This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Where language names come from and why they change’. 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.

Gretchen: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about language names. But first, we’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow for 2023. The liveshow will once again be on the Lingthusiasm Patreon Discord, and it will be on the 18th or 19th of February, depending on your time zone.

Gretchen: We’re really excited to be returning to one of fan favourite topics and answering your questions about language and gender with a returning special guest, Dr. Kirby Conrod, who you may remember from the very popular episode about the grammar of “singular they.” We’re bringing them back for more informal discussion, which you can participate in. If you’re a Lingthusiasm patron, you can ask questions or share your examples and anecdotes about gender in various languages via Patreon or in the AMA questions channel on Discord. We might mention some of them in the episode. Or bring your questions and comments along to the liveshow itself.

Lauren: The Lingthusiasm Discord is available for all patrons at the Lingthusiast tier and above. You can join the Lingthusiasm Patreon by visiting lingthusiasm.com/patreon. That tier also allows you access to our monthly bonus episodes.

Gretchen: The Lingthusiasm liveshow is part of LingFest, which is a fringe festival-like program of independently organised online linguistics events running in February 2023.

Lauren: If you’re listening in the future and want to find out about these events as they’re happening, you can follow us on various social media @lingthusiasm. Our most recent bonus episode for patrons was outtakes and deleted scenes from some of the interviews we’ve done recently. If you wanna hear more from our guests – Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe – you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to that, a whole bunch of other bonus episodes, and our upcoming liveshow.

[Music]

Gretchen: There’s this really fun group activity that you sometimes see in linguistics classes or when linguists are hanging out which is collaboratively brainstorming all of the languages that people in the group can think of.

Lauren: Ooo, yeah.

Gretchen: Especially if you don’t allow Google or Wikipedia, it’s just which languages have you heard of or do you know at least a word or phrase in and can you put them on a whiteboard or in a notebook.

Lauren: Hmm, I’m already finding this a little bit complicated because I never know what name to give some of the languages that I know or know of or work with.

Keep reading

Lingthusiasm Episode 76: Where language names come from and why they change

Language names come from many sources. Sometimes they’re related to a geographical feature or name of a group of people. Sometimes they’re related to the word for “talk” or “language” in the language itself; other times the name that outsiders call the language is completely different from the insider name. Sometimes they come from mistakes: a name that got mis-applied or even a pejorative description from a neighbouring group.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about how languages are named! We talk about how naming a language makes it more legible to broader organizations like governments and academics, similar to how birth certificates and passports make humans legible to institutions. And like how individual people can change their names, sometimes groups of people decide to change the name that their language is known by, a process that in both cases can take a lot of paperwork.

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

Announcements:

We’re doing another Lingthusiasm liveshow! February 18th (Canada) slash 19th (Australia)! (What time is that for me?) We’ll be returning to one of our fan-favourite topics and answering your questions about language and gender with returning special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod! (See Kirby’s previous interview with us about the grammar of singular they.)

This liveshow is for Lingthusiam patrons and will take place on the Lingthusiasm Discord server. Become a patron before the event to ask us questions in advance or live-react in the text chat. This episode will also be available as an edited-for-legibility recording in your usual Patreon live feed if you prefer to listen at a later date. In the meantime: tell us about your favourite examples of gender in various languages and we might include them in the show!

In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about some of our favourite deleted bits from previous interviews that we didn’t quite have space to share with you. Think of it as a special bonus edition DVD from the past two years of Lingthusiasm with director’s commentary and deleted scenes from interviews with Kat Gupta, Lucy Maddox, and Randall Munroe.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds, and get access to our upcoming liveshow!

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• ‘A grammatical overview of Yolmo (Tibeto-Burman)’ by Dr Lauren Gawne
• ‘Language naming in Indigenous Australia: a view from western Arnhem Land’ by Jill Vaughan, Ruth Singer, and Murray Garde
  
• Wikipedia List of Creole Languages
• Wikipedia entry for Métis/Michif
• ‘A note on the term “Bantu” as first used by W. H. I. Bleek’ by Raymond O. Silverstein
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘How languages influence each other - Interview with Hannah Gibson on Swahili, Rangi, and Bantu languages’
• Wikipedia entry for Endonym and Exonym
• All Things Linguistic post on exonym naming practices in colonised North America
• Tribal Nations Map of North America
• Wikipedia entry for Maliseet
• OED entry for ‘endoscope’
• Wikipedia entry for Light Warlpiri
• Language Hat entry for Light Warlpiri
• Los Angeles Times article about the use of Diné instead of Navajo
• OED entry for ‘slave’
• Wikipedia entry for names of Germany

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.

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Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

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

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

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. 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).