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Lingthusiasm Episode 116: Cross-cultural communication (in space!)
Sometimes, you're talking with someone and you just seem to click. Other times, you just can't seem to get comfortable: they're standing too close or too far away for comfort, making too much or too little eye contact, touching or not touching you in a way that just doesn't quite feel right. But where do our senses of what feels comfortable in a conversation come from, and how can they be so different from each other?
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all, other human cultures. We talk about a science fiction book called Hellspark by Janet Kagan (which was recommended by a listener!) which is a murder mystery set on a planet of cross-cultural communication gone wrong, and which sent us on a whole deep dive into the world of proxemics, aka the linguistics of personal space. We also talk about how these early roots of cross-cultural communication studies have shifted in modern-day linguistic anthropology, and compare several newer speculative fiction books about alternative structures for human societies (plus aliens and/or dragons), including What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed and To Shape A Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
Check our our updated topics page! It's a great resource if you're not sure what episode to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. We've added some new topics that let you browse, for example, which episodes analyze the linguistic elements of all the science fiction and fantasy that we've been reading! And we've kept the ability to browse episodes by linguistic structural features, which is perfect for when you're looking for an episode to pair with a topic you're teaching or studying.
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about idioms! We talk about some of our favourite idioms, the interplay between idioms and metaphors, why linguists are so excited about breaking idioms by changing one word slightly, and in particular why "the shit hit the fan" was responsible for multi-hour-long discussions that Gretchen participated in during grad school. (Swear warning, because there's really not another idiom that uh, hits the fan in the same way.)
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
Hellspark by Janet Kagan on Amazon
What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed on Amazon and Bookshop
To Shape a Dragon’s Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose on Amazon and Bookshop
The Bluesky post from Trish B that started it all
Wikipedia entry for 'Edward T. Hall'
Wikipedia entry for 'Proxemics'
Wikipedia entry for 'Mosuo'
'Moniquill Blackgoose: Also There Are Dragons' on LocusMag
'An Indies Introduce Q&A with Moniquill Blackgoose' on BookWeb.org
'A wish for something different at the frontier' by Jo Walton for Reactor
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky 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 assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).
Transcript Episode 116: Cross-cultural communication (in space!)
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Cross-cultural communication (in space!)’. 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 show notes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about understanding aliens, fantastical creatures, and perhaps the trickiest group of all, other human cultures. But first, we’ve been doing a bit of spring cleaning on our website.
Gretchen: There are kind of a lot of Lingthusiasm episodes by now. We have deliberately made them so they can be listened to in any order that strikes your fancy. That means that if you’re trying to do something a little bit more systematic, it can be hard to figure out what to listen to next or what to recommend to someone. We’ve added some new topic categories that you can browse, for example, which episodes analyse the linguistics elements of all the science fiction and fantasy that we’ve been reading.
Lauren: We’ve kept my favourite part of the Topics page, which is the ability to browse episodes by a linguistic structural feature, which is perfect for when I’m looking for an episode to pair with the subject I’m teaching this term.
Gretchen: You can also see a starter pack of episodes we think are especially good to try to get your friends into Lingthusiasm with, all our interviews and book-related episodes grouped together, and more categories.
Lauren: Go to lingthusiasm.com/topics or find this under the Episodes section of our website.
Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was all about idioms and how they work linguistically. It’s a real barrel of laughs.
Lauren: It’ll pass muster. It’ll bring the house down. Heads will roll.
Gretchen: Wait, that sounds bad.
Lauren: Okay, maybe we’ll put that cat back in the bag.
Gretchen: This episode also has a swear warning because we finally explored why linguists are so keen on the idiom “The, uh, stuff hit the fan.”
Lauren: To get access to the idioms episode and over nine years of Lingthusiasm bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Gretchen: Lauren, some days, do you ever just wanna can it all and become a linguist on a spaceship?
Lauren: Oh, yeah. I mean, sometimes the space linguist is more like an interpreter, or they’re very good at wrangling the translation machines, but what I love are those episodes of Star Trek where Uhura or Hoshi have a gap in the system, and they need to figure out what’s happening in order to communicate.
Gretchen: We recently got a great book recommendation from a listener – shoutout to Trish B. – who asked us on Bluesky whether we’d read Hellspark by Janet Kagan and said it was a science fiction murder mystery and one of your top four books ever.
Lauren: Also, shoutout to the four other people who immediately replied and said they also loved this book – a book we’d never heard of.
Gretchen: With endorsements like that, I had to read it. I can tell you it was great. We are gonna structure a whole episode around it.
Lauren: If those initial endorsements weren’t enough, you told me there was a bunch of gesture stuff in it, and so I had to read it.
Gretchen: Let’s start with the basic premise of Hellspark. We’re not assuming anyone else has read it.
Lauren: Yeah, I guess it’s a murder mystery.
Gretchen: [Laughs] I honestly forgot about the murder mystery part. To me, this book was really about cross-cultural communication. We’re on a planet. There’s a survey crew of humans trying to figure out whether this alien species – which I pictured as sort of looking like an emu – is capable of intelligent communication.
Lauren: We have a whole episode on communicating with aliens who have completely different ways of doing language, but this episode isn’t about trying to communicate with the emu aliens.
Gretchen: Instead, the thing that’s very enticing about this particular book is the survey crew of humans.
Lauren: Which is made up of this really diverse set of cultures. They deliberately recruit people from different human cultures to expand, I guess, the range of how useful they’ll be in interacting with aliens.
Gretchen: The ironic thing is for a deliberately recruited and trained cross-cultural group is they are so bad at cross-cultural communication.
Lauren: Yeah. And then there’s this one character who arrives who’s a Hellspark who’s basically from this culture where their whole deal is cross-cultural communication.
Gretchen: Is it “Hell’s park” or “Hell spark”?
Lauren: This book has really fun language play in that this is a deliberate joke that’s overtly discussed in the book. It could be either “Hell’s park” or “Hell spark.” The Hellspark humans seem to play this up for their own amusement and consistently alternate their pronunciation.
Gretchen: Random fluctuation is absolutely how human languages work. Being incredibly consistent about AB AB AB is not really how human communication works. That’s a fun little detail that makes it more alien to me. But the thing that made me want your take on this book the most, Lauren, was that the cross-cultural miscommunication was a lot about how people interact with each other in physical space not just outer space – so how people sit with respect to each other in a room or how close they stand in conversation. The term that this book uses for this phenomenon is “proxemics,” which looks sort of familiar to me from linguistics terms like “morpheme” and “phoneme,” but a “proxeme” isn’t a word I’d ever heard before. This seems not exactly gesture but kind of like gesture. Have you heard of “proxemics”? Is it a real thing in linguistics somewhere?
Lauren: Yeah. Figuring out what is polite or comfortable in terms of how close you can physically stand near people, how you face each other or don’t face each other in conversation, is absolutely part of the larger way that we structure interacting with people. It is a real piece of communication terminology that she’s taken into the book, which I love.
Gretchen: I've definitely experienced the feeling of having a conversation with someone who’s continually advancing on me because their personal bubble is smaller than mine or where they’re sort of standing awkwardly distantly away from me because my personal bubble is small than theirs. It felt very real that like, “Oh, this is great. Someone has actually studied this.”
Lauren: We might also interact with someone who really enjoys sitting side-by-side and not making eye contact, or you might have people who really prefer their conversations to be really front onto each other. There’s lots of ways we can arrange ourselves in space. A lot of this has been looked at in the cultural anthropology literature. I knew about this term, but Janet Kagen specifically gives a shoutout (I love it when authors do this) to an anthropologist who specifically coined the concept of proxemics, Edward T. Hall, who is someone I hadn’t really read before and went down a little Edward T. Hall rabbit hole – a “rabbit hall.”
Gretchen: [Laughs] That’s a joke that only works in your accent not mine. I loved the author’s note at the end. Janet Kagan, alas, is no longer with us. This book came out in the ’80s. But we do have her author’s note at the end where she’s like, “Yeah, I was very influenced by Edward T. Hall. Proxemics comes from this real literature.” And I was like, “Yes!” Lauren, do you know this literature? What does Hall say about proxemics?
Lauren: He was really interested in a really expansive idea of proxemics. He was interested in face-to-face communication but also how people structured the physical, built environment. He hung out with architects as much as anthropologists and linguists. He had this really expansive view. He had this real sense of there being this really strong cross-cultural variation. He trained as an anthropologist in the United States of America. He worked in a number of Native American communities. And then in World War II he served in the US army in Europe and the Philippines. He’s known for noticing a few things that vary across cultures, whether that’s the way people relate to each other in space, the way different cultures relate to time and concepts like punctuality, and he also talks a lot about how we can take a structural approach to researching these differences. By making those differences more apparent, we can learn them and try to overcome them as we interact across cultures, which, if anyone’s read one of those like, how to do business-type books, this is such a common trope now that we need to understand people from different cultures, but in the second half of the 20th Century, this became a new thing to consider and actively study.
Gretchen: This is the guy that pre-dates what I think of as the tired business cliché about the Japanese. He’s predating that and coming up with this stuff that wasn’t as cliché when he was observing it.
Lauren: Yeah, he has a book called Hidden Differences: Doing Business With the Japanese in the post-war US-Japan trade relationship where you had these two very different cultures, and people trying to conduct business. This whole trope kind of started with this military-trained anthropologist who then spent a lot of time working with the United States Foreign Service institute training diplomats and then, subsequently, training business people.
Gretchen: I feel like maybe there was less global popular culture or this idea that maybe Western people have watched some anime or read some manga or less of this overlap, so that maybe some of the some of the stuff was less familiar at the time.
Lauren: We take our much different cultures – and the general population from different cultures get to interact thanks to modern transportation and modern airplanes, so yeah, this was really fulfilling that. It is wonderful. The other thing that I really appreciate about Edward T. Hall is that a lot of his writing was for a general audience. I can absolutely see how Janet Kagan would’ve read his books and just been able to really be inspired for them because he really did this great, accessible writing in the late ’50s through to the 1990s. Perhaps one thing that has shifted from that earlier work to today is that it was really predicated on “This is how all American English speakers stand when they’re talking to each other,” or “This is how all American English speakers think about punctuality and timeliness when it comes to meeting people,” and then it’s like, “Now, we will discuss the Japanese. Everyone in the Philippines.”
Gretchen: I don’t wanna brag here, Lauren, but I’ve known quite a few Americans in my time. And what I would say is they have differing approaches to punctuality depending on themselves as individuals. Presumably, this is also true for Japanese people, of whom I’ve known several but not quite as many as Americans.
Lauren: You are definitely zeroing in on one of the, I think, challenges and limitations – and a lot of his work, at a very high level, you may be inclined to be like, “Ah, yes, there must be differences here,” and when you zero in, it becomes a lot harder to actually pin down those differences.
Gretchen: I was thinking about this when reading Hellspark because I’ve definitely experienced these sorts of communication breakdowns that are described in the book. There’s a few examples of like, oh, this person is accidentally approaching this other person from the direction that leads them to be perceived as a threat rather than as a friend, or like this one person is from this culture where they wear really elaborately-painted toenails and things like that, and another person’s from a culture where the feet are very taboo and need to be covered all the time. They’re in this tension. I was thinking about a time when I was talking with someone in a professional context, and this woman kept touching my thigh in a way that I am not typically familiar with being in a professional context. She wasn’t flirting with me. It was just like, “We’re having an engaged, professional conversation. The way that I’m gonna demonstrate that is that I’m gonna do this.”
Lauren: Were you seated really close to each other?
Gretchen: We were seated on the same bench. She didn’t have to reach around a table. That would’ve been kind of awkward. She was just sort of engaged. The way that some people might touch your arm – I think she might’ve started with the arm and kept going with the thigh. She was my mom’s age. There wasn’t the dynamic that –
Lauren: I just wanna double check she wasn’t flirting with you. That’s not the vibe you got.
Gretchen: Really that was not anything about the rest of the vibe that I got. Eventually, I was like, “Okay, well, I guess if we’re in touching-thighs-shows-that-we’re-engaging culture, I’ll do this back because maybe you also like this.” I did it back even though I wouldn’t normally do so. There I’m passing the Hellspark test of like, “Can I adjust my behaviour on the fly?” She seemed quite engaged. We did not go on a date. She did not interpret this as me flirting back. It was just a like, “Oh, we’re having this engaged conversation.” Nothing about this person’s particular background – I have met other people from her background, and they were not inveterate thigh-touchers. I can’t say that this was – this was a cultural difference at some level, but it wasn’t a cultural difference in this reductive, like, oh she’s from a certain place, she must be doing it in this particular context.
Lauren: But it’s also a really good illustrator of how often we arrange ourselves in relation to other people in a really not conscious way. She was just like, “We’re having a friendly conversation.” This wasn’t a like, “This is a professional-but-friendly relationship, and so I’m going to move into the five centimetre zone instead of the 20 centimetre zone that I would stay in for a professional-but-non-friendly conversation.” She’s not doing that consciously.
Gretchen: No. I was doing a certain amount of it consciously where I was like, “Oh, I guess this is what we’re doing. I will mirror back to you whatever you’re doing.” I do think that people potentially have the ability to adjust our behaviour on the fly more to each other than this (I wanna emphasize science fictional) book that is deliberately exaggerating a fictional premise. Not to critique this science fiction book for being science fiction.
Lauren: The characters do display a remarkable lack of insight, but we’ve all possibly been there as well. It’s very obvious when your cultural norms are being infringed on without necessarily being aware of when other people’s are being infringed.
Gretchen: And that sometimes what you need to do in response isn’t as clear as reciprocally also touching someone’s thigh. Sometimes it’s like, “Oh, I need to not approach this person from the left,” which I’m not gonna know if some culture has left-approachment taboos.
Lauren: I do have to say I just love how much this Hellspark character really just felt like an avatar for this concept from anthropology but also how much she absolutely just feels wish fulfilment for anyone who has been in a social situation where they are second guessing how they should interact with people.
Gretchen: Definitely a wish fulfilment character for socially awkward people. You’re like, “Oh, what if I could just decode and perfectly replicate other people’s body language and then we would totally all get along, and everyone would be my friend.”
Lauren: And very much treated as “This is a fixed code. As soon as I am exactly the distance away from someone that their cultural script expects, they will immediately start being relaxed around me, and they won’t know why” It’s just like, I don’t think – it would be nice if proxemics existed in this strict, almost grammatical way, but I don’t think they do.
Gretchen: And none of the other people were bi-cultural or culturally fluid at all. They’ve been on this planet for so long with sometimes no one else or only one other person from their culture, and they haven’t adapted to each other’s norms at all, and yet they’re immediately able to do that as soon as someone points out to them why they need proxemics and what to do overtly and that that they weren’t doing any of that adaptation spontaneously. I love when a very specific academic concept is taken all the way to its full extreme in a fictional context, particularly when it’s a theory I haven’t encountered before. I wish more people would run with concepts like this and take inspiration from specific academic concepts.
Lauren: Is this the very unsubtle point where I point out we have a whole episode about the Sapir-Whorf theory of linguistic relativity, and how much it pops up in science fiction and other genre?
Gretchen: Yeah, and so many people have already done Sapir-Whorf. Pick a new theory to take to its extreme. Please. This is why this was so great.
Lauren: And cite your academic sources. We love it.
Gretchen: Even if those academic sources get more discredited later than they were in the ’80s when the book was written, it’s still a fascinating introduction to the academic topic that introduced me to something.
Lauren: The vibe I got from anthropologists is that Hall is very much a product of his time. He had some interesting ideas and certainly is considered to be one of the fathers of the field of intercultural communication, which is now a massive area across linguistics and anthropology. I couldn’t find anything particularly dubious about him beyond your usual white-guy-in-the-middle-of-the-20th-Century. Intercultural communication has definitely moved on to be a lot more nuanced as has anthropology.
Gretchen: I got to go to the Canadian Anthropology Society conference last year when it happened to be in Montreal and very much noticed this “Oh, we’re gonna consider this one particular culture on its own terms. Someone else is gonna consider this other particular culture.” I remember a fun presentation about someone doing anthropology on the roles and enactions of people playing a D&D game – like a role playing game, like Dungeons & Dragons – and how the players enact specific character roles, or the saying that they’re going to do something is effectively the doing of it because you’re doing this imagination thing. You’re not doing a LARP where you’re actually physically having the swordfight.
Lauren: And just to be clear – that D&D game wasn’t being used as representative of the entirety of North America or Canada or even west coast Anglo-sphere Canadians.
Gretchen: Or even all D&D players. It was really being considered as an example of what these particular players were doing and what maybe has generalised ability to other players of role playing games but not exactly as avatars for their entire culture the way that like, “Oh, we analysed a few businessmen in a boardroom, and now they’re avatars of their entire culture” – was sort of the initial trap that this was falling into.
Lauren: You see this a lot more with studies in anthropology or in linguistics. You’re looking at a much more specific community of people rather than this whole – the entirety of Japan or “Everyone in North America does this.”
Gretchen: I will say that there’s been some more specifically-grounded-in-particular-fictional-communities types of science fiction in the ’80s as well. I’m thinking of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, which is very much written from the point of view of an anthropologist in a particular community and has this very rich description of that one particular community. But I also feel like I’ve been seeing this in some recent fiction as well that I wanna talk about in conversation with this.
Lauren: Excellent. Does this mean we can talk about What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed?
Gretchen: I really enjoyed What We Are Seeking and made you read it. I think it’s got some really fun parallels to Hellspark. It’s also set on a planet where some people have been trying to figure out how to communicate with some aliens.
Lauren: These aliens are more like free-roaming cactus people rather than hyper intelligent emus.
Gretchen: Yes, indeed. But the thing that I found most compelling, again, was the communication between different cultures of humans again. The viewpoint character is coming from a culture that views the broader settler community as in thrall to a barbaric custom called “marriage.”
Lauren: Ew.
Gretchen: [Laughs] And instead is coming from a cultural background that reminded me of a group of people called the Mosuo in China, who have this type of matrilineal household structure where women can have lovers but ultimately children are raised by the mother and the mother’s brothers, and the fathers are involved in raising the children of their own sisters. There’s less of a – it’s not a patriarchal or patrilineal society or organised around a marriage; it’s organised around a matriarch and her daughters and her sons and the children of those daughters.
Lauren: This culturally isolated man who is in this fictional world is trying to navigate this society where he doesn’t have his matrilineal house that he’s affiliated to because he’s in this new environment and all of the cultural challenges for him that spill out from that. I will say, as a classic sci fi trope, Cameron Reed has done this great thing where she’s taken the absolute tiniest kernel of matrilineal household and just dialled everything up to 20.
Gretchen: I don’t wanna say that this is at all an accurate reflection of what the Mosuo are like just that there is a real world culture that, at some level, provides a germ of where this science fictional concept is taking something and running with the implications in a direction that enriches the story rather than trying to be grounded in that one culture.
Lauren: I think it’s a really important development in a lot of the most interesting recent science fiction and fantasy that does this is that you’re coming from the perspective of that cultural outsider rather than a book like Hellspark where that character is very North America coded or very Anglo-sphere coded.
Gretchen: The Hellspark character is very much the cultural insider who’s the insider to all of the cultures rather than having her own particular point of view that’s finding everything else just as unfamiliar. I think another recent book that does this in a different way is To Shape a Dragon's Breath by Moniquill Blackgoose.
Lauren: It’s on my reading list. My entire recommendations list is pretty much made up of things that Gretchen recommends to me.
Gretchen: Look, I know you’ve got less time to read than me, and I wanna make sure you only read the best.
Lauren: I appreciate your curation.
Gretchen: [Laughs] This one is set on Earth in an alternate history where there’s a young Indigenous girl in colonial America who bonds with a dragon – also there’s dragons.
Gretchen: Well, the author in an interview points out that the dragons aren’t sorts of people, they’re sorts of animals. They have this emotional bond with people, and you can tell them to do things like, “Go there,” the way you could with a dog that you’re bonded to, but some dragons in some contexts are really like, they communicate in full sentences, and that’s not what the dragons are doing in this particular story, but they’re still this sort of “other” that makes the plot happen where the humans are interacting in particular levels. This main character who’s from a community – is in southern New England sort of Rhode Island/Massachusetts area – and speaks an Algonquin language has to go to a colonial boarding school in order to learn how to train her dragon quote-unquote “properly,” so it doesn’t get taken from her by the colonial authority. You get this Indigenous perspective on colonialism but as a way of making that colonial world feel just as unfamiliar to the reader as it does to the protagonist. This is an alt history where, basically, the Roman Empire and Christianity never happened.
Lauren: Huh, so who was our European hegemon then?
Gretchen: Well, they’re still from the island of Britain, but they are sort of like the-Danelaw-happened-the-whole-way-through. They’re influenced by a Viking culture into England. All of the names for chemistry and stuff that she’s learning are based on this Anglish/Anglo-Saxon roots rather than Latin and Greek terminology.
Lauren: Excellent. So, we also get that feeling of being a bit of a cultural outsider.
Gretchen: Exactly. You get that double levelled outsider-ness and coming to understand the other people who are also, in various way, outsider-ed from this society, and how they form alliances, and what they’re trying to do in the world.
Lauren: How does this tie into the other books we’ve been talking about?
Gretchen: I think that it’s more specifically grounded in a particular culture, although I checked some interviews with Moniquill Blackgoose to see if she intended the protagonist to be from a specific existing Indigenous culture or one that was influenced by her own background but wasn’t a specific named one, and it was definitely more the second one that it was influenced, she says, “A lot of the time it was weird for me because I am from Rhode Island, and the Algonquin language kind of seeps into the things that are named.” It’s got this sort of influence, but it’s not intended to be (I think) a one-to-one mapping because it is this fantasy setting. But that’s going one step further in terms of being grounded in the very specific sense of place and people and relationships that’s also showing cultural differences. What she says in an interview is that one of her goals was to get readers to comprehend how fundamentally different the European or colonialist perceptions of the world are from the Indigenous perceptions. I think it fits with this theme of cross-cultural communication and putting characters into friction as a way of having readers inhabit different kinds of ways of being in the world.
Lauren: One of the reasons I’m excited to get to this book on my reading list is because it actually makes overt this theme of people coming into a space that’s not theirs and this coloniser frontier theme overt in a way that it’s not in a lot of non-fiction history and the kind of fiction of meeting aliens or new peoples.
Gretchen: When we were researching this episode, I came across a post on the Reactor website by Jo Walton, who’s a friend of the podcast, called “A wish for something different at the frontier,” which is about how there’s actually quite a lot of books that are somewhat like the books we’ve been talking about where you have a tiny group of humans on a planet trying to figure out whether they can communicate with the aliens and eventually arriving at something that resembles greater understanding and how those books are influenced by the American frontier colonial history but with the Indigenous people cast in the role of aliens. To have a book that’s saying, “No, this is explicitly about an Indigenous worldview,” is, I think, interesting in conversation with that broader history within the genre.
Lauren: Hellspark and What We Are Seeking and To Shape A Dragon’s Breath all have these big, looming, alien, unknown presences, and finding these out and discovering more throughout the narrative is what is the big driving plot. But what really drives things forward and what really helps us see these characters is the way they relate to other humans from different cultures.
Gretchen: I think one of the things that draws people to linguistics and also to anthropology is this desire that if we could analyse the systems and the people that are around us more closely and with more engaged and curious attention, we might ultimately be able to communicate with each other more deeply and more respectfully and in a way that shows how much we truly want to appreciate and get to know each other.
[Music]
Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode – and to vastly expand your reading list – go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the International Phonetic Alphabet, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like the very apropos “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it” bags and notebooks – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media as @gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky, @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.
Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes from the last nine years to listen to right now, or if you just want to help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include idioms, children’s oral culture in things like shipping rhymes and counting chants, and an extended chat with Kory Stamper about the colourful spoilers in her book True Color.
Gretchen: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – or leave us a nice review, like this one from Notcharizard, who said, “I really like – and this sounds obvious given the name – how enthusiastic the presenters are! It makes me so happy when they get excited about what they’re talking about, because it makes me get very enthusiastic too! I also really like how they don’t assume a lot of knowledge, so I can understand what they’re talking about because they always explain.”
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Gesture: every language has them, but what do they have to do with the emoji on your phone?
Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about Lauren's new book 'Gesture: A Slim Guide' from Oxford University Press in our episode 'A hand-y guide to gesture'
Listen to the full episode here: https://soundcloud.com/lingthusiasm/103-a-hand-y-guide-to-gesture
Bonus 111: The idiom hit the fan by Lingthusiasm on Patreon. Join Lingthusiasm's community for exclusive content and updates.
Bonus 111: The idiom hit the fan
Don't miss the boat! The cat is out of the bag: keep your ears peeled for this idioms episode before you kick the bucket...or else heads will roll.
In this bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about idioms! We talk about some of our favourite idioms, the interplay between idioms and metaphors, why linguists are so excited about breaking idioms by changing one word slightly, and in particular why "the shit hit the fan" was responsible for multi-hour-long discussions that Gretchen participated in during grad school.
Warning: this episode does contain mild swearing because there's really no non-sweary substitute for "the shit hit the fan" so we kind of had to say it a lot.
Listen to this episode about idioms, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
Transcript Episode 115: The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked’. 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 show notes page.
[Music]
Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.
Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the complicated legacy of linguistic data collected by problematic people with This Guy Sucked. But first, This Guy Sucked is a history podcast who reached out to us about doing a shared episode.
Gretchen: We had a look, and we were like, well, we clearly share an approach to accessible podcasting that nonetheless has scholarly rigour in it. We were like, “Wait, This Guy Sucked is for professional haters, and we are just really enthusiastic about things.”
Lauren: Claire Aubin, who hosts the show, was like, “Look, I am also very enthusiastic about hating things.”
Gretchen: This is how we learned that there are sort of two meanings for “enthusiastic.” One is high energy, and another is high positivity. Normally on Lingthusiasm, we’re both.
Lauren: This was a chance for me to revisit a topic where maybe I don’t feel both.
Gretchen: How was life as a temporary hater?
Lauren: It was very cathartic, actually. This episode is a bit more fast-and-loose than I usually am. I discovered that I used the extended form of “BS” more when I’m really fired up. This Guy Sucked is a fun and unique way to approach history.
Gretchen: What did this person do that you hated so much?
Lauren: Daisy Bates left one of the most important and extensive archives we now have of Australian Indigenous languages from the early 20th Century. But it only exists because of her particularly bad attitudes towards Indigenous people even by the standards of that colonial era, which were also pretty bad, so just a heads up going into this one.
Gretchen: There’s your content advisory. Or most recent bonus episode was about a less problematic woman from the 20th Century, Margaret Godlove (who secretly wrote a whole bunch of definitions for colour words), with our very un-problematic guest, lexicographer Kory Stamper. It’s the second half of the interview that we did with Kory Stamper as a main episode last month. If you listened to that first half, and you want to know the answer to the spoiler, this is your chance.
Lauren: For access to this and over 100 other bonus episodes, head to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.
[Music]
Claire: Welcome to This Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it’s never too late to have haters, and you can’t label the dead. I’m your host, Dr. Claire Aubin. I’m a historian, writer and, most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it’s because of their politics, their behaviour, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. We bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. Today, we are here to do a super special mash up, collaborative episode thing, with who?
Lauren: Yay.
Claire: Who are you? What are we doing?
Lauren: Hi Claire, my name is Lauren. I am co-host of Lingthusiasm, a podcast that is enthusiastic about linguistics. This is really fun for me because normally we just do “Yay, enthusiasm!” and hating is a new vibe for me. Let’s see how it goes.
Claire: I mean, I think we try to be enthusiastic about the hating a little bit in the sense that we’re doing it for justice. The goal is we’re not just being mean; we’re doing it to try to rewrite someone’s history back into the historical narrative or to try to be clear about harms that are caused by people that we in some way or another hold up as “good” or “useful” or “important.” We just like to make sure that the record is balanced.
Lauren: As long as it’s pedagogically informed and academically rigorous hating – sounds great.
Claire: It sure is. The way I do that is by having other people who’re experts to tell me the stuff. But we start today, we wanted to make some acknowledgements though. I’ll let you take this away.
Lauren: [Laughs] Thanks, Claire. I want to acknowledge that this recording is taking place for me on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. Those lands were never ceded. The Kulin peoples live across the area that we now know as Melbourne and its outer surrounds today. I want to pay my respects to any Indigenous people listening. To be completely honest, you can look at the content notes for this episode. It’s gonna involve a lot of coloniser bullshit, so just as a heads up on that. My acknowledgement to any other Indigenous people who have been subjected to colonisation who are listening to this episode as well because, man, these people are maniacs. I do also wanna let you know that almost all of this story has nothing to do with Melbourne or Victoria or Kulin country. A lot of what we’re talking about today has taken place in Western Australia and a lot in South Australia in the Northern Territory. That’s important because Australia is incredibly diverse in terms of Indigenous peoples and their cultures and their languages. It is the longest continuing culture in the world. We have records back to 60,000 years ago. At the time of settlers arriving and white people coming to Australia, there were over 400 distinct language groups. So, an incredibly diverse country. I’m gonna be talking about a different part of it to where I’m from today.
Claire: This is a very important thing. We don’t always do things like land acknowledgements on the show, but it’s a very important thing for, particularly, the person that we’re talking about. There is a particular approach being taken here that we wanted to make sure we were really thoughtful about from the jump, so that you know we’re thinking about these things as we’re making it. I’m trying to be a little bit better – at least on my show. I think you guys do this better than we do. I’m trying to be better on TGS about being more open about the back end and how we approach and think about and formulate the show. I think you guys do a really excellent job with that. I encourage everyone listening to this, if you want the opposite side of this coin – enthusiasm and really, really thoughtful scholarship – to go listen to Lingthusiasm because they’re really great. I’m very excited about this episode because I have been listening to Lauren’s show (and Gretchen’s show) for a while. It’s really cool to get to do this.
Lauren: [Laughs] Well, I’m really excited because doing this let me know about your show. I’ve since been listening. I love academically informed content. I’m not a historian, as you’ve correctly identified for me. I am a linguist. I’m not even a linguist who mostly works in Australia. A lot of my research is either with English or other languages, or a lot of my work has been with Tibetan languages in Nepal, which is a whole other historical and social context. But this person I wanna talk about today – shall we get into it? Because she’s pretty wild. I came to her in – there are some academics who just finish a PhD and wander straight into a research fellowship or a tenure track job. I can hear in your laughter, Claire, that that was not you.
Claire: I was working at a store.
Lauren: It took me about a year, a year and a half, to get my first research fellowship. In that year and a half, I had these colleagues who kept trying to find work for me, but they were always these, like, “I’ve got 40 hours of research project” here, “I’ve got one day as a research officer.” And I’m so grateful to all of those colleagues for keeping me employed and housed in this great period of uncertainty. One of these colleagues was Nick Thieberger at the University of Melbourne, who was like, “I have this big project. I’ve got these pages and pages of PDFs that I’ve just scanned. I need as many people as I can to help me check that the scans look okay, that everything’s there, that they’re properly labelled and named.” These are over 20,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts and 4,000 pages of typed wordlists. These were all this massive survey of Indigenous languages of western, southern, and central Australia that were collected in the early 1900s. They were collected by (or kind of managed by) this lady named Daisy Bates. I was just like, “What is this project, and what was this woman doing in the early 1900s?” This is an astonishing amount of data. All of these Indigenous languages – for some of these languages, it’s the only record we have left of them. It was just astonishing. I’d never heard of Daisy Bates. I didn’t know this massive collection of data existed. It had just sat in the National Library of Australia for years. People knew it was there. But until Nick had this big project to digitise it in a project called “Digital Daisy Bates,” it had just sat there. Probably should at this point say, “If the name Daisy Bates rings a bell, and you’re American, we’re talking about different Daisys.”
Claire: Oh, yeah, to be clear, there are two Daisy Bates when you google “Daisy Bates.” We’re not talking about the civil rights activist. We’re not – she rocks.
Lauren: Okay, good, because I was just like, “I don’t know if she sucks. I don’t have time to go down that rabbit hole. She seems great.”
Claire: On this show, I think I’m happy to come out and say we’re openly pro-desegregation of Arkansas schools in the mid-century American period. We like integration, and we like Daisy Bates.
Lauren: Good Daisy Bates.
Claire: But the one that we’re talking about is not that one. That one was not moonlighting as an Irish-Australian linguist.
Lauren: Very busy – Irish-Australian linguist 50 years earlier.
Claire: We haven’t gotten there quite yet, but it’s going to my previous thesis (that I have engaged with a little bit on the show) which is that white people in Australia in the late-19th-early-20th Century were up to some stuff across the board.
Lauren: We will talk a little bit about why the social context permitted, in fact encouraged, that kind of behaviour. I probably sound terrible now because I’m just like, “This amazing collection is some of the only recorded information we have about some of these languages and some speakers.” She also spent 30 years living in the desert living alongside especially the Aṉangu community in the middle of South Australia, literally giving them her own food, the clothes that she had. At this point, I always feel like I’m kind of losing the plot a little bit where it’s just like, “Is this really a guy who sucks?” Just like coming on here to hate on Mother Teresa energy. At one point, when I was preparing for this – because I did this work well over a decade ago now. I was like, “Maybe she’s not that bad. Maybe I just made up that I thought she was terrible.” And then I went back and was like, “No, no, it’s fine. We can talk about her. She was pretty terrible.”
Claire: I mean, I’ve got some crazy news for you, which is that Mother Teresa, also kind of bad as it turns out.
Lauren: Okay, great. I should’ve seen that coming.
Claire: Wild news. Everyone on this show turns out to be a little bit bad. But this is part of it, actually, so I’m glad that you brought that up early that part of it is the contributions are why we know about people. Often the methods by which they make those contributions or the other people in their lives or the way they position themselves while making those contributions don’t necessarily take away from the contributions themselves, but they need to be added into the record when we think about how all of this knowledge is generated, right, and who is at the centre of its generation is actually quite important to understanding the story of that knowledge. When we think about Daisy Bates, if people are not familiar with her, which many people will not be –
Lauren: Most Australians, even. I think she had a real moment in the 1970s. Since then, she’s just been (for good reason, actually) just let be. She was born in 1859 in Ireland. The problem with detangling her history is that there’s a lot of like, “She was born Margaret Dwyer. By the time she came to Australia, she was Daisy May O’Dwyer.” Her Wikipedia page is a thing of beauty because it tells her story as she tells it, and then down the bottom there’s a whole section of like, where the bullshit is. Thank you to the Wikipedia editor who did that. I’m just gonna tell a version of her story and not worry too much about the inconsistences because I used to think they were important that she was such a liar, and I actually don’t think it’s that important anymore.
Claire: I mean, it also goes to something we talk about on the show a lot which is that part of the difficulty of understanding people’s legacies is that they engage in these myth-making practices while they’re alive.
Lauren: Oh, she was so good at that.
Claire: Part of the difficulty is the fact that their legacy is, in part, self-made. Yeah, it’s totally okay to be like, “We’re gonna go with what we’ve got, but who knows if it’s real.”
Lauren: At age 23 in the 1880s, she lies and says she’s 21 so she can meet the criteria for this Irish-people-come-to-Australia-for-free because they’re trying to bring over all these working class white people to create the white Australia that they think should be created. She works in Queensland and New South Wales as a governess. While she’s there, she gets married three different times. Never divorces – which apparently this was pretty common. People would just get married again because divorce was so hard to come by. She marries – her first marriage. For Australians, this will be wild. This is the surprise crossover you did not expect. In 1884, she marries Breaker Morant, who is a mythologised Australian hero poet who actually did war crimes in the Boer War and was one of the last Australians to be executed by the British. Absolute – that guy sucks, for sure. They got married (briefly). He didn’t pay for the marriage license and shirked off on her. That marriage ended. In 1885, she marries Jack Bates, hence Daisy Bates. At some point, that marriage isn’t going well because she expected a lot of him, and he was just a dude droving horses and droving cattle and would disappear.
Claire: Classic Australian stuff.
Lauren: Just classic, classic Australian stuff. At some point, they’re not really together, and an old flame named Ernest C. Baglehole comes to Sydney.
Claire: Sorry?
Lauren: Yeah, for real, his name is Baglehole. For a long time, I was really distressed that that marriage didn’t survive, and it wasn’t known as “the Baglehole collection.”
Claire: She could’ve been Daisy Baglehole.
Lauren: She could’ve been Daisy Baglehole. It appears that he’s a guy she knew from Ireland (maybe). He was in Sydney because he was working on the ships. They kind of had a relationship for a while. Daisy burnt all of her correspondence and all of her dairies shortly before her death. Piecing all of this together and whether she felt like any of these marriages were more real or if this was just the way one kind led a more casually promiscuous life in the 1880s it’s very hard to say. She was definitely a bigamist – “trigamist”? I guess you can be “trigamous” –
Claire: “Trigamous.” Polygamous.
Lauren: Sure. She was apparently a very charming mega-flirt. Everyone talks about her being very charismatic. I think that charisma links through to her later life. With Jack, she had a son. She didn’t seem that into being a mum, apparently. She had a baby, and she’s like, “Well, no one told me that was gonna hurt,” and swore off sex for the rest of her life (according to her narrative).
Claire: Look, I get it. I have not given birth, but I understand the implications of this, and I get if that’s what someone chooses to do afterwards.
Lauren: If you didn’t have a heads up on that, like, golly golly. She didn’t seem that into her son. She sent him off to boarding school and to live with her extended family. He doesn’t appear in the story that much. I think it’s an oversimplification to just be like, “She wasn’t maternal. There was something wrong with her,” but she really didn’t seem to be into parenting. In the 1890s, like 1894, her son was primary school age, her relationship wasn’t working out. She went to London. She was like, “I have to go home. I’m feeling homesick,” and became a Fleet Street journalist. For a while, she was working on this newspaper about psychics and mediums. She’s not a fan.
Claire: Look, she and I agree – [laughs]
Lauren: She doesn’t seem to be super into the woo woo. She seems like quite a rationalist. But she gets this really great apprenticeship in journalism and writing for public audiences. This is where the relationship between reality and not reality becomes a lot harder to pin down. In 1899, she comes back to Australia. She comes to Perth, which is on the west coast of Australia, saying that she has a commission from The Times of London to write a story about how Indigenous Australians are being ill-treated. This does not appear to be true. It’s possible that she talked to someone at The Times who said, “Sure, you can send a letter to the editor if you want,” and then by the time she got to Australia, this had evolved into a full-blown story. From here on out, she starts talking about Jack as her “late husband.” He is not dead. She’s like, “I mentally divorced him. He’s dead to me.”
Claire: “A conscious uncoupling.” Isn’t that what people were calling that for a little while – the Gweneth Paltrow –
Lauren: It’s a very powerful manifestation of – she’s like, “Naw, he’s my late husband.” The other two never get mentioned again in her lifetime. In fact, it wasn’t until historians started looking in the 1970s that they put together the Breaker Morant story. She’s very circumspect about her life unless it suits her story. She’s a great self-publicist. We’re gonna see that a lot for the rest of this.
Claire: What is the context of what Australia – what settler and Indigenous relationships – what is this looking like at this moment when she comes back and is like, “I’m here to write”?
Lauren: In 1899, Australia is two years off being a federated commonwealth where we still have the British head of state as our head of state, and we have a governor general who acts for the King. It’s so cringe to even say it out loud.
Claire: I lived in New Zealand for a year, and I still do not understand what the deal is over there.
Lauren: Technically, the King is not meant to interfere in the running of Australia, but there was some extreme bullshit in the 1970s where some dudes who sucked definitely had some royal interference in our government. We are a couple of years off being federated – a little bit like the US, I guess, where the east coast – the colonies were established there first, and then white occupation – it didn’t quite go across the country because across the country, right in the middle, there’s a great big bit known as the Nullarbor because there is “null arbour,” “no trees.” It’s very hard to impose a Western way of living on that part of Australia. There were some train lines that were built to get people east to west, but in general, sea travel was the way to get around the country. They created a whole new legal illusion to allow white people to feel okay about occupying Australia. They invented this thing called “terra nullius,” where they’re like, “There aren’t people living here.” And then when everyone was like, “What about all those people living here?” They were like, “They’re not people-people because they’re not doing the kind of agriculture or house-building that we do. Because they’re different, they’re not right. That will allow us to take the land because we’re using it in a good European way.” That wasn’t overturned as a legal framework until the second half of the 20th Century, like, well into the 1980s.
Claire: If I’m thinking about my understanding terra nullius, it’s a way of thinking that a land that is “uncultivated” in the concept of Western cultivation of land is, therefore, unoccupied land. It really relates – or it ties the relationship of peoples to their use of space. This is something we see repeatedly in history, but it’s an immensely harmful thing because it enables you to say some people aren’t people or, like you’ve said, they’re not people in the right way. You get this doctrine that allows people to be treated closer to animals or just features of a landscape which you are now trying to cultivate rather than human beings with rights and dignity and desires and agency.
Lauren: The academic part of me wants to “Well, actually” them with like, there are really great examples of very elaborate aquaculture and eel traps. Bruce Pascoe has done a lot of work on traditional grain farming that doesn’t look anything like Western grain framing because they’re very different grains. It wasn’t about proving that they were really occupying the land because that wasn’t the point. The point was to create this nonsense framework.
Claire: What happens when you push back against that is implicitly you are saying that there’s something of worth that you need to argue with to begin with. To be like, “Well, they are actually occupying the land in the European way.” We don’t need to acknowledge the argument in the first place.
Lauren: Indigenous Australians weren’t even counted as people until 1967 when we had a referendum. They couldn’t get passports. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t do all the things that everyone else living in the country could. When I say Daisy Bates was outraged about how they were being treated, there was this straight up abuse and neglect. There were also a lot of Aboriginal people essentially in slavery-adjacent conditions. They were working for people where they really wouldn’t be being paid. There were lots of really dire circumstances. It’s not that she wanted them to be able to live rich and free lives, it’s that she straight up thought and wrote in her book like, this is a dying race, and we are just being nice to them while what she saw as the inevitable played out. Her work in the 1910s and the 1900s with – it seems like the government was already sending out this survey for people to collect words from different languages. It was already being sent out to pastoralists and police stations. It seems like she was the one who collated it all and would often – this is the one bit that I find really relatable about her – she’d get these surveys back, and she’s like, “This person did a terrible job. They’re missing a whole bunch of words. This is sloppy work.” She’d travel around western Australia pinning people down, finishing the forms, collecting data for herself to build this really comprehensive – I mean, relatively comprehensive. It would actually just be better if we had people continue to speak their languages, but then again, the self-aggrandising and the strong personal narrative where she would talk about being able to speak over 100 different languages. It’s just like, “I am sceptical.”
Claire: I dunno about that. Especially because part of this is she’s a sort of self-styled anthropologist, self-styled linguist person. It’s not to say that one can’t learn lots of things without specific extensive training. But.
Lauren: In her defence, anthropology didn’t actually super technically exist – certainly in Australia and certainly not in a way that women were allowed in to the academic community. There’s a really great book by Eleanor Hogan where she talks a little bit about the ethno-mania of this era. It really ties into this empire nonsense where people were just trying to collect everything for the empire. That included people and their customs and their languages. She was really a person of her time. The fact that it was a little bit odd that she was a woman – normally, this was men doing this work. After that time with the Western Australian government, she moved to Ooldea, which, no one’s ever heard of it. It’s literally not a place anymore. It was a stop on the train line across from east to west. She lived there for over 16 years with the Aṉangu people who lived near the sidings because their way of life had been completely disrupted by the train bringing Western practices, bringing in Western foods that upset their natural ecology, draining the water soak that was nearby, so there wasn’t fresh water that people could access easily. And then you had this train that brought these people through for them to trade with. By 1919 she’s in her 50s. She’s there until her 70s. People start then bringing her in for care and heading out – she leaves again, and she never really settles down well into her 80s. Eleanor Hogan has this amazing book. It’s one of the more recent publications about Daisy Bates where she looks at her relationship with a travelling journalist named Ernestine Hill, who seems pretty cool. She was travelling around in the 1930s. She came to Ooldea to talk to Daisy Bates and published a couple of articles about Daisy Bates’ time in the desert in that community. A thing she regrets is that she published this story that Daisy Bates had about cannibalism among Indigenous Australians, which, like, again, I kind of thought, “Ah, maybe she just said that one time.” No, she went on about it all the time, which is not only unsubstantiated but like, seems pretty actively refuted by evidence at the time. This is why I think Daisy Bates sucks specifically because lots of people weren’t great, but lots of people at the time were just like, “We don’t think this is true.” There was very little evidence. One time she sent some bones to the South Australia Museum, and they’re like, “This is a cat. You’ve sent us cat bones. Chill, lady.” This narrative of cannibal natives is such a classic bullshit trope. There’s a really great book by Larissa Behrendt, who’s an Indigenous lawyer and scholar looking at this narrative of cannibalism in a different context in Queensland, but I think it’s part of this recurring trope of using it to make other cultures scarier and othering them.
Claire: Absolutely. We have lots of examples of this. Particularly in spaces where there’s rapid colonial expansion, we see cannibalism being used, for example, in our Christopher Columbus episode, we talk about cannibalism as this trope that’s being used against people in the Americas. What’s actually happening in these spaces is more often we see much more intense violence and things like torture coming from the colonising side against the Indigenous people. The things that they’re being accused of doing more often are closer to things that are being done to them in this moment. It’s a way – I think you’re totally right – of othering people and saying, “Well, they’re doing something we find unconscionable,” in order to distract from the fact that we are, in fact, doing something unconscionable to them.
Lauren: It’s just such a bingo card.
Claire: I mean, it really is. Everything you’ve said about Daisy Bates so far reminds me of an episode that I highly recommend people listen to, actually, in conjunction with this which was with Rhiannon Garth Jones on late-19th-early-20th Century orientalists in places like Iran and Iraq where they’re doing the same thing. They’re like, “Oh, we’re paying attention to the art, to the language. We’re translating their poetry,” to show that they are this backwards place, and we’re taking this, and we’re sending it back to the imperial court. We’re sending it back to the governments that we work for or the journals that we work for in, in these cases, the UK (at this point) or Ireland, saying, “We’re sending this back there,” in order then justify, actually, the actions that are being taken in these spaces, these incredibly violent things that are happening there. There’s one of these women named Gertrude Bell in Iran who’s doing almost the same thing that Daisy Bates is doing – which I find fascinating that they’re both women who’re like, “Okay, well, I’m gonna go far away from home where I can be this thing that I couldn’t necessarily be back there and be a girl boss in the wild.” Gertrude Bell, for example, was doing the same thing in Iran where she’s like, “Well, I live out in the desert with these people. I really understand their way of life.”
Lauren: I think it’s really important that they are women for this narrative. She was given a Most Excellent Order of the British Empire – a CBE – in 1934 for this incredibly paternalistic – but it’s the maternal spin of this woman in the desert looking after her – she talks about “her natives.” This is a term that got used at the time that doesn’t get used in Australia as much. The thing I haven’t stressed enough (possibly) is whatever image you’ve had of her you have to – she’s actually this incredibly tiny woman dressed as Mary Poppins. She’s in full Edwardian governess gear. She never gives this up. She really understood the power of the personal brand before celebrity was a thing. Clearly, an incredibly strong and resilient woman out in incredibly hot, arid conditions in full Edwardian boned corset. That was not comfortable. But there was something really compelling to people about this woman and this tension between this incredibly edge-of-civilisation (as it was conceptualised) place but while completely from another era and completely refined and all this decorum.
Claire: You’re able to be photographed, for example, in this case, around people who are dressed for the environment that they’re in and be able to be like, “Look at how civilised I am. Look at who I am, especially this maternal feeling that I have towards them – not my own son – but these people that I have.”
Lauren: She talked about just her presence would be a “civilising influence,” and you’re just like, “Wow. What a mindset.”
Claire: For sure. I think that’s visible when you look into some of these things. In the research I did ahead of time, I was thinking about this dying race thing that you brought up earlier, this idea that her research follows this narrative that assumes these Indigenous cultures are inevitably disappearing, like this is an evitable disappearance, and she’s doing this pastoral thing to help them as they are in cultural hospice where she’s like, “The most I can do is catalogue all of this. Look at how wonderful I am for doing that and how much I love you for that,” instead of being like, “Ah, this is a living, evolving society that I can help to thrive and grow and work against” –
Lauren: We’ve just stuck a giant stick in the gears of this society. We’ve completely ruptured it. And then we’re surprised that it’s a ruptured society. Wow.
Claire: You’d be like, “This society is dying. Who knows what killed it,” which is a wild formulation for this.
Lauren: In 1939 she publishes her book called The Passing of the Aborigines – just in case you weren’t entirely sure that she thought this was a doomed society.
Claire: And not a word we’re using that much anymore. Am I right on – because some of these things differ across countries and spaces. I don’t think we’re using that word, right, so much.
Lauren: “Aboriginal” and “Indigenous” are pretty – different groups, have different preferences. There’s a bunch of sub-preferences. We also distinguish the Torres Strait Islands right at the top of Queensland. Some groups will prefer, like, “Koori” is a very New South Wales/Victoria term. We sometimes talk about “First Nations.” I know that’s a very North American way of talking about things. But, no, “Aborigines” – it has a real 1938 vibe to it.
Claire: It does. Especially because it starts, usually, with “the” beforehand. Anything we say, like, “the race,” we have a problem, often.
Lauren: I think it’s just worth flagging she was a big fan of removing children who had an Aboriginal mother and a white father from their family context, a process that happened for many, many decades in Australia and is a major intergenerational trauma that we now refer to as the “Stolen Generations.” She would alert the authorities to these children who she felt needed to be taken away from their families.
Claire: I was gonna ask what you meant by her being a fan or a proponent of this. I thought you were gonna say, “Oh, she was in legislation.” No, she was like, “Let’s call the police.” That’s wild. I’m sorry. That’s so far beyond what I thought you were gonna say. I’m not laughing like “Ha ha.” I’m laughing like, “That’s appalling.”
Lauren: Absolutely valid shock response to that behaviour.
Claire: It has the vibe of being like, “Ah, there’s someone in the attic. Let’s call the Gestapo.” I study Nazis, so that’s where my brain is immediately going. This is a type of a person who thinks they’re doing something for a good reason, but the thing they’re doing is abjectly terrible and pretty much anyone can see that.
Lauren: Also, just another sub-thread of why this guy sucks is Eleanor Hogan’s book is all about this relationship between Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill, who wrote those initial articles with her. Daisy Bates had been publishing in newspapers. It’s how she had supported herself while living in Ooldea and all these other remote places. Her prose was becoming increasingly not of the era. She was this 75-year-old Victorian lady. Ernestine wrote those couple of articles with her and then, essentially, co-wrote the book with her (which started as a series of newspaper articles – became the whole book), and Daisy Bates gives her no credit. She refers to her briefly at some point as her “typist.”
Claire: The academic, the scholar in me is even more – I don’t like this woman at all. I already didn’t.
Lauren: No, but she had this absolute sense of self-importance. Ernestine Hill – very famous in Australia in the early 20th Century for her prose. It is a horrific book in terms of content, but there’s quite a bit that’s quite well written, and it’s very engaging, and it’s rollocking, and it’s like, “Oh, that does – that makes complete sense. That explains why that book was so well-regarded.” It was considered a bestseller. It was pretty much basically in print until the mid-1970s. My copy is from a re-print in 1966. She not only responded to but actively fed in the public imagination this narrative that’s still absolutely harms Australia’s understanding of itself until today. I haven’t really thought about Daisy in the decade or so since I last did a little bit of work on her, and as I said, I don’t necessarily research in Australia, but now that I work in Australia, and I teach in Australia, for me, returning to this story is part of an ongoing process I’m trying to engage in in educating myself, doing better by my discipline and by my students to understand the historical context of Australia and drawing a line directly between the kind of narratives Daisy Bates engaged in and the kind of things that especially non-recent migrants and non-Indigenous Australians need to really unpack. We still have massively high rates of Indigenous incarceration. The Stolen Generations is considered historical, but we still take a massive number of children out of their family context into the foster home system every year. That’s still just perpetuating this kind of attitude towards Indigenous Australians.
Claire: I’ve been thinking about the best moment to bring this up. When you talked about her not properly crediting one of her collaborators, I have a question about linguistics in general and how the field works in relation to her. When I was doing research, I started to feel like the way that Daisy Bates is talking about people who she is ostensibly working with or getting information from, she’s treating them like subjects and informants rather than as collaborators in this project that she’s working on.
Lauren: Absolutely.
Gretchen: Does the field now do a better job, do you think, of crediting the people that you’re learning from as collaborators in your learning? Is that more normal?
Lauren: There’s definitely a lot to reflect on in Daisy Bates work, not only in my understanding of Australia’s colonial history but also in linguistic colonial history. My summary would be that individuals are better at thinking about their relationship with the people that they’re working with. As a field, I think we generally would love to see more and try to encourage more people to work with their own languages to change that power relationship. Institutionally, I think, institutions are just so slow moving, it’s hard to always necessarily have that play out in a more fully-fledged form if that makes sense. I think individuals are better at crediting, making people visible – not always. I had this project with colleagues where we looked at the genre of descriptive grammar writing. This is where you write about the full grammar of a language not just word lists like Daisy Bates did. It’s like, even 10, 20 years ago, a shocking number of grammars were written where it’s like, “I don’t know the names of the people you spoke to. That feels like a bit of a problem.” There were some grammars where we were like, “Does it count that they talk about some people in the acknowledgements as ‘making visible’ the work those people did?” No.
Claire: This is so wild to me because our fields are so different, obviously, in many different respects, but you could not get away with that in history. The whole thing is the source. The whole thing in history is who is saying something.
Lauren: I think the PhD grammars we looked at were doing better. I think the genre moves so slowly, and the researchers are doing better. The other thing that I think really has caused me to reflect a lot in this narrative is that the field that I work in, which is documenting and describing languages, we talk about it a lot as “endangered language documentation.” There’s been this whole reckoning in the last – kind of since I’ve been a graduate student – so in the last 15 years, there’s been this reckoning with “What does it mean when we’re calling these languages ‘endangered’?” Because it is this encroachment of larger languages, you know, English being the obvious global example, but in China, it’s Mandarin. In Nepal, where I work, Nepali is the language of state education. These languages are endangered. The problem is that we have this incentive as academics trying to fund the work that we’re doing of talking up the endangerment and how – we never talk about what is endangering them.
Claire: I was gonna say that sounds like the passive voice to me. Even “impearled” is better than “endangered” in my mind because “endangered,” to me, is like, the way we talk about species or something where some environmental change has just happened rather than this being not a naturally occurring phenomenon and, instead, an utterly man made one.
Lauren: The economic and the social incentives, if you’re trying to do work that’s important, you still end up in this trap of talking about or exoticising this language. There’s maybe an unfair stereotype of a bit of a “Well, how many speakers does your language have?” Like, “The language I work with” and the “my language” is the same vibes as Daisy Bates’ “my natives.” The really difficult thing about reading about Daisy Bates – just absolutely really problematic discourses, but it’s still discourses we are trying to unpack and step away from even today.
Claire: I mean, there’s so much here that I find fascinating in that how well do you feel like Australia has reckoned with this really awful past? My feeling on America is: bad. Reckoning with this? Bad. I’m curious what your view on how Australia has dealt with this, and how this has helped to shape Australia’s understanding of itself, like what your feelings regarding these things are, or how you’re reading them as someone who is thinking through a lot of this stuff – even not from a scholarly perspective but just from thinking and teaching in this space.
Lauren: The data that I will bring to this is that in 2023 our government brought forward a national referendum (we don’t do these very often). We wanted to change the constitution to include an Indigenous voice to parliament. This was framed as a way of actually listening to Indigenous people, letting them lead policy that related to Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians make up about 4% of the Australian population, but the majority of larger Indigenous communities are still in remote South Australia, Northern Territory, and Western Australia. This Indigenous voice referendum was supposed to be a way to provide structural acknowledgement of Indigenous Australians. Due to a confluence of conservative media and conservative politicians campaigning against this idea (but also, I think, because a lot of Australians haven’t acknowledged this history), the referendum was voted down pretty much 60-40 across Australia.
Claire: What.
Lauren: Yeah.
Claire: I’m saying, “What,” as though that’s not what would happen in the US right now, too, like what we would do here.
Lauren: This is a classic case of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the US have a lot of overlapping history. It’s very interesting that I feel like each of us point to the other and we’re like, “But you’re doing better, right? You can’t be doing worse than here.” Often, when I talk with North American colleagues, they’re like, “But you guys have got it sorted out, right?” It’s just like, “Ugh, I wish.”
Claire: You know, what is funny is that when I was living in New Zealand it was always like, “Well, Australia’s worse.” They would be like, “Oh, we have some problems. You should look at what they’re doing in Australia.” Because I worked for the New Zealand government when I was working there. It’s funny because there it was the opposite where they were like, “Well, at least we’re not Australia.”
Lauren: I’m happy to give New Zealand that for sure. That’s what’s happening on a national level. It just created this massive flashpoint for people to be really racist – overtly, publicly. What a lot of Indigenous Australians have asked for – and I couldn’t find a single person saying anything nice about Daisy Bates who was Indigenous. They’re possibly out there. I’m sure she had some personal relationships. But in terms of what Indigenous Australians want – again, this is not everyone – but we have something called the “Uluru Statement from the Heart” from 2017 in which they lay out very clearly the challenges Indigenous Australians are facing, the rich diversity of Indigenous culture, but also that what they are asking for is truth-telling, treaty, and a voice. I think, in some ways, putting that referendum for a voice ahead of the truth-telling really didn’t help because a lot of people aren’t receptive to the truth at this time. In Victoria, we have gone through a truth-telling process with the Europe Justice Commission in which our premier stood up and was just like, “Ugh, I didn’t quite realise that those massacres happened or the effect that this has all had.” It was just like, “This is progress.” From the work from the Europe Justice Commission, a treaty was signed in 2025 in Victoria which is a step towards the formation of a voice that is framed around a mutually shared set of agreements and expectations. Things are happening, but this pernicious narrative – I was just listening to a podcast episode the other day with Sue-Anne Hunter, who’s our new National Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children [and Young People]. She was just like, “Our kids are still really dehumanised.” I was just like, “Absolutely a direct line between what Daisy Bates was doing and the challenges that Sue-Anne Hunter articulates.” You’re just like, “Ugh, so much work still to be done.”
Claire: I mean, even the word “voice” I find very interesting here in this context. Thinking about Daisy Bates and the idea of “We want a voice” because there’s also this person who’s going around being like, “Well, actually, what we can do is erase the people who speak the words that I am collecting. We can just divorce the words from the people who use them,” or “the grammar from the people who use it,” etc., “We can separate these, and we can preserve just the word and not the voice that speaks it. Not the person as a collaborator. They’re an informant. They don’t have a voice.” I just find the word “voice” really interesting in this context, too, because even being like, “Well, we want not just a say but representation when we get to say something or ask for something. We want actual representation,” I find fascinating. And the fact that it’s still like, “No. You should be represented in some way, but you aren’t the person who gets to represent you,” fits with Daisy Bates’ approach to all of this. Because I was also finding things within her personal narrative, right, she’s saying that the Indigenous people she’s working with, she’s saying that they’re calling her “grandmother” and that they have this sweet, familial relationship to her.
Lauren: Which is probably because she was just handing them food stuffs that they needed.
Claire: Also, maybe it’s a situation where every old lady who’s hanging out with you is called “grandmother,” the way that I would call anybody an “auntie” or something here. There’s something here where she’s also like, “Ah, they see me as their mother. I can impose this thing on them. I can take away their voice. I can control their language.” All of this creates a worldview that I don’t think is gone – it sounds like from what you’re saying.
Lauren: Yeah. She definitely had in the 1960s and ’70s – there was a lot of repressing some of her more eccentric behaviour. It was a less complicated story about her. A lot of the early response to her work in the 1960s and the 1970s, obviously her time spent in Ooldea with the Aṉangu people was central to the hero myth and the media narrative. A lot of the response was really positive. Elizabeth Salter’s 1971 biography, you probably get the vibe of the hero myth from the fact that it’s called “the great white queen of the Never Never.”
Claire: That’s wild.
Lauren: There were plays. There’s paintings. She is kind of mythologised because she’s so iconic in this long black skirt and this rigid jacket. She wears this hat and veil. She had this umbrella that she used everywhere because it was so sunny.
Claire: She’s got a CBE. She’s basically like the queen.
Lauren: And you know that she wore it all the time. I think she was definitely not motivated by religious feeling, but empire was the religion.
Claire: Absolutely.
Lauren: Julia Blackburn’s 2012 book called Daisy Bates in the Desert is a (I would say) fascinating choice to try your first-person biographical account. Given how hard I find it to get into the head of Daisy Bates, I would personally not try that.
Claire: I found the Smithsonian article they talk about these people who Daisy meets, and they say in this Blackburn book that they are “naked, smiling, and glistening in the sunshine.” Something about that, to me, smacks so incredibly much of this orientalist worldview. Part of why I’m thinking about this is because I taught orientalism in my class on Thursday, so it’s the most recent thing that I’ve taught in class. It’s one of those things that whenever I teach my students, like, once you understand this, you’re gonna start seeing it everywhere. It’s everywhere. I think what’s fascinating – and many other people have made this argument much better than me – there is no untangling of this imperial orientalist thing in the East in terms of spaces like the Middle East and this same gaze within the Australian context because they’re still saying there is some far away, static, unchanging, even dying because they’re unchanging, race that are beautiful. And they’re more naked than us. They’re more free. They’re more primitive than us. It gets re-inscribed over and over and over again. Then someone can write a book decades later and still do the same thing without realising that what’s animating this is this view of this unchanging, barbaric, East, basically, or this island other nation. It’s so wild to me that you could write that not that long ago and still be doing it.
Lauren: And I think there’s something really hard to get your head around with Daisy Bates where you’re like, promiscuous, polygamous, and then there’s prim and proper, but just motivated by her own self-interest.
Claire: Whatever she wants to do, she can do. This is so fascinating. I feel like it’s one of these episodes where I emerge being like, “I’m gonna be thinking about this for a while afterwards,” because it really does have some resonances with present cultures that I – some episodes I’m like, “Yeah, obvious. Draw a line. Whatever.” And then other episodes it’s like, “Oh, this one’s gonna stick with me. It’s gonna be one where I notice it a bunch after this.”
Lauren: When you were like, “Who do you wanna talk about?” I was like, “Ah, all these years later, she’s still with me.”
Claire: Well, hopefully this will help you to feel like you have said your piece on this and been like, “I want to go on the record and say that this woman has been haunting me, and I don’t like her.”
Lauren: It’s been really good to revisit her and my complicated feelings about her and about white ladies blundering into places that they do not need to be.
Claire: I mean, again, this is one where we can say someone did useful, interesting scholarship – I think they did it the wrong way, and some of the other stuff they were doing while conducting this study had really bad long-term negative effects, so it’s good to be able to complicate things in that way. We should be doing this in public, which is the point of this podcast.
Lauren: You can visit the Digital Daisy Bates project. You can see all those beautiful pages and pages of manuscripts. The way that the website has been set up, it is set up as a map so that you can bring up a particular word and see what that word was in each of the Indigenous languages geographically. Or you can look at a particular language or the words of a particular speaker. It’s just such a great digital humanities project in bringing 90 archive boxes full of thousands and thousands of pages of manuscript into something that we can interact with as a living collection today.
Claire: We’ll make sure to link that below for people because it’s important that people are still using this scholarship but that they’re engaging with it with a critical view. We want this to still be used. Please go look at it and please check it out and do some exploration, but also, when you’re doing it, think about where and how these things are being produced and who gets named and not named in their production. That’s what we want.
Lauren: And why are these the only records that we have of some of these languages and some of these speakers.
Claire: Definitely. I think this is a good place to end now that we’ve given people a little bit of a call to action. Thank you so much for this. I’m so happy that we were able to make this happen and have this conversation. It’s given me a lot to think about.
Lauren: Thanks, Claire. This has been more fun and cheaper than therapy.
Claire: [Laughs] It usually is on the show. This is gonna go out as a collaborative post on Patreon. For people who are listening on our respective feeds elsewhere, it will be there, too. Both of our podcasts will be linked everywhere below if anybody wants to check out Lauren’s – or from Lauren’s show if they want to check out mine. Thank you to everyone who’s listening to this. Remember, if you encounter someone in Australia in history in the end-of-the-19th-beginning-of-the-20th Century, you should be suspicious of them. [Laughter]
Lauren: Get the full story.
Claire: Get the full story.
[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 all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including the International Phonetic Alphabet, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like the “Ask me about linguistics” badges and t-shirts – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. I’m on social media @gretchenmcculloch.com on Bluesky, @gretchen.mcculloch on Instagram. My blog AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet.
Lauren: My social media and blog is Superlinguo. You can follow our guest, Claire Aubin, and listen to her podcast about more historical guys who sucked at ThisGuySucked.com. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you want to get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include the second part of our chat with Kory Stamper about her book True Color and a conversation about childlore including skipping games and childhood rhymes.
Gretchen: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Lingthusiasm Episode 115: The long shadow of Daisy Bates with This Guy Sucked
What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who spoke it?
In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about a crossover episode with Claire Aubin of This Guy Sucked! Lauren's Guy who Sucked is Daisy Bates, who did a lot of early 20th century work documenting over 100 Indigenous languages in western and southern Australia, while also directly adding to policies and narratives that continue to harm Aboriginal Australians to this day. We talk about Lauren's history with the original archive, how much has changed since Daisy Bates's day, and where linguistics (and society) still has room to improve.
Please note that this episode includes reference to deceased Aboriginal Australians, as well as reference to attitudes and actions that are harmful to the self-determination of Aboriginal Australians.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the second half of our interview with Kory Stamper about her book on defining colour words, and this half contains spoilers!! We talk with Kory about how she learned about Margaret Godlove and many other women whose labour has been forgotten in early colour science and dictionary making.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
This Guy Sucked
This Guy Sucked on Patreon
Daisy Bate - Dangerous Women Project
Digital Daisy Bates project
Wikipedia entry for 'Daisy Bates (author)'
Wikipedia entry for 'Breaker Morant'
'Yarning with Youth: Our new Commissioner for Aboriginal kids' episode of the 7am Podcast
Uluru Statement from the Heart
Wikipedia entry for 'Australian Indigenous Voice Referendum'
The Yoorrook Justice Commission
Books:
'Finding Eliza – Power and Colonial Storytelling' by Larissa Behrendt
'The Passing of the Aborigines: A Life Time Spent Among the Natives of Australia' by Daisy Bates on Project Gutenberg
'Daisy Bates: The Great White Queen of the Never Never' by Elizabeth Salter on Goodreads
'Daisy Bates in the Desert: A Woman's Life Among the Aborigines' by Julia Blackburn on Goodreads
'Into the Loneliness: The unholy alliance of Ernestine Hill and Daisy Bates' by Eleanor Hogan on Goodreads
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 Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky 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 assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).
We’re taking you on a journey to new linguistic destinations, so come along for the ride and don’t forget to hold on!
From ‘Welcome back aboard the metaphor train’, the episode where we get enthusiastic about our unlocked bonus episode on metaphors!
Listen to the full episode here.
Bonus 110: The pink-collar labour of colour words - Part II with Kory Stamper
The dedication at the beginning of TRUE COLOR by Kory Stamper is "For Margaret". When we started reading it, we assumed that Margaret was someone important to Kory herself. But midway through, we got hit with a paintbombshell: Margaret Godlove was also the key to the strangely evocative colour definitions in Webster's Third International Dictionary. Like this one:
coral: a strong pink that is yellower and stronger than carnation rose; bluer, stronger, and slightly lighter than rose Delphia; and lighter, stronger, and slighter yellower than sea pink.
This bonus episode is the second half of our interview with Kory Stamper about her book on defining colour words, and this half contains spoilers! If you missed the first half, it's available for free on our main podcast feed, and if you like to experience history spoiler-free in book form, you can pick up True Color first. But then come back here for our discussion with Kory about how she learned about Margaret Godlove and many other women whose labour has been forgotten in early colour science and dictionary making.
Listen to this episode about the secret history of colour terms with Kory Stamper, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.
Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among some morphemes
From ‘Micro to macro - The levels of language’, where we took advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspctive often found in Linguistics 101 classes
Transcript Episode 114: Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper’. 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 show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about colour and how we describe it with Kory Stamper. But first, our most recent bonus episode was all about idioms. We “go the extra mile” to “get to the bottom” of why we should “cut idioms some slack.”
Lauren: “It’s easier said than done.” Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get this and many other bonus episodes.
[Music]
Gretchen: Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and was Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster for almost two decades. Her first book was Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries. Her second book is out 31st of March 2026 and is titled, “True Color – The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color – From Azure to Zinc Pink.” Welcome, Kory!
Kory: Thank you. It’s good to be here with both of you.
Lauren: It’s so lovely to have you here. We’re already off to a start where I’m like, “You don’t say /azjuə/?” [Laughter] We’re doing so great. Kory, how did you get into lexicography?
Kory: It was pretty much an accident. Back in my undergraduate, I was a Medieval Studies major, so I studied languages and literature primarily. After I got out of college, I thought, “Well, now what am I gonna do?” I answered – this is how long ago it was – I answered a want ad in the newspaper (in a print newspaper) to be an editorial assistant at Merriam-Webster. I got the job and within a few months of being there just realised “This is what I wanna do. This is what I love doing.” And that’s how I got into lexicography. I’ve been a lexicographer now since 1998.
Gretchen: Whoa. And you also wrote a previous book about lexicography, Word By Word, which we also loved and reviewed in one of the very early episodes of Lingthusiasm. We will link to that from the archives. How did you get into writing about lexicography?
Kory: You know, it was an occupational hazard of working at a dictionary company. Merriam-Webster, way back in the dark ages, used to respond to every single piece of consumer mail or email that came in. Most of them were asking – yeah, I don’t think they do that anymore. Please, folks, don’t email Merriam-Webster to ask them questions. I was one of the people that was in charge of answering a lot of that email. There was that coupled with the fact that whenever I would go out or meet new people, they would say, “What do you do?” I’d say, “I write dictionaries.” People would say, “What? How? Why? Who? When?”
Gretchen: “You mean there are people behind those dictionaries? I thought it just appeared from the sea foam like Aphrodite.”
Kory: Exactly. Or “Why do we need to write dictionaries? They’ve already been written.” After a little bit of having these conversations with people over and over, I started a blog where I started talking a little bit about what it’s like to write dictionaries. Why do people write them? What are some of the weird parts of writing dictionaries? The blog took off. People loved it. That’s what led to my first book. That’s led to this book, too.
Lauren: If you can cast your mind all the way back, Kory, how did you get into the research topic for this book?
Kory: It really began as part of the work I was doing at Merriam-Webster. We were moving Webster’s Third New International Dictionary Unabridged online. This was a book that was published in 1961. It had never been digitised. Part of my job was to go through and make sure that all of the text-to-HTML conversion went properly. It was a boring slog that I am uniquely built for. [Laughter] I would open up a dictionary page, and I would say, “Okay, I’m starting at ‘Beaufort scale’,” and I’d go through, I’d read the whole entry in print. Then I would go online and make sure, okay, everything’s there. The etymology has rendered correctly. All the special characters are there.
Lauren: That’s really astounding because I can kind of comprehend that dictionaries get made, but I also just assumed that the Webster’s online that we now have also just manifested – someone just went clickity-click-click, and then it was there. But this is a book that was printed in the age of physical print and before digital print files, so it was a big old manual job. It’s thanks to your diligence that it’s up there.
Kory: Yeah, and if there’re errors, those are my fault. I missed those.
Lauren: It’s someone else’s fault. [Laughter]
Kory: I would go through, and I would read through and read through. It’s very important to note that Webster’s Third has a very particular defining style. It’s very dry. It is very formulaic. It seems like it was created in a lab to put you to sleep immediately.
Gretchen: Can you give me an example of a definition in this dry, technical style?
Kory: Absolutely. This is one of the definitions for the noun “street.” It is “a public thoroughfare, especially in a city, town, or village including all areas within the right-of-way such as sidewalks and tree belts and sometimes further distinguished as being wider than an alley or lane but narrower than an avenue or boulevard and as separating blocks rather than penetrating them.” That’s “street.”
Gretchen: That’s “street.” Very clear.
Lauren: So evocative.
Gretchen: Very dry. This is the kind of definition that I think of, really, as a dictionary definition. This is a Webster’s Third definition.
Kory: Absolutely. This is what you’re – as a lexicographer at Merriam-Webster, you’re used to this style. You know it’s gonna be very formulaic, very dry, very scientific to the point of ridiculousness at times – kind of like with “street.” And then I got to the entry for “begonia.”
Lauren: Which is a flower but also a colour.
Kory: Right. “Begonia” is a flower, and it is also a colour. I got to the entry for “begonia.” I began to proofread it. Yes, the etymology is correct. Yes, the pronunciation characters all rendered correctly. Yes, the flower definition – very scientific. There’s the taxonomy. Then I got to this definition “a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see ‘coral’ 3B), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet William, called also ‘gaiety’.” I was like, “What is this?”
Gretchen: This feels kind of beautiful.
Kory: And also “bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral” is kind of like, that assumes a whole lot about –
Lauren: I have a lot of questions about “average coral” now.
Kory: Exactly. I didn’t realise that there was such a thing as “average coral.” Like, average in comparison to what? What’s average about it?
Gretchen: I feel like people disagree about what colour “coral” is. If we averaged all their opinions, do we end up with average coral?
Kory: Oh, you would think that. But that’s not what “average” means in this definition.
Gretchen: Oh, no. I also – what colours are “gaiety” and “sweet William”? I’ve never seen those.
Kory: Or “fiesta.” What colour is “fiesta”? Those are like, okay, coral at least I can recognise as a colour, but then you get to something like “fiesta.” I would run into these as I was proofreading. It became my subtle and sly way to take a break while still at my desk. I’d get over one and be like, “Okay, I’m just gonna pick a word, and I’m gonna pick a colour name.” I would pick a colour name, and then I would follow all the links these “bluer” and “brighter than” or “yellower” and “duller than” or “darker and redder than,” and I’d follow those. Inside of these colour definitions, which did have this very particular formula to them, so they kind of were formulaic in the way that Webster’s Third definitions are. It was just ridiculous to me a. how they were structured and b. there were so many colour names that I had never heard of. This is a dictionary that is supposed to be based on common usage.
Lauren: We don’t know three of the colours in that first definition.
Kory: Yeah! I remember in particular one definition – well, now I have to find it, sorry. Give me a second. This is a great example. I got to “coral” – because of course I was like, “What’s average coral?” Went to “coral.” I found coral 3B, which was the one referenced, but then beneath it was another colour definition that reads “a strong pink that is yellower and stronger than carnation rose; bluer, stronger, and slightly lighter than rose Delphia; and lighter, stronger, and slighter yellower than sea pink.” I hit “sea pink” and lost my mind because the sea is blue. What is “sea pink”? That doesn’t make any sense.
Lauren: Whereas I thought “algal bloom,” which is not quite as evocative.
Gretchen: I feel like when I read “sea pink” there, I was like, “Oh, yeah, that’s the colour the sea is in a sunset when the sun reflects pinkly on the sea.”
Kory: [Laughs] Well, this is the thing, right, you hear a colour name like that that’s not a colour name that’s associated with a thing or with the basic colour categories, and all you have to go on is your own internal association with those words – not necessarily the colour itself. I had no category for “sea pink.” I just was like, “Does not compute.” My brain just stopped working at that point. But I really wanted to know “How did these get into this dictionary?” Because the more that I read, it’s like, these are so rich and textured, and they’re so many of them, and also, these don’t match.
Gretchen: They clearly exist as a system within each other, right, because here’s “begonia” referring to “average coral,” and here’s “coral” referring to “sea pink,” and I assume if you kept going to “sea pink,” it would refer to some other ones that would also be in Webster’s Third. Clearly, there’s some mind or minds behind all of them together as a system.
Kory: Right. And if it’s not something that’s – lots of these definitions were not carried through to other Webster’s dictionaries. It’s kind of like they exist in this frozen time capsule that is the Third. Not just who but why did we not continue to use these? Why is there no definition for “sea pink” in any of the later dictionaries either? It is this weird little – it’s a little puzzle. It’s just a little puzzle. You can put the pieces of the puzzle together by going through the internal archives at Merriam-Webster. That’s how the research really began. I started with these slips, and then 10 years later, I was in archives and knocking on random people’s doors to ask to read their grandparents’ letters, you know, like most people. [Laughter]
Gretchen: Tell us about this research process. As far as I’m concerned, you wrote this cool blog post in 2014, and then when Word By Word came out, you mentioned that a chapter had gotten deleted from that book because it was really its whole own book. And I was like, “I bet it’s the colour chapter because I have been following this colour thing since it was a blogpost. There wasn’t anything about colour in that book.” And I was like, “There should be because I know there’s a really meaty chapter about colour.” How did that become the colour research and the colour book?
Kory: That initial chapter that was cut from my first book Word By Word was kind of about how hard it is to define colours – colour names and the word “colour” itself. What is colour?
Lauren: Let’s come back to that question later.
Kory: Yes. How many hours do we have? How many days do we have?
Gretchen: How many peoples’ entire careers do we have?
Kory: [Laughs] Exactly. My editor said, “This is not a chapter for this book. This is the first chapter of your next book. When you’re done with this book, do the next one.” I said, “Great.” I started by “How do we define ‘colour,’ and why do we need to define ‘colour’ this particular way in the Third?” That led me to – well, it led me to a bunch of places. I’ll try and go in order. It led me first to the in-house archive at Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster is a working publishing company, but they also have this on-site repository of slips, basically, that are production slips and bits of language and draft definitions that go all the way back to the late 1890s. There’re more slips in off-site archives.
Lauren: I don’t think it’s a surprise that an organisation run by people who are meticulously paying attention to language are also meticulous (almost to a fault, I think, with some of the documents you were talking about) at keeping track of everything that everyone writes and everyone touches in the dictionary-making process, which sounds like a nightmare to keep track of but sounds like an absolute treasure trove for putting together the story of colour in this dictionary.
Kory: It was. We’re very lucky that we are all paper hoarders because, you know, everyone kept every slip, every piece of paper, every letter.
Gretchen: The slips are like index cards, primarily?
Kory: They are index cards, yes. There are – inside baseball, there are three primary kinds of slips. There are citation slips, which are white 3x5 index cards; there are definition slips, which are on yellow or buff index cards (those are called “buffs”); and then there are production notes back and forth to each other that are on pink index cards. Those are called “pinks.” Already, the whole system is wrapped in colour. We have buffs and pinks. Going through, for instance, I’d pick “coral,” and I would go over to the giant banks of card catalogues. I’d just start going through “Who came up with this?” I found that we had this name that was not a name that I recognised as any of the staff names that was stamped on all of these. These were all meticulously typed out. The name was “Godlove.” That sends me to the next part of the archive, which is all of these old files for finding what were called “special editors” or “consultants.”
Lauren: This was a real revelation to me that – as though a dictionary wasn’t already enough naming and editorial and administrative work – there are also all these people who aren’t full-time, in-house lexicographers who come in as outside experts.
Kory: And the people who are invited to come in as outside experts are usually at the top of their fields, especially in this era. This would have been the beginning of the 20th Century, from the 1930s onward. Those people – it was not just an extra CV line for those people, but it was also a show the dictionary that this consumer was gonna drop a huge amount of money on was written by the best and the brightest in the industries. The Third had 202 named consultants. There were other consultants that also did work on this, but if you go through the pages in the print dictionary, you’ll see, basically, little CV lines for every single consultant (what their area was).
Lauren: This is like the influencer crossover of its day.
Kory: Yeah, for a very, very niche group of people, for academics, yeah.
Gretchen: Would this be for things like the scientific name of “begonia,” you need to have a botany consultant to do all your plants?
Kory: Exactly.
Gretchen: Or you need to have a chemistry consultant to do your oxygen and your hydrogen, or you need to have an astronomy consultant to do your constellations or something like this?
Kory: Absolutely. It wasn’t just what we think of as the “hard sciences.” There were consultants for everything. I love that there is a consultant listed in Webster’s Third for the Mayan calendar and only the Mayan calendar – like you do.
Gretchen: You need to have someone who knows about it.
Lauren: As though we could ever accuse anyone else of being too niche. What kind of expert was Godlove officially?
Kory: I. H. Godlove was a –
Lauren: What a name.
Kory: – I know, right – physical chemist.
Gretchen: His friends called him “I.H.” They didn’t call him whatever those stood for.
Kory: His full name was Isaac Hahn Godlove. He went by “I.H.” I.H. was a physical chemist. He was employed – at the time that Merriam-Webster first contacted him – he was putting together a colour exhibit for the Museum of Science and Industry in New York. He was a really fascinating guy because he was educated right on the cusp of when colour moved from being philosophical and an applied chemistry (dye stuffs and things like that) to a lot more of the, like, physics/chemistry/optics – a little bit more theoretical. One of Godlove’s biggest contributions to colour science was in illumination. He was a guy who helped measure “What’s the best light to measure colour under? What’s the colour of that light?” We talk about “cool” light –
Gretchen: Oh, wow. I guess you need to know that.
Kory: Things like daylight – your daylight LED bulb, which we now think of as like, “Oh, the daylight bulb is 4,000 lumens” or 4,000 something – he was one of the first people to start measuring those things to say, “Okay, daylight 65 is the optimal way to look at this set of colours. And daylight 50 is used this way.” He was a chemist. He, over his career, worked at DuPont as a dye stuffs specialist. He measured colours in dyes. He then went to the colour research laboratory for General Aniline, which now is GAF – if you know anything about GAF, you know that they make roof tiles. That’s what people know now. He was a very well-respected scientist. He was also a scientist that just had tendrils and links with scientists in all these other areas that touched on colour. He was the perfect guy to get in to define these things.
Gretchen: That’s the cool thing about colour, right, because, first of all, if you want to have clothing or fabric being dyed a particular colour, and you wanna be able to match, okay, the red fabric that I bought last time and the fabric I bought this time, I want to be able to continue making garments out of them and have them be the exact same colour so that I don’t have this top half of the dress in one colour and the bottom half in a slightly different shade of red, or the military camo application where you actually want the military camouflage garments to show up in the same shades of camouflage as the other ones because otherwise it doesn’t camouflage that great. Big point here. But at the same time, paints in things like make-up, dyes for other stuff, product photography, food dyes – there’s so many different areas of life that colour and colour standardisation and colour description in this very precise way ends up touching on.
Kory: Absolutely. It was so interesting to start researching colour because I had not – kind of like when people first become interested in linguistics, and they start thinking about language as something to be studied, you don’t realise how much of your world is affected by different colour standards, different colour formulas. I mean, we get used to thinking of “white” as something that’s colourless, but in fact, white as a product (as a colour) has thousands of different formulas and thousands of different applications. This particular white, which is used as an enamel coating on dryers and dish washers, is not the same enamel white that’s used as a car colour, which is not the same enamel white that’s used on your high gloss bathroom door. It’s these things that we think of as like, “Oh, it’s white,” actually there’s 17 different shades of white in the white that I’m looking at at my wall right now –
Gretchen: And the cross-consistency – because when computers were early on, it was so common to see an image on one of those old CRT screens that like, the colours were very different from what the photo of that object would look like in real life. With early digital cameras or with scanning of things, the colour would often shift dramatically. The colours on the monitors would be dramatically different. These days, when I look up something on my phone, and I’m like, “Oh, I wanna buy this pair of shoes. Here’s what colour they are,” and they show up, I’m not surprised by that colour. We’ve gotten so much better at that.
Kory: Though not always. [Laughter]
Gretchen: That’s fair.
Kory: Not always. One of my favourite things to do when I give talks about colour definitions is I will do a web search for the colour “taupe,” and I will just take all the different swatches that are called “taupe” on one monitor, and line them up. You get everything from like, in context, something that looks really bright yellow to something that’s dark and purple-ish. I think we like to think – or we’re accustomed to thinking – that colour, a colour, and its name are intrinsically tied together.
Lauren: Gretchen and I once had a big fight about colour when we were deciding on the purple that we were going to use when we were designing the LingComm logo. I was like, “I think this is a very balanced, clean – I know purple’s not a primary colour, but it’s a” – what is a called – “a focal purple.” It’s a really non-contested purple. Gretchen was like, “Can we just get something that’s less – can we make it a bit cooler if we want it to be balanced?” It turned out that someone –
Gretchen: Hers was a really grape-y colour.
Lauren: Turns out that someone, who was not me, had the going-to-bed-yellow filter on their screen. [Laughter] For this 30 seconds before we realised what was happening, it just felt like we had both lost touch with reality. Because we, as far as we were concerned, were looking at the same image but seeing very different – but then we realised what had happened. It’s just like – as the need for colour to become more specific and replicable develops and the more scientific methods get created for being specific and consistent, you start to get this gulf between “I’m just a person living my life who’s like, ‘This is a purple-y purple’,” and “I’m a scientist who needs to differentiate between 50 different purples that are all right next to each other.”
Kory: It starts with science, but it moves into all these other things as well. Fashion is a great example of this very common application of colour where you need to have this really clear description of what, you know, this colour, which we’re gonna call “misty mountain,” is – and not just a description of like, “Here’s the formula for creating it,” because those formulas are all different depending on the application and, depending on what they go on, the colour’s not consistent. There’s all these things about colour production where you really, you can’t rely, necessarily, on numbers to get colour across. You do have to have a standardised way of describing it, either with words or in a stable, printed colour standard. Let me tell you, stable, printed colour standards are insanely expensive. Just because you have one doesn’t mean you can match a colour to a colour chip.
Gretchen: “Stable” is an operative word here because we all have old books that are yellowing, which creates the same problem.
Kory: The more you expose things to light, the more they’ll fade. I mean, the whole idea of a colour standard or how to describe colour or how to show colour, this has been a problem since colour has been in use, period. When it was time to write the Third, Godlove was approached – and the whole drive behind Webster’s Third was this is a new dictionary for a new age. Previously, dictionaries, especially unabridged dictionaries, there were consultants and special editors who would write and help, but it was these very like, these long disquisitions on like, “What is an escapement? How does an escapement work? In what applications would one find an escapement?” It just went on. It was very encyclopaedic. When the Third was being conceived of a. the publisher and president was like, “We can’t afford to print a bigger dictionary. The technology does not exist to print a larger dictionary.”
Lauren: We’ve reached the limits of dictionary production technology.
Gretchen: This book is too thick, and we can’t split it into two books because the public doesn’t wanna buy two books.
Kory: Exactly. No one’s gonna buy a two-volume dictionary. That’s stupid. We have to keep it in one volume. The managing editor that they brought in was a linguist. He was someone who was really absolutely convinced that the way that we need to move forward is to get rid of all of this fluff, get rid of all of this cultural information, and really focus on “pure language.” His name was Philip Babcock Gove. He’s the subject of a bunch of different books. He was a very particular man. He had very particular ideas about how to implement things. He very much felt that if this is going to be a dictionary for a new age – this was being written in the early ’50s, so we were just coming out of World War II. We’re in the Cold War in America. We are seeing this big, post-war scientific boom. We’re also having lots of conversations about the place of science in society. Gove said if we’re gonna have this brand new dictionary for a new age, it has to be based on scientific principles because that’s what’s objective. This needs to be an objective record of language. Even still the Third, as a print book, is, I think it’s like 14 lbs. It’s huge. It’s like 11 x 17. It’s an enormous book. Even still, these are enormous books, which is why you can see from a marketing standpoint why Gove wanting to smash it down to just pure language because there’s also a ton of new language to enter into the dictionary. We have all this scientific terminology that’s coming out. Saying this is gonna be a dictionary of pure language also makes it attractive in terms of the idea that this is going to be a universal standard. We love universal standards. We can get them.
Gretchen: Especially in the 1950s and ’60s.
Kory: Oh, yeah, we knew everything in the 1950s and ’60s, let me tell you. Gove said, this is going to be a dictionary of pure language. Whatever gets entered needs to have evidence of current use. Anything technical is going to be defined (as we have done) by the top consultants, by the top minds in their field, but everything is going to be run through an in-house editor to dictionary-ise it.
Gretchen: They can’t just wax on about the hartebeest or whatever.
Kory: And Gove felt very strongly that lexicography was a skill that needed to be taught and honed. Not everyone could do lexicography. He really focused heavily on this really overwhelming workload where he said, all right, all of our in-house editors are defining according to this very rigid style that was brand new, and they’re also overseeing the work of all of these consultants. They are taking what all the special editors are turning it, and they are cutting down into this pure, lovely, Govian definition.
Lauren: They’re also corresponding with the general public. This isn’t the only dictionary Merriam-Webster’s working on at this time. Language just keeps changing, and you have to keep chasing it. I don’t understand how – I mean, I guess lexicographers just live in a permanent state of existential dread.
Kory: Basically. Especially for a dictionary like the Third, it was behind and over budget from jump. There was just no way they were gonna meet any of their production timelines. There were lots of points where certain things were like, “Eh, it’s good enough.” One of those things was this very weird formula for colour defining.
Gretchen: I wanna get back to Godlove. We bring in this colour expert and say, “Okay, you’re in charge of colour definitions now.” What happens?
Kory: Part of what was so fascinating at Godlove – remember I said he had tendrils everywhere. One of those things was that he was one of the founding members of something called the “Inter-Society Color Council,” which was a group of people from arts, industry, and science who agreed to meet together to solve colour problems. Those colour problems were everything from “What’s the best kind of light to use to measure colour?” to one of their earliest problems (it was called “Problem 2”) – Problem 2 was “How do we come up with a plain language way to describe colour?”
Lauren: Sounds like that would be useful for a dictionary.
Kory: Funny that. It wasn’t a dictionary that started it. It was actually what’s called the “US Pharmacopeia,” which was basically a list of all the drugs that were available to pharmacists.
Lauren: Why do we need to worry about colour for drugs? I feel like we’ve just gone down a rabbit hole inside a rabbit hole. [Laughter]
Kory: Part of it is because this is also before we had Walgreens and easily compounded medications that were available over the counter. If you needed something from your pharmacist, you would go and say, “Ah, my stomach’s not feeling great,” and they would literally mix up something using different chemicals, using different herbal remedies at the desk. They had the pharmacopeia.
Gretchen: If you want an antiacid, they’re going there and being like, “Okay, well, I’ve got some sodium bicarbonate, and I’ve got something else. I’m gonna add all these things. Here you go. I’ve mixed it together just for you.”
Kory: Exactly. A lot of their basic ingredients – they were all powders or liquids, and they were all brown or white, basically. That’s what you got. But you know, let’s say you’re pulling something – you’ve got acidic titanicum and acidic tartaricum (because also they all use Latin names at this point), and they’re right on the shelf next to each other, and they’re in brown little bottles, you don’t see what they are, you’re grabbing one for the person who has an upset stomach and wants an antacid, and you grab the wrong one, and you mix it, and you’ve actually given them a diarrheal. That’s not great.
Gretchen: No. [Laughter]
Kory: The pharmacopeia was a description of what each of these ingredients was and what it would do and what to compound it with. One of the main descriptions was “This is a powder or a liquid that is this colour” because that was how you could distinguish some of these things. But the colours they used were weird. There was one that the team focused on, this group of people solving their colour-naming problem – one of the drugs was described as “blackish white.”
Gretchen: I didn’t think that’s how colours worked. Do we mean “grey”?
Kory: I know. And why not “grey”?
Gretchen: Not that “white-ish black” is much better.
Kory: And how “blackish” and how “white” – exactly – or “reddish green.” Well, is that “brown”? What is that? The ISCC – the Inter-Society Color Council – decided they were gonna help out the US pharmacopeia by coming up with standardised ways to describe colours using plain language. Again, remember, well before photography was good or was useful in books like this. As they got into it, they realised one of the problems is “How do you describe ‘Here’s one tan powder,’ ‘Here’s another tan powder,’ and they’re slightly different tans. This is a little darker.” But how much darker? What’s our scale here?
Gretchen: Because we don’t have a whole lot of blue powders and green powders that would be really distinct from each other.
Kory: And if this is a “reddish” liquid and this is also a “reddish” liquid, but this “reddish” liquid is “browner” and this other “reddish” liquid is “oranger.” How do you describe that? This overlaps with something that was happening in the sciences where you would get a colour standard. Let’s say someone came to you and said, “Hey, we are a weaving company. We weave cotton. We need to know just by looking at a giant 400 lb bale of cotton whether it’s good quality or not.” We also know that certain people are gonna want cotton to be whiter and brighter, and that cotton that comes in that’s yellower may not be worse quality, but it can’t be used for certain things. Basically, companies would go to government agencies in the US and say, “Give us a bunch of colour cards, so that when we get cotton in” –
Gretchen: “We need a colour grading system for our cotton.”
Kory: “So when we get 700 bails of cotton in, we basically just have a little card we can go through and say, ‘This one’s Grade A. This one’s Grade B. This one’s Grade C,’ based only on colour.”
Lauren: Nifty.
Gretchen: I mean, this same this exists (just to be incredibly Canadian about it) the same thing exists for maple syrup. It gets graded by colour.
Kory: Yeah. Is it golden? Is it amber? Is it dark? Exactly.
Gretchen: In the modern day, they have a little colorimeter. You can put a drop of syrup in, and you look through the little light thing, and it does a little analysis for you, and then it pops something else. How did we get that result?
Kory: Colour measurement was the new hotness in the early 20th Century. The way that it was mostly done before computers was by eye. People would use mirrors or “spinning disks” – that was a great one. People would get a thing that looks like a top that’s tipped up on its side. You put different colours of paper on it and spin that. Then it optically blends into one colour.
Gretchen: Is that a way of seeing how much blue and how much green a colour has in it? Because if you put all the blues and greens on a spinning disk and spin it together, you get a precise shade of purple or whatever?
Kory: Exactly.
Gretchen: That’s clever.
Kory: You can be like, if I take this red card that is this kind of red, and this yellow card that’s this kind of yellow, and this white and this blue that’s this kind of blue, and I’ve got 45% red, and I’ve got 3% yellow, and I’ve got 5% white, that’s gonna spin to be this exact purple.
Lauren: It’s such an early 20th Century story that colour was becoming more scientific as the dictionary is becoming more scientific, but that almost all of this was achieved through men sending very polite but quite terse letters to each other. So much of what I love in True Color is just these men being quite snippy at each other. One’s an expert in colour. One’s an expert in dictionaries. These two meet in these wonderfully fantastical definitions, but it’s a slog to get from “We both have our own agendas here” to what does get produced in the Third.
Kory: Absolutely. There is this constant tension then and now between “Well, this is the technically correct way to think about colour and talk about colour” and this other way is the way that we all experience colour. That was this huge source of frustration for the editors who were dealing with Godlove, and Godlove dealing with the dictionary, was Godlove was saying, “Okay, you’re saying, for instance, the primary colours are red, yellow, and blue. And they are not red, yellow, and blue. Red, yellow, and blue, as subtractive primaries, do not mix to neutral grey.” I will say that anyone who knows anything about colour mixing who’s listening to this will go “Absolutely,” and anyone who does not is like, “What are you talking about?”
Gretchen: I watched Sesame Street, and Sesame Street told me that the primary colours were red and blue and yellow. What do you mean it’s cyan and yellow and magenta? Is that what we’re talking – your printer has those cartridges.
Kory: That’s one set of primary colours.
Gretchen: That’s true. There’s light as well.
Kory: That’s red, green, and blue (RGB). This is where science is going. Science is saying, “We have the technology to pull it apart” – not build it, but we can see now what colour is made of. We can talk about light in this very particular scientific way. We can say that objects do not have colour, that colour is an interaction between light, a stimulus, the eye, and the brain. That’s great for scientists. For anybody who’s not, that’s so bad.
Gretchen: It’s like, “Excuse me, I have a blue water bottle, and it’s just blue. Don’t tell me it doesn’t have a colour, and it’s just a product of my light and the environment. C’mon, look at it. It’s blue!”
Kory: So much of my research in both the internal archives at Merriam-Webster and then going out – I found I. H. Godlove’s grandchildren, and they kept a bunch of his papers. I got to read a bunch of papers there. I got to read in the corporate archives for the Inter-Society Color Council how they developed this plain language way of describing different gradations of colour. But all of this really is this very early 20th Century like, “Dear Sir/Madam” – it tends to be very formal and, yeah, very snippy in the dictionary world.
Gretchen: Your book doesn’t read like that. Your book is much more fun than the “Dear Sir, I have an important point to make.”
Kory: I’m glad to hear that.
Lauren: “I have a numbered list of points that I wish to address at length.” [Laughter] We have done a Lingthusiasm episode on colour. In that, we started with a big research project from 1969 by a team called Berlin & Kay, who figured out what the boundaries of the basic term colour terms are for English speakers. This was replicated for a bunch of other languages. It’s so funny because teaching the linguistics of colour terms, the story starts for me in 1969, but Berlin & Kay could only have done that work if all of this 20th Century scientific standardising of “Can we get some objective labels to consistently represent colours for blues and greens and reds? And then we can give them to people, and they can have a big old argument about the boundaries of those colours.” What is the start of that earlier colour episode for us is really something that comes very late in True Color, where it comes full circle back around to that perception and general usage for colour names and really basic colour terms.
Kory: What’s really fascinating is the work that Berlin & Kay did, and the rubric that they came up with in saying – for those of you who don’t know, Berlin & Kay basically did a big study to say not just “What are the boundaries of the basic colour terms?” – like, when I say “basic colour term,” I mean, when you’re describing “magenta” or “cerulean” to someone, what’s the colour bucket you put that in? Is “magenta” a pink or is it a purple for you? Is “cerulean” a green or a blue? Those are the basic colour terms, those buckets. What Berlin and Kay’s work did was to say, “Here are the 11 buckets that we all sort colour into. These are our basic colour terms.”
Gretchen: In English.
Kory: In English. They also did some work to say, “When other languages (that are not English) add colour terms, they add them in a particular order.” Now, that’s hotly debated. We won’t get into that. But the idea was that there are, in fact, these basic colour terms that we can use. The thing that’s fascinating is that work that Berlin & Kay did, and that a lot of people say, “Ah! These basic colour terms date back to 1969 – the Berlin & Kay study,” those basic colour terms actually had been in use and were codified in Merriam-Webster dictionaries and through the Inter-Society Color Council’s work 30 years prior to Berlin & Kay – 40 years prior to Berlin & Kay. There is something about, you know, colour language is like all language, we do have a shared experience of it. There are things that we can all agree on, like that there is a difference between red and orange. Now, where that difference is, we’ll argue about that forever. We do think of it in linguistic circles as the beginning of colour terminology, but it really comes at the end. It’s built on dozens and dozens of years of work prior.
Gretchen: One of the most exciting things for me was getting about three-quarters of the way through True Color and then being like, “Hold on, wait, we’ve been missing part of the story.”
Lauren: Especially if Gretchen has her night filter on.
Gretchen: [Laughs] But I also want people to be able to have that experience fresh, especially because this episode goes up a few days before True Color comes out, I really encourage people to get it and read it. I don’t wanna necessarily spoil people for that. I wanna know everything about how the research for this came to be, but I also don’t wanna spoil people before they’ve had the chance to read it. Please stay tuned in two weeks to the Lingthusiasm Patreon where we will have this bonus episode. You have time to read the book first. You also have time to get on the Patreon and listen to the previous bonus episodes. If you’re lucky enough to be listening from the future, and everything is out already, you may be able to just get it right now.
Lauren: I enjoyed the plot twist so much that we are going to leave you with the opportunity to read True Color when it comes out at the end of March. Then we’ll do a bonus episode where we’ll chat with Kory about –
Gretchen: I’m so sorry to do a cliffhanger, but we can’t fit all of this interesting colour nerdery in one episode anyway, so this way, you get to hear from Kory twice.
Lauren: Lucky you! Kory, if you could leave people knowing one thing about language, what would it be?
Kory: I think one of the things I love telling people about language, and one of the things that I hope people remember about language, is we are taught to think of language as something outside of us, something that is this rarified, external thing that we have to master, like the Sphinx’s riddle. But language is an embodied thing. We all carry language in us. It’s very personal. The thing I think I would like everyone to take with them is the knowledge that language isn’t something to wrestle with. This isn’t something that is outside of your ken because it is entirely out of who you are, where you are, what you do, and that includes things like how you see colour, and how you describe colour.
[Music]
Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba and kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch – like our “Etymology isn’t Destiny” notebooks and stickers – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog are Superlinguo.
Gretchen: Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include idioms, childlore, and an updates chat for 2026 in which we also take the “Which Character of the IPA are You?” quiz. You can also subscribe to the Lingthusiasm Patreon right now so that you’re first in line to get the True Color Kory Stamper plot twist that we didn’t wanna spoil in this episode, but we did discuss at length with Kory. We’re so excited to share that part with you. You can follow our guest, Kory Stamper, on Instagram @harmless_drudge and on Bluesky @ korystamper.bsky.social. Her first book is called Word By Word. Her new book is called True Color.
Lauren: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language – or you can leave us a nice review, like this one from Kaliador, who says, “Funny banter between two likable hosts. Perfect for us who are fascinated by language diversity and analysis. Sit back and enjoy!”
Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Kory: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Lingthusiasm Episode 114: Begonia, average coral, and sea pink - Defining colour terms with Kory Stamper
begonia: a deep pink that is bluer, lighter, and stronger than average coral (see ‘coral’ 3B), bluer than fiesta, and bluer and stronger than sweet William, called also ‘gaiety’.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about trying to pin down definitions for colour terms with Kory Stamper, author of the new book TRUE COLOR! Kory is a lexicographer and was Associate Editor at Merriam-Webster for almost two decades. Her first book was Word By Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, which we also loved, and now Kory is back with the fruits of her dive into the mid-20th century quest to standardize colour terms, taking us from dying fabrics to painting cars to assessing grades of maple syrup.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about childlore! We talk about our favourite bits of childlore from our own childhoods, such as skipping/clapping rhymes, counting-off rhymes, and fortune-telling. We also talk about tracking down the sources for "All Right, Vegemite!", a compilation of Australian children's chants and rhymes from Lauren's childhood, selectively choosing to pass on less racist and sexist versions of the rhymes, the relationship between childlore and memes, as well as research from folklorists and anthropologists on childlore around the world.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
'True Color: The Strange and Spectacular Quest to Define Color–from Azure to Zinc Pink' by Kory Stamper
Kory Stamper's website
Kory Stamper on Bluesky
Lingthusiasm episode 'People who make dictionaries: Review of WORD BY WORD by Kory Stamper'
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.
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky 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 assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).
Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among some morphemes
From ‘Micro to macro - The levels of language’, where we took advantage of the aptly numbered 101th episode to get enthusiastic about linguistics from the micro to macro perspctive often found in Linguistics 101 classes
Bonus 109: Skipping rhymes, counting chants, and fortune-telling games - Children's oral culture
Children have a shared culture that's transmitted face-to-face in schoolyards, summer camps, and all sorts of places where kids do unstructured play with each other. These chants, rhymes, and games are known as childlore, and they're one of the last vestiges of oral culture in our highly literate society.
In this episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about childlore! We talk about our favourite bits of childlore from our own childhoods, such as skipping/clapping rhymes, counting-off rhymes, and fortune-telling (Gretchen runs the MASH fortuneteller game on Lauren with a linguistics twist). We also talk about tracking down the sources for "All Right, Vegemite!", a compilation of Australian children's chants and rhymes from Lauren's childhood, selectively choosing to pass on less racist and sexist versions of the rhymes, the relationship between childlore and memes, as well as research from folklorists and anthropologists on childlore around the world.
Listen to this episode about childlore, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon. You'll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord where you can share some of your own childlore, and see how much it differs from other lingthusiasts!
Transcript Episode 113: Why "it's a diglossia!" explains so many social dynamics
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Why "it's a diglossia!" explains so many social dynamics’. 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 show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about when there are two different social roles for two languages or varieties in a society (a.k.a. “diglossia”). But first, the LingComm grants are coming back for 2026. If you’re working on sharing linguistics concepts with broader audiences or you know someone who is (whether in person, online, with kids, through art, video, audio, writing, in-person events, in other languages, or some other idea we haven’t thought of) we have 300 US dollar small grants to support your cool project, which also come with a mentorship meeting with us or a LingCommer who we know who has experience working on something similar that we can connect you with.
Lauren: LingComm grant applications close on the 30th of April 2026. That’s the end of April anywhere on Earth. Thanks to the generosity of several people, we have more grants to give out than we expected. Now, we need people to apply for them. Tell people to apply for a LingComm grant. For more information about applying, go to LingComm.org/grants.
Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode was an update on what we’re up to in 2026 and a discussion of some great linguistics books, including Talking Hands by Margalit Fox and Hellspark by Janet Kagan.
Lauren: I loved Hellspark so much. We also took our own patented questionnaire for “What Character of the IPA are You?” and assigned each other characters from the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is an activity available to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier.
Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to bonus episodes, to sponsor your very own character of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and for more ways of supporting us.
[Music]
Gretchen: I sent you a text from a party that I was at recently, saying, “Lauren, we have to do an episode about diglossia.” People keep asking about linguistics things at parties, which to be clear, I love. Several times recently, the answer has been “diglossia,” but because people don’t know what diglossia is – and at a party, they wanna hear a 3-minute explanation of something (they don’t quite wanna sit there for my full 30-minute explanation of something) – saying, “Oh, that’s a great question. The answer is diglossia,” does not help as much as I want it to help.
Lauren: Look, to be honest, it’s not the first time you’ve sent me the text message, “I was at a party, and the answer was diglossia.” I thought we’d have a chat about this question in a bit more detail because I’ve refilled my drink. I’ve got my canapés. I have nowhere else to be for the next 30 minutes.
Gretchen: You’re gonna be my party-guest-slash-victim. I’m gonna put the question into your mouth because you’re my party guest. Part of the reason why this question keeps coming up for me at parties is partially because I live in Montreal. This is a question that is particularly relevant to French.
Lauren: I feel like it’s also a question that is also particularly relevant to French learners, which is “I keep being told that the way I’m doing something is wrong, but everybody does it. If everybody does it, how is it wrong?” This is the French-learning paradox.
Gretchen: Diglossia itself explains a whole lot of things. One of the questions that you, my party victim, can keep in your mind towards the end of this is “Is everything secretly a diglossia? Are there way more hidden diglossias than we thought there were now that we have this diglossic lens to look on the world with?” We’re talking about French, but you can keep this in mind for any other language or linguistics situation how many of these are diglossias.
Lauren: The answer is diglossia. What is a “diglossia,” Gretchen? My dinner party conversationalist.
Gretchen: Your audition for Jeopardy guest is going great.
Lauren: [Laughs]
Gretchen: At its most neutral form, a “diglossia” involves two languages or dialects or varieties of a single language or two quite different languages that are in stable use in the same place by the same people for different social situations. One of them is more prestigious than the other.
Lauren: I’m hearing “social baggage.” I’m hearing maybe a bit of “political complexity.” This sounds like a very specific situation. Is this really something that crops up all the time?
Gretchen: Part of the reason why it’s hidden is that, oftentimes, one of them isn’t considered a real language.
Lauren: Okay, that’s a great way to make it invisible.
Gretchen: You might think, okay, this is just multilingualism. It’s a specific kind of multilingualism. The answer is “Sometimes, yes,” but multilingualism is a whole bunch of other things. But the way that diglossia hides is by one of them being the “real” version of the language, and the other ones just being “bad” versions.
Lauren: Right. I guess this is one of those situations where variation between two dialects or two varieties hides in the fact that the boundary between “What is a language?” and “What is a dialect?” is often also really hidden.
Gretchen: Exactly. Especially when, as is often the case, one of them is the one that gets written down and the other one doesn’t get written down.
Lauren: I’m gonna assume the written-down one is the prestige one.
Gretchen: You’d be correct about that. Then you can hide that as, okay, well the writing is the real form of the language, which we’re gonna unpack, and the spoken thing is just like, “That’s just what people say, but it’s not the correct thing.” This is the hidden aspect of the diglossia if we’re ignoring how people actually talk to each other, and we’re only paying attention to writing, you can be like, “Yeah, there’s one language here.”
Lauren: Which is a good reason, as a linguist, to pay attention to how people actually speak to each other.
Gretchen: It sure is. Especially when these varieties are related to each other. Let’s talk about some concrete examples because we’re gonna get back to French and how French is a secret, hidden diglossia, but let’s talk about a classic diglossic situation first that everyone agrees is a diglossia so we can get a little bit more clarity. Very classic example of a diglossia is Arabic. When I studied Arabic for a couple years in university, they were very clear with us, like, “We’re teaching you Modern Standard Arabic, which is based on Classical Arabic but with modern vocabulary and stuff, but no one actually really speaks this, but everyone recognises it and learns it in school because a.) Modern Standard Arabic is the thing you learn in classrooms. You go to a classroom to learn this. If you’re learning it in the classroom, you got to learn the classroom thing.”
Lauren: And then you have people speaking Egyptian Arabic. I’ve definitely read about Moroccan Arabic. They do cool stuff with gesture. There’s all these different – Jordanian Arabic is slightly different again.
Gretchen: Exactly. You have these different varieties of Arabic, which are certainly related to each other and related to the Modern Standard variety or the Classical variety, which is the version that’s found in the Quran. They’re related to each other historically, but they are not necessarily mutually intelligible. You know, somebody speaking Moroccan Arabic and someone speaking Egyptian Arabic can’t necessarily understand each other. So, sometimes, when you have people who are from multiple Arabic-speaking regions, they end up using the Modern Standard variety that’s found on, like, news to communicate with each other across those dialect boundaries, even though you would sound like an absolute weirdo if you were talking in Modern Standard Arabic to, like, your kid, or your dog, or your friends in a casual social situation because no one does that.
Lauren: This is where, as a single speaker operating in this community, everyone agrees “We use Moroccan Arabic for these parts of our lives and Modern Standard Arabic for these other parts of our lives.”
Gretchen: Right. And some of these local varieties may be different even between cities in the same country or regions in the same country, or they may have slightly larger regional varieties, but everyone agrees that there’s multiple Arabics. Everyone agrees this is literally a textbook diglossic situation.
Lauren: Has Arabic always been the go-to example of a diglossia?
Gretchen: There is a classic article by a linguist named Charles A. Ferguson in 1959 called, “Diglossia,” in a journal called WORD – very bold titles, I love it –
Lauren: To the point
Gretchen: – where he introduces diglossia as a term for English speakers. It had been previously used in French as “diglossie,” which has been applied to the same situation. His four textbook citation examples are Arabic, Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. Those are his defining examples of diglossia. Arabic is literally textbook – I mean, he wasn’t writing a textbook; he was writing an article. But Arabic is literally in the defining examples of diglossia.
Lauren: This is why I’ve heard this contrast between standard and local varieties of Arabic framed in this way before.
Gretchen: If English speakers on average knew more about the situation in Arabic and knew that it was fully a diglossia, then I would be able to say, “It’s a diglossia” at parties, and people would be like, “Ah, yes, of course, like Arabic, which we all understand in detail.” But sadly, this is not true among my friends, so it’s worth getting through what the situation is like – and also talking about these other three paradigmatic examples that Ferguson talks about.
Lauren: What are some of the features of diglossia that were in the definitive article?
Gretchen: In a diglossia, you have two varieties that are the high form of the language, or the high language, and the low form of the language. They’re associated with different levels of prestige, with different types of situations, and so, for example, in Arabic, the high form is Modern Standard Arabic, and the low form is whatever the regional variety is (Egyptian, Moroccan, etc.).
Lauren: But they don’t have to be related languages, right? Because I’m thinking about that era in Europe where your vernacular language may have been a Romance language, but it may have been a language like English, but your formal prestige language was Latin that’s directly related.
Gretchen: That can still be a diglossia. The formal language, the written language, can be related or unrelated. They can have varying degrees of relationship. In Greek, you have two forms of the Greek language, one is the high form, which is modelled after Classical Greek and adapted to the modern language, and one is the Demotic form of Greek, which is the casual variety. Spoiler: Greek isn’t still like this. People have stopped using the modern-after-classical one for news broadcasts and stuff now. They now just use the Demotic form, the low form, for most social situations, so it doesn’t necessarily stay the same. But in 1959, when Ferguson is writing this article, this seems to be the stable situation for Greek.
Lauren: I guess “stable” being a reminder of persistent but not necessarily forever. We don’t send kids to school in Latin anymore.
Gretchen: Exactly. In Swiss German, the high form of the language is High German, which is the one that’s spoken in a variety of countries where German is spoken. The low form is Swiss German – so Standard German and Swiss German. This is not necessarily the case in other places. In other places, in Germany, for example, or at least in parts of Germany, High German (Hochdeutsch) is the normal form people are talking to their kids in, and there isn’t this same bifurcation between the two varieties. But in Switzerland, again, at least at the time this article was written (things may have changed somewhat), there’s this bifurcation. And then in Haiti, you have French as the high form as the language, and Haitian Creole, which is ultimately derived from French with influences from other languages, as the low form of the language. Again, French is used in France as a language people do speak to children in and do lots of other stuff in, but in Haiti you have this distinction. Again, there’s been a growing movement to use Haitian Creole in more circumstances in Haiti for some of the same reasons as – this has been the case in Greece and Switzerland and things like that. “How much of this is stable?” is the real question. In some of these cases, we have a high form of the language that is used as the normal form of the language in other places. In some places, the high form is only ever used as the really formal variety, like in Arabic.
Lauren: You can’t just use the languages objectively to say one is definitely high and one is definitely low. It’s about this particular context as well.
Gretchen: It’s about the particular social context. Ferguson gives this really nice table breaking down a bunch of context where he thinks these are the main linguistic contexts and, in each one, whether the high or low variety is used. Do you wanna guess, actually? If I give you some context, do you wanna guess which ones are high and which ones are low?
Lauren: Sure. Let’s do this.
Gretchen: All right. Context Number 1: a sermon in a church or mosque. High or low?
Lauren: Well, I get to cheat because you just told me that Classical Arabic is the language of the Quran and, therefore, is the form of the language used in religious ceremonies. But also, up until very recently in Catholicism, masses were said in Latin and sometimes still are. I’m gonna guess that’s the high.
Gretchen: That is absolutely the high form. Even in English you sometimes see some “thees” and “thous” floating around. They’re not quite the high form of the language, but they’re certainly an older form of the language that is sometimes found in religious contexts.
Lauren: We give that a bit of a social prestige buff for those.
Gretchen: Absolutely. Next context: instructions to servants, waiters, workmen, and clerks (is the four professions).
Lauren: I mean, as an Australian who lives with the erroneous belief that we are a very egalitarian and informal society, just the idea of having servants makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, but I guess this is your everyday – you’re interacting with everyday people – you’re going for your more vernacular-slash-low variety of the language.
Gretchen: You’re correct. This is a low variety. If you’re writing a personal letter to someone. Do you use the high or low? This one’s maybe trickier.
Lauren: This is where I have to ponder how long it’s been since I’ve written a personal letter – how much my personal letter writing has been influenced by my informal, online language use. But also, Gretchen, I’m taking it for granted that literacy is the domain of everyday people. So, maybe – I guess I am more formal. If I was writing you a letter, I would be like, “Dear Gretchen,” so maybe literacy is prestige and high.
Gretchen: Ah, you’re correct. I was really wondering if you were gonna go for low, but that is also considered a high context.
Lauren: That was a real roller coaster.
Gretchen: Note that this paper is from 1959. This is pre-texting. We can get into texting in a bit. Next context: a speech in parliament or a political speech. High or low?
Lauren: I think Ferguson and I are hanging out in different social domains, but parliament is a very formal place. They get very stuffy. I’ll say high.
Gretchen: Absolutely. University lecture.
Lauren: I mean, I’m pretty chatty, but I am 60 years younger than Ferguson, so I guess university lectures are meant to be very formal, so prestige.
Gretchen: Absolutely. This is sort of a classroom kind of variety, so you have to put it in the classroom. Next up: conversation with family, friends, colleagues – all the same.
Lauren: For the record, I do not speak to my family and my friends and my colleagues in exactly the same way even with my delusions of egalitarian-ness. But they’re all very close to me. They’re all very much people I hang out with every day. So, maybe the low variety rather than the standard.
Gretchen: You got this. Absolutely. That’s low. Next up is “news broadcast.” When was the last time you listened to a news broadcast?
Lauren: I listen to very chatty news broadcasts, but I also know in Australia we had this whole accent that people only ever really heard on the radio that was very much more British-adjacent. I still remember watching – not watching live but watching re-runs of the first television broadcast in Australia, and it was [British-ish accent], “Welcome to Television.”
Gretchen: Oh, we had one of those in Canada, too. We had a whole British-inflected radio-TV voice that is out of date now but used to exist.
Lauren: That is so high that it prestiged itself into extinction. I’ll say high.
Gretchen: Absolutely. Next up (I’m sure you listen to these all the time): a radio soap opera.
Lauren: Look, I’m gonna do my best to extrapolate that to my personal context, which is gossipy podcasts, which are absolutely – if you told me, “radio soap opera,” I would default to formal as well. But if I actually think about it in its modern equivalent, like a gossipy YouTube breakdown video – vernacular.
Gretchen: Yeah. That is also low. I think these are like, soaps, the idea is that they’re everyday people having dramas about who’s having whose baby kind of thing. That’s definitely low. This is the telenovela genre. Okay. Newspaper editorial, news story, caption on picture – high or low?
Lauren: I mean, newspapers are always pretty formal in their language. I’ll go high.
Gretchen: Yeah, that one’s high. Next up (as its own category): caption on political cartoon.
Lauren: Wow, that’s a really specific niche. I’m 100% gonna guess this because I don’t really have a lot of data to work with. If news broadcast is formal, soap opera is informal and low, newspaper editorial is high, I’m gonna say that caption on a political cartoon is in the vernacular-slash-low more often.
Gretchen: Absolutely.
Lauren: Which I think reinforces this point that it is both of these varieties used by the same group of people because the same person can be listening to the same radio station and understand both the news and the soap opera – understand the newspaper and the joke-y, slang-y political cartoon.
Gretchen: I think this is also – when I think of a political cartoon, when I saw that and was thinking about the Quebec context, I was like, “Oh, the political cartoon is where you’re so much more likely to see vernacularised Quebec-specific spellings of formal language.” For the most part, there’s not as much writing in the low variety, but there is still an ability to represent the low variety in writing as you can see in political cartoons or as you can see in like, you know when you go to a tourism tchotchke shop, and they have t-shirts that say, like, “Here’s a local word that you can say,” “that you can buy on a shirt” or “on a mug.” In Quebec they say things like, “icitte,” which is Québécois for “ici,” which is “here,” but “icitte” is the Québécois way of saying “here.” Localising the word for “here” is an especially strong way of saying that it’s local. You see this on t-shirts and ball caps and things like that. Okay, final two – again, this is another pair – we have poetry versus folk literature.
Lauren: Oof. I think Ferguson and I just live in different realities – with deepest respect to poets I love who are trying so hard to blur the boundary. I assume he’s speaking of the kind of – you read Shakespeare; you read very formal language; it’s in the high variety. Folk literature – much more your everyday language.
Gretchen: This is the formal-sonnets-type-poetry-versus-slam-poetry distinction. Are you using the vernacular? This is a high-low distinction. I’m gonna read a paragraph from Ferguson because I think it illustrates an important point, “The importance of using the right variety in the right situation can hardly be overestimated. An outsider who learns to speak fluent, accurate L and then uses it in a formal speech is an object of ridicule. A member of the speech community who uses H in a purely conversational situation or in an informal activity like shopping is equally an object of ridicule. In all the defining languages, it is typical behaviour to have someone read aloud from a newspaper written in H and then proceed to discuss the contents in L. In all of the defining languages, it’s typical behaviour to listen to a formal speech in H and then discuss it – often with the speaker himself – in L. The last two situations on the list call for comment. In all the defining languages, some poetry is composed in L, and small handful of poets compose in both, but the status of the two kinds of poetry is very different. For the speech community as a whole, it is only the poetry in H that is felt to be ‘real’ poetry. On the other hand, in every one of the defining languages, certain proverbs, politeness formulas and the like are in H even when cited in ordinary conversation by illiterates. I has been estimated that as much as one-fifth of the proverbs in the active repertoire of Arab villagers are in H.”
Lauren: Okay, so maybe Ferguson and I are in the same reality because poets who are doing very interesting things with everyday language are often seen as being more invisible or less legitimate than reading your classic sonnets. So, maybe things haven’t changed as much as I think they have. But this idea that everyone is using both varieties all the time and shift between them depending on the domain is a key feature of what makes diglossia a very specific form of multilingualism.
Gretchen: Exactly. The differences between the two varieties can be relatively large. I wanna read another paragraph from Ferguson that I think illustrates this well. “A striking feature of diglossia is the existence of many paired items – one H, one L – referring to fairly common concepts frequently used in both H and L where the range of the two meanings is roughly the same, and the use of one or the other immediately stamps the utterance or written sequence in H or L. For example, in Arabic, the H word for ‘see’ is ‘ra’a.’ The L word is ‘shaf.’ The word ‘ra’a’ never occurs in ordinary conversation, and ‘shaf’ is not used in normal, written Arabic. If, for some reason, a remark in which ‘shaf’ was used is quoted in the press, it is replaced by ‘ra’a’ in the written quotation. In Greek, the H word for ‘wine’ is ‘inos.’ The L word is ‘krasi.’ The menu will have ‘inos’ written on it, but the diner will ask the waiter for ‘krasi.’ The nearest American English parallels are in cases such as ‘illumination’ – ‘light’ – ‘purchase/buy’ or ‘children/kids.’ But in those cases, both words may be written and both may be used in ordinary conversation. The gap is not so great as for the corresponding doublets in diglossia.”
Lauren: I read that paragraph, and I decided we should do a wine bar tour of Athens.
Gretchen: [Laughs] To see if this still the case since 1959.
Lauren: Just to check.
Gretchen: What did you find on the menus? Dis they say “inos,” which is the H form, or “krasi,” which is the L form?
Lauren: Yes, you have correctly identified we don’t have the budget to send us both to Athens on a wine bar tour.
Gretchen: If the Athens tourism bureau wants to sponsor this podcast, please get in touch.
Lauren: Wants to sponsor our very important update on Ferguson 1959. I did the next best thing, and I poked around some of the menus people took photos of for wine bars on various maps and tourism websites.
Gretchen: What did you find? Are they still using “inos,” or they switched to “krasi,” or what?
Lauren: What I found is they’re mostly using the word “wine,” which is slightly disappointing. But I do have at least one example of “krasi” on the menu.
Gretchen: Ah, okay. So, it is not explicitly the case that – I mean, to be fair, I don’t know how good your Greek is, but I expect you were partially doing this search in English.
Lauren: I was partly doing this search in English.
Gretchen: This is something that’s changed in the last number of decades that the formerly L variety has just become the version that’s used all around places in Greece.
Lauren: I think it’s so interesting that even from this first example, he’s talking about H and L. He’s just immediately shrunk down “high, prestige,” this common phenomenon across these different contexts, into H, and this “vernacular, everyday” into L, and that that is there from the very beginning, and that he kind of invents “diglossia” in this etymologically slightly confusing way.
Gretchen: I love that “diglossia” comes from Greek “di,” meaning “two,” and “glossa,” meaning “language,” literally “tongue,” which is the same etymology as “bilingualism,” which is “bi,” meaning “two,” and “lingua,” meaning “tongue” or “language” in Latin, but just a different word in Greek. These are complete cognates. They both mean “two languages.” They’re just “two languages” in slightly different social situations that we’ve decided to make separate for an academic purpose.
Lauren: I think bilingualism is the general phenomenon of where a group of people – maybe there’s a society – that is bilingual even if the individuals in it are not.
Gretchen: I mean, Canada is famously a bilingual country, which really just means that some people speak English and some people speak French. There are some people who themselves speak both, but in a lot of cases, like the governmental systems or the signage on the milk cartons, is set up to allow people to be monolingual in their language of choice, which is a different type of situation.
Lauren: I love using exactly the same etymology to coin a new word in English that is for this subset of bilingualism where you have people using these two languages or two varieties in this particular dynamic.
Gretchen: I also want to look into this question of the H and L because high and low prestige are what they correspond to, but originally, H and L, to go to the German context, are “Hochdeutsch,” “High German,” and “Plattdeutsch,” or “Low German,” which I always assumed as a person who hadn’t been to Germany when I first learned about this phenomenon that this referred to “Oh, the north is high, and the south is low,” but in fact, the south is high, and the north is low. Because the highness does not refer to the cardinal directions; it refers to whether there are mountains.
Lauren: We have three different high-low metaphors crashing into each other for German. I would also take a guess that a high and a low variety had to do with north and south, but it’s the opposite. It’s hilly and flat.
Gretchen: It’s hilly and flat. The Netherlands (a.k.a. the low countries) are spoken in a flat area of Europe that is correspondingly prone to flooding.
Lauren: I just had one of those moments where I had to actually think of “nether-lands” as like, the low –
Gretchen: Yeah.
Lauren: Right. That one is right there is front of your face, isn’t it.
Gretchen: It’s right there. The high German varieties are spoken in the German highlands, which in Scotland, the highlands are in the north, and so they are both high intrinsic cardinal directions and also high in terms of literally “high-lands” that are mountainous compared to the south of England. But in Germany, the mountain ranges are on the other side of things, and the High German from Germany is spoken in the highlands.
Lauren: Thank you for clarifying that complexity of high and low.
Gretchen: But I think that if the mountainous situation had been different, it’s possible that this metaphor might not have been imported to stand for high and low prestige because it does map onto a familiar conceptual space that if it was the low countries that spoke the prestigious variety, there might have been an entirely different termed because it does have this cross-sensory mapping.
Lauren: I think one of the challenges here is that linguists talk about these community-driven prestige values in a way where it kind of reinforces them, but we don’t necessarily claim to own them, or linguists don’t necessarily want to reinforce (even though they may) these values of high and low. They try and use “high” and “low” as relatively neutral terms because you get things like “vulgar Latin,” or you get these values that have a lot more baggage when it comes to people’s opinions about the everyday language variety.
Gretchen: I think this is particularly interesting in the original Ferguson article even though many people have talked about other languages and linguistic situations where this also occurs because some of these particular examples of local situations have shifted because everyone is using Demotic Greek now, and so it’s less like, “Oh, this version of the language doesn’t exist because it’s not the classical form.” But the attitudes are still being reflected in other types of situations. Here’s another quote, “In all the defining languages, the speakers regard H as superior to L in a number of respects. Sometimes, the feeling is so strong that H alone is regarded as ‘real,’ and L is reported ‘not to exist’.” I found this wasn’t the case when I was studying Arabic because they were like, “Ah, yes, this is clearly a diglossic situation,” but that might be because of this work that’s now been happening over present decades.
Lauren: Or because you weren’t necessarily in one of the contexts where everyday language was just happening and didn’t need to be commented on.
Gretchen: Exactly. But they were still like, “Well, clearly you want to learn the high variety because that’s the only one that’s learnable in a classroom. We’re gonna sort of teach you a little bit of Egyptian Arabic because people kind of understand that from a lot of popular Egyptian media, but the primary thing we’re gonna teach you is this classroom thing.” [Quoting] “Speakers of Arabic may say (in L) that so-and-so doesn’t know Arabic. This normally means that he doesn’t know H, although he may be a fluent, effective speaker of L. If a non-speaker of Arabic asks an educated Arab for help in learning to speak Arabic, the Arab will normally try to teach him H forms, insisting that they’re the only ones to use. Very often, educated Arabs will maintain they never use L at all, in spite of the fact that direct observation shows they use it constantly in all ordinary conversation. Similarly, educated speakers of Haitian Creole frequently deny its existence, insisting they only speak French. This attitude cannot be called a deliberate attempt to deceive the questioner but seems almost a self-deception. When the speaker in question is replying in good faith, it is often possible to break through these attitudes by asking such questions as to what kind of language he uses when speaking to his children, to servants, or to his mother.”
Lauren: The three main groups of people.
Gretchen: “The very revealing reply is usually something like, “Oh, well they wouldn’t understand [the H form, whatever it is called].”
Lauren: I find there’s also a big social difference between the Greek example and the Haitian-Creole-slash-French example in that a lot of the current diglossic situations that we see are a direct result of colonisation and the languages of colonisation being imposed in particular situations. In each situation, the power dynamic at play ends up being different. Again, you can’t just take, “Well, this language comes in, and then this is how the diglossia unfolds” because it’s unique depending on the particular context of any given place. If you think about Portuguese, the whole of Brazil is now an area where Portuguese is considered the standard language. It’s the language of media. But Brazilian Portuguese has become its own standard. There might be variations between how standard your Brazilian Portuguese is, but there’s this understanding of it as its own system with its own social dynamics, whereas somewhere like Mozambique – European Portuguese is still that H variety used in formal situation and news reports, and there’s a local Mozambiquan Portuguese that’s used.
Gretchen: And which has much less prestige associated with it than Brazilian Portuguese, which has become this national standard.
Lauren: Brazilian and European Portuguese have a very different dynamic than Mozambiquan and European Portuguese. Again, taking each social context and its own historical perspective into account when figuring out the dynamic between prestigious and non-prestigious varieties.
Gretchen: This is the thing that brings me back to French, which is when I was learning French in school, which was in Canada but outside of Quebec, we learned France French. This is something that people have told me in many parts of Canada that they learned France French in school. And then once you go up in Quebec somewhere – Quebec City, Montreal, wherever – “Great, I’ve been learning this language for years to communicate with you guys. Here I am trying to communicate.” It turns out that we’ve been learning the wrong French to do that.
Lauren: The Standard French that you learnt in Canada and Montreal French are doing something different.
Gretchen: The Standard French that we learn in Canada is France French, which is spoken in France and, especially, is based on the standard of Paris. You do occasionally, these days, especially in Ontario and places like, especially, Ottawa, places that are closer to Quebec, get some Québécois teachers in Canadian schools. I don’t wanna say people are only learning France French. But by and large, there’s this reliance on France as a standard source of French. You’re more likely to be exposed to media with a Parisian accent. You’re more likely to be exposed to France French and to be using that as a model for both grammar and vocabulary and accent especially. And then you show up in Quebec, really anywhere in Quebec, and the French that you’re hearing – you go into a store, and you try to talk to someone, you try to talk to someone on the street – you’re hearing a completely different accent than what you’ve been exposed to for all those years in school.
Lauren: But this is just a different variety. This isn’t – are people moving between Québécois French and France French in their everyday life, or is this “You just come here and have to learn a new dialect?”
Gretchen: Well, it’s a little bit of one, a little bit of the other because I’ve said this to Québécois people since moving here, like, “Hey, I learned the wrong variety to communicate with you guys. I had to come here and re-learn French and learn some vocabulary differences, learn a lot of accent differences, learn quite a few grammatical differences in terms of actually being able to use spoken French, especially in Quebec, that I wasn’t taught in school. Especially between the difference between speaking and writing, I had to learn quite a difference in terms of French, so that I could actually talk to people here. I would’ve been great if my schooling had prepared me for that in really any way.” The response that I get is really interesting – and I think this is why it’s revelatory that it’s more of a diglossia and less of a “Okay, there’s just two different varieties,” because they’re like, “Oh, but don’t worry. That’s what we learn in school, too.”
Lauren: They’re not learning Quebec French in school; they’re learning France French as well.
Gretchen: Yeah. And they’re like, “Yeah, of course we go to school to learn France French. We go to school to learn written French, to learn Standard French,” which comes with this whole set of baggage – and to learn this French that has – like, there’s a past tense in French that’s only used in writing, in literary writing, that’s not used in speech.
Lauren: Huh, right. Just to clarify, there’s nothing about the relationship between French and English in Montreal that’s diglossia. You can use both on signage. You can use either in school or work depending on where you are. You might be a French speaking household at home or an English speaking household – or you might be bilingual – but there’s not one as the default high.
Gretchen: Right. French and English in Montreal – Montreal is bilingual in the sense of French and English, but this is not a diglossia because, apart from certain situations that are government-mandated where you have to use French – with signage there are laws about how large the French has to be, which has to be larger than the English, and before the English, and this kind of stuff, but that’s because the government has said, “French is important. We want to put it on signs.”
Lauren: Not because English isn’t a real language.
Gretchen: The individual people who’re making the signs and, indeed, before this law was passed, were perfectly happy to put English on signs. It’s not to say that English is a language you can’t put on signage and French is the only language you can put on signs. That’s only the case for legal reasons. It’s not the case for people’s pragmatic sense of what language could go on a sign. The same thing is – there’re people who send their children to French school; there’re people who send their children to English school; there’re people who go home and speak English in the home or French in the home. These are bilingual aspects of the situation, but they’re not diglossic because there aren’t certain social situations where only one form is appropriate and other social situations where only another form is appropriate.
Lauren: Whereas the relationship between Québécois French and France French is diglossia to some extent because in particular formal contexts, there is an orientation towards France French, and then Québécois French is the everyday French, whereas if you went to Paris, you would be learning France French, and then going home and speaking France French.
Gretchen: Well, sort of. But my argument is that maybe French is just diglossic the whole way down.
Lauren: Okay, this is the plot twist I did not expect from you.
Gretchen: Because, yes, there are more differences between how people speak on the street in Montreal or in Quebec and how people speak on the street in France. We do learn the France accent more than the French learn the Quebec accent. But also, there are things that are different between what people call “spoken and written French” that are, if not yet a diglossia, at the very least, verging on a diglossia.
Lauren: I feel like this is where writing systems bring a lot of baggage to high and low forms of a language. Even with the limited French that I know, all of those silent letters really do not help you to speak the language through reading.
Gretchen: All of those silent letters, every French child, when they learn to read and write, has to learn how to do a whole grammatical analysis on their language in order to be able to put the correct T at the end of the word or R at the end of the word in order to know which one it is, whereas in speech people communicate just fine without making this distinction. In addition, silent letters are something English also has. We can get back to “Is English a diglossia?” But French also has a whole tense that’s only used in writing. There’s a whole past tense – the simple past – that’s only used in literary writing. It’s used in children’s picture books for kids to introduce them to this literary past tense.
Lauren: Training into two separate varieties happens very early.
Gretchen: Yeah. But it’s not used in speech ever. Even when I was taking French in school, they were like, “Oh, yeah, you’re not gonna speak this one. You’re only gonna encounter it in writing.” There’s a different way of doing negation in speech versus writing which is pretty basic to the system.
Lauren: I feel like this is where a lot of the French learner paradox of like, “If everyone does it wrong, how is it wrong?” is because spoken and written are actually different varieties to a far greater extent than English, just like you say “kids” when you’re being slang-y and “children” where you’re being formal.
Gretchen: Or like in English, we have this whole system of contractions. You can say “will not,” or you can say “won’t.” But you can write “won’t.” It’s a bit more informal, but it has a standard written form that is associated with slightly less formal writing. In French, the formal way of forming negation is you that you put “ne” before the verb and “pas” after the verb. If you wanna say like, “I don’t know,” that’d be “Je ne sais pas.” In spoken French, nobody says that. You look like you’re a time traveller if you go around saying, “Je ne sais pas.” The spoken way of forming negation – and this is still true in France – is “Je sais pas.” You don’t say the “ne.” You can potentially contract the vowels even more like “J’pas,” which is how people actually say, “I dunno,” rather than, “I do not know,” which, again, you look a bit of a time traveller if you go around saying, “I do not know.”
Lauren: If you look back at the distribution on Ferguson’s table of where you use each variety, you begin to see how writing systems and formal education help create this friction and this distinction between the two varieties.
Gretchen: The things that are sort of parasitic on the written standard, or reading things out loud, or writing itself versus this caption on political cartoon – that’s also where the texting goes. I can read a whole linguistics textbook in French and not have any difficulties because it’s in the formal French that I was trained on, but when I try to read people’s comments under a YouTube video in French, which are written in this vernacular style, the texting-variety of written French (which is newer and more informal, but it doesn’t not have rules; the rules are just emergent from the context), people are doing all sorts of stuff that I’m just not familiar with. It feels like a different variety to me because I’m worse at understanding it, especially in writing. I have to read it aloud to myself and then I go “Oh, that’s what they mean.”
Lauren: I think it’s really great to have stepped back and taken this perspective of the fact that this dynamic between high and low varieties of a language (or high and low languages within the same context) have these similarities because I think when you’re explaining this to a French speaker or to someone looking at the old distinction between English and Latin, it can seem like this is just a one-off case. But Ferguson’s whole idea is this is a recurring dynamic between languages that plays out because of recurring power dynamics in society.
Gretchen: And the hard thing talking about it with French speakers is precisely this thing that is the case in a diglossia where you have a hard time convincing them that the low variety even exists or is real because all of the realities that they’ve been taught in schools have been “Oh, but here’s how you do this written standard; here’s how you do this formal variety.” I guess the big galaxy-brain question is “Is English also a diglossia?” Because there are aspects of written English, especially when it comes to silent letters, that abstract from the pronunciation of any given variety of English, or some varieties pronounce the words the same that are written differently, and some languages say, “Yeah, these words are written differently, and we’re still pronouncing them differently.” Different phonetic mergers have happened in different varieties of English, but we’re still writing them according to one particular set of principles. Or a very few differences like O-U-R versus O-R, but realistically, any English speaker can actually recognise both.
Lauren: There are also situations where you may have someone in your social life who’s in a diglossic relationship. They may be an Aboriginal English speaker in Australia who their particular community is diglossically moving between Standard Australian English and Aboriginal English even if you, yourself, are not. Being aware of these dynamics can be really helpful.
Gretchen: I think one of the things that’s helpful about having a fancy Greek word to talk about it with, like “diglossia,” is that it helps legitimise this thing which otherwise invisibilises a perfectly valid linguistic system that is actually really cool and, often, underappreciated. And to say, you know, it’s not that you’re sometimes speaking the “wrong” version of a language or sometimes speaking the bad version, it’s that there’s this complicated and interesting social dynamic around which one you speak at which time. Both of them have value. Some of them feel more personal, more intimate, more joke-y, more casual. Some of them connect you to a broader history of literature and intellectual tradition. These are both things that are great. It’s not that only one of them has merit.
Lauren: Being aware of this dynamic can help you articulate why we need to respect all varieties even if they have been made invisible in this dynamic.
Gretchen: The other thing that I think this can answer a question of that often comes up for me at parties is “Is technology – is the internet, the printing press, the phone, social media – is this creating a linguistic situation in which we’re all talking more like each other, we’re all using the same English, we’re all using an internationalised version of things that we can talk to each other, or do we still have this linguistic fragmentation? As time progresses, linguistic varieties get more and more distinct from each other.” I think diglossia is one way where the answer can be both. If we’re doing things that let us participate in the lingua franca of a globalised style of English or a globalised style of French or Arabic, Spanish, or any of these other big languages that are spoken in a lot of different places, that globalised style can still exist, and people can use it to do this communication between people in lots of different places, at the same time as the local versions can keep diverging from each other because languages, you know, that’s how entropy works. Languages keep having a tendency to diverge from each other. What can happen is that people are actually fluent in both varieties and use them in different situations. This is way more common than we give it credit for.
[Music]
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[Music]
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Lingthusiasm Episode 113: Why "it's a diglossia!" explains so many social dynamics
In some communities, everyone regularly uses two languages or varieties according to the social situation, with one of them being more prestigious (and more likely to be written down) than the other. This particular kind of multilingualism is known as a diglossia.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about diglossia! We talk about why diglossia is the answer to so many questions Gretchen gets asked at parties, what "high" and "low" versions of a language have to do with mountains, where the four "classic" cases of diglossia come from (Arabic, Greek, Haitian, and Swiss), and how at least some of them might not be diglossias anymore. We also talk about whether there are new diglossias emerging (French? English???) and how to tell if you might be in a diglossia.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
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Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
'Diglossia' by Charles A. Ferguson
Wikipedia entry for 'Mozambican Portuguese'
Wikipedia entry for 'Brazlian Portugese'
Wikipedia entry for 'European Portugese'
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Gretchen is on Bluesky as @gretchenmcculloch.com, on instagram @gretchen.mcculloch and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky 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 assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. 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).
Bonus 108: Collaborations, your latest pop ling reading list, and assigning ourselves IPA symbols - 2026 updates!
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about what we've been up to in 2025 and what's coming up in 2026! Plus, we go behind the scenes on the Lingthusiasm Supporter Wall of Fame: we finally take our Which IPA character are you? personality quiz ourselves and use the results to give you a look into our artisanal process of assigning phonetic symbols to patrons at the Ling-phabet tier.
In 2025, Lauren published her academic-ish book Gesture: A Slim Guide, coauthored an article about crowdfunding Lingthusiasm, and coedited a special issue of the Australian Journal of Linguistics in memory of her mentor and friend Barb Kelly, which is a traditional way of honouring people you love in academia. In 2026, she's celebrating her promotion to Associate Professor as of January 1st (finally, a job title that's more legible internationally!) with uh, more meetings. Lauren is grateful that Lingthusiasm patrons let us pay other people to do the editing, transcripts, and other behind-the-scenes podcast admin work so she can stay involved in the episodes themselves around her increasingly busy schedule.
Gretchen went to ASL camp in Ontario for a week last year, did a talk called 101 ways to communicate linguistics with a broader audience (slides), and enjoyed several interviews and books, including Talking Hands by Margalit Fox (nonfiction about Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language) and Hellspark by Janet Kagan (science fiction, recommended by a Lingthusiasm listener!). Plus: a special not-yet-public announcement only in the episode itself! Gretchen is grateful that the Lingthusiasm patrons let her stay afloat while working on projects that one day you're going to love...but which aren't bringing in their own money yet.
We both enjoyed celebrating World Linguistics Day in November (greetings from 70 cities in over 30 countries!) and attending the International Conference on Linguistics Communication in April, where we talked about lingcomm collaboration with academia. Plus: we hit our 100th Lingthusiasm episode and celebrated by compiling a list of 101 places to get enthusiastic about linguistics.
Join us on Patreon to listen to this episode now, and help us keep making this podcast ad free and grow the broader lingcomm ecosystem (make sure to send the lingcomm grants to your favourite up-and-coming lingcomm creators!).
