This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 48: Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates. 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 48 show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, I’m joined by Shivonne Gates, and we’re getting enthusiastic about linguistic variation in the UK. But first, Crash Course Linguistics is out this month – the beginning of the 16-part introduction to linguistics through the Crash Course YouTube Channel. We’ll have a link to their channel in the show notes. We’ll also be doing weekly emails every time a new video is out through the Mutual Intelligibility newsletter. If you sign up to Mutual Intelligibility, you’ll receive a link to every new video as it comes out and some related linguistics resources.

[Music]

Lauren: Today, I’m joined by Shivonne Gates who is a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research. Shivonne has a background in linguistics as well as sociology and applied social research. Her linguistics research interests include language and ethnicity, sociolinguistics, and critical race theory. Welcome, Shivonne.

Shivonne: Hi, Lauren! Thanks for having me.

Lauren: It is absolutely a delight to have you here today. Can you tell us a bit about how you got into linguistics?

Shivonne: Sure. I actually got into linguistics when I was in sixth form, which is the last two years of high school in the UK. I did A level English language. As part of that, I did a mini research project.

Lauren: Cool!

Shivonne: Yeah, it was really cool. I did some narrative analysis of a couple of recordings of my cousin at different developmental stages. He was, I think, something like 5 and 9. I compared how his narrative structures had developed over time, essentially.

Lauren: Cool. Had you happened to just record him as a 5-year-old because he was cute, or were you thinking that you had plans to analyse his language?

Shivonne: Neither. His family just did lots of home videos, and something he liked to do for himself was just stand in front of the camera and record himself telling stories.

Lauren: Oh, how wonderful.

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