Bonus 76: Linguistic jobs beyond academia

Linguistics professors are some of the most visible career role models that you see if you’re taking courses in linguistics (since they’re teaching the courses), but most people who study linguistics go on to jobs outside academia. Eight years ago, Lauren was trying to figure out what some of those job options were and how people kept using their linguistics training in doing them.

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about the jobs that people go on to do after a linguistics degree! We talk about Lauren’s new academic article in a fancy linguistics journal about a blog post series she’s been running for 8 years, interviewing 80 people who studied linguistics, from a minor to a doctorate level, and their experience and advice for non-academic jobs. We also talk about domain-general versus domain-specific skills, the literature by other people on career options for linguists, and Lauren and Gretchen’s own thought processes by which we ended up in one academic and one non-academic career.

Announcements:

Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, bonus and main, and you’re still looking for more linguistics in your life? Don’t forget to check out our Crash Course Linguistics series! If you want to find all the other places we’ve been on as guests, check out our crossovers page on our website.

Listen to this episode about linguistics, jobs and skills, and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Word Magic’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about word magic. But first, people often ask us to recommend books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books plus a few bonuses, including both nonfiction as well as some fiction books with some linguistically interesting elements.

Gretchen: Social media’s in an interesting state of flux these days, which, as someone who studies online interaction, I find very interesting. However, not unrelated to that, we like to encourage people to sign up for emails from us in case everything else just melts down.

Lauren: You can get this list of 12 of our favourite linguistics books by signing up for our free email list by following the link in the show notes or going to lingthusiasm.com.

Gretchen: Our email subscribers also regularly get an email once a month when there’s a new episode of Lingthusiasm. This month you will see a link to our linguistics books list if you’re an existing subscriber. Otherwise, you will get the books list in the confirmation email after you sign up at any time even if you’re listening to this way in the future. Technology is very useful for things like this.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode was the 2022 listener survey results. If you’d like to know whether being aware of the kiki-bouba meme affects how people respond to the blobby shape and the pointy shape, as well as other results from our survey, you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Speaking of books, I’ve read some linguistically interesting books lately!

Lauren: We realised that a common thread between some of the books we’ve been reading was this link of magic.

Gretchen: Specifically, I love the way that books about magic are also often really linguistically interesting because saying the word and casting the magic spell are so intertwined when it comes to our conception of how magic works. Actually, “magic spell” and “spelling a word” – etymologically, I’ve just look this up, and these have a common root.

Keep reading

Episode 80: Word Magic

The magical kind of spell and the written kind of spell are historically linked. This reflects how saying a word can change the state of the world, both in terms of fictional magic spells that set things on fire or make them invisible, and in terms of the real-world linguistic concept of performative utterances, which let us agree to contracts, place bets, establish names, and otherwise alter the fabric of our relationships. 

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about word magic! We talk about how the word magic systems are set up differently in three recent fantasy books we like: Babel by R.F. Kuang, Carry On by Rainbow Rowell, and the Scholomance series by Naomi Novik. We also talk about linguistic performatives: why saying “I do” in a movie doesn’t make you married, aka Felicity Conditions, aka an excellent drag name; performativity as applied to gender (yup, Judith Butler got it from linguistics); the “hereby” test; and how technology changes what counts as a performative.  

Read the transcript here.

Announcements: 
People often ask us to recommend interesting books about linguistics that don’t assume prior knowledge of linguistics, so we’ve come up with a list of 12 books that we personally recommend, including both nonfiction and fiction books with linguistically interesting elements! Get this list of our top 12 linguistics books by signing up for our free email list. Email subscribers get an email once a month when there’s a new episode of Lingthusiasm, and this month existing subscribers will see a link to our linguistics books list! If you find this any time in the future, you’ll get the books list in the confirmation email after you sign up. 

In this month’s bonus episode, we get excited about the results of the 2022 Lingthusiasm Survey. We talk about synesthesia fomo, whether people respond differently to kiki/bouba depending on whether they’re aware of them as a meme, complicating the “where is a frown?” map, the plural of emoji, and more! Plus, we mentioned swearing in this episode? Yeah, we’ve got bonus episodes about that too. 

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds! Our patrons let us keep making the main episodes free for everyone and we really appreciate every level of support.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Sign up to our newsletter and get our list of 12 linguistically interesting books!
• Etymonline entry for ‘spell’
• Etymonline entry for ‘glamour’
• ‘Babel’ by R. F. Kuang on Goodreads
• ‘Carry On - The Simon Snow series’ by Rainbow Rowell on Goodreads
• ‘A Deadly Education - The Scholomance Series’ by Naomi Novik on Goodreads
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Cool things about scales and implicature’
• Wikipedia entry for ‘performative utterances’
• Superlinguo post on ‘I do’ and performatives in weddings
• Government of Canada post on ‘hereby’
• All Things Linguistics post on performatives
• Judith Butler Wikipedia entry
• ‘Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity’ by Judith Butler on Goodreads
• ‘Universality and specificity in infant-directed speech: Pitch modifications as a function of infant age and sex in a tonal and non-tonal language’ by C. Kitamura et al
• Tambiah 1968 on word magic

Lingthusiasm bonus episodes on swearing:

• ‘Real swear words vs pseudo swears’
• ‘The grammar of swearing’
• ‘What makes a swear word feel sweary? A &⩐#⦫& Liveshow’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

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

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

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

Lingthusiasm 2022 Survey Results

In late 2022, we ran our first Lingthusiasm audience survey! We tried out some linguistic experiments, and now we have the results. To learn more, and stay in the loop for potential future surveys (we have ethics approval for 3 years!), join us on Patreon.

In late 2022, we ran our first Lingthusiasm audience survey! We wanted to get to know you better and try out some linguistic experiments with you, so we got formal ethics approval from La Trobe University in case we want to use any of these findings in a research paper later. Thank you to the over 1000 people who filled it out! We have ethics approval for 3 years, so if you missed it this time around, keep an eye out in the future!

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get excited about the results of the 2022 Lingthusiasm Survey. First, some demographics: we had respondents from over 50 countries, in which Canada and Australia are tied (phew!), and a mix of genders, in which about 1 in 5 respondents are not a binary gender (including nonbinary, agender, and genderqueer; from responses to the “other” category it looks like we should add genderfluid for next year!). Also about 1 in 5 people answered some version of “all of them??” to the “what languages are you interested in?” question, which was honestly unfair of us to make you pick. We also talk about synesthesia fomo, whether people respond differently to kiki/bouba depending on whether they’re aware of them as a meme, complicating the “where is a frown?” map, the plural of emoji, and more!

Listen to this episode about the results of the 2022 Lingthusiasm Survey and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Episode 79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.

Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the melodies of words. But first, our most recent bonus episode was a recording of our liveshow with Dr. Kirby Conrod about language and gender that we held as part of LingFest.

Lauren: Thanks to all the patrons who attended, asked excellent questions, and also helped support us by keeping the show ad-free.

Gretchen: To get access to this bonus episode and many, many other bonus episodes to listen to go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Lauren: Hey.

Gretchen: Hey.

Lauren: Hey?

Gretchen: Hey!

Lauren: Hey!

Gretchen: So, here’s one word, “hey,” and it’s got a bunch of different vibes depending on what pitch contour we’re using with it.

Lauren: We can use those pitch contours with a whole bunch of different words to give them a different spin. If we have a word like, “ice cream.”

Gretchen: “Ice cream.”

Lauren: Oh, very serious. Uh, “Ice cream?”

Gretchen: That’s a bit of a question. Ice cream…?

Lauren: Ice cream and what?

Gretchen: Ice cream and ice cream!

Lauren: Perfect choice. “Ice cream!”

Gretchen: Very excited ice cream.

Lauren: We’ve said the word “ice cream” with a whole bunch of different intonation that’s given it different meaning. That’s because we’re making use of the way that we can change the melody of words that we’re saying.

Keep reading

Episode 79: Tone and Intonation? Tone and Intonation!

Spoken languages can change the pitch or melody of words to convey several different kinds of information. When the pitch affects the meaning of the whole phrase, such as rising to indicate a question in English, linguists call it intonation. When the pitch affects the meaning of an individual word, such as the difference between mother (high mā) and horse (low rising mǎ) in Mandarin, linguists call it tone.

In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about tone, intonation, and the combination of the two. We talk about various meanings of intonation, such as question, list, floor-holding, emphasis, enthusiasm, and sarcasm, and how different languages use different shapes of intonation contours for functions like these. We also talk about things languages do with tones, from changing meanings of individual words to indicating grammatical information like negation. Finally, we talk about the many, many options for writing tone and intonation (from highly technical proposals to fun internet creations), how tone interacts with lyrics/melody in songs, and how “high” versus “low” tone is actually a culturally-specific metaphor – could we start calling tones “thin” and “thick” or “big” and “small” instead?

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:
In this month’s bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod. We answer your questions about lots of things related to language and gender, including: gender-neutral versions of sir/ma'am and dude/bro, why linguistic gender even exists, how people are doing gender-neutral and nonbinary things across related languages, and how neopronouns are often made by recycling bits from a language’s canonical pronouns.

Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 70+ other bonus episodes, as well as access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds! Our patrons let us keep making the main episodes free for everyone and we really appreciate every level of support.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

• Original tumblr post on New Internet Grammar question marks from @pervocracy
• Formal definitions of tone and intonation from the Routledge handbook
• Gender Reveal episode on the social dynamics of pitch and other features with regard to gender
  
• Falling question intonation in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi and Hawaiʻi Creole English
• All Things Linguistic post on transfer features of our intonation into writing
• ‘Tone’ by Moira Yip, for information on prevalence of tone in the worlds languages
• The Four Mandarin Chinese Tones
  
• All Things Linguistic post on understanding tone as a non-tone language speaker
• Hacking Chinese post ‘7 ways to write Mandarin tones’
• Zhao Yuanren/Yuen Ren Chao, such a cool Chinese linguist (he also translated Jabberwocky! and gave his daughter the name Lensey, which contains the only two syllables that are possible in the Chinese language but not actually present in any no Chinese words, thus making her name impossible to write properly in Chinese. Just like, please go read his Wikipedia article.)
• Wikipedia entry for Gwoyeu Romatzyh
• Wikipedia entry for Chinese tongue twisters
• ChinesePod Blog post ‘How to read a Chinese poem with only one sound’
• Wikipedia entry for Vietnamese tone
• ‘Tones in San Juan Quiahije Chatino’ by Emiliana Cruz
  
• ‘High Tone Docking in Sierra Juárez Zapotec’ by Lee Bickmore and George Aaron Broadwell
  
• WALS entry for tone
• ‘The tone system of the Luanyjang dialect of Dinka’ by Bert Remijsen and D. Robert Ladd
  
• ‘Tone and intonation: A case study in two Tibetic languages’ by Teo, A., L. Gawne and M. Baese-Berk
  
• HK Magazine post ‘Ask Mr. Know-It-All: How do you sing in a tonal language like Cantonese?’
• ‘The Thickness of Musical Pitch: Psychophysical Evidence for Linguistic Relativity’ by S. Dolscheid, S. Shayan, A. Majid, and D. Casasanto
  

Other relevant Lingthusiasm episodes:

• Lingthusiasm episode ‘What Does it Mean to Sound Black? Intonation and Identity Interview with Nicole Holliday’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Various vocal fold vibes’
  
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Why spelling is hard — but also hard to change’
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘Making books and tools speak Chatino - Interview with Hilaria Cruz’
  
• Lingthusiasm episode ‘What words sound spiky across languages? Interview with Suzy Styles’

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.

You can help keep Lingthusiasm ad-free, get access to bonus content, and more perks by supporting us on Patreon.

Lingthusiasm is on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

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

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

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, and our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

In this bonus episode, originally recorded as a liveshow on the Lingthusiasm patron Discord server, your host Gretchen gets enthusiastic about how languages do gender with special guest Dr. Kirby Conrod. Since we last saw them in our episode on the grammar of singular they, Kirby is now a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College in Pensylvania, USA, where they’re doing fun new research about neopronouns (like xe/xer) and reflexive pronouns (like themself) and have two new cats (pic below!).

We answer your questions about lots of things related to language and gender, including: gender-neutral versions of sir/ma'am and dude/bro, why linguistic gender even exists, how people are doing gender-neutral and nonbinary things across related languages, like final -e in Spanish and Portuguese and using the -ende (-ing) form in German and Swedish, and how neopronouns are often made by recycling bits from a language’s canonical pronouns, such as ey/em/eir and xe/xem/xer in English, iel in French (from il+elle), elle in Spanish (related to él/ella), Swedish borrowing a gender-neutral pronoun from Finnish, and fruit-related pronoun riffs in Vietnamese. Plus: experimenting with pronouns for fun and cats and if you know of more examples in more languages, you should send them to Kirby!

Listen to this episode about neopronouns, gender-neutral vocab, and why linguistic gender even exists and get access to many more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Bringing stories to life in Auslan - Interview with Gabrielle Hodge’. It’s been lightly edited to reflect the Auslan used in the interview. Watch the bilingual Auslan/English video episode here, and listen to the audio only version here, or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

L: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Gabrielle Hodge who’s a deaf researcher and writer based in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in research relating to d/Deaf people, signed languages, and communication, and has worked with Auslan and British Sign Language (BSL) in Australia and the UK. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about how we bring stories to life. But first, if you’re listening to this episode in the normal Lingthusiasm audio feed or reading the transcript, you are missing out. This episode is in Auslan and English. We’re working with an interpreter, Julie Judd, so you definitely want to see the video version to see the full interview with Gab. You can see the video with captions at youtube.com/lingthusiasm. If you’re already seeing my face, you’re in the right spot! It’s thanks to our patrons that we’re able to do these occasional video episodes. To become a patreon, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Gab, welcome!

Gabrielle: Hi! Hi, everyone.

Gretchen: Thanks so much for joining us.

Gabrielle: Ah, thanks for having me. I would like to, before we start, just acknowledge the Country and where we are at the moment is at La Trobe University Bundoora campus. It’s beautiful Wurundjeri country. I want to pay my respects to Elders past and present.

Gretchen: Thanks for sharing that. My first question is “How did you get into linguistics?”

Gabrielle: Wow! A big question. I think that I began my journey into linguistics when I was at school. Originally, I was very enthusiastic about plants. Things like biology, the life system, how things grow, and how we’re all connected. I thought I might become a nurse. So, I registered in a course, and then I pulled out because there wasn’t any role models. Deaf nurses were not there. I felt that I couldn’t do that and dropped it. In a few years, I went to work, realised as a deaf person seeing a world very differently, it was very different from being in school, being in the big wide world, and communication was very difficult. There were many barriers. I started to get interested in language, communication, speech, and sign. I started to think, “Okay, I want to go into a university course and look at linguistics.” Auslan being my language, I wanted to bring those two together. I enrolled here at La Trobe University way back.

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