Like, Literally, Dude

Megan and Carrie talk with Dr Valerie Fridland about her new book, Like, Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English, how to pronounce Nevada, and all things language.

• Charles Boberg's article on 'foreign (a)'
• Words with no English equivalents

Chapters

• 14:00 Interview with Valerie Friedman

Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi and welcome to The Vocal Fries podcast. A podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Carrie Gillon: I'm Carrie Gillon.

Megan: And I'm Megan Figueroa, and hi.

Carrie: Hi.

Megan: You know, those articles that say eight words in German that don't have a translation in English. 

Carrie: Hey, I've noticed that they've stopped saying that.

Megan: Oh, how do they say it now? 

Carrie: Well, now they say, that are like difficult a translator or I can't remember, but it's like they've changed the wording into a more accurate statement and I am so happy because that used to be one of my biggest pet peeves.

Megan: Oh well, okay. This is perfect that you've noticed that because I saw someone share one of those things and maybe I just didn't see that slight change because I've been thinking about linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. AKA Sapir Whorf hypothesis. Which we've talked about, I think before, but the idea that the strong version, linguistic determinism means that language determines cognition. The languages that a person has reflects their cognitive ability basically or what they conceptualize.

Carrie: Not reflects, determines.

Megan: Determines, yes. Sorry, yes, absolutely.

Carrie: Because reflects would actually be closer to real, right?

Megan: Right. So maybe that's more or less linguistic relativity, right? Would you say that?

Carrie: I don't know. I mean, there's a strong Sapir Whorf or strong linguistic, relativity and a weak Sapir Whorf or a weak linguistic relativity. And yeah, I guess a weaker one would be closer to saying reflects, but I just feel like reflects... If you have these categories in your head, then your language could reflect that. Right?

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: I don't know that just doesn't feel as wrong as determines.

Megan: So the reason I bring it up is because I just read this book by Rebecca Solnit, Orwell's roses. So I'm thinking about 1984 in Newspeak and so I was wondering if... 1984 is linguistic determinism, right? And Newspeak is linguistic determinism. People can't complain about what the state is doing if  the only language they have is Newspeak. And since the language, they have determines our cognition, they don't know that they have it bad, basically. So I was thinking, I wonder if he basically was poking fun at Sapir Whorf, at that idea or if he believed that.

Carrie: I think he believed it.

Meghan: Do you? That's the question. I was having.

Carrie: Okay. I'd have to reread it. I haven't read it since I was a teenager because it was one of the things you had to read in high school. So I haven't read it as an adult. But as I understand it, he's making the claim that you can't escape your [inaudible] patterns, if you have Newspeak.

Megan: Right, and yeah, absolutely. But I wonder if George Orwell, outside of the page believed that. That that's...

Carrie: Well, I mean, how would you write that novel, if you didn't believe that they could work that way?

Megan: I don't know. I think a linguist right now could do it as social commentary.

Carrie: Wouldn't a linguist write it differently, though?

Megan: Yeah, you're right.

Carrie: Because it wouldn't have the effect that we think it would, or that it wouldn't have the effect it does in the novel.

Megan: I want to talk about this because I was thinking about how, I bet there are so many people that listen to our podcast are just avid readers. So if anyone has any idea, any thoughts about 1984 or Newspeak, or just this idea. I would love to hear them. But I've just been thinking about this, for the past week because, again, I'm glad that you notice that the headlines are changing or it's like difficult to translate, but I still see these listicles, like, once a week, at least.

Megan: Really? Wow.

Carrie: Yeah. 

Megan: It's interesting because the last three or four that I've seen from legitimate outlets, have been better worded.

Carrie: Mental Floss, I think, is really good about it because they have language people. 

Megan: Yeah, I'm talking about, like, CBC, BBC, I can't remember. They're the major media outlets of different countries.

Carrie: Well, I wonder just the idea that there's still doing these things, even if they've changed the headline. Is it still playing into the whole idea?

Megan: Well, the ones that I've seen recently, because they've reframed them as 'hey, here's some interesting things that you can say in these other languages.' It's less deterministic. Just the way that is worded, everything about it, all the framing is just not as... It's just more like, isn't this cool? Isn't language cool? Which I heartily endorse. 

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. I agree.

Carrie: But the old ones or the ones that maybe still exist, but are just like, I haven't seen them recently. They drive me crazy because, yeah, it does sort of feel like if you don't have a word for something, that means that you're lacking, some kind of cognate cognitive ability. And it's just like, "No do you understand the concept, if I explain it to you? Yes. Because you'd give it a label if you wanted to? Yes. The end. 

Megan: Exactly. Well, I was thinking about this too because one of the biggest language myth and racist myth is the idea that the Inuit have so many words for snow.

Carrie: I don't know if I would call it racist, exactly, but...

Megan: [inaudible] idea that they have less cognitive ability.

Carrie: No, there's no suggestion of that. It's more that they need more words for snow because they're surrounded by it. That's more contextual, rather than racist, to me. It's wrong. Or, it's super right, depending on how you look at Inuit. So, the Inuit languages or dialects are varieties, there are basically three or four bases, like roots, that refer to snow. And then you can build an infinite number of words. But just because of the way that the morphology of the language works, thousands of words based on these three or four roots.

Megan: And that's a language structure thing, not a brain morphology thing. It's a language morphology thing. So I was thinking about this. So you said, if you explain something to someone, they'll understand the concept, right? I have lived in the Sonoran Desert. I grew up in Phoenix. Snow was not a concept that I was really thinking about or caring about, until it came up, right? It doesn't mean that as a kid, even, that I didn't have the ability to understand concept. It was just that it didn't come up. The context is so important. So I just Googled through news, "words difficult to translate in English," and there's one right here, February 21. Words in other language with no English equivalents.

Carrie: See, that's good. 

Megan: You like that?

Carrie: That is accurate. There is no English equivalent, because that just means a one-to-one translation. Correct. But they used to say untranslatable, and I was like, no you can translate it. It's just that there is no one-to-one equivalent.

Megan: But I just wonder if we've been integrated[?] with those untranslatable things for so long, that some people are just going to see this as the same thing.

Carrie: Oh, probably. The only reason why I'm sensitive to it, is because it's bothered me for so long and now that they're switching... Because, I think that's the first one I noticed where I was like, "Oh, yeah look at them."

Megan: Well, this one says, these terms define universal feelings, yet cannot be universally translated.

Carrie: Universally translated, I don't like that, but I guess it depends what you mean by universally translated.

Megan: Here we go. Words in any language are usually a reflection of the local culture, they reflect emotions that are valued or experienced within that culture on a regular basis. 

Carrie: Correct, true.

Megan: Yeah, it's just context, context, context. It doesn't mean that you are lacking in cognitive ability. I've been really thinking about that. 

Carrie: So here is here's an example that exists in English. So, if you're living in a snowy place, potentially, all the different kinds of snow would matter. So maybe you do want a lot of words for it. Even though, as I explained, it's not quite the system in any way, it just not quite map on like that, but, whatever. It's possible. In English, how many names of dog breeds do we have? So many, I don't know them all because I'm not a dog person. I know a lot of them, though. Against my will, I've had to learn so many of them, but anyways, some people know every single dog breed name. And some people only know a handful because they don't really care. 

Megan: I'm thinking about Best in Show, right now.

Carrie: Exactly. So, it's not that it's wrong. We do have these kinds of things that happen. So, that's why I'm like, even though the snow myth is a myth, it's not inherently a bad thing to assume that a culture would do or a language would do. Because we do it English.

Megan: Well, I wonder if people assume that over here in Tucson, we have so many different words for dirt or something. 

Carrie: There are lots of words for dirt, in English, right? Loam[?]…

Megan: Soil.

Carrie …soil, there's probably a lot more than I can think of and same with snow too, actually. Sleet, hail, graupel, powder. 

Megan: Well, isn't it helpful to have the word for sleet, if you're talking about, be careful, when you're driving.

Carrie: Yeah, also, it's kind of miserable when you're walking in it so, anyway...

Megan: Yeah, I have one more example that I think a lot of people will resonate is schadenfreude. I think a lot of us have heard that example, that's always been on one of those lists, right? Is that how you pronounce it?

Carrie: Schadenfreude or schadenfreude, I guess. And that doesn't make any sense anymore because we adopted it, we borrowed it. It's an English word now. 

Megan: Yeah, exactly.

Carrie: But at the time, before we borrowed it, it was this concept that we fully understand, but we just didn't have a word for it in English.

Megan: It took us a sentence to say it, instead of a word, right? But that's okay, what does it matter?

Carrie: Well, efficiency. We like to be efficient, I think.

Megan: We do.

Carrie: Maybe not all of us, but that is something we think is cool, right? Being able to say things in the smallest amount, I think, is this fun thing we like to challenge ourselves with. And so that's why we want a word versus a phrase or a sentence. 

Megan: And isn't that the greatest example of how, of course, we understand the concepts, is that we borrow these words because we're like, we have this concept, we'd like this word for it.

Carrie: Or we may not have had the concept, but now that we know it exists, we need the word. So we're just going to borrow the word. 

Megan: Yeah, when one derives pleasure, draws[?] self satisfaction from learning about or witnessing to troubles, failures or humiliations of others. I mean, isn't that sadism?

Carrie: No, it's not sadism. Sadism is like, you hurt someone on purpose to get pleasure out of their pain. Schadenfreude is just more like, oh that person is in pain due to their own fuckery, ha-ha-ha. It's not, sadistic.

Megan: What's the other one? The other is...

Carrie: Masochism?

Megan: Masochism. Oh no. It's when you're, never mind. Okay, we did not have a schadenfreude word. I'm thinking now those don't work. But, yeah, I feel this all the time. 

Carrie: I don't like it about myself, but I do too.

Megan: Oh yeah, I love when I see people that I can tell feel entitled to things. Mostly white dudes, I'm like, that's what you get dude. I guess I don't really love it about myself, but I'm also like, yeah. But anyway...

Carrie: Sometimes we're petty bitches and it's okay [inaudible]

Megan: Petty bitches, salty fries. We're human.

Carrie: We're humans, we're allowed to be flawed.

Megan: Well, I guess people will probably want to listen to her interview but I love chatting with you about this, obviously. This is what we would do over happy hour if we're still in same town, right?

Carrie: It's true. So, today's episode, we talk about...

Megan: A little bit of everything, kind of?

Carrie: A little bit of everything, yeah, so enjoy.

Megan: We're so excited today to have fellow linguist, Dr. Valerie Friedland on the show to talk about her new book. Dr. Friedland, is a professor in the department of English, at the University of Nevada in Reno. She has a PHD in linguistics and is an expert on the relationship between language and society. So, Valerie is used to coming on podcasts. She's a public facing linguist and often speaks and writes widely for a popular audience, and she has a language blog, Language in the Wild, which appears in Psychology Today. Her book, is her first book for a popular audience, literally dude arguing for the good and bad English. We're so excited to have you. Thank you for coming. 

Valerie Friedman: Thanks, I'm truly excited to be here. I'm happy to talk to other languages. It's always so much fun. Thank you for letting me come talk to you.

Megan: Before we started recording, you mentioned that people. Mispronounce Nevada. Will you talk to us a little bit about that, because I know you also wrote about it. Or, you are interviewed about it?

Valerie: I like to joke that that's my claim to fame. I've re-lived that 15 minutes, several times. Every time someone high profile comes to Nevada and says Nevada, I get tapped to do some talking about the state name. But it's a really interesting thing because, it's typically Western people that know how to pronounce Nevada, like Nevadans do it. I grew up in the East and there we said, Nevada. I'm probably going to be given a lot of death stares in my home state, now, since I let that come out of my mouth. But I have learned, actually, the day I came for my interview, at University of Nevada, they warned me that it would be a deal-breaker if I couldn't figure out how to say the name really fast, and so I did. And from that day forward, I have always said, Nevada, but I've had a lot of interviews where people have said, Nevada and I don't tar and feather them or anything like that. Instead, I simply give them a lesson on the way Nevadans like to pronounce their name and I think it's a great lesson. Not just about having respect for people who are living that experience and them being able to name what they want for their state name, but also just a lesson in the fact that we have differences. And they're really, historically driven and they're often driven just from the weird little quirks of language, and it's an awesome point to have a conversation about. So, no one needs to get mad about anybody saying, Nevada, but it's a great teachable moment, as I used to say to my kids.

Megan: Well, and it's kind of a low stakes example of this, because a more high stakes example would be like someone's last name. It's very important that we, at least, try to get people's names correct. When it comes to people's names, that's something that is very important to respect.

Valerie: Right, they're very personal. It's a very personal attribute, your personal name, but also the name of the place you live, because it's part of your social identity and I think that's where it gets tricky. When I hear someone saying, Nevada, it doesn't really bother me, but I take it as an opportunity to tell them, "Oh, in Nevada, if you actually go there people prefer that you say, Nevada." It's a fascinating history because I don't know if you know Charles Boberg, who's a linguist at McGill University. He did a study, and it's very little known study and it's such a great study. I'll have to find the exact title, but it was basically on loan words with the vowel that's written as, A, in English. That, historically, A words, words with A, usually have one of three vowels and its really idiosyncratic to some degree. Although it does depend a little bit on time period, which vowel it uses. So there's the, a, vowel, the, a, vowel and the other, a, vowel, which I'm a merger. So the, a, and the, oa. So those are the three vowels. We're going to have a lot of fun today, trying to talk about vowels.

Those are the three vowels that get picked up for anything written with, A. So, if it was prior, I think I have to reread the article to be absolutely sure. But I'm pretty sure if it was before the 15th century, it tended to get brought in as an, a. If it was after the 15th century, it tended to be an, a, and this differed depending on if it was Canadian or American English. Which is why Canadians say, pasta and Americans say, pasta because of the [crosstalk] [inaudible] of this word. So Nevada is the same thing, I think.

Megan: The first time I heard you say, pasta, I think we were at Casey Moors in Tempe and I was like, what is that? Again, it's not making fun of Carrie. I wasn't in that moment in front of her, I was just like, I've never heard that. I don't spend a lot of time with Canadians, I guess, or at least before Carrie. So here's a moment for a tiny mini lesson. I like to always point out that writing is like a social construct, an artificial thing or language and language development is organic. So, just this example of an orthographic in writing, A, representing different sounds. I mean, literacy, reading and learning to read is very hard, and this is one of the reasons why. We're trying to put something like speech into writing and people talk differently, pronounce things differently. 

Carrie: Well, and the borrowing process, it complicates things because it's a vowel we don't have in English and so we have to choose from the inventory we have, so we could go forward or we could go back and our mouths and... Anyway, I found the article.

Valerie: Oh, perfect.

Carrie: It's in the chat, if you want to look.

Valerie: It's a fun article, definitely. You don't hear us discuss that often, but those words come up a lot, words that have an A. So tomato, tomato, is another perfect example of that vase, vase. I loved that article because it really does a great job of explaining how we end up with these weird different layers of the way we say sounds. But, just to that idea, of that the spelling being so distinct and really hard to represent speech sounds. I have two kids, and I remember when they were in kindergarten and first grade, and they were learning words. They had those spelling lists every Friday, which were pretty much the bane of my existence. 

Megan: That's so iconic. I had those too. Do you remember them as a child?

Valerie: I think I do. I kind of blocked it out, I think. But I re-lived the experience with them because then you're like, oh my God, English spelling is so stupid. 

Carrie: Yeah, it's awful. It's so terrible.

Valerie: I really feel for kids, my own kids and everybody else because we don't at all teach children why the words are so wacky and their spelling. We just are like, "Okay I know, meat and meet sound the same and they're spelled differently, but just learn it." And there's no rhyme or reason, but we could provide a little better explanation. But yes, I do remember their spelling words and I do feel like I remember vaguely having them. They might have been among the spelling words, though. 

Megan: It's hard to represent human language and human language variation. 

Valerie: Absolutely, and you know it's pretty recent. Literacy is surprisingly recent, the widespread literacy we have today. And even schools, actually, in some of my work when I was looking at archival Western speech, we tried to find speakers that were recorded in the early 1900's, that had been born in the 1800's, to try to get back to what the old western dialect was like. One of our speakers that we ended up finding a recording, he was born in, I think, 1869. His father was actually the founder of the public school system in the state of California. So we're talking about schooling, not even being that old, where that kind of thing that... At that point, really, literacy wasn't very prevalent and it's not till we have these generations of kids in school, that became widespread or even something that people aspire to. So, I think we forget how really young prescriptivism, in general, and spelling and writing, as part of what we're supposed to know, being quite recent.

Megan: I appreciate you saying that, just because I happen to get this 1930 copy of Sonora, Mexico census, that my grandfather is in and at 22, and it said that he couldn't read or write, at 22. I don't think that's uncommon or was uncommon.

Valerie: Not at that era. 

Megan: That was my grandfather, and my dad removed away from me that literacy was a lot different or the idea of literacy. You and Carrie, both, have taught in English departments have or have been part of English departments as a linguist. Do you have to do a lot of myth-busting? Because English departments tend to be full of, say, undergraduates, who are really proud of the fact that their grammar skills are good, so-called grammar skills. Are grammar nerds and all this.

Valerie: That's a great question. I have found that my experience in English Department has been wonderful. I think part of it is because of where I teach, a lot of our students are first generation and so they come with different myths, I think. A lot of them are not so much about what's right, but worries about their own correctness. And that's what I've battled more, the insecurities that a lot of them come to class with. A lot of them come to class with insecurities based on them not having a background of parents that have gone to college. I have had a lot of students that have come with myths about who they were, as first generation speakers of English, as well. So I found that to be the harder part. Getting people to believe in themselves and getting them to believe that they know what they know and they know enough, rather than that they come with these really prescriptive notions. 

Now, I did have a student and I love this student, we're still very, very close friends, but she took my class. So it depends on which class you're talking about too, in those Notions. She took my sociolinguistics class and she said, after the end of semester, "I just want you to know, I was a real prescriptivists asshole, before I met you." I felt like I had done my job, but she said, she used to actually buy people grammar guides for Christmas, if she felt like they needed it. I took that as a win. But, generally, no, I found both my colleagues and my students to be pretty engaged and interested in linguistics. I think a lot of it is because it required to take general linguistics before they can take classes like sociolinguistics. So, before we get into how language very socially and how that's completely acceptable, and these are norms, just different norms than you have, not incorrect or bad norms. They've had to have what language structure is, how sound works. And I always incorporate some fun sounds in your life and morphosyntax in your life, so that they've learned about Linguistics, from a science perspective. By the time they make it into the Linguistics, from a social perspective, I think they know better than to bring those prescriptivists views in with them. I can't remember any experience I've had, that has been negative in that way.

Megan: Carrie, ASU, being such a huge public university, it had to be a little bit different, right? I mean, I also grew up in that apartment and got my degree, technically, my first degree is a Bachelor of Arts in English (Linguistics), because that's how they did it at ASU. 

Carrie: Yeah, I think most of the undergrads were at least open to the ideas that I was telling them about language. There was like, one or two, who are really hard cases, who are just really firmly believing in their prescriptivism. But it was actually the grad students that were the more problematic because a lot of them were in the TESOL program, which is specifically teaching you, how to teach English correctly. 

Valerie: Right, we didn't have a TESOL program, actually, in our department, it was in the education department. So, I can see how that would have worked, for sure. I will say though, what I do find is in their their papers, now that chat GPT is going to write them, I don't know if they'll have that same [inaudible] in their papers. I would also often find them accidentally slipping into prescriptivists language, though. Where they have these attitudes that come out in their papers, but I think just unknowingly, rather than fighting with me on it.

Carrie: Yeah, that's true. Actually, the worst stuff came out during, either papers or the final exam, when I would ask really pointed questions about certain things. And then I was like, oh, I guess my propaganda didn't seep in and we're stuck with the old propaganda.

Valerie: Well, I'll sit there and think, did you not listen to anything I said? When I read those papers. I really remember saying this, but okay.

Carrie: Yeah, I would often get the exact opposite thing than I had actually said, and I was like, how are they misinterpreting it, exactly opposite?

Valerie: Exactly, yes. Oh, the joys, but I actually haven't been teaching this year because I've been on a NEH Fellowship, for writing and finishing the book. And I'm going back in the fall, I probably would deny this publicly, but I miss it and I'm excited to have the students back in my in my life. 

Carrie: Okay, so why did you decide to write this book and why now?

Valerie: Well, I think, why now is, it's sort of my pandemic baby. I think a lot of us changed course a little bit, during the pandemic and did things a little differently. So that was the timing of it really, but this was an idea, I'd had percolating for years, because as you probably know, just from my background, I've mainly been an academic research linguist. I've done a lot of research that has been from the National Science Foundation, funded angle and no one wants to read that stuff. My last book was called Socio-Phonetics. Doesn't that make you want to run out and go get it? Personally, it was a great book. I would suggest you go get it, but for people that are not in linguistics, it really [inaudible] read it. 

Megan: Well, I'm in linguistics, phonetics scares me.

Valerie: I will send you a copy. I think this one, we baby step because it's really written for people not in phonetics, so I'll send you a copy. Just pop me your address after the podcast. But I think the thing is, over the years, since I got tapped to do a Great Courses lecture series, years ago, I have been asked to do a lot of public facing talks. At first, I thought well, I don't really have researched the works for that, but then, I would go give talks about vowels, for example. Regional vowels or regional speech, which was what I worked on a lot and I would try to make it interesting from a public facing perspective. So I talked a lot about speaker groups and how variational language changes over time and it would really interest people and they would all come up afterwards and they would tell me how awesome it was and they had never thought about language that way. And then they'd say, but could you tell people to stop saying, like. Because it really irritates me or, okay, that's great, but I hate it when people use literally, non literally. Why do people do that? 

What I realized is, I was actually giving them the tools to answer those questions, but in such a roundabout way, they couldn't make that connection. So all the lessons I was trying to get out, about how language changes over time, who drives language change over time. Why we change language over time, what kinds of voids, socially and linguistically language change arises to fill, was in the talk I gave. But what I hadn't done is made it relatable to everyday speech. And these were really the legitimate questions and I realized as a linguist, an academic linguist, I had shunned folk Linguistics, as being not really knowledgeable about language. But everyday, people know a lot about language, but they just have one perspective on it and I know a lot about language from a different perspective and I thought, what if we try to combine those? Where we took the things that people know about language every day and then combine those with explanations in history, from the things that I know every day. And we could really come up with a solution to the question of why people do X and why we hate it when people do X. 

So this was just a percolating backroom pressure, one of those things I put in the back of my mind thinking, oh, that'd be fun to do someday. That someday never probably coming and I was doing research, at the time, with a lot of field work and then the pandemic hit and I was on sabbatical, actually, that year, to do field work and of course, that one out the window. So I thought, maybe this is the time, I'll just write this up. Never knowing what that actually meant, going from being academic research, linguist to being a public facing linguist with an agent and book deal and things like that. So it was a little more of a process than I had anticipated starting out, but I basically wrote up a proposal, listing all the things people ask me about. So I thought, well let me go at it from the angle of why do we like and what [crosstalk] literally, non literally, means and what dude means.

Carrie: "Why do we like," I love that.

Valerie: Why do we like, right? And so I'll just break that down, use that as the entry point, so that people understand how those things are not just idiosyncratic behaviors we have, they're actually tied to these really large, important processes about language. And then it just came together and here I am, three years later, sitting here with the book, done.

Megan: It's a huge accomplishment. I feel like every linguist has had a point where they realized Linguistics was for them and in your introduction, you talked about how you got to Linguistics. Will you share that with us here? 

Valerie: Oh, sure. Well, and it's a funny story because I think if you had told my 10-year-old self that I was going to be a sociolinguist, I don't know that I would have taken it well. It's not the thing you grow up dreaming about being, although I've been very happy to have been it, now that I live it. My parents were actually non-native speakers. So, I'm the first natural-born American in my family and my parents had come here from various different things. My father is actually a holocaust survivor and came from Belgium and my mother is French Canadian. When they moved here, I think it was six months before I was born. And they moved to the South, which was a different place, especially back in the day when I was born. Which I will not mention how long ago, but it was long enough. Let's just say that. 

I really noticed how people reacted to their accents, growing up. That was something that was really salient to me and not just to their accents, but to the things I said from their accent. So, the pieces of first-generation native speaker transference on certain sounds that they made, certain words that they used and people didn't think it was cute. People laughed at me or made fun of me or mocked me and that was really painful at that age. So it really engaged my interest in language. I think it made me wonder about the social aspects of language. Why is it that my parents are treated so differently because they're not native speakers of English? I mean, they were French speakers, so they didn't get the same kind of discriminatory behaviors that people from different language groups can get when they come here. So my parents were held as the exotic, sophisticated creatures. But, five-year-olds, don't know that. So I wasn't exotic or sophisticated as a sort of influenced child. 

Basically, what I thought is, I want to study languages because my parents are so worldly. My father spoke several languages, having grown up mainly in Israel, so he also spoke French and Yiddish and Hebrew. So I thought, well, I want to study languages. I want to travel, I don't want to stay in the South, I want to travel. That was my big goal as a ten-year-old, travel. So I decided to sign up to be a Chinese major at Georgetown, which is the school I went to. Mainly because I thought it sounded cool, right? Who wants to be a Spanish or French major? Everybody does that. I'm going to be a Chinese major, without thinking how my Southern accent, which was more apparent at the time, was going to interfere with the tone system. So I thought I was doing great in Chinese class and my drill, they called them the Drill Masters. My Drill Master did not share that attitude and he actually took me aside one day and said, "I appreciate your effort, but you sound like you sing Chinese Opera?."

Carrie: Is that an insult?

Valerie: I think that's how he intended it. I thought, well, maybe there's a new career here I hadn't thought about. But, yes, I think he meant it, like, give it up babe, you're never going to do this. What happened, is, I had a very Southern intonation pattern, and with the tone system, my intonation pattern and the tone system, didn't really get along in such a way, that it flowed. So, I think what would happen is, I'd be raising and lowering my voice as an intonation pattern and it was interfering with the tonal system. And it made me sound like I was singing Chinese Opera. So, that made me rethink that as a career choice and I ended up taking a Linguistics class, which was required. I won't lie, I didn't take it just by choice, but I ended up in a linguistics class and it was covering language and gender and I just all of a sudden had my eyes opened to all these things I had noticed about language. Especially talking to boys, I think, was really what was driving it at that age. I had noticed these ways, I didn't feel like we communicated right or I felt not listen to a lot of times or just, I don't know. Those senses you get, as a young person, when people dismiss your speech or you're not communicating the same way and all of a sudden there was a reason for it. There was a linguistic, sound scientific explanation of the way I felt. And it was really earth-shattering to me. Totally changed my view about language and I took as many linguistic courses after that, as I could. And that is what set me on this path to end up going to get a Linguistics degree. 

Carrie: That's really cool story. I love that there was a Chinese opera. 

Valerie: Yes, I knew I had to have you recount it for us. I think it worked out okay for me. Although, I would say that hurt my feelings back in the day. 

Carrie: I understand that it is an insult, but also, I'm like, but Opera, isn't that a high [inaudible]

Valerie: It was actually a lovely insult, I think. I feel like he could have said, "You suck, just give it up," but instead, he did it in this really lovely way. So, I thank you.

Carrie: There are so many, I think, pieces, on what's causing the downfall of society. Why do you think that language is usually pointed to, as one of the culprits?

Valerie: I think, a lot of that has to do with intergenerational differences, that become very apparent. A lot of it is that we see these divides. Language changes occur, whenever there are social fractures, essentially and social fractures can be space. So regional differences or differences across different land masses and oceans, but more often, it's culture, it's gender, it's ethnicity. It's a million different things, but also age. So, I think when we look at young speakers, particularly, and we notice how different they speak than we do, we see that as degradation, not evolution. And we only see this one cultural moment, we live in and these cultural moments we live in, say that one thing is right and the rest of things are wrong. And that's been ingrained into us since probably even preschool, when parents tell us, it's not him and I. That it's he and I. When they're teaching us these rules about structures that are really politeness, they're about manners. The way we think we should talk, but they are misconstrued and misinterpreted and mistaught as die hard rules that you can't break. And that sets us up to see anything that varies from it, as bad and wrong. And then, particularly, with young speakers who go out of their way to do things that are non conformist or slightly rebellious or different, then we really notice it, I think. Or if it's a group that we tend to have stereotypes about, it's really easy to then assign them into that category of bad language that we've learned since the time we've been little exists. So I think it's a matter of just generational divides and social divides. But I also think it's a matter of the way that we teach children about language. 

Megan: So I wanted to mention double modals too, because that's associated with some Southern dialects and my mom has double modals, but I got that from her too. I can seem like that works with me, but if people were judging me, based on how I speak, it might be weird that I have double modals.

Valerie: Well, only because I think you don't have a Southern accent, we so strongly associate that. But I grew up with double modals and I actually think they're incredibly useful. I love a double a modal, I use it. I think it's a nuance, we lack in Standard English. But, actually, if you look at the history of double modals, they seem to be Scots-Irish. So they are actually are a pretty old form that probably just got returned[?]. They were probably much more widespread, across the early colonies, but ended up getting slowly atrophied, so that they only became a southern feature. I grew up in the South. Now, I think when you have parents that are non-native speakers, it does sometimes orient you a little differently towards peer group influence. I was never as strongly Southern sounding, as some of my friends, when I was growing up, who had parents that were from the South. But I definitely had a Southern accent, which ended up, of course, derailing my career plans in college. 

When I moved to Michigan, to get my doctorate, I called people honey, and I said, "y'all", and what I found was people reacted to me so strangely and it misconstrued it, a lot of times as overly intimate. And what I realized, I tempered that in my speech because you learn quickly that it's not rewarded in other speaking context. In the South, I had used it all the time. No one ever said, "It's just totally normal." But once I moved out of the South, I think, like everybody else's experience, who has left the South, they then get called out for the stereotypes that we have about the South, by their speech. And that's unfortunate that we do that because I think I actually love many aspects of Southern speech. I think "y'all," is a beautiful way to solve pronominal problems.

Megan: Can we talk about "thou" and "y'all" and how "y'all" is filling a spot that's much-needed.

Valerie: Yes, English pronouns are amazing. They're so fun. They have such an amazing history and I could talk for hours on that one, but I'm going to try to restrain myself and just talk about thou and you. So, if people don't know the history between the 13th and 17th century, the second person pronominal system of English drastically changed, based on, basically, massive changes social culturally that were happening in Britain at the time. First we had Norman-French, that got brought over with William the Conqueror in 1066. Well, that introduced something called, Power semantics, which meant that we had to really pay attention to status and we wanted to show linguistic respect to authority. So, instead of the older pronominal system, second person pronominal system, which had been thou/thee, for singular subject-object. With thou being subject and thee being object and ye/you, with ye being plural subjects, and you being plural objects. That was really the distinction between them. 

We then around the 13th century, started using ye and you for status, for recognizing status and authority and thou/thee, was intimacy and close relationships or for people lower in status than you were. This was a big shift because it really hadn't been used in that way. But what you'd do is basically, if you had a parent that was talking to you [inaudible] because you were showing respect for authority. Parents would say, thee or thou, to their children. Same thing, to servants, or other people that you didn't think were your equals. But around we get to around 1500. Things started changing and by the early modern period, egalitarians beliefs had really started to take over, where there was more chance for upward mobility. There was a breakdown of the traditional class structure, that had been really rigid up to that point. So it became dangerous to thou somebody and in fact, in Shakespeare, I think it's in Twelfth Night, there's a character that says, "If thou thou'st him some thrice, it shall not be a myth." Which essentially means, thou that asshole. Right? 

Megan: That's awesome. 

Valerie: It means, insult him by calling him Val three times and then we'll see how this all works out. So the idea there is, it had started to be a signal of calling someone out is being, you're socially inferior. And now, in this time when you really couldn't know who was above you and who was below you, in social hierarchy anymore, you were going to be in trouble if you thou the wrong person, because it would be taken as an insult. So that's where we started to get rid of thou and thee. Because it became a marker of thinking someone was lowly and you didn't want to take that risk, so if you were going to meet someone, you would 'you' them just to be safe. Or  you would 'ye' them to be safe. Now, the really interesting twist comes with the people that were standing against that, were the grammarians, which was a fledgling thing. Grammar, in the sense that we think about it today, and grammarian angst, really didn't start till about the 1700s.

What happened is the early grammarians started to say, "Well, this is not correct, we need to go back to thou and thee and restore the proper pronoun paradigm. But also, the Quakers, found it to be against their code of plain speech, which meant that all humans were equal. There was no status, because it was between you and God, not between you and others, and thou, was the symbol of humility. So, by shifting to you and ye, we're actually going against the God. There was both this grammarian angst, and religious angst around this shift, which I think is really interesting when you consider, what kind of angst we have today. There's this conservative religious backlash against non-binary, they. And then there's also this grammarian angst about subject-verb agreement. The real lesson we can get is, not only did 'you' start to be used with all people, and thou and thee fell by the wayside, but ye was actually the, if we're going to say, correct, the correct subject pronoun, and 'you' would have been the object pronoun. And do we ever ye people today? Well, not unless you're Kanye West, right? It might be, ye, in that context. 

Generally speaking, we say, you. We say, you, for subjects, we say, you, for objects. And the reason that we probably just adopted, you, for both, much like we say, him and and I, now for subjects, is because think about you and ye in fast speech. If you say, "Ye hear ya, ya hear ya," right? You see how that can change from, ye hear you, to you hear ya, to ya hear ya. So it probably just became confusing. at the time, because of fast speech, they fell together, which we do all the time when we talk. But also, at that time, we didn't have do support, where you stick a 'do' in for questions. So if you said, "Do you know that?" It would be knowest thou or knowest ye that. But who keeps up with where the subject and object is, when you do that kind of verb raising? Nobody, right. So now you have the ye, after the know, where it should be a you. So it's really super confusing. So why not just get rid of all of it and say, you, all the time?

 If I were a grammar Maven, I wouldn't like it any of it, but it went through anyway. We did it anyway, and now all of us, you, and to make matters worse not only do we, you, in singular and plural, not only do we, you, in subject and object, we also, you, to everyone with a plural verb. But has anybody dropped dead? Has lightning struck any of us? Have we stopped functioning as a society because of it? No. It's just a great lesson that pronouns have shifted all through time. They've shifted in ways that we don't like and yet it becomes the norm and we have no problems with it. But the problem we do have with it, is because we use, you, for singular and, you, plural and we like to be specific sometimes. We don't have a way to refer now, to separate you, singular and you, plural. So we have to come up with inventive ways to do it, which is why you guys, for example, has become so prevalent, it mainstream speech. But, you all, is another wonderful form and in fact, also, a Scots-Irish form and that seems to have gotten shortened to "y'all", which was a beautiful solution to the lack of a true second person, plural pronoun. So, all of its related to Shakespeare, somewhere down the line, right?

Megan: Yeah, I've picked up "y'all", [inaudible] [crosstalk]

Valerie: I think that it's become widespread, I actually think it reaches far outside the South now. I hear a lot of people say, "y'all"

Megan: It does, yeah.

Valerie: Because it's so handy. There are other ways people say, you all, you guys, yous, yans[?], yens. There are tons of different ways. Obviously, it's a need and I think that's one message that I try to get in the book, is language constantly has things that we need, as speakers, that it doesn't have and we create ways to do it. And "y'all" is a great example of how we have taken a void in the language and filled it in such really fabulous ways. And "y'all" is probably the best example of what the perfect plural pronoun should be. 

Megan: What kind of resistance have you faced as a public face in linguistics, as we do, when we try to explain that there's nothing wrong with vocal fry? And how is it related to misogyny?

Valerie: Well, I think is so fascinating because if we look at the history of women's talk, it's always one thing or another and the thing doesn't matter. The process is what's important. And vocal fry is just the last, on the long list of things that women have done that don't like and generally, they get called out for it. The fascinating thing about vocal fry is if you look at the literature, men have actually been studied for fry, much longer than women. And most of the studies in the '80s, for example, pointed out that men fried more but it was never caught. We don't hear things written up in magazines about the vocal fry epidemic, ruining men's job prospects. It's just one of those problems that we have, that we police women's voices more. We historically have always done this. This goes back to the times of Aristotle, who valued and wrote about the silent woman. And in Antiquity women's women's voices were not allowed in public spheres. 

You could lobby your husband, or you could lobby a male member of your family to go and speak for you, but if you did it yourself, you were disparaged. And then this gets picked up in the medieval period, where women were charged with, in the late medieval period, with sins of the tongue at a rate of almost 80% to 90% more than men. So, essentially, it was a exclusively a female crime and the men that were charged with sins of the tongue, were then accused of being womanly, and that was the biggest problem for them. So we have always pleased women's voices more because of the danger when they are out of the domestic sphere, that they pose, I think. The other problem is, not so much that it's intentional always. I think, obviously, charging someone with  sins of the tongue's pretty intentional. But a lot of times what happens in professional workspaces, which is what I think has happened with broadcasting and vocal fry, is, we have become used to a certain type of voice in that context and in professional top context and specifically, broadcasting, higher pitched voices have not been well received. Women's voices were not heard in those domains and therefore, we don't like them as much, when we hear them, and we come up with adjectives, like shrill and annoying, and high-pitched and screechy, to describe those voices. Because we're not used to them in those domains.

Vocal fry is a really interesting, I think, a genius solution to women that are abused. We find it a lot in broadcasting. In fact, several studies have pointed to higher use in broadcasting of vocal fry for women, than in other contexts. And what do you do, when someone is telling you, you have too high a pitched voice? You have to lower it, right? If you're going to try to meet those needs. But then what do you do when people tell you that low-pitched voices are not well received either? Well, what if you just used your high pitch voice and did an excursion into low pitch, with vocal fry. What a brilliant solution, I think. Two stones, one vocal fry. And I think that's really what has driven a lot of this movement towards vocal fry, is that young women increasingly see models in professional places and spaces that we didn't before, but we also see that the models that are most revered, tend to have lower voices. We're told that high voices are not attractive in those professional domains. So what's the solution to become urbane and professional-sounding and also hip and young? You can do this attribute that's called vocal fry. And if you actually pull young people, generally, they actually like like the sound of vocal fry. I think it's just old geezers that don't really like it. And like with everything else, we just don't like what we don't know and that's been the truth through history. 

What happens is when you get used to something being a certain way, things that are new and novel stand out to you. And because of women's role, and sound change, more generally and in language change more generally. Women have often been the progenitors of new changes. So what happens when you have social stereotypes about a group already and then that group does something that also makes them stand out? Well, it's generally not well-received. So I think we have this underlying pressure on women to be novel in language, to be creative. Partially because unconsciously, and non-agentively, just naturally, they get more sensitive to these potential embryonic, linguistic forms, and the opportunities they may open up if they use them for stylistic fashioning of themselves. And because we already noticed women's voices more, than when women's voices sound different, we call them out for it more. So it's this weird cycle of women are more creative and innovative with language and therefore women don't get held to be a good model of speech because we notice more of these new things they are doing. So it's kind of this weird cyclical pattern that we fallen into and I think that's why every new feature is met that same way.

I feel like vocal fry is a really understudied area and I've actually been proposing to one of my colleagues that we do an extensive study on vocal fry, where we collect a bunch of voices. Because really, we don't know that much about it, like this idea that vocal fry is increasing. Well, I do suspect that it is. I actually do suspect that it is. There's no really good research that supports that it is. Actually, maybe this should be the free blend vocal fry collaborative project.

Megan: That would be really cool because I've tried to find it, and this research is just not there. And if it's done, it's done by non linguists and I've even listened to samples that they have and I'm like, they're saying this is a woman with vocal fry, but she's not using it or she's not using creeky voice, which we call it in linguistics. And this male selection they have, he's frying. So, it's not good data, some of it.

Valerie: Right, and you know, that really well-known study, that was widely publicized about women's voices with vocal fry, not being as hireable. I will say interesting, to be kind, but it was an unusual testing situation because this stimuli was made by having someone adopt vocal fry, when it wasn't natural and their voice. Which I think is a lot like saying, "I'm going to go talk with a British accent all day and see if people like that more or less than my normal voice." It's not going to be an accurate rendition when you adopt it in that way, because it's not organic and natural to your speech and we notice that. I've had a few friends that I've noticed, when they would adopt a Southern speech feature when they were in the South, and it would irritate me because it wasn't authentic. You know that, right? You can feel that. So, I think we should do that study. Let's do it. That'll be our future project.

Carrie: A few years ago, we were on a different podcast, talking about all this stuff. So I did an experiment where I was trying to watch older TV shows, just to see, when is it that women started using vocal fry more? The '90s, women were already using it. I don't think it's maybe as much. I do think people are frying more intensely now, at least some people are. But they're still using it and then I went back further into the '80s and I could still hear it. And then, I got to one person, one character, Diane, from Cheers, who didn't use it. It took me that long to find someone. It wasn't like in a totally extensive. I didn't really watch all the shows, but...

Valerie: And that's why it's been tricky to measure, because I think what we're saying is maybe some slightly different use of vocal fry, that makes them more salient and either it's just  this placement is different, so it's more salient. Because it's at the end of words, versus more to scattered. I don't know what the difference is, but it's something we should study because I think we need the data. We don't have evidence of even time processing, change over time. We know that young women get called out for it a lot, but there was one study that looked at middle-aged women and younger women and there was not a significant difference in the amount of frying in their voices. So, even that, doesn't tell us really whether it's actually increasing or we just believe that it is.

Carrie: I strongly suspect that there are individuals who use it a lot more than it ever has been used in the past. But generationally, it's probably not that much.

Valerie: I think there's definitely something happening, that's where we need more data to figure it out, but I actually agree with you. I think there's something different and I actually do think it's probably more prevalent at least in women's voices, than it was. But again, we don't have that data.

Megan: I would love to do this because I'm just so tired of these really strong claims by papers that are very misguided and not from linguists. Not to say that linguists are the only ones that could do this, but I'm saying that at least have a linguist to look at your stimuli.

Carrie: You need a linguist to make sure the data is going pretty good. You do. 

Valerie: And how to do the measurement, so it's accurately reflected in similar or across groups. The other thing is, there was another study done by a speech pathologist and a linguist, that looked at a review of all the studies on vocal fry. And they found that young women were the participants in those studies at a rate of three to one, of any other participant. So that's the other problem, is we don't have good data on people, other than young women. So, again, we just need more more research on it.

Carrie: Well, even the very first study that really kicked, all this off, it was linguists, but they only looked at women's language. They had tested male students as well, but they didn't report the data. So we don't actually know if there was a difference. It was just the fact that they only talked about the women, that had turned into this thing.

Valerie: Right. I think that's exactly what that three to one ratio shows, is we've focused on young women and that all ties back to this whole process we've have been talking about, that young women's voices are policed more than men's. And we notice things in their speech, so we use them as their subjects. Linguists do this too, because that's where we see it. And then what happens is that sends off this message, that the only person who does it is this young woman, or young women, more generally. So we kind of, I think, help that cycle inadvertently.

Carrie: Yeah, I definitely don't think it was on purpose, but I do think that that study, unfortunately, is responsible for some really bad science.

Megan: All of these things that we've been talking about are all in your book. This is what I would call a word nerd, language nerd's dream book. I feel like some people are like the dictionary or I love grammar rules. Use more books from linguists as your guiding light when it comes to your word nerd, language nerd stuff. Because I think it's better for society. Do you have a last message for our listeners?

Valerie: I think the big message is that we get really upset over changes in language and what we really need to do, is just step back and realize, hey, we don't sound like we're in Beowulf and who would want to? So, the idea that we've gone downhill, I think, no. No one wants to go back to the days of Old English. And if we really believe that time travel in languages, only to the detriment, then we really should be going back and reading all these old texts and considering whether that's what we actually want to sound like. I think my main message would be, a, just later, dude, because that seems appropriate here. But also, just relax, enjoy it. Know that it's not going to kill anybody to adopt a new feature and in fact, what we're saying today, and what they're saying as youngsters today, our next generation, it will all work out in the end. It has done this over centuries. No one has died because of it. Well, okay, maybe a few people that call the others, dude, in the 1800s did die, out of duals[?]. So that's not completely true. But, it works out. It works itself out and it's like getting your child off the pacifier. You stress about it. You're thinking, oh my God, it's going to mess them up for life. I'm going to give them horrible teeth. I've destroyed them as a parent, and it works out. You don't see 10-year-olds walking around with pacifiers, right? It works out over time. Language works out over time. So just relax and enjoy it.

Carrie: Yes, relax and enjoy it. I like that.

Valerie: Later dude.

Megan: I think, later dude and I think we leave our listeners with one final message, and this fits well too. Don't be an asshole.

Carrie: Don't be an asshole.

Megan: Thank you.

Carrie: Thank you so much. The vocal phrase podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillen, theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod, you can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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