Damon Young brings his keenly-honed attention to the topic of gesture, and its role in the texture of being human as part of the philosophical detail of life. Young focuses specifically on gestures that have a fixed meaning for a group of users. The category of emblems is a rich topic of exploration, although I am a highly biased reviewer because they are a category of gesture to which I’ve also given a lot of thought. As Young marvels, “[t]hese signs are fluid, subtle; they are finely suited to situations.”
Each of the fifteen chapters focuses on one gesture, the author’s relationship to it as well as what it can tell us about culture, history, religion and so much more. The shrug is an opportunity to ponder the theological question of whether God shrugs, the finger guns are a launch point for a discussion of gun culture, and the salute at the beginning of a fencing match is an opportunity to ponder class and gallantry.
Young uses a depth of research, but with a light touch; he mentions in passing the shrug is a recurrent gesture, while (sensibly) sidestepping the complex relationship between recurrent gestures and emblems as categories. The conversational introduction to key references, rather than a performatively detailed set of formal citations, suits the cosy, conversational tones.
The book is a very pretty, petite, 200 page hardcover, with striking blue cover art by Angi Thomas.
I apologise I am bad at online influencing - I probably should have taken a photo of the cover before this copy lived in my bag for a few days while I read it..
Young’s selection of gestures is wide ranging, including some classic, prototypical emblems (the ‘horns’, the Vulcan salute, the shush), as well as opportunities to push into ritualistic or stylistic actions, including the plié of ballet, taking off a hood (a recurring motif in Star Wars) and slack-mouthed miming life as a goldfish in a bowl. Each short chapter takes its own journey while weaving into a larger set of themes. I enjoyed Young delighting in the observation of actions typically taken for granted, and their storied histories. At one point he marvels “[b]ut I was very much in the world" - capturing the wonderful transition into a way of seeing that comes with paying attention to the gestures of our lives.
To celebrate the publication of Gesture: A Slim GuideI’ve selected five facts from/about the book to share:
1. The cover is a deepcut reference to my first gesture research project
Gawne & Kelly (2014) is actually work from my honours project in 2007 - it took us a while to write it up for publication. In that experiment, participants watched a short video narrative and marked everything they thought was a ‘gesture’ without being given a definition. On the whole, people agree at a minimum level with Gesture Studies researchers about what a gesture is, but tend to include far more in their definition. The cover illustration from Lucy Maddox captures some of the key gestures from that video. Because we had no budget, I filmed the video of myself narrating the story.
2. Learning a signed language will affect the way you gesture in spoken language
Research on learners of ASL shows that learning a signed language affects the gestures of people who have spent their whole life speaking English. Gesture and signed languages are two very different uses of the same modality, but they influence each other in interesting ways.
3. You can make people imagine emphasis differently by changing the placement of emphatic gestures
Hans Rutger Bosker and David Peeters created experimental video clips that you can see here. They took inspiration for their experimental work from the classic McGurk effect in phonetics, where watching a mouth closing like a /g/ while a /b/ sound is played will make the viewer hear a /d/.
4. Dolphins and seals demonstrate the capacity to follow human pointing gestures
While there is evidence that many domestic animals can follow human pointing gestures, this is the only documented evidence to date that shows this skill in wild animals that aren’t primates.
5. People still gesture even if their audience can’t see them, but the way they gesture changes
Speech and gesture are so closely linked up that we can’t help but gesture, even if our audience can’t see us. Experiments show that changing the audience conditions changes how large or frequent gestures are, but nothing stops us gesturing completely.
The official launch party for Gesture: A Slim Guide will be the April episode of Lingthusiasm, stay tuned!
Book overview
The gestures that we use when we speak are an important, if often over-looked, part of how we communicate. This book provides a friendly, fast-paced introduction to the field of Gesture Studies. Gestures are those communicative actions made with the human body that accompany spoken or signed language. Paying attention to gesture means paying attention to the fuller context in which humans communicate. Gesture is absolute, in that every human community that has language also has gestures as part of that language. But gesture is also relative, in that it is far more heavily context dependent than other elements of communication. This book provides a broad introduction to current understandings of the nature and function of gesture as a feature of communication. This Slim Guide covers the ways gesture works alongside speech and the different categories of gesture. The way these categories are used varies across cultures and languages, and even across specific interactions. We acquire gesture as part of language, and it is deeply entwined with language in the brain. Gesture has an important role in the origin of language, and in shaping the future of human communication. The study of gesture makes a crucial interdisciplinary contribution to our understanding of human communication. This Slim Guide provides an introduction to Gesture Studies for readers of all backgrounds.
I’m so excited to be able to share the final cover for Gesture: A Slim Guide, which will be out in March! I’ll be sharing more about the contents (and the origins of the wonderful cover image from Lucy Maddox) in the lead up to publication.
Book overview
The gestures that we use when we speak are an important, if often over- looked, part of how we communicate. This book provides a friendly, fast-paced introduction to the field of Gesture Studies. Gestures are those communicative actions made with the human body that accompany spoken or signed language. Paying attention to gesture means paying attention to the fuller context in which humans communicate. Gesture is absolute, in that every human community that has language also has gestures as part of that language. But gesture is also relative, in that it is far more heavily context dependent than other elements of communication. This book provides a broad introduction to current understandings of the nature and function of gesture as a feature of communication. This Slim Guide covers the ways gesture works alongside speech and the different categories of gesture. The way these categories are used varies across cultures and languages, and even across specific interactions. We acquire gesture as part of language, and it is deeply entwined with language in the brain. Gesture has an important role in the origin of language, and in shaping the future of human communication. The study of gesture makes a crucial interdisciplinary contribution to our understanding of human communication. This Slim Guide provides an introduction to Gesture Studies for readers of all backgrounds.
I was delighted to get the chance to review a new book from Laura Wagner & Cecile McKee all about doing lingcomm through hands-on demos and conversations at museums, science fairs and other public events. There’s a lot in the book for anyone who wants to start or refine the way they share linguistics with different audiences, particularly those that do face-to-face interactive work.
Communicating about linguistics to non-specialist audiences (lingcomm) is a specialist skill set in its own right. Equipping more linguists with these skills is vital if linguistics is going to stake a claim for its relevance to people’s lives as more than a passing curiosity. Until now, this skill set had to be learned mostly through emulation of existing practitioners, online resources and informal networks. Thankfully, Laura Wagner (Ohio State University) and Cecile McKee (University of Arizona) have distilled their extensive experience running lingcomm activities and events into a clear and practical book. How to Talk Language Science with Everyone (Cambridge University Press) illustrates the best of lingcomm practice; it is informed by linguistic research as well as insights from related fields, including psychology, education and anthropology. It also illustrates the best of the lingcomm community more broadly; it is accessible to those new to the practice, encouraging in tone, and passionate about introducing more people to how great linguistics is (a fact taken as given in this book).
The closing worksheets of each chapter are a sequence of activities that allow the reader to work towards what the authors call a ‘doable demo’, a well-planned hands-on demo that engages an intended audience in your topic of interest. While the activities in the early chapters are not particularly linked to the chapter topic, as the book builds the activities allow the reader to put the lessons of the chapter to work designing and refining a hands-on demo. The book can make a good classroom resource for anyone lucky enough to be able to run a lingcomm/scicomm subject, but the clear structure of the book means that it can be put to great use in the hands of an individual with time to work through the activities. It would be great to see more people working on short, engaging hands-on demos that capture people’s linguistic imagination (and, as the authors say in the book, sharing them!). Alongside initiatives like 3 Minute Thesis and 5 Minute Linguist, a hands-on demo can be an important part of a linguist’s toolkit for communicating with a range of audiences outside of academia. This book is perfect for you to share with your engaged graduate students or highly-enthusiastic undergraduates.
Thanks to Language for arranging for the review copy!
Wagner, Laura & Cecile McKee. 2023. How to Talk Language Science with Everybody. Cambridge University Press. [Review in Language]
In Thinking With Your Hands, Susan Goldin-Meadow meets the challenge of summarising a lifetime of research for a non-specialist audience. Since the early 1970s Goldin-Meadow has been researching the role of gesture in thinking, communicating and learning. This book captures her passion for this work, and the enthusiasm for collaboration that has resulted in the Goldin-Meadow lab being a powerhouse of Gesture Studies scholarship over the last three decades. There are some black line images throughout the book that illustrate some key gestural moments. I was delighted to read a physical review copy from the publisher.
Goldin-Meadow’s work spans a range of topics in child language acquisition, the emergence of homesign and signed languages, and the use of gesture in educational contexts. The book is divided into three sections. The first section, “Thinking with our hands”, introduces the ways that gesture provides a more expansive understanding of language and what we communicate. In this book, as in her research, Goldin-Meadow focuses on the gestures we use alongside speech. These gestures can provide visual information alongside the structured linguistic content of spoken or signed languages. Sometimes that information is not found in the linguistic content and instead offers a different perspective on the thought processes of the person using gesture, other times, gesturing appears to not only show, but help, the thinking process.
The second section, “Speaking with our hands”, is built around Goldin-Meadow’s expertise in children’s communication, particularly in contexts without spoken language. This includes discussion of homesign, where a deaf child is raised in a hearing household without signed language and develops a way of communicating with their family. These homesign systems are more than gesture, but less structured than a language, although as Goldin-Meadow’s work has shown, it’s the child driving the structure, not their caregivers. Goldin-Meadow is exceedingly diplomatic about the choices made by parents in these contexts, but at least makes it clear how the oralism approach does not benefit children. We also get to read about the birth of signed languages in contexts like Nicuagua, where the first school for deaf children was set up in the 1980s. In a context of support and input, children are able to collaboratively build a full language, often drawing on local gestures as one of their resources.
The third section, “Why you should care about hands”, draws on insights from the research introduced in earlier chapters to make a case for gesture being relevant to parents, clinicians and teachers. The final chapter “what if gesture were considered as important as language?” is an opportunity that Goldin-Meadow uses for a vision for the use of the many remarkable insight from her work and that of collaborators and colleagues.
Although this book draws mostly on research conducted by her own lab, or by people from her lab who have gone on to become leaders in the field in their own right, the book still draws on research from others across the field as well. It’s clear that Goldin-Meadow is demonstrating the ways she’s honed the message about her work, and its wider relevance, for a general audience. For someone with a passing familiarity with work from the Goldin-Meadow lab, there’s a great deal of charm in learning the stories behind some iconic pieces of research. Goldin-Meadow is very happy to let us know that had shown students some classic gesture mismatch footage in her classes for years before Brecky Church coded the data and noted that the mismatches preceded a developmental advance. Goldin-Meadow is exceedingly charming in her enthusiasm for name-checking her junior collaborators and students, as well as their students (who she gleefully points out are her academic grandchildren).
In Thinking with your Hands Goldin-Meadow’s expertise and depths of enthusiasm are exceedingly evident, but so is her commitment to finding ways to share her work with people beyond psychology and Gesture Studies. This has become one of my go-to recommendations for Gesture Studies scicomm.
Susan Goldin-Meadow, Thinking With Your Hands (Basic Books, 2023)
English spelling, pronunciation and grammar have been fertile ground for Pop Ling books (up there with swearing), and it’s a delight to see this often-covered topic in the hands of one of the best lingcomm writers.
This book grew out of Okrent & O'Neill’s videos for Mental Floss that were made between 2015 and 2018, which featured Okrent’s voice over O'Neill illustrating onto a whiteboard. The book covers similar terrain to the video series, but with a tighter focus.
The book takes a tone of playful exasperation that never gets too heavy-handed. There are five sections, each focusing on a different place we can lay ‘blame’ for the state of English; The barbarians (English’s Germanic origins), the French, the printing press, the snobs, ourselves (a final catch-all section). As with the videos, each chapter is short and tightly focused. There are 40 chapters of around 5 pages each, with or or two of O'Neill’s illustrative examples in each chapter. Chapters can be read consecutively, allowing the reader to build a larger picture of these five different pressures on English, or you can dip in at any point that takes your fancy.
With this focus, there is a lot of focus on writing system and historical processes, but different chapters also cover topics in morphology, syntax, semantics and idioms.
The framing of whimsical affront at the state of English never gets too heavy-handed, and Okrent’s writing is a masterclass in the judicious deployment of both terminology and humour. I’ve used her videos in my undergraduate teaching, and plan to borrow some of her explanations (and jokes) in this book for future teaching.
I would use this as a gateway to Crystal’s A Little Book of Language (review here), you can safely leave it with a keen middle grader who is flummoxed by spelling bees or asks questions about linguistic oddities, or enjoy reading the short chapters with them.
Get the book:Bookshop, Amazon [buying through these links provides financial support to Superlinguo]
I’ve been keeping a casual eye on the market for kids linguistics books for a while, but it turns out one of the most delightful I’ve encountered was printed in 1966.
How You Talk provides a brief introduction to the development of
speech in children, the use of breath in producing speech and the basic
articulators that are used to make different sounds.
The book
includes a demonstration of how the larynx works using balloons, and
uses tongue twisters to show the different articulators. And yes, the
book uses the word larynx. Why not? The other day a three year old told
me their favourite dinosaur was Dipolodocus, and another said they
liked Quetzalcoatlus. I didn’t even know that was a dinosaur.
The
book received a reprint with new illustrations in 1992. The updated
version has some minor tweaks to the content; baby Kate goes from 7
months to 10 months, and Solomon the bunny becomes Benji the bunny.
There’s some repagination work, but overall it’s pretty much the same
book.
I’m torn as to which edition I prefer. The 1992 version has more
educationally insightful illustrations. The stylised illustrations of
the 1960s edition are utterly charming, but also very much of their time
(including a kid in a Native American Headdress in a couple of
illustrations for no particular reason).
I’m so delighted this book exists, both editions have their advantages, and a reprint that combined and updated them would be a forever favourite.
You can still pick up secondhand copies of both editions. For Australians Booko is a great aggregator, for those overseas, WorldCat links to some secondhand sites.
A common genre of book in the last few decades of the 20th century was a jokey, vulgar book of ‘Aussie slang’, full of phrases like ‘bloody drongo’ and ‘crack the shits’. Australians have a generally relaxed attitude towards swearing, which is anything but relaxed when you start looking at who is illustrated in these books as doing the swearing - usually a white bloke with a beer in hand. In Rooted, historian and lexicographer Amanda Laugesen explores the history of swearing in Australia. The history of swearing is a history of language and power and identity, a perfect way to unpack the myth of what it means to be Australian.
Tracing the history of informal languages is always a particular
challenge, because it’s so ephemeral. Laugesen weaves together this
history using media, court documents and letters. If there is not as much colourful language in the early years of Australian history as might be anticipated, this is partly
because of its ephemeral nature, but it would also appear to be partly
because a whole lot of it was made up by Barry Humphries in the 1960s.
The book covers the history of Australia from colonisation in the late 1700s, through to today. This history is divided into four parts, covering the first century of settlement, the period of federation and the first world war, the core of the 20th century from the 1920s to the 1980s, and finally a tour through the last four decades. Each part contains one to three chapters, and each of these chapters is divided into sections of a few pages, making it an easy book to read through in short bursts.
The middle sections of the book really show Laugesen’s expertise in the language used by Australian soldiers in the world wars. I also greatly appreciated the discussion of the strict censorship laws of the mid-20th century, which were even more rigorous than those found in the US and the UK. The final chapter on contemporary issues around profanity feels the least grounded in the specific Australian context. The analysis of humorous emoji strings as realistic examples of swearing in no way reflects accurate usage, which highlights the challenges ahead for the next generation of lexicographers interested in documenting profanity in informal online communication.
Although this book focuses on the period of history since English and its speakers arrived, Laugesen ensures that the stories of Indigenous Australians are told across the time periods. Likewise, there are dedicated sections that look at swearing about, and by, women, migrants and all those others who do not fit within the narrow stereotype of the foul-mouthed Aussie larrakin bloke. Laugesen makes clear the distinction between swearing and slurs, and the importance of not ignoring the hurtful effects of the language people choose to use.
The book not only provides a good introduction or refresher on Australian history, but is also full of language and word facts, including the geographical origins of the word ‘bugger’, the 1960s etymology of Ocker in the name Oscar, and the very colourful language of outback outlaw Ned Kelly.
I read an uncorrected proof copy of Rooted, thanks to NewSouth Publishing.
This post is a collection of all the reviews and write ups of linguistics fiction and non-fiction that has appeared on Superlinguo over the years. I’ll add to this post whenever I write a new review.
I didn’t write a review of this because it’s weird to review a book where you pop up as a minor character in a chapter. I can promise the rest of the book is also excellent. Gretchen is one of the most compelling pop linguistics writers out there. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
This example-rich ten chapter volume from David Adger focuses on the unique syntactic capacity of human languages. I wish there were more linguistics professors bringing their A-game to a larger audience like this. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
If you did linguistics but never got to study Conversation Analysis, or
you want a whistlestop tour of some of the most interesting work to come
out of the field in the last couple of decades, this book is certainly
worth a visit. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
The history of swearing is a history of language and power and identity,
a perfect way to unpack the myth of what it means to be Australian. (Booshop.org affiliate link)
This book is designed as an introduction to conlanging, but can just as
easily be read as an introduction to linguistic analysis, or a refresher
if you’re heading back to university and want to polish up on your
linguistics vocab. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
Blake does a good job of wending his way though an impressive array of topics, explaining things clearly and providing often entertaining examples, but never dwelling too long on any one topic. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
Overall this book is a great read, suffused with both enthusiasm for the topic and a desire to not fudge things for the sake of a good anecdote. (Amazon affiliate link)
Bastard Tongues is part memoir, part linguistic adventure. Until as recently as the 1970s Creoles were dismissed as simple languages, arising from simple communicative needs. Bickerton very quickly shows that this is not the case. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
Netymology is a romp through the lexicon of the interwebs, with 100 short and snappy entries all focusing on one or two words, their meaning, etymology, origins and changing usage. (Amazon affiliate link)
If yours is the kind of family that gets a kick out of sitting around
guessing the punchlines to the jokes in Christmas crackers, then you’ll
get a great deal of entertainment in your post lunch stupor reading and
sharing informative gems from this volume. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
A Young Adult fantasy adventure, with a cracking pace and memorable characters. The book features the first few snippets of Aramteskan, a language I
created to be unlike any existing human language, which places smell at
the centre of people’s experience. Check out the Shadowscent hashtag on the blog for more news. (Book 1: Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link, Book 2: Amazon affiliate link)
There are two separate plots that explore linguistic relativity,
the first explores the consequences of humans learning languages of
aliens with radically different perceptions of reality. The second, and
really the core of the book, is the secret organisation of women who are
creating their own language to escape the tyranny of the male dominated
world. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
The pace is good, the universe isn’t too badly dated and even though
there’s a neat ending with regards to some of the plot, there are enough
unanswered questions for the reader to build their own conclusions. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
Even if you’ve not studied language or linguistics Mieville guides you
though the narrative turns with consummate skill that rarely feels too
heavy handed. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
The tale itself is a compelling one, but for a word nerd it’s got
another layer of intrigue as the Finnish language is a central focus of
the story. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
Stephenson goes right to the heart of some of the biggest debates in linguistics in the 20th century, although Hiro doesn’t seem that convinced by Universalism. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
Woven throughout the story are a
small number of examples of this ‘dialect’, and while I tried very hard
to behave and just enjoy reading the books, I couldn’t help but note
them all down. (Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
In a reality that is constantly being invaded by portals to other worlds, linguists are called in to deal with whoever and whatever comes through from the other side.
It’s one of the best fictional descriptions I’ve come across of the process to document and capture a language you don’t speak. (Short story collection: Bookshop.org affiliate link, Amazon affiliate link)
This book was first published in 2009, which makes it about as old as its most precocious readers. I somehow missed this book when I was doing my round up of language books for kids back in 2011, but thanks to Dr Vanja K for mentioning it in a Twitter thread.
I should actually have assumed that David Crystal had written a book for children. He is one of the most prolific authors on the topic of the English language and linguistics, and is not only incredibly sensible but also charming and engaging. Most of us would be lucky to write one book as clear and engaging, while David Crystal has written (checks his website)… over a hundred. (over a hundred?? No wonder I missed this one.)
This book has 40 short chapters of 3-4 pages, with many featuring a separate breakout with a related story or example. It begins with a baby learning to acquire sounds and grammar before whistle-stop tours through many areas of language from literacy, spelling, grammar, linguistic diversity, language change, dialects, names, literature and more. If you can only read a few chapters without your head exploding with facts and information then you’re doing better than me. This book covers far more topics than you get in a typical introduction to linguistics book, and never lags on a point.
There are a few chapters the book shows its age, mostly in the later sections touching on text speak and technology. Crystal comes across as a genial grandfatherly guide through language, but not unlike chatting with my own grandparents there are a few awkward intergenerational moments (are we still calling it ‘motherese’? making jokes about ‘the men in white coats‘? oh ok).
Other than these moments where the book is showing its age, it’s pretty much the best thing going for a keen middle grade reader. No need to wait another 5 years to discover linguistics at university.
So much exciting news for PM Freestone’s Shadowscent duology! Here’s an update on what’s been happening.
The Darkest Bloom translated into four languages and counting
The Darkest Bloom, the first book in the series is now available in German (with a beautiful new cover), French, Spanish and Russian, with Hungarian, Czech and Polish to come. I am very excited to see how Aramteskan words have been given grammatical gender and case markers across the different translations! I’m possibly even more excited to see how things got transliterated into Cyrillic for the Russian.
Crown of Smoke pre-orders for 2nd of April 2020
The Shadowscent story is wrapping up with book two Crown of Smoke out on the 2nd of April. US readers can order from the UK, as UK Scholastic will be handling all orders. It’s a fun and face-paced adventure with the future of the empire at stake and I’m looking forward to holding this beauty:
Map of Aramtesh from Virginia Allyn
Crown of Smoke readers will get to see Virginia Allyn‘s map of Aramtesh. This map featured in the US print of The Darkest Bloom (’Shadowscent’ in the US). It’s full of so much wonderful detail.
The Darkest Bloom… as a fragrance!
Finally, 4160 Tuesdays is a small perfume house in the UK and they have teamed up with P.M. Freestone to create The Darkest Bloom, a fragrance inspired by the world of Shadowscent. I’m beyond excited to smell this. This must be the first fantasy world with its own scent-based conlang, map and fragrance.
If you’re a regular reader of this blog then Gretchen McCulloch will
already be familiar to you as the other half of the Lingthusiasm. While
the podcast is something I do alongside an academic job, Gretchen is a
full-time pop linguist. She runs the blog All Things Linguistic, has a regular column with Wired and her book Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language is out on the 23rd of July. It’s particularly delightful to include Gretchen in the Linguistics Jobs
interview series because I started doing these after a chat with
Gretchen about how we need more stories about how people use their
linguistic skills in different jobs.
What did you study at university?
I
did my undergrad at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada
where I got a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) with a major in linguistics and
a minor in World Language Studies. I’d actually been planning on doing a
minor in French and was just filling my electives with other language
courses but then they rolled out the World Language Studies minor right
before my final year and I already had the right credits for it, so I
changed my minor on paper. I thought about this with great care at the
time, but the difference has never mattered.
I then did a Master of Arts in linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, where I still live. I started my blog, All Things Linguistic,
while I was in grad school, which was how I got started writing for a
general audience. The blog led to my current career more directly than
the schooling did, although I couldn’t have done either kind of writing
without the academic background. The socialization of grad school was
very useful as well: learning how to feel comfortable at an academic
conference and how to self-manage on a large research/writing project. I
also did a ton of public speaking as an extracurricular activity all
the way through, which has been incredibly helpful, both directly for
giving talks and also indirectly for media, teaching, and the podcast.
What is your job?
I
call myself an internet linguist because I analyze the language of the
internet, for the people of the internet. I think linguists have an
ethical responsibility to make our work useful to the communities that
we serve, and for me that generally looks like producing accessible
linguistics resources online and defending internet language in popular
media.
When I was writing and editing the
book, I had a daily to-do list with the same thing at the top every day:
work on the book! But in order to make such a massive task manageable, I
broke that down into both effort-based goals (checking off each
pomodoro of time spent) and results-based goals (such as rewriting a
particular section). Now that I’m working on multiple projects at once
rather than one enormous project, I’ve switched to weekly to-do lists: a
given week will generally contain a few things I need to do for the
book, a few things for the podcast, a few things for an article I’m
writing for Wired or a consulting project, some media calls or meetings,
and some general admin. (I also have a weekly section called “fun”
because that’s an important part of a healthy lifestyle!)
When
I’m home, I’m either working from my home office or from a coffeeshop,
and Twitter and Slack are kind of my “virtual water cooler” for when I
need a dose of social interaction. When I’m travelling, it’s generally
for a conference where I’m giving a talk and having conversations with
people for the entire day, which is pretty much the exact opposite and
then I have to make sure I get breaks away from people. I like to keep a
certain travel-to-home ratio – enough to keep things exciting without
being so much that I’m run off my feet.
How does your linguistics training help you in your job?
My
linguistics training is crucial! It’s becoming less and less common for
public commentators about language to have zero linguistics background
and I think this is a positive trend. I have the background to go
directly into academic papers and books in any subfield of linguistics,
and I have a deep network of linguists who I’ve seen give talks or
chatted with about their projects over the years – I never know when
something I vaguely heard about five years ago is going to turn out to
be relevant.
What I notice is, because I
have a linguistics background, I’m comfortable claiming certain things
about language on my own authority. When I quote another person in one
of my articles, it’s because that person has specific expertise – I
don’t need to find a secondary source to quote for basic background
information that any linguist would know or for analyses that draw on
general principles of linguistics. Indeed, I’m often a secondary source
that journalists without linguistics training go to for quotes. I also
see all my articles through a linguist lens, which means that I’m
inspired to write about topics that linguists know are interesting but
the average person doesn’t even realize might exist, and that I can
avoid perpetuating the same old myths and misconceptions that often show
up in language media.
What was the transition from university to work like for you?
How I got started in my job is somewhat unusual, so I actually ended up writing an extended blog post series about Weird Internet Careers.
Do you have any advice do you wish someone had given to you about linguistics/careers/university?
I
wish I’d known more about the breadth of writing styles that were
available. The only kind of journalism that I was taught about in school
was reporting, where a non-expert goes out with a notebook to interview
witnesses and writes an “inverted pyramid” style article about what
happened. I didn’t know about the “explainer” style of article, which
takes a deeper and less time-sensitive dive into why or how something
works, until much later, when I was basically already writing them. It
turns out that I have very little interest in reporting on current
events (and let’s face it, there isn’t a ton of language news), but I’m
always interested in the question of how and why language works, and
answering it in ways that are exciting for non-specialists keeps me
fired up about the big questions of our field.
In
retrospect, when I was first getting into linguistics, I was reading a
lot of science communication about linguistics, but I didn’t know that
this was the name for the genre or that you can get a whole degree in
SciComm (often a masters after doing a bachelors in a specific science).
And SciComm as a field is often more focussed on subjects like physics
or biology, so I’ve been using the word LingComm to draw attention to
linguistics communication as a subset of science communication. I’d
encourage anyone who might be interested in writing for a general
audience to follow journalists, editors, and scicommers on twitter to
get a sense of what that area can look like.
Any other thoughts or comments?
l also post linguistics job related information at allthingslinguistic.com/jobs,
including some interviews and advice posts on specific aspects of
explaining linguistics for the general public. In particular, I’d
recommend my post Linguistics + X, about finding interesting jobs at the intersection of linguistics and your other interests, and my series on how to do LingComm.
It’s really astonishing that human conversation happens at all. People respond to questions more quickly than they should be able to think of their answers, and our decisions about whether someone is being helpful or not can be based on millisecond differences in their responses.
Nick Enfield’s 2017 book How We Talk: The Inner Workings of Conversation summarises some of the key work he has undertaken on how conversation works, with colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The book situates this work in some of the key research from the field of Conversation Analysis in the last 50 years. Topics covered include looking at how silences of different lengths gets interpreted, how people repair their speech as they go along, and how ‘um’ in English has correlations in enough other languages that Enfield refers to it as a ‘universal’ word. All of this is framed throughout the book with the metaphor of the ‘conversation machine’, which is a delightful commercial model of the ‘interaction engine’ in Nick’s 2006 book with Stephen Levinson (which I found tremendously helpful back when I was conceptualising my PhD research).
There’s lots to like about this book, and the presentation of research. I particularly like the commitment to ensuring that it is not only the ol’ regulars like English that are included in analysis. You’ll get to learn about the differences in conversational features in languages like Lao (Laos), Murrinhpatha (Australia) and Siwu (Ghana) too - or perhaps more astoundingly, the similarities between them.
This book is a great example of how research can be presented in a clear way that is engaging for a non-expert reader. It’s for the quick-minded non-expert, who is ok with acquiring (or ignoring) a bit of jargon along the way, but if you want an exercise in good pop-science writing, sit down with one of these chapters and the original research on which it is based. I did hope the larger question of ‘why this work?’ would be answered; Enfield is diligent about making sure all of the researchers are given a research-area title, but it is intriguing to ponder why conversation intrigues psychologists, linguists and sociologists alike.
If you did linguistics but never got to study Conversation Analysis, or you want a whistlestop tour of some of the most interesting work to come out of the field in the last couple of decades, this book is certainly worth a visit.
[Thanks to Basic Books for the review copy. I also purchased a copy when Nick launched the book during the ALS conference in December because I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy.]
Jackal and Pheasant picture book in Syuba, Nepali and English
This book is an illustration of a story we recorded in Syuba called “Jackal and Pheasant”, as part of the documentation
of Syuba (Tibetic, Nepal). The illustrations were made by Jolene Tan
as part of an ongoing project at NTU Singapore lead by Joan Kelly to connect students in
the School of Art, Design and Media with people working on language
documentation.
This small project demonstrates how digital resources can be useful for making a variety of outputs. The story was originally told in Syuba, and then translated into Nepali and English. We made versions that are only English or Syuba, and then bilingual versions in Syuba/English and Syuba/Nepali. English speakers can purchase the mono- or bi-lingual versions, while Nepali speakers can also access the story, and Syuba speakers can read a copy only in Syuba, or also in another language.
We used slightly different formatting styles for the bilingual (above) and monolingual (below) versions. Thanks to Emily Gref for formatting the final books from Jolene’s images.
Whether you’re celebrating the Christmas holiday season, or the linguist conference season, here’s a list of great linguist-themed gifts to leave around people who might be likely to buy you things (those people can include you).
I’m even more excited about the seasonal gift guide this year, because we just launched a Lingthusiasm merch range!
Stories and
Songs from Kagate (illustrated picture book) [One of my students
made these beautiful illustrations with endangered language materials,
copies purchased help print more for Kagate speakers - my post]
ALT
