Rare Tongues

We talk with Dr Lorna Gibb about her newest book, Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages.

Steven Pinker:

• Harvard Derangement Syndrome
• vs. LSA
• Jews and IQ

Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi, and welcome to The Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I'm Carrie Gillon.

Megan: And I'm Megan Figueroa. Hey, we're both here.

Carrie: We're both here. We're both alive. We're doing something, giving an extra May episode, because...

Megan: Yeah, we have.

Carrie: We have lots to talk about.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Books to sell.

Megan: Yes, exactly.

Carrie: On other people's behalf.

Megan: Yeah, I love these book episodes. I love that people reach out to us with their linguistics books. It's lovely.

Carrie: Yeah, me too. It's always fun. Yeah, so speaking of linguists, sort of, but not books.

Megan: Sort of.

Carrie: Not books. There is an op-ed written by our favorite linguist, Steven Pinker.

Megan: I knew you were going to say that when you said it's favorite linguist.

Carrie: Yeah. Yeah.

Megan: Oh no.

Carrie: Yeah, everyone, we asked the LSA to kick him out.

Megan: I remember that. There was a whole like form, right? Like everyone had their signatures.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. 

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Did I sign it? I can't remember. If I didn't, it was because I was not a member. But yeah, and then the New York Times reached out to a bunch of people and actually interviewed me, and I was not cited anywhere. Zero places.

Megan: Because they didn't say what you wanted, or you didn't say what they wanted, that is, rather?

Carrie: I think I didn't say anything sufficiently wild or crazy enough for them. I don't remember the guy's name. Michael something, I think.

Megan: They wanted to make it as salacious as possible.

Carrie: I think they wanted to make the people who disliked Pinker or were upset with what he was doing, they wanted to make us seem crazy, you know? Like, unreasonable. And I guess I didn't come across as unreasonable, which yay!

Megan: Yeah, good for you!

Carrie: But I really wish I recorded that whole interview, but of course, I didn't even think about it.

Megan: Oh, that's a good idea for the future.

Carrie: Just because the questions that this guy was asking were so weird. He was so clearly biased, and I was just like, okay.

Megan: Yeah, I see right through you.

Carrie: Anyway, trying to find the actual title of the article. I don't know, I can't even look at the title. Okay, sorry, New Times. There's an op-ed from Steven Pinker, and this is a part of it.

Megan: Okay.

Carrie: In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. My 2014 essay, The Trouble with Harvard, called for a transparent meritocratic admissions policy to replace the current eye of Newt wing of bat mysticism, which conceals unknown mischief. What?

Megan: That's the beginning?

Carrie: I think it's the beginning. Yeah.

Megan: Also, I found the title. It's Harvard Derangement Syndrome.

Carrie: That's right. Harvard Derangement Syndrome. I knew I'd seen the title, and I knew it was good. 

Megan: Yeah. Yeah.

Carrie: It's a good title. It's terrible op-ed, but it's a good title.

Megan: Right. And it might not have even been him that title.

Carrie: No. Yeah, that's probably true. Probably wasn't him. My 2023 five-point plan to save Harvard from itself urged the university to commit itself to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and disempowering DEI.

Megan: Oh, fuck off. Fuck right off. Disempowering DEI, of course.

Carrie: I love how you have viewpoint diversity and disempowering DEI. Like, if you truly believed in viewpoint diversity, you would also support DEI. But that's not what viewpoint diversity really means. It just means I want to hear more conservative voices. It's all it means.

Megan: Absolutely. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Wow, he straight up said that. Like disempowering DEI. Wow.

Carrie: Yeah, hot dog meme.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Okay, so last fall on the anniversary of October 7th, 2023, I explained how I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel, calling on the university to teach our students to grapple with moral and historical complexity. I haven't read that, so I don't know what he was actually saying, but you know, I have questions.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Two years ago, I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has since regularly challenged university policies and pressed for changes. What kinds of changes, Stephen?

Megan: Yes, what kinds of changes? Certainly not DEI-related ones or only anti-DEI-related ones. I'm sure.

Carrie: I'm guessing, I'm guessing. What are we talking about here? Are we allowed to call the genocide in Gaza a genocide?

Megan: Right. Probably not.

Carrie: I don't know.

Megan: That doesn't match with his viewpoint diversity statement there.

Carrie: Probably not. I don't know for sure, though. So I'm hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. Yes, I agree it's unhinged.

Megan: Yeah, I agree too.

Carrie: However, you're part of the problem, dude.

Megan: Yeah. Yeah.

Carrie: According to his critics, Harvard is a national disgrace, a woke madrasa, a Maoist indoctrination camp, a ship of fools, a bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment, a cesspool of extremist riots, and an Islamic outpost in which the dominant view on campus is destroy the Jews and you've destroyed the root of Western civilization. 

Megan: Yeah, I see it now. I brought it up. There's links to all of these. So people have said he has links to who said all these things. Like, these are literally things people have said about Harvard.

Carrie: Yeah, no, he's not lying. He's absolutely correct that those are things that have been said. I'm not denying that. I'm just saying, dude...

Megan: You're part of the problem.

Carrie: What were you expecting?

Megan: Yeah. Yeah. Especially with his creation of the Council on Academic Freedom. He is definitely part of the problem.

Carrie: Yeah, he's part of the intellectual dark web shit.

Megan: Oh yeah.

Carrie: Deeply entrenched with them. Here's another paragraph. I'll start with myself. During my decades at the university, I've taught many controversial ideas, including the reality of sex differences, the credibility of intelligence, and the evolutionary roots of violence, while inviting my students to disagree as long as they can provide reasons. I claim no courage. The result has been zero protests, several university honors, and warm relations with every chair, dean, and president.

Megan: Oh god, pat yourself on the back.

Carrie: It's so slimy. All these controversial ideas. Gee, I wonder why they're controversial, Stephen. 

Megan: Yeah, I forgot. He has been shady as fuck for so long because he is all about inheritability of intelligence.

Carrie: Yes, yes, you can watch videos of him talking about how smart the Ashkenazi Jews are compared to everybody else. It's very uncomfortable.

Megan: It's really, really uncomfortable. And it just so happens to benefit him. 

Carrie: Yeah, it just so happens that he's a member of that group. Like, okay. 

Megan: Right.

Carrie: The sex differences piece, it's like, okay, but you know that those differences are like curves, it's not binary. Like, they overlap. Like, what are you talking about? I mean, I know what he's talking about, but...

Megan: Right.

Carrie: This also reminds me of If Books Could Kill, did a two-parter on the angels or whatever, the book about how we're always getting better all the time, less and less violent. Just ignore the 20th-century violence, like, no, that doesn't really count. The episodes are great. 

Megan: Oh yeah, and he's famous for cherry picking data.

Carrie: Yes, 100%.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: And citing rape apologists and like, really...

Megan: Oh yeah, Kate Mann's book, Down Girl, has a really good take-down of Steven Pinker. Yeah.

Carrie: So yeah, we have not been fans of Pinker for quite some time. We intended to do a written thing about him, and we never did. But yeah, he's problematic as fuck.

Megan: Don't take him seriously when he claims he's a linguist.

Carrie: Well, he doesn't anymore, right?

Megan: Yeah, that's true.

Carrie: Because of that whole LSA thing, he was like, Oh, never mind, I'm not a linguist anyway. I haven't done linguistics in a while. Which I brought up to the New York Times guy, and he was like, yeah, yeah, he told me about that. He's like, oh yeah, I don't think I'm a linguist anymore. And I was like, oh, you're friends. The way he told me that, I was like, oh, you two are friends. Anyways, just yeah, shady AF. There's also like race shit in there too. See if I can find that.

Megan: Wait, in this Harvard derangement syndrome piece?

Carrie: Oh yeah, here it is. Yes. Here's one last paragraph. Most of my colleagues, too, follow the data and report what their findings indicate or show, however politically incorrect. A few examples. Race has some biological reality. Marriage reduces crime. So does hotspot policing. Racism has been in decline. Phonics is essential to reading instruction.

Megan: What?

Carrie: The phonics doesn't fit into any of this. Also, yes, it's controversial, but in a totally different way.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Trigger warnings can do more harm than good. Africans were active in the slave trade. Educational attainment is partly in the genes.

Megan: No, no, no.

Carrie: Cracking down on drugs has benefits, and legalizing them has harms. Markets can make people fairer and more generous. For all the headlines, day-to-day life at Harvard consists of publishing ideas without fear or favor. Oh my god. Apparently, if you click on the racist and biological reality, it takes you to a study that tells you something basically exactly opposite of what this claim is.

Megan: Oh my gosh.

Carrie: It's more like, yes, as we understand it, there's overlapping things going on in all what we call race. Race is not real, right?

Megan: Right.

Carrie: Oh, whatever. It's just infuriating. Yeah. So the man is terrible. He is a trash can.

Megan: He's a trash can. He's terrible. He's trash.

Carrie: Yes. And just to give New York Times just a little tiny bit of credit, to Mel Bowie, who was there, his tweet, or sorry, skeet is, this entire paragraph is Steven Pinker openly saying, I think race science is real and correct, which is true.

Megan: Yep. Yep.

Carrie: Except for the phonics bit, which...

Megan: Which, Nate, yeah.

Carrie: It's neither here nor there.

Megan: I wonder if in his head, somehow though it's related.

Carrie: Probably.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah, he probably thinks like, well-meaning liberals got rid of phonics, you know?

Megan: To not offend the blacks and browns, or something.

Carrie: Maybe. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. Reading is hard. And there's a reason why there's a controversy. It's hard to teach. Yeah, whatever. 

Megan: It's so hard. Yeah. It's not a natural thing. It's definitely something we have to be taught and learn. And yeah, it's not natural.

Carrie: Well, and also English writing system is particularly bad.

Megan: Yeah, it's not transparent.

Carrie: It's not very transparent. It's kind of like half transparent, half not, which I think in some ways makes it worse.

Megan: Yeah. 

Carrie: Because you're like, oh, you can just sound it out. That works for a lot of things, but not all things. Anyway, so yeah, I just do not like this man.

Megan: No, I do not like him either.

Carrie: I'm embarrassed he's Canadian.

Megan: I forgot about that. Of course he is. He's not a good person.

Carrie: No.

Megan: He is, in fact, a bad person.

Carrie: He's a bad person, and also, he just clearly thinks he's better than everybody else.

Megan: He does.

Carrie: He's very sneering, and I absolutely despise sneering.

Megan: Yes. It's a bad way to be.

Carrie: It's a bad way to be, especially when you're you, Steven Pinker, with your bad brain. Anyways, so about languages around the world.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: So enjoy.

Megan: Enjoy.

Carrie: So we're so excited today to have Lorna Gibb, who is an associate professor of creative writing and linguistics at the University of Sterling. Her books include the extraordinary life of Rebecca West, Lady Hester, Queen of the East, and the novel A Ghost's Story. Her writing has appeared in leading publications such as Granta and The Telegraph. She's also the author of the book Rare Tongues: The Secret Stories of Hidden Languages, which we are excited to have her here to talk about today. So thank you so much for being here, Lorna.

Megan: Yeah, thank you.

Lorna: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Carrie: We always start with the same question when we have someone who's just written a book. Why did you want to write this book, and why now?

Lorna: It's an area of language and linguistics, generally, that's interested me for a long time, but I think I was both heartened and dismayed by the kind of current situation for languages. So there are constant language disappearances, there are constant deaths of languages, there are languages in abatement, language in abeyance and so on, but there are also really exciting programs for lots of minority languages starting up now with people who really care and are passionate, and I think there is a growing awareness that this linguistic diversity is really important to the planet and for all of us. So I wanted to write about it. Also, it was nice to find something that I really cared about that combined my two subject areas because my PhD was in linguistics, but I've been writing popular mainstream books for about 20 years now. So it was nice to bring the two things together.

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. You did so beautifully.

Megan: Yeah.

Lorna: Thank you.

Carrie: And you put a lot of yourself in this. And so I was wondering, actually, before writing this book, what was your experience with endangered and rare languages?

Lorna: I had quite a lot of experience through my very first kind of research as an independent scholar into languages that are... Not really independent. Sorry. I'll say that again. I had quite a lot of experience through looking at languages when I was doing my postgraduate study, first at SOA class, which is part of the University of London, and then at the University of Edinburgh. One of the languages I ended up working on, Khoekhoe, which is spoken in Namibia and in South Africa. I didn't know much about the language, but was offered a job to help put together a dictionary because I had also studied computational linguistics, and I got to know more about Khoekhoe and got very interested in it. Then when I went on to do my PhD, I got a scholarship from Australia to go and work on an Australian, native Australian endangered language there, but wasn't allowed to go because my supervisor didn't really like me jetting off all over the place because I'd been in quite a bit of that. So I had a kind of early exposure to it, and then I met people in the course of looking at other things. So I met a woman who spoke Basque when I was doing a conference out there. We used to spend a lot of holidays in Sicily. I made friends with people who were Sicilian speakers or, more accurately, whose parents and grandparents were Sicilian speakers. So it was bringing all these threads together, really.

Carrie: So what was it like to travel the globe for this book?

Lorna: It was more difficult. The last book I wrote actually involved masses of travel as well because it was a kind of global experience of childlessness. So I went to a lot of countries and I quite enjoyed that. This time it was much more difficult because I was commissioned to do the book, and then COVID hit. So it was a real nightmare in the sense that some of the journeys I was supposed to take couldn't actually happen at all. And then the ones that could happen had to be squashed into quite a short time frame. But at that time I was working at the University of Hertfordshire and they were really good and obliging at kind of letting me use my leave in kind of chunks so I could do the trips. By the time I got to Stirling I had done most of them but I had a couple that I wanted to do and I asked my editor if I could have a bit more time so I could do the the Polish, Wymysorys one, for example, because I wanted to go there and actually speak to Timo because he'd done some work on it and they were quite good. They gave me a bit of extra time so I could do that trip and also the Monaco section because I knew Monaco really well and had lived there, but I hadn't lived there for a long, long time, so I wasn't quite sure what the live-mood situation was. So, my employers, both employers, were quite obliging, kind of letting me do these to fit with the book's deadlines, and they did have a bit of an extension.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Oh, that's nice.

Carrie: Well, yeah. During COVID? [crosstalk] You'd hope so. Yeah. Yeah.

Megan: Oh my goodness.

Lorna: Some of the travel was before. So the powwow I went to, which was just the most incredible experience, that was before, and that was actually because of a Nevada trip. So I was in Nevada, I was doing a talk at UNLV, and I had met someone just by chance when I was milling around, having a break between papers. And she said, Oh, you could go to a powwow if you're interested in a particular language or aspect. And I said, Oh, I wouldn't do that. I said, I'd feel really like I was an interloper, that I was stepping in on someone's culture. But then I met this woman on Facebook who invited me to her powwow. So that's how it happened. And she said, Oh no, she said, we love to have people come. And she said, you'd be surprised how rarely white people ask if they can come. And she said, We want to be welcoming, and we want to show that we can now do this. We can now have this celebration of our language, of our dancing, of our art, of our culture. So in a way, it's lovely if we can show it to outsiders, because for so long we weren't able to do it. So we went and had an amazing time, and everyone was incredibly welcoming, and it was just really special. So some of the travel was incredible.

Carrie: Yeah, some life-changing experiences. I mean, have you always had this appreciation for different cultures?

Lorna: I think so. I hope so. I've always had an interest and a curiosity, but I've always been worried about stepping on someone's toes or presenting something that's not my story. And one of the nicest things about writing these kind of books, and it's true for the last book as well as it is for this one, is in a sense you can be a conduit for other people's voices. Those voices that don't get heard so often, those languages that maybe people aren't listening to anymore, or aren't used to hearing anymore. So you get to be this fabulous kind of conduit for them, and that's really nice.

Carrie: Yeah, so being a conduit for languages that are less likely to be heard, what is at risk when a language is no longer heard, understood, spoken?

Lorna: For the people who have that language, it risks the loss and the disintegration of culture. It risks their culture being subsumed by dominating, often post-colonial cultures, risks the loss of the knowledge that that language carries. So in some of the languages in the books, you'll see that there's knowledge about medical properties of plants, for example, in specific areas that don't really translate in the sense that we might not even have particular words for those plants, but they have properties. And as the language is lost, then those kind of special qualities are also lost. Belief systems are lost. A sense of identity is lost. And many people speak about that when you ask them. They feel that they are losing their ancestors, their sense of history, their sense of belonging to where they've come from.

Carrie: So I wonder what is your language identity? Like, what languages do you speak and what's your identity when it comes to that?

Lorna: Well, my native language is English, I guess, but my mum speaks Scots and that's one of the things I speak about in the book. Scots, which I always grew up thinking of as a dialect, and I have a very working-class dialect because I grew up in a very working-class area. So it's not one of the pretty Scottish ones that people like. It's quite, you know, Gideon Giselaena is very rough, kind of Glasgow-Ajig, Glasgow-Ajison as some young linguists call it now. But so it's not one of the more romantic ones, but that would be my native tongue. That's how I speak with my mother still. My husband understands it, but doesn't use it. So, he can now and then we've been married more than 20 years, so he can understand it if I'm speaking it with my mum, but to him it still is different. That's probably my default. But when my mum sadly finally passes, I won't really have people to speak that way anymore because I'm not in touch with people I grew up with, but for now, that's a very core part of my identity, I'd say. Other languages I learned French at school, but then ended up working in Paris for two years. So my French used to be pretty native, but it's probably not anymore because it's got rusty. We lived in Italy for several years. I used to teach in Italian, so my Italian's okay. I studied Finnish as part of my PhD, but my Finnish is gone. It's really sad. I mean, it's gone. I don't know if I went back there and stayed for a year, if it would come back. But now if I have a WhatsApp from a friend in Finnish, I have to Google words, you know?

Carrie: Yeah.

Lorna: So, it's gone, sadly.

Carrie: Yeah. 

Megan: Yeah. That's another one that's probably hard to keep up unless you're there. Not that many opportunities.

Lorna: No, it is. And it's not somewhere I go back to. So, like with Italian and French, we go quite a lot and we visit, and we have friends there. So we'll go and see friends. It's also a loungey because you can still be in contact with more easily. So it stays.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: There's more movies that you could watch.

Lorna: Exactly. But I suppose if I had been really desperate to keep up Finnish, I would, but I wasn't. And I regret it because it was a big effort to learn it. So, now I feel a bit sad.

Megan: Yeah, when you were talking about like being grateful for your Latin teacher so that you could learn it, I was like, yeah.

Lorna: Interestingly, my Latin stayed, actually. I don't know whether it's because I learned it when I was quite young, but also because it feeds into all the other languages I know, and because we are both quite history buffs, so we love to go to all those old sites. But my Latin's not bad, actually. It's not terrible, funnily enough.

Megan: I do think that there's more Latin just sprinkled around us, too.

Lorna: Yeah.

Megan: What is linguicide, and what's an example of it? 

Lorna: Linguicide is when a language really stops being spoken. It is quite controversial. People used to talk a lot about the deaths of languages, and now there's a movement, a way to say that language is sleeping rather than dead, because even a language that's no longer actively spoken could be revived. That's really interesting. There's really exciting work going on in that area. But linguists, I generally say, to me, when there are no more speakers or so few speakers that the end of the language being spoken is inevitable. So there's a lot, dozens of languages in Australia like that, quite a few in India. And Australia is the one that is kind of like almost the biggest killer. It's because they have a lot of different Aboriginal languages, and they're gone in favour of some of the more popular ones. I'm sure there are many in North America, too, but I couldn't give you a list of North American languages that are about to vanish, but I'm sure there are many.

Megan: Most of them are severely under threat, for sure.

Carrie: I wonder, what is an example of a language revitalization project you came across working on your book?

Lorna: It's quite a really interesting one. So, the Manchu one in China is quite interesting. Manchu speakers have set up a kind of online forum, and Manchu was a very threatened language, but almost akin to Latin in the sense that it had its glorious heyday and doesn't anymore. But it was fantastic to hear people trying to get in touch with each other across the different places where they could find Manchu speakers. And so that was interesting. There's huge revitalization work being done with Māori, for example, which is now very firmly entrenched within New Zealand government policy, within popular culture, music, and it's not even, I mean I'm sure many Māoris because they'll feel it is sidelined and it probably is, but it is really a language in resurgence. Hawaiian is another one. Hawaiian is doing amazing things. And I think there's a real appreciation and understanding of the knowledge that Hawaiian carries, especially given the unique biosphere that language belongs to, really. I'd like to say that Gaelic in Scotland is, but it's not really, I think because so few people use it as their daily language anymore. So there have been attempts. There's a kind of Gaelic TV station. There's certainly a lot more educational opportunities than there was when I was young, but it's still not really a great success in terms of revitalization and increased exposure.

Megan: Yeah, I've heard, I don't know if this is true, but that there was a stronger resurgence in Canada for Scottish.

Lorna: I've heard that too, actually, in New Caledonia, is that right? Yeah, I've heard that too. It's not something I pursued, but I think in the States, too, there's quite a big community of Gaelic speakers. I don't have much information about it. I mean, there's a lot. One of the things about the book is that there are only so many languages and so many stories you can get in. And one of the things I think is going to happen when more people have read the book is that people are going to start saying, well, why didn't you talk about X? There's always going to be an X or Y or Z. And that's why I kind of tried to say this is a very personal choice of languages, which is why I use the memoir to weave them, because you simply can't do all of them because there's so much going on. Wymysorys is really interesting. The Polish minority language in the book is really interesting because this man, Timo, has just done an incredible job. So he has people all over the world learning Wymysorys, and there's a Polish group that gets together and meets and they speak only in Wymysorys, and they have Teams meetings where they speak only in Wymysorys. So it's really fantastic. It's all been done by one person. It was one person that started it off, but it's a real global kind of coming together. And that was one of the reasons I did that particular language because I was just amazed by this one man and what he was doing.

Megan: Yeah. I mean, often it started by one person, a couple other people join in, but usually it's just one person who's like, wait, why aren't we doing this? But that's really cool. I don't know that much about the situation in Poland, actually, at all.

Lorna: It's a tiny village and basically the language there was Germanic based. And so they have this odd history, which is in the book, but in short, basically the language is Germanic based, so was kind of almost protected in some ways during the Nazi occupation, although it wasn't terrible, terrible things happened to people there, but it was sort of protected because it was seen as high status as a more kind of prestigious language to speak than Polish. But of course, that meant that everybody around it absolutely hated them. And then, when it became communist, of course, they didn't want people speaking this strange, tiny Germanic language. I didn't know this until I went, but that whole area is dotted with interesting languages and then probably deserves a book called its own actually.

Carrie: I feel like all of the stories in here could do a book of their own.

Megan: Yes. Well, also, I just think that a lot of people don't realize just how many other languages in Europe there are. So this is a really cool instance of something that I had never heard of before.

Carrie: I wonder what are some of the reasons why languages are endangered?

Lorna: Colonization, obviously. So we are in a post-colonial world where people have suffered discrimination and violence for trying to retain their indigenous identity or their kind of language identity even. So there's quite a lot of examples of that in the book where people recall their childhood and being punished just for speaking their mother tongue. So that's one reason. So dominant cultures. Another is just to do with the dominance of English, really, sadly, but dominant languages do force in a way people to speak them because if job opportunities are better or economic opportunities are better, then people can feel that the native language is not as prestigious, so they won't themselves feel it's worth having and they will focus instead on a learned language or a second language or a dominant language. Third reason is kind of dwindling communities. So, communities where they were quite small to start with, but people leave because of job opportunities or better economic circumstances. And so the pool of people speaking that language gets smaller. People aren't coming in and learning the language. So it's a kind of no-win situation where things are just drifting.

Carrie: And then does school aid in this process, too, schooling?

Lorna: It can. I mean, Namibia is very interesting in this respect because they have introduced Khoekhoe into primary education. So that's great. And Māori did really exemplary work with nests. So they, I think they may have been the first people to do the nesting actually.

Megan: Apparently not. I just found out that there were other people in New Zealand, other Pacific Islanders who may have been first.

Lorna: Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Oh, that's interesting. I wonder where from. My husband's from New Zealand. So I wonder which Pacific Islanders? 

Megan: I'll look it up and I'll let you know.

Lorna: So, yes, schooling can help. In Scotland, there's been quite a resurgence of Gaelic primary schools and Gaelic nursery schools, but they're often private. And in a sense, they don't solve a lot of the problems because when kids then go back to their own island communities, Gaelic's not actually being spoken that much in the communities anymore. So I think it can help. I think there has to be opportunities tied to that learning of the language. So it's not seen as kind of add-on.

Megan: So it's Samoan and Cook Islands.

Lorna: Oh, okay. So they were the first. I didn't know that. That's interesting too.

Megan: Yeah, I just found that out this week.

Carrie: Yeah, why is it important to preserve linguistic diversity?

Lorna: I think it's important for our understanding of the planet, for our understanding of much of, I mean, in the book I talk about how many languages contain ecological awareness, strategies for looking after the land, kind of land stewardship. And this kind of knowledge is integral to the language as well, so that the language carries those knowledge of cycles of when it's best to take a particular kind of fish, how that fish has to be restricted in its catching, and so on. So there's knowledge about that, which in a sense is for all of us because it's about wider ecological issues. And of course, it's just a diverse world. We can learn from diversity. We can learn from these interesting and very different cultures that have information and knowledge, and wisdom that we don't have, and we can gain greater understanding. 

Carrie: So, do you have a favorite language that you worked on for this book? 

Lorna: Wow, that's really good. I think the one that surprised me most was the hand talk because I actually thought it wasn't used at all anymore. So meeting someone who could still do the signs was incredible. It's not that it's my favorite language, but it was just incredible. It's quite magical. The Plains hand talk was really special. And I mean, I have a soft spot for kind of Khoekhoe, just because I worked on Namibia versus so long ago, I think. And also, I guess, Monogathe, because it's such an odd story. There's this prince who's trying to resurrect language, and it's a tiny place and there are hardly any speakers anymore, but people are trying, and it's a nice story. But I think it's also that I have personal relationships to those, except for the hand talk, which I didn't. That was just phenomenally interesting. The kind of idea that there was a lingua franca that could be signed and could be used to communicate between all these different Native American languages, as well as with white settlers. So it was really interesting and I thought it was lost. So I was just amazed that it wasn't. I'm very pleased that it wasn't.

Carrie: Yeah, very pleased.

Megan: Yes, yes, it's very cool. And we don't talk about sign languages enough. Like, linguists don't generally speaking in, our podcast hasn't had a chance to talk as much about it.

Carrie: Yeah, it's true. It's definitely something I'd like to talk more about.

Lorna: What area of linguistics did you both work in? You work in Squamish now. Is that historically what you've always worked in?

Megan: That's what I did my PhD on, was Squamish. I'm a syntax semanticist person, so formal linguistics.

Carrie: And I did language development in children.

Lorna: Oh, wow.

Carrie: Yeah.

Lorna: Oh, okay. 

Carrie: Yeah.

Lorna: Oh, that's nice. So, first time is acquisition and...

Carrie: Yeah. And I focused on morphosyntax for my dissertation, but I'm interested in all of it. And my dissertation was on 16-month-olds, so it was...

Lorna: Oh, wow. Okay. Oh, so it's later. Yeah. Oh, that's interesting.

Carrie: A little bit later.

Lorna: I did morphophonology.

Carrie: Okay. 

Lorna: I was really a theoretical phonologist, but I ended up working on the morphology-phonology interface because it was just really interesting in different languages, how it worked. I worked on a language called Kikuyu, which is really interesting in how it puts things together. And also I was working on Finnish because I'd been living in Finland. So, looking at the different ways that it worked and trying to think how it might be represented in the brain was really interesting.

Carrie: Yeah, that is really cool.

Megan: Yes. I'm having flashbacks to my PhD because I definitely had to do a little bit of morphology. It was really interesting.

Lorna: I had to do a bit of syntax.

Megan: Exactly, exactly. So, is there anything that we didn't ask you about that you would like to talk about with your book?

Lorna: I don't know really. I think you've asked most of the things that I would have wanted to be asked. You seem to be very good at this.

Megan: Aww, thanks.

Lorna: I don't know. I think, no, I can't think of anything really. I think it was just really, it's nice to be able to talk about the reasons for writing the book, which we've done, and also to kind of talk about the variety and what we kind of gain and can understand from all these different varieties. I think that's the main point really. I'm not very good at selling myself. I don't like selling.

Carrie: I know it's hard. It's hard. Yeah.

Megan: I get it. It's a nice entree into the world of language, diversity, and reclamation. I think people will enjoy it.

Carrie: It's very readable. Yeah.

Lorna: Thank you very much. That's what I wanted to write. The thing is that if you write very academic books, there's a limited pool of people who are reading them. And what I wanted to do was write a book that was going to show people what it could mean and also make that interesting by showing just how wide an issue it is, and how different languages can be, and how different the issues are. And I think that is what I wanted. I wanted to be for people who maybe hadn't thought about it before, but were just a bit interested in languages.

Carrie: Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

Megan: Yeah. Exactly. And I think people in that category will definitely enjoy this. So, thank you so much for coming on to talk to us about this.

Carrie: Thank you so much.

Lorna: Oh, thank you for having me. It was lovely.

Megan: Enjoy the rest of the evening.

Lorna: I hope you both have good days. See you morning.

Megan: Thank you so much. 

Carrie: And we usually leave our listeners with one final message: Don't be an asshole.

Megan: Don't be an asshole.

Carrie: Thank you.

Megan: Thank you.

Carrie: The Vocal Fries Podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon, theme music by Nick Granham. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at VocalFriesPod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com, and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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