. But I was really interested in whether people remembered emblems more – those “thumbs up” and those “peace sign” ones – because they have really clear names. Or if people pay attention to pointing because we often think of pointing as being kind of simple –

Gretchen: The prototypical gesture.

Lauren: – prototypical. So that was some early work I did with English speakers that showed the kinds of things that we study in gesture studies people seem to treat as different from then again other phenomena like facial gestures, or the kinds of the things we do unintentionally like coughing, or those kinds of things. So there’s these whole other things that we can do with our bodies that we also have to think about in terms of these studies but aren’t always directly relevant. So that was –

Gretchen: That was the first gesture thing you did. And you also went to Nepal and did a bunch of – I mean, you did stuff with language in Nepal. Wrote a grammar or two.

Lauren: Yeah, so then, again, under the very good influence of Barb Kelly, went and did fieldwork in Nepal. And I looked at the grammar and spent some time focusing on that. And then I, finally, in the last few years, got to come back to gesture and look what’s happening with gesture in those languages, which is really exciting.

Gretchen: What is happening with gesture? Not that you can say it all now, but is there something that’s happening that’s –

Lauren: There’s so much to ask, and it’s great that we have a really rich corpus of gesture recordings and general recordings that I can now use to study gesture.

Gretchen: So you’ve got a whole bunch of videos you’re now poring through?

Lauren: Yes, and it’s a nice mix of – they do things that are very specific to those stories that they’re telling, and they help them tell the stories. But they’re also the kinds of gestures that we see cropping up in other languages as well and part of what appears to be a set of things that humans tend to be likely to do. One of these is [holds both hands up in front of her, palms facing each other, then flicks the palms in towards her body] this gesture that gets made. It can be used without speech.

Gretchen: [Gestures the same] This kind of thing?

Lauren: It’s kind of a [gestures again] – without speech, it’s a very prominent flicking up, a bit of a shrug, and it’s a like [gestures again, with shrug] “What are you gonna do about it?”

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: Fatalistic. But the fact that it can be used as a question – it can just be a tiny flick of the wrist, where people, say, are asking a question or they’re a bit unsure. Someone might be telling a story, and they’re like [gestures again, but with right hand only] “What do I say next?”

Gretchen: Is it always two-handed? Do you get one-handed ones?

Lauren: No, it can be one-handed. There’s lots of variation. And you see it across the larger – I look at it specifically how it’s used by Syuba speakers, who speak a Tibetan language in Nepal. But we see this handshape used for questions cropping up all over Southeast Asia and in India and Pakistan and Nepal. And we also see it related to a lot of other – [both gesture a shrug, hands up, palms up] palms up as question. I think a shrug is very familiar to English speakers. And so kind of looking at the very specifics of how it’s done in this culture but thinking about it in terms of the larger –

Gretchen: The larger family of shrug gestures?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: That’s super neat.

Lauren: Yeah, it’s really great.

Gretchen: Like the “I have nothing in my hands, and I’m gonna show off how empty my hands are” or something.

Lauren: Yeah, there’s a whole set of arguments around why, across speakers of English and speakers of Syuba – it’s not a like a historical, related-language thing. It just seems to be something about the way humans think, and think about space, and how they use their hands.

Gretchen: Because we’ve all got the same – mostly the same – set of hands.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: We can do very similar things with them.

Lauren: We all experience our little – we talk about the “meat puppets” sometimes. The way that these meat puppets move through space and time. We all kind of do the same thing, and we can draw on the same resources.

Gretchen: That’s really neat. I think that’s what makes gesture studies super interesting. It’s another way of looking at, not just the stuff that you can articulate outside, through your throat, which you can’t always see unless you get a little camera or something going. Gestures are very there, and you can see what’s going on with them.

Lauren: You’ll probably notice them for the next day, at least. You’ll be paying attention to what everyone is doing with their hands.

Gretchen: Have fun with that. We’ve both been there. It’s a fun position to be in. Don’t spy on people too hard, but maybe just a tiny bit.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to everything mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to Lingthusiasm wherever you get your podcasts. You can even subscribe on YouTube. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links in the description. Our patrons allow us to do things like make this special video episode about gesture. Thanks everybody! Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay too. We also really appreciate if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our audio and video producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are A.E. Prevost and Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, our music is “Ancient Cities” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[superlinguo]

Linguistics Jobs: Interview with a School Linguist

I was fortunate enough to undertake my PhD in a fabulous research lab. Bill was one of the excellent people who I overlapped with in my time there. Bill is one of the people who made a deliberate choice to not stay in academia, and instead took on a role that has allowed him to use his skills to advocate for the community and language he worked with for his PhD. Bill is on Twitter (@BillForshaw), and you can find out more about the bilingual program at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Thamarrurr Catholic College on the school’s website.

What did you study at university?

I completed a BA in German and Linguistics at the University of Melbourne before going on to complete an honours year and PhD in Linguistics also at the University of Melbourne. When I began at Uni I didn’t know much about the study of Linguistics. I initially had planned to study Politics but I wasn’t very good at it. Consequently, I had to pick a different area of study and my Mum suggested linguistics and I loved it.

My PhD was a longitudinal acquisition study of Murrinhpatha a language of Northern Australia spoken primarily by people in Wadeye, NT. Specifically, I examined children’s acquisition of bipartite stem verbs (verbs with two stem elements) and large verbal paradigms. As part of my PhD I helped to record a collection of Murrinhpatha child language.

What is your job?

I currently work at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Thamarrurr Catholic College in Wadeye as the school Linguist (I picked my own title). The school has a bilingual program with biliteracy instruction in Murrinhpatha and English. Almost all our students speak Murrinhpatha as a first language.

I primarily work to support the Murrinhpatha language and literacy programs across the school. This includes developing new Murrinhpatha books and teaching resources at the school’s literature production centre (an on-site publishing house), supporting Murrinhpatha speaking teachers to plan and deliver classes and further developing the Murrinhpatha curriculum.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

Yes it certainly helps, but my job is a long way from the fine-grained analysis of morphological structure that I undertook in my thesis. What helps most is my awareness of language in situations. English dominates and forces out smaller languages, it is a language of colonisation. My Linguistics training allows me to see and articulate the privileged position of English in Australia and the impact that this can have on the education of Aboriginal children in a remote context. It helps me to be a language activist and to work towards providing a better education for children in Wadeye.

My previous study of Murrinhpatha of course also helped greatly as I continue to work with and through this language every day.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I’d like to repeat some great advice that I was given. When I made the decision to move to Wadeye and was considering working at the school I wanted to know how I could best apply my training to this context. I received great advice from Denise Angelo. Her advice was to ‘get on the mat’. To be able to apply my linguistic training in a school context I needed to better understand the job of a teacher in Wadeye and to build mutual respect. A teacher doesn’t want an academic linguist to lob some ‘linguistic awareness’ at them and then walk away. I’d like to thank all the teachers that have helped and continue to help me understand how I can better do my job to support them in educating children.

Any other thoughts or comments?

To students studying linguistics, working at language centres and schools alongside speakers towards common goals is a fabulous way to be a linguist.

Photo Credit: Bilingual Education in the Northern Territory Facebook page

Previously:

Interview with a Journalist

Interview with a PR Consultant

Interview with an Agency Owner & Executive Editor

Interview with a Freelance Editor, Writer and Trainer

Interview with a Language Creator

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for even more interviews  

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 27: Words for family relationships: Kinship terms. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 27 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: And I’m Gretchen McCulloch, and today, we’re getting enthusiastic about words for family members – kinship terms! But first, we’re looking forward to 2019. It’s almost here. We’re very excited to continue with the regular show. We have some exciting plans – like video episodes.

Lauren: We’ve had a really exciting 2018. We’ve done lots of really cool stuff. You’ve been along for the ride, and we’re really looking forward to continuing with regular episodes and other exciting things in 2019.

Gretchen: And we just hit our goal to make a special video episode about the linguistics of gesture, which is super exciting.

Lauren: It was also really great to have Gretchen in Australia when we hit the goal for the gesture videos. That happened while she was out on her trip to do the live shows. We had celebratory ice cream. It was very exciting.

Gretchen: Yes, so that was fantastic. We’re looking forward to the next goal, which is going to be a special video episode interviewing a deaf linguist about the linguistics of sign language. Stay tuned for which sign language and which linguist we’re going to be interviewing for that once we hit that goal.

Lauren: Our latest bonus Patreon episode is a Q&A that we did while we were in the same geographic location, which you can find on patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

Gretchen: Yes, as well as 20 previous bonus episodes, which is almost an entire double Lingthusiasm. You should definitely check that out if you haven’t already.

Lauren: We also both have other exciting 2019 adventures. I am having a baby, which we mentioned a couple of episodes ago. That will take up a fair amount of my 2019, I feel.

Gretchen: I feel like babies are pretty busy. But the episodes will continue as scheduled. I have a book coming out in July 2019, so you’ll also hear –

Lauren: A book baby!

Gretchen: A book baby! I wonder which one is gonna be cuter. We probably shouldn’t have that competition.

Lauren: They’re cute in their own ways.

Gretchen: One of them will eventually learn to talk back, and it won’t be the book. If you wanna see what the cover looks like, and for pre-order information, you can check out the link in the show notes or on my website as well.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, Lauren, here is an important linguistic question – what are you gonna have your baby call you? Are you gonna be a “Mama,” a “Mum,” a “Mummy?”

Lauren: I haven’t thought about this, which means I guess that I’m just gonna go with my socio-cultural norms, so I’m probably gonna be “mum.”

Gretchen: Okay, that’s very standard, yeah. It seems legit.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I mean, I have some friends who called their parents – or had their kids call them by their first names.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, that always seems really weird to me. If I call my parents by their first name, it’s because we’re having some kind of very silly conversation.

Gretchen: I think I only do it if I’m at a grocery store, or a park, or something, and I need to catch their attention, and saying “Mom” or “Dad” isn’t working, and so I’m like, “I guess I should say their name to get them to turn around.” Maybe that’s a thing you could do.

Lauren: I love how it’s such a conscious decision for you.

Gretchen: Definitely not part of my norm, but it is part of some people’s norms.

Lauren: Yeah, I know people whose kids call them by their first name just because they find the idea of being “Mum” or “Dad” really weird.

Gretchen: I also know people who find the idea of “Mum” or “Dad” being weird. They go by something like “Mama,” or “Papa” or, you know, things like –

Lauren: Or they have some kind of cultural – I have people whose families have Italian heritage, so they’re “Mama” or “Papa.” I knew someone at school who had a “Grandmother,” but her friend at school had a “Nonna.” And she was like, “Well, that word sounds cool.” And so she just started calling her very Anglo-Australian grandmother “Nonna” even though there’s no family history of Italian naming in their family.

Gretchen: That’s very cute.

Lauren: It was really cute. So sometimes people will deviate – every family has its own idiosyncrasies. Sometimes, they pop up in the kinship terminology that people use.

Gretchen: I think, especially for grandparents, those seem to be a little bit more idiosyncratic, whether cultural or there’re just more names for grandparents. Like, “Mama,” and “Papa,” and “Da-Da” seem to be very common across different languages. Whereas, whether you say “Nana,” or “Nonna,” or “Opa,” or “Oma,” or these kinds of things, tend to be a bit more different.

Lauren: We have both a “Grandfather” and a “Pop” in terms of my grandparents.

Gretchen: Yeah, I had both “Grandad” and “Papa,” then, for the grandmothers, both “Mimi” and “GG,” which are idiosyncratic names.

Lauren: “Mimi” and “GG?”

Gretchen: Yeah, my –

Lauren: Where did they come from?

Gretchen: Well, so “GG” comes from the fact that that grandmother was named “Gretchen,” who I was named after. So “GG” stands for “Grandma Gretchen.” And her grandmother –

Lauren: Oh, that’s so great. Like, lovely and meta.

Gretchen: Yeah, and her grandmother was also named “Gretchen,” who she was named after, so she had a “GG.” Sometimes she used to say, “Well, my GG blah blah blah…” So I’ve always known in a weird way that if I had grandkids, I already have a grandma name.

Lauren: Wow, that’s a lot of presupposition there, Gretchen.

Gretchen: Because, clearly, I have to continue the tradition of “GG” if I have kids – if I have grandkids.

Lauren: It’ll be a nice story.

Gretchen: Yeah, and “Mimi” – I, apparently, at around the age of one or two, gave this name to my grandmother because I was the oldest grandkid on this side. That’s what I apparently started calling her, and it stuck.

Lauren: Cool. You created language change within your family.

Gretchen: I was pre-linguist!

Lauren: You’re a linguist innovator.

Gretchen: Yeah, but my grandmother Mimi used to joke that “Mimi” and “GG” sounded like two little French poodles or something like this.

Lauren: They do. It’s very cute.

Gretchen: I think, especially in English, kids often end up creating or using different terms from different cultures because it’s really useful in a family context to be able to distinguish between maternal and paternal grandparents. And yet, this is not something that English has built-in words to do. Whereas, other languages do.

Lauren: Yeah, and when you start looking at – we have all these different things that we call different members of our family – so different kinship terms – and we start looking at how different parts of the family get segmented up and what different languages and cultures pay attention to. You start to realise that some languages lump together a whole bunch of people that we might separate out into different terms. English is very good at lumping together groups of people that have distinct kinship terms in other languages and cultures. It’s always really fun to learn those different systems and start thinking about how your family relate to each other in different ways.

Gretchen: Yeah, I haven’t really – most of the languages that I’ve worked with have been European, so I haven’t done a whole lot with languages that have other kinship terms. But there’re some different forms in Syuba, right?

Lauren: Yeah, when I’m in Nepal, when people ask about my family, I suddenly have to start thinking about – for example, aunts and uncles. It varies depending upon whether they’re your uncles on your dad’s side or your uncles on your mother’s side. In Syuba, your “Ao” is your father’s brother, and your “Ashang” is your mother’s brother. So your uncles on each side have different names. And then, in terms of your aunts, there’s actually a whole bunch of different terms. The aunts on your mother’s side all get called “Ama,” which is the same as the word for mother –

Gretchen: Oh, interesting.

Lauren: – and so you distinguish them by saying “Ama Chombo” or “Ama Chame,” which means your “big mother,” your aunts that are older than your mother, and your “Ama Chame” are your aunts on your mother’s side that are younger than your mother.

Gretchen: Oh, so that’s also distinguished – the older versus younger side.

Lauren: Yeah, and it’s not that people don’t know – just to make it clear. It’s not that people don’t know that their mother is different from their aunt. It’s just that that’s how the system – I know that my uncles on my dad’s side are different to the uncles on my mom’s side. I just don’t think about it that much day-to-day.

Gretchen: But something I find really interesting is that English doesn’t distinguish between uncle-by-marriage or aunt-by-marriage versus uncle and aunt that are actually your blood relatives.

Lauren: No.

Gretchen: Personally, I have a distinction, I guess, between uncles and aunts that were already in the family when I was a kid and the ones that have subsequently married my uncles or aunts after I got older because the ones that were in the family when I was a kid, I call them all “Uncle” and “Aunt.” And that’s fine. The ones that showed up when I was already a teenager, towards adulthood, I’m like – I just call them by their names because I didn’t have that – they were first introduced to me, I guess, as, “This is the boyfriend or girlfriend or person that so-and-so is dating.” And so, I spent a couple years knowing them just by their name for that reason. And then, when they got married, I didn’t switch over to calling them “Uncle” or “Aunt” even though, technically, they are. But somehow, that doesn’t work for me in the same way as the ones that I’ve known as part of the family ever since I was a kid.

Lauren: It’s like, for you, the terminology involves some kind of entrenchment within the family system.

Gretchen: Yeah, or like, “Did I know you as a child,” or something like that seems to be the factor, which is definitely not a factor that is officially encoded into any kinship system I’ve ever encountered but seems to be encoded in my personal kinship system.

Lauren: Which always makes these things more interesting.

Gretchen: Yeah, there’s the official kinship systems and then there’s the personal, idiosyncratic kinship systems. But there are languages that have different terms for relatives by marriage as well.

Lauren: Yeah, so your aunts on your mother’s side are your “Ama,” but if it’s your father’s brother’s wife it’s “Tsitsi.” Whereas, your aunts who are your father’s relatives – so younger sisters – are “Ani.”

Gretchen: Oh, interesting. Okay.

Lauren: And so, you know who was married into the family as opposed to who is a sister of your father.

Gretchen: And there’s more terms on the aunt side than on the uncle side?

Lauren: Because aunts can marry into families or marry out of families. In this culture, it’s the women who move house when they get married. So your uncles are always around whether they’re your father’s brothers or your mother’s brothers. Whereas, women aren’t bringing uncles into the house, necessarily. They’re less important to you.

Gretchen: Your uncles-in-law – you’re gonna have less contact with them, so they don’t have a distinct term for them.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I mean, you could say “uncles-in-law” or “aunts-in-law.” I don’t know why we don’t.

Lauren: I find the whole “in-law” terminology in English very confusing. If I were gonna fix English –

Gretchen: You would fix the in-laws?

Lauren: The kinship system does need a bit of a makeover, and the in-lawing is very confusing because – I mean, to me, it’s confusing because so many people in my family have long-term partners who aren’t married. I like to refer to them as “out-laws.”

Gretchen: I think a lot of people use the out-law terminology as a jocular version of in-laws.

Lauren: But it does kind of upset my grandparents.

Gretchen: See, my family says “out-laws” all the time.

Lauren: Whereas, it amuses me that – say, my brother’s partner technically has the same terminology as my partner’s sibling’s partner.

Gretchen: Yeah, that double layer. Maybe there should be “in-law-in-law.” Like, “brother in-law-in-law” should be the one that’s two steps from you?

Lauren: Yeah, I guess it depends on how close you feel to people as well. I generally don’t refer to my “sister-in-law.” I just refer to her by name.

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean, that’s fair, too.

Lauren: It’s a bit like the aunts-and-uncles thing. It’s too hard to assimilate you into my pre-existing kinship structure.

Gretchen: Well, and that’s the thing because, especially, if your siblings are having partners – assuming you’re fairly close in age to your siblings – you’re probably encountering those partners – you’ve already gone through your childhood acquisition of who your family is. And then, suddenly, your sibling’s bringing in somebody new. And it’s like – at what point do you switch over to that? Is it when they start living together? Is it when – do they have to have a formal wedding? Where do these things change? Maybe that’s part of the idiosyncratic system.

Lauren: We’ve distinguished some cultures have terms that vary depending whether it’s on your mother or father’s side, terms that differ depending on if someone’s older or younger. And, again, Syuba distinguishes siblings that are older or younger. “Older sister” is “Adzi,” but “younger sister” is “Nomo.” “Older brother” is “Ata,” and “younger brother” is “No.” When people ask me about my family, they ask, “Do you have siblings?” And I can say, “Yes, I am ‘Older Sister,’” and it – immediately, I have to say I have a younger brother and a younger sister. I immediately situate myself in my family structure.

Gretchen: If you say, “Older Sister,” that means you’re the oldest because that’s what your siblings call you?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: If people say, “Do you have brothers or sisters,” and I say, “I have two siblings,” I think that immediately implies, “Okay, they’re different genders,” because if I had two sisters, I could just say I had two sisters.

Lauren: It would be – for an English speaker, you are giving an insufficient quantity of information by using “sibling.”

Gretchen: Yeah, I was giving a less-informative answer than I could. My sister and I both say, “Oh, yes, I have two siblings,” but my brother says, “I have two sisters.” And this always surprises me because I think of myself as being one of “siblings.” I don’t think of myself as being one of “sisters” because I have “siblings.” I don’t have “sisters.” But, of course, you know, at some point, it breaks down.

Lauren: Which brings us to some cultures focus on defining kin terms by gender. We do have a lot of terms in English. Your parents get distinguished by gender, your aunts and uncles, your grandparents. But not everyone does. “Cousins” is a good example of that. “Siblings” is a good example of that.

Gretchen: Yeah, “cousins” is especially interesting because English has this elaborate cousin system. And yet, for a lot of people, it’s fairly obscure. They’re aware of the terminology involved, but they don’t actually know how to apply it.

Lauren: I’m in contact with a fairly extended range of my family, and we all have just agreed at some point to just refer to each other as “cousins.” If someone’s really curious about why I have a 60-year-old cousin in Canada, I will talk them through the family structure. I can calculate out second-cousinses and once-removeds, but we just end up using “cousins” because it’s so much easier. We really aren’t very good at calculating it.

Gretchen: I mean, I have this very distinct memory for “cousins,” which I don’t have for other terms, of when I was about nine or ten. I had been seeing a bunch of one corner of the family tree, sitting down and calculating how all of the once-removeds and how all of the first-and-second-cousins-thing worked. When I did that, I memorised which of the people were which and which of the people weren’t. I call them all “cousins.” I’m not like, “Hi, Second Cousin Bill,” because I don’t think anyone really does that. But I can also be like, “Oh, I have a cousin in Australia.” He’s actually my first cousin once-removed because he’s my mom’s cousin. There’s a removal of generations.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I’ve had to explain this system to adult, native English-speakers, who, in principle, you’d expect to know the kinship terms of our own language, but the “cousins” system –

Lauren: And like, learning them at nine or ten is very late in language acquisition. A lot of kin terms we learn really early off. They’re some of our first words.

Gretchen: Especially for family terms, yeah. It’s one thing to be learning the extended numbers system. Like, maybe you don’t know what a “quadrillion” is at age nine or ten, or you don’t know some of the more technical vocabulary, or business jargon, or these corners of the lexicon. But kinship terms are very basic. They’re often learned very early. 

This brings me to one of my favourite cross-linguistic studies, which is the one that finds that “Mama” and “Papa” are words that children use to address their mothers and fathers – are some of the very, very first words across a whole bunch of languages that are completely unrelated.

Lauren: Yeah, this is one of those it-seemed-so-obvious-when-I-first-learnt-it facts about language.

Gretchen: Yeah, about 60 years ago, the American anthropologist G.P. Murdock did this survey of over 500 cultural groups around the world. He found that about half of societies use some sort of combination of /mə/, /mɛɪ/, /na/, /nɛɪ/, /noʊ/ to mean “mother.” And another half, not necessarily the exact same societies, uses some combination of /pə/, /poʊ/, /ta/, or /toʊ/ to mean “father.” So /mama/, /mɛɪmɛɪ/, /nana/, /nɛɪnɛɪ/, /papa/, /tata/ – these kinds of things. He’s like, “This is a weird coincidence. Why?”

Lauren: Linguists get really caught up in historical linguistics, trying to use the relationship between lots of current languages to trace back to an older language. Some people thought maybe this relates to some fact of history. But Roman Jakobson had a completely different theory, and one that I find really compelling, which is that when you have an infant, and they’re learning to use their mouth, they’re gonna start with the sounds that are the easiest to make. The very easiest sounds to make are exactly those sounds that you mentioned in Murdock’s paper.

Gretchen: Especially, you know, /a/ is very easy. You can scream it. Many other sounds aren’t very scream-able. Babies can scream it. And /ma/, /pa/ – the sounds that involve your lips – are very also easy to make – very straightforward for the baby to learn to make. It doesn’t involve as much control as using the tongue or further back in the throat. It’s just a straightforward open-and-close thing. You’re not trying to do bits of vibration, or bits of frication, or other types of more complicated things. And maybe the baby can see what their parents are doing – you can see when someone else is using their lips. He figured it’s kind of a property of babies, but it’s also a property of parents thinking, “I’m so important in my child’s life. Clearly, this baby’s saying my name.”

Lauren: It’s a self-reinforcing fact across generations where parents are like, “Oh” – take what is essentially a child babbling and learning how to use their mouth as – “They’re talking to me! They’re saying my name!”

Gretchen: “They’re saying my name!” Which I think is also beautifully human of us in a very different sort of way.

Lauren: Which is why even though we say the proper English names are “Mother” and “Father,” if you ask people what their children’s first words were, you’ll often get them to say, “Oh, she said ‘Mama,’” even though that’s not what we think of as the normal English term. We accept very low standards from children in those regards.

Gretchen: It’s very charming. It’s also interesting that “Mama” and “Papa” are a lot more common as first names than “Amam” and “Apap,” which are made out of the same sounds but putting a consonant and then a vowel is much –

Lauren: Easier.

Gretchen: Is much easier. And some languages don’t let you begin words with vowels. But every language will let you begin a word with a consonant and end it with a vowel. Or some languages won’t let you end a word with a consonant. But consonant-vowel is a good basic syllable in every language. /ma/ is a better word than /am/, and /pa /is a better word than /ap/ for babies to learn and for languages to produce. You don’t get “Apap” and “Amam.” You get “Mama” and “Papa.”

Lauren: I’m gonna go from talking about some of the most primary and parentally instinctual vocabulary about kinship to sharing some really cool stuff in Australian languages, because one thing I find really interesting is when you have a culture that, over time, manages to create these incredibly elaborate and complex kinship systems – I think, in some ways, our inability to process our word for “cousins” is potentially a bit of a chicken-and-egg thing, right? We don’t use these terms very much because we don’t really talk about or track our extended families very often in our culture.

Gretchen: Right, but in cultures where people are less likely to move to cities, and are more likely to have larger families, and continue living in the same villages with or areas with a lot of extended family around, it’s useful to distinguish between all these different kinds of relationships. Especially to prevent people from having kids with people who are too closely related to them, which is, you know, useful for the continuation of the human species and shows up in different cultures a lot.

Lauren: When you have cultures that have been together, living in close-knit, complex societies for generations and generations, you can get some really cool kinship stuff. And Australian languages seem particularly well-disposed to this. One thing that’s really nifty is people calculate “harmonic generations.” This is where – to use your family as an example of what a harmonic generation is – in some ways, your lineage of GG’s is an example of harmonic generations, where grandparent and grandchildren are treated with the same kin term or treated as being part of a cohort together.

Gretchen: Oh, that’s interesting. I mean, I guess it’s kind of the case in English in the sense that they both get the prefix “grand.” Whereas, you don’t have that for parent/child, mother/father, daughter/son. They don’t have the prefix. Whereas, grandchild/grandparent have a symmetrical prefix.

Lauren: So in the Waanyi language, the term for “grandparent” can actually be used reciprocally to refer to a grandchild as well. There’s a really nice paper on that that I’ll link to in the show notes. Another really interesting thing is all of the relationships we’ve been talking about so far have been about my relationship with another person or your relationship with another person. And a lot of kin terms, you start with the individual in the centre of the diagram, and you’re like – “my aunt” is about my relationship with this person. Or “my grandparent,” or “my grandchild,” is about my specific relationship with a specific individual. And then – my grandparent is not your grandparent because we are not related to each other.

Gretchen: That is true.

Lauren: Whereas, tri-relational kin terms are terms that encode three different relationships. There are reasons why these come into being, but I’ll give you an example of one first.

Gretchen: Okay, I can’t even visualise this right now.

Lauren: Well, the good thing is there is a visualisation. There’ll be a link to this article by Joe Blythe. In Murrinhpatha, there is a term that is used by a male speaker when talking to their son or daughter about the son or daughter’s grandmother on the other side of the family.

Gretchen: Okay, okay.

Lauren: It’s not saying – it’s not a word for “my mother-in-law.” And it’s not a word for “your grandmother.” It’s a word that specifically means –

Gretchen: “Your opposite-side grandmother.”

Lauren: “Your opposite-side grandmother.”

Gretchen: “Your grandmother who is not my mother.”

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: And is it a prefix that’s used for any of the relatives on that side?

Lauren: No, there are entirely different forms depending on different relationships – for your son or daughter’s maternal grandparent on the other side of the family. And the reason that tri-relational kin terms like this one evolve is because there are taboos within the culture on men being able to speak to or about their mother-in-law.

Gretchen: Okay.

Lauren: That explains that one. But there are other tri-relational kin terms that don’t have to do with these taboos. It’s just about triangulating everyone in the relationship.

Gretchen: I guess that makes sense in the sense that – so when I’m talking to, especially, younger relatives, like ones that are little kids, I might refer to my own mother as “Aunt Whatever” if I’m talking to my young cousin because I know that if this kid is two or something, they don’t quite understand how all of the complex kinship terms work. So I’m gonna use the one that places myself in their position.

Lauren: Yes.

Gretchen: Or especially, if you see a young child, and you’re like, “Where’s Mummy,” you don’t mean where’s your own mum, you mean where’s the child’s mum.

Lauren: Yeah, so we can do these triangulations. We just do them in our own head and position ourselves like the other person.

Gretchen: Right. And we don’t have an additional set of vocabulary for it.

Lauren: This is an entirely separate set of vocabulary to help navigate the three-way relationship.

Gretchen: Yeah, that’s really interesting.

Lauren: It’s super interesting.

Gretchen: I can definitely see why that would be useful in certain circumstances, especially if you have a complex network of kin.

Lauren: There are complex words that are encoded into the language that aren’t encoded into ours, but there are also examples in Australian languages where these things get encoded into the grammar as well. In Kayardild there is – coming back to this harmonic-generations thing. I will use a different pronoun if I’m talking about me and someone in my own generation, or me and my grandparent, compared to me and my father, or my child, because the father or child are not – they’re disharmonic generations. Whereas, my siblings and my grandparents and my grandchildren are my harmonic generations. So there are entirely different pronoun forms depending on whether I’m referring to a group of people in my harmonic generations or non-harmonic generations. There’s a whole paper on this that I really love from Nick Evans back in 2003 that I’ll link to. The thing I really love about it is that Evans refers to this kind of phenomenon as “kintax.”

Gretchen: “Kintax?” Oh, that’s really good!

Lauren: Where the kinship system is so ingrained into the language that it becomes part of the grammar.

Gretchen: The kinship system is in the syntax. It’s “kintax.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: That actually – it sounds like a kind of tax that – a fee that you impose upon your family a little bit.

Lauren: Only if you’re not thinking of it with your linguist brain.

Gretchen: Only if you’re not thinking with your linguist brain. “Kintax.” That’s really good. Another linguistic system that I find really interesting that encodes family relationships in a different sort of way is the situation in Icelandic. Icelandic speakers will have names like – you might get, like, “Leif Erikson,” who is the son of Erik the Red, which a famous Viking. And then –

Lauren: Oh, yeah, “Erik’s son.” Sorry, just have to point out the obvious.

Gretchen: Who’s, literally, “the son of Erik,” yeah. But then Leif’s son doesn’t become something-something-also-Erikson. He becomes, I don’t know, like, “Sven Leifson.” This system is vaguely familiar to English speakers because we have names like “Davidson,” and “Peterson,” and “Johnson,” and stuff like that that have the “son” in them. But they’re no longer active.

Lauren: There was a recent History of English podcast episode where Kevin Stroud looks at how this changes in the Middle English period. We did have – you would be “Christopher Robertson.” And then, you’d have “William Christopherson,” who would then be having children who were like, “Thomas Williamson.” But then, eventually, those names froze. The whole idea of surnames is really central to English and really weird to Icelandic people.

Gretchen: Yeah, whereas in Icelandic, all of these get created. You also have the equivalence of, you know, like, “Leif’s daughter.” She’s not gonna get the last name “Leifson.” She’s gonna be “Leifsdottir.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And in Icelandic, when you refer to someone, you know what their father’s name is, or sometimes their mother’s name – if they get named after their mother. They don’t have the custom of referring to people by their surname in formal contexts. Political leaders or dignitaries in Iceland – the correct formal way to refer to them is by their first name because the only context in which you would use “So-and-So’s son,” or “So-and-So’s daughter” is when you’re saying the full name, not as a replacement for their name.

Lauren: I love that everyone’s been on a name bender at the moment because, obviously, with an imminent human to name so have I. But there’s also a great Allusionist episode recently where Helen Zaltzman chats to some people in Iceland about their naming conventions and about the way that surnames aren’t static, but they change with each generation.

Gretchen: Yeah, and I found the Iceland thing really interesting because I realised that in the context where I’m figuring out who all my second cousin once-removeds are, I also generally know, when I’m introducing myself in a family reunion context, which of my family members I need to name in order for the person I’m talking to and I to figure out how we’re supposed to know each other.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: I don’t have this encoded in my name anywhere except for the fact that I happen to be named after my grandmother. But like – it’s part of conversation even in a more limited context.

Lauren: Yeah, going to family reunions or weddings, and then, I’m Lauren, “Chris’s daughter.”

Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. Or like, “Who are you here for in this wedding?” Like, “Which side of the wedding are you here for?” Even if you’re not a relative, you can be like, “Well, I’m So-and-So’s friend from university.”

Lauren: Yeah, that’s putting you in the extended non-kinship group.

Gretchen: Yeah, or like, at academic conferences, you’re like, “Oh, well, I’m So-and-So’s advisee.” And they’re like, “Oh, I know So-and-So.” Or like, the kind of extended networks.

Lauren: Humans have this need to triangulate where they sit within social relationships.

Gretchen: Yeah, absolutely. It’s also interesting – I was intrigued to learn when researching this episode that the word “sibling” in English is both fairly new and also very old.

Lauren: Hm, new in terms of its current use?

Gretchen: Yeah, so it comes from Old English. “Sib” is actually related to the word for “self.” But in Old English, “sibling” is just any family member. And then, in the early 1900s – 1903 – geneticists started talking about inheritance, and they were like, “Guys, it’s getting really annoying to keep saying ‘brothers and/or sisters’ this whole time. It’d be really great if we had a gender-neutral term for this umbrella category because inheritance doesn’t care.” And so they reached into Old English and pulled out this term that had meant “any relative” and started using it to mean “brother and/or sister.”

Lauren: Useful.

Gretchen: I was like, “This seems like a totally unremarkable word for me. It’s totally part of my active vocabulary. I didn’t acquire it when I was ten, like third cousin once-removed.” And yet, it’s a surprisingly recent innovation.

Lauren: I didn’t realise it was that recent. But one recent-ish innovation that I’ve enjoyed bringing into my vocabulary is a word on analogy, which is, instead of saying “nieces and nephews” all the time, saying “niblings.”

Gretchen: That’s fantastic. I like “niblings” a lot.

Lauren: Which has the double benefit of being cute. It was first used in a 1951 article by a linguist who was talking about kinship terms across languages and was like, “Look, a gender neutral-term like ‘sibling’ is really handy, so I’m just gonna coin ‘nibling’ while we’re at it.”

Gretchen: That’s great. I’ve also been seeing some people who are non-binary or gender queer trying to come up with terms for like, “Oh, well, one of my siblings is having a child. I want that kid to call me something, but I don’t want to be called ‘Aunt’ or ‘Uncle’ What other term can I come up with here?” I’ve seen a couple examples. I don’t think there’s one “nibling” go-to yet, but there’s a bunch of options like “pibling,” “parent-sibling.”

Lauren: Oh, I like “pibling.”

Gretchen: It’s kind of cute. It works very well in analogy or portmanteaus like “Auntle” or “Ancle.” I’ve seen “Unty,” which is like “Uncle” and “Aunty.” Or “Titi,” which is, I think, based on the Spanish – “Tio” and “Tia” are used for “Uncle” and “Aunt,” respectively. “Titi” is combining those. Or “Zizi,” similarly, for “Zio” and “Zia,” which is the Italian equivalent.

Lauren: And we’ve seen lots of examples of individual families innovating terms. I feel like if the system isn’t working for you within kinship, making it work for you and your family, however it’s structured, is a great idea.

Gretchen: Yeah, I think it’s very easy to make it to catch on in an individual family because if you tell a kid, “Here’s what to call me,” the kid doesn’t know any different. It works great for grandparents, and I think it should work really well for other family members as well. It’ll be interesting to keep following that,   because maybe in another generation or two, people will be like, “What do you mean ‘pibling’ was only invented in the 2000’s? It’s clearly part of my active vocabulary. You mean ‘nibling,’ and ‘pibling,’ and ‘sibling,’ were all once innovative?” Which I think is a really interesting corner of the lexicon.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. And you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLingustic.com.

Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, and help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include: hyperforeignisms, multilingual babies, and a Q&A with both of us. You can also help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay too. We really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life.

Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are A. E. Prevost and Sarah Dopierala, our editorial manager is Emily Gref, and our production assistants are Celine Yoon and Fabianne Anderberg, and our music is by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 42: What makes a language “easy”? It’s a hard question

Asking which language is the hardest to learn is like asking where the furthest place is -- it all depends on where you start. And for babies, who start out not knowing any of them, all natural languages are eminently learnable -- because otherwise they wouldn’t exist at all! 

In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about a common question: what are people really asking when they ask about “easy” or “hard” languages? It turns out that there are several things going on, including which languages you already know, whether you’re approaching a language as an adult or a child, and what sort of motivation and contexts to speak it you have.  

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here

Announcements: 

This month’s bonus episode is about teaching linguistics, and how you can be your own best teacher even if you aren't heading to university any time soon. We discuss ways to make learning about more than just terminology, how to get right into data from the beginning, and how to keep a clear picture of how linguistics is relevant to other things you're studying or enjoying. Support Lingthusiasm on Patreon to gain access to the teaching linguistics episode and 36 previous bonus episodes, and to chat with fellow lingthusiasts in the Lingthusiasm patron Discord. New this month we’re also doing a couple listen-along chats in the Discord as well, so you can stream the episode at the same time as fellow lingthusiasts and chat with each other in the channel for that! 

Lingthusiasm merch makes a great gift for yourself or other lingthusiasts! Check out IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at lingthusiasm.redbubble.com

Have a great idea for a linguistics communication project, but need a bit of money to get it off the ground? Looking to support emerging lingcomm projects? The LingComm Grant is a $500 grant for communicating linguistics to broader audiences in 2020.

If we reach 790 patrons by the 1st of May 2020, we’ll give out four grants instead of two. Applications close 1st of June 2020. Find out more and apply here. 

Here are the links mentioned in this episode:

We’re giving away grants for linguistics communications projects!

Lexical similarity amongst European languages

Lexicostatistics

Language Structure Is Partly Determined by Social Structure

Language acquisition of Murrinhpatha

Simpler grammar, larger vocabulary: How population size affects language

How to Teach Old Ears New Tricks

Motivation in Second Language Learning

Master/Apprentice Language Learning Program

Mono-Lingual Field Methods, Ken Hale

Mono-Lingual Fieldwork Demonstration - Hmong

NASA post about whether monolingual field methods would be useful in space

Lingthusiasm Episode 3: Arrival of the linguists

Communicating compassionately with people who are less fluent in a language you speak well

Tweet about never regretting learning a language

Excerpt from Polyglot: How I Learn Languages

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production manager is Liz McCullough, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[superlinguo]

How We Talk, N.J. Enfield (Review)

It’s really astonishing that human conversation happens at all. People respond to questions more quickly than they should be able to think of their answers, and our decisions about whether someone is being helpful or not can be based on millisecond differences in their responses.

Nick Enfield’s 2017 book How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation summarises some of the key work he has undertaken on how conversation works, with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The book situates this work in some of the key research from the field of Conversation Analysis in the last 50 years. Topics covered include looking at how silences of different lengths gets interpreted, how people repair their speech as they go along, and how ‘um’ in English has correlations in enough other languages that Enfield refers to it as a ‘universal’ word. All of this is framed throughout the book with the metaphor of the ‘conversation machine’, which is a delightful commercial model of the ‘interaction engine’ in Nick’s 2006 book with Stephen Levinson (which I found tremendously helpful back when I was conceptualising my PhD research).

There’s lots to like about this book, and the presentation of research. I particularly like the commitment to ensuring that it is not only the ol’ regulars like English that are included in analysis. You’ll get to learn about the differences in conversational features in languages like Lao (Laos), Murrinhpatha (Australia) and Siwu (Ghana) too - or perhaps more astoundingly, the similarities between them.

This book is a great example of how research can be presented in a clear way that is engaging for a non-expert reader. It’s for the quick-minded non-expert, who is ok with acquiring (or ignoring) a bit of jargon along the way, but if you want an exercise in good pop-science writing, sit down with one of these chapters and the original research on which it is based. I did hope the larger question of ‘why this work?’ would be answered; Enfield is diligent about making sure all of the researchers are given a research-area title, but it is intriguing to ponder why conversation intrigues psychologists, linguists and sociologists alike. 

If you did linguistics but never got to study Conversation Analysis, or you want a whistlestop tour of some of the most interesting work to come out of the field in the last couple of decades, this book is certainly worth a visit.

Buy: Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link

[Thanks to Basic Books for the review copy. I also purchased a copy when Nick launched the book during the ALS conference in December because I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy.]

[superlinguo]

Linguistics jobs -  Interview with a Linguistic Project Manager at a Language Tech Company

This month’s interview highlights the increasingly central role of human language in tech, and the important role that linguists can play in the current tech landscape. It’s also been a delight for me to interview Sasha Wilmoth, who I last caught up with when she was taking one of her final undergraduate classes at Melbourne Uni. This interview is also something  slightly different, because Sasha is one of a growing number of ‘hybrid’ researchers - working across both the university and private sector. I’ll leave it to her to explain more!

What did you study at university?

I did a Bachelor of Arts majoring in Linguistics, and studied Mandarin and Swedish. I also squeezed in as many literature subjects as I could. Within linguistics, I became interested in the morphology and syntax of Australian Aboriginal languages – my honours thesis was on Murrinhpatha, which is a polysynthetic language spoken in the Northern Territory.

What is your job?

That’s a good question! I think most of my family and friends still don’t really understand what I do for a living.

My time has been split between two jobs this year: I’m a Linguistic Project Manager at a company called Appen, and a Research Assistant within the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL). I’ll just focus on my job at Appen, because it’s a bit further away from academia.

Basically, Appen provides all sorts of data for AI and machine learning, including for speech and language technology. In the Linguistic Services department, we make the specialised annotated data that’s used to train these systems, in whatever language our clients need (we’re up to something like 180 languages and dialects by now). This includes pronunciation lexicons, prosodic annotation, part-of-speech tagging, tokenisation, proofing tools, guidelines, and so on. There are also lots of linguists working in the Data Collection, Transcription, and Translation departments. My job encompasses the technical and linguistic bits, as well as the more typical project management things like planning, budgeting, and delegating tasks.

For example, for a pronunciation lexicon project, which is what I’ve largely been working on, I start by researching the grammar, phonology, orthography and dialects of the language. Based on this research, I figure out what our approach to phonemic transcription will be and come up with some technical tools to predict the pronunciation of the words based on the orthography. I manage a team of linguists around the world who are native speakers of that language, and they check that the pronunciations are correct. Then I do a bunch of quality checks according to what we know about the language and prepare the data for our clients. Recently, I’ve been working on Serbo-Croatian, Persian, and Mandarin projects – as you can imagine, each language presents completely different technical and linguistic challenges.

Appen is an industry partner with CoEDL, so another cool thing I get to do is collaborate with academic linguists and see if we can apply our own processes and problem-solving skills to their research projects.

How does your linguistics training help you in your job?

I’m happy to say that I apply my linguistics education at work every day: I solve linguistic puzzles and read grammars and write phonological rules and use ToBI (a way of transcribing intonation) and the International Phonetic Alphabet. I never managed to become a very fluent Mandarin speaker, but I use that knowledge for our Mandarin and Cantonese projects. I even do a bit of Swedish proof-reading here and there. I didn’t imagine this was possible when I chose this rather impractical combination of subjects.

Do you have any advice you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?

I know some previous interviewees have said they wish they had been more aware of the (lack of) job prospects for linguists. I’m stubborn though, and I was determined to study what I was most interested in without taking into account career prospects. I’m really glad I made that choice (and had the privilege to do so), because there are actually more opportunities outside of academia than I thought. The future for linguists in industry is bright, as we’ll be using speech more and more to interface with our phones, cars, toasters, personal robot servants, etc.

Most linguistics students don’t end up working as linguists, so it’s wise to keep your options open. But if you’re motivated and can’t think of anything else you’d rather be doing, there are jobs out there – I wish I had known about them when I was at uni. It’s really important to seek out and take advantage of opportunities for students like summer research programs, internships, or volunteering with organisations like RNLD here in Melbourne. Get to know your lecturers and tutors and ask them what you can get involved in.

Any other thoughts or comments?

Just a note on working in tech: I don’t have a computer science background, and I’ve never been a big computer nerd. I’ve learned everything on the job, and it turns out I quite like computers after all. If you have the type of pattern-finding brain that linguists tend to have, chances are you might enjoy the technical side of things when it’s applied to something interesting. Developing some technical skills as a student can help you in many career paths, but it’s not an absolute necessity. If you’re looking for a place to start: regular expressions, bash, and Python are all very useful and relatively easy to learn.

Previously:

Interview with a Data Scientist

Interview with a Librarian

Interview with a Text Analyst

Interview with a User Experience (UX) Researcher

Interview with a Study Abroad Facilitator

Interview with The Career Linguist

Interview with a local radio Digital Managing Editor

Check out the Linguist Jobs tag for more interviews