Life is built on Language

A few quick reminders/affirmations to share today, especially based around academia:

There are likely more disabled people in academia than you think. No, this does not mean you can slap a label of "high-functioning" on them and call it a day - it means you need to make any academic events and environments as accessible as possible.

Many disabled people are also queer. No, you cannot use this as a reason to discredit their experiences with queerness or the queer community as a whole. Disabled people deserve just as much autonomy and respect as everyone else.

Self-diagnosis is a valid form of disability. There are many reasons why someone may be unable to get a diagnosis: financial reasons, waiting lists, limitations to human rights, or a lack of understanding disability and intersectionality from medical professionals. Despite how the media may portray it, many self-dx disabled people have done extensive research into the disabilities they feel a connection with, and/or feel a strong connection to others in the community with similar experiences.

If you're in academia, consider looking into critical referencing practices! Many of them focus primarily on gender and race diversity in citations, which is also important, but a significant amount of disability research is done by able-bodied neurotypical researchers who are looking at disability from an external pov and see it as a deficit. By including disabled researchers more, we can make our conversations within research much more nuanced. Nothing about us without us!

If you're not sure how to make something more accessible, just ask! Maybe there's local communities/organisations you can get in contact with to ask for advice; you can look online to see if anyone's already given suggestions for something similar; or if it's something with a budget you could even hire an accessibility advocate to help. If you're enlisting the help of disabled people beyond basic advice, remember to make sure they're reasonably compensated for their time and labour.

Disabled people are allowed to feel pride for their identity! Disabilities have their pros and cons just like every other part of life, so those feelings of pride might not be there all the time, but that doesn't mean people need to feel ashamed. And if they do feel that pride all the time, good for them!

Hope you don't mind me peer-reviewing your tags but absolutely, thank you!

The fact that so much time and effort was put into making online learning feasible during the pandemic and we're now having to fight *so hard* to keep it going is ridiculous. Disabled people deserve a high standard of education just as much as able-bodied people, and in-person-only academia that many people can't consistently access is not a high standard.

For people who struggled with online lectures over the pandemic, I get it. I really do. Everyone works differently and some people need face-to-face interaction and a separate space from home to learn in and that's fair enough! But that's why hybrid learning is such an important fight to keep pushing.

Is it too difficult to leave the house, either because of a disability or even just an illness or a family emergency? You can still access everything online that you could've done in person!

Terrible weather? Train strikes? Cost of living crisis making it difficult to afford transport to all of your lectures? Thankfully, there's already a framework in place for meetings and classes to move online easily.

Plus, hybrid conferences? The coolest things ever! I've been able to attend various conferences over the last couple of months that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise because they're on the other side of the country.

When the framework and technology to make it a reality is there, hybrid learning is as simple as beginning a class or meeting by letting in-person attendees get settled, while you turn on Zoom or Teams or whatever you use and start welcoming people in online. And with the chat function and whiteboard apps within those programmes, engagement becomes so much easier as well!

Disabled Students UK has a report they conducted (link here) as a result of the pandemic to show universities how disabled students found lockdown and how they want them to improve going forward. It's quite long so feel free to go and read it in your own time but when asked, "What lessons do you hope that your university learns from the pandemic to become more accessible moving forward?”, the second most common answer was "listen to disabled students" (Westander et al. 2022: 3).

I know I am way, way too invested in this post and the discussion around it, but this kind of shit makes me fume.

The fluidity of language is about new words being created and accepted into the language. It's about words acquiring new meanings. It could even be about new sentence structures forming. And, yes, it could even possibly be about the division of the English grammatical persons into four, in the distant future.

It is very much not about people completely butchering word classifications, not knowing the difference between a noun and pronoun, not knowing what a grammatical person even is or creating a new, impossible one out of thin air. That's just ignorance, and you know what else? It's a whole lot of disrespect for language studies, is what it is.

If you said "new math concepts are being discovered to this day, so if enough people say 3² = 6 it becomes true", you would be considered a fucking idiot.

If you said "our notions of history change every day, so I can make up anything I want to and you can't tell me it's not real", you would be considered a huge fucking idiot.

For other sciences, it's generally understood that sometimes people just have no clue what the fuck they're talking about. The ever-changing nature of knowledge does not mean preconceived, hundreds of years old notions about the area of study suddenly become untrue because you decided so.

Yet, when linguistics enters the picture, we can all do whatever we want. I guess the fact that the general population has control over language also means they have control over its studies and classifications, right? Fuck the rules and everyone's an expert, because it's so easy and simple as to be common sense, right?

Well, apparently not, as a single read through these notes would make abundantly clear.

No, chat is not a pronoun, no matter how you spin it. No, "we" is not a fourth person pronoun, it is first person plural and you are mixing up grammatical person with storytelling POV. No, the fourth person does not exist as a separate person from the more common three, and any references to it are just different divisions of English's (and most languages') three persons, because those already cover literally everything possible. No, a potential fourth person has absolutely no relation whatsoever to the theatrical concept of a fourth wall. No, "chat" is not unique for being simultaneously singular and plural, this is true for many collective nouns, such as "group". No, chat is not unique for not requiring an article despite not being a name either ("Congress decided today..."). And no, the kids aren't literally speaking to an imaginary chat anyway, they are just citing a meme, which is functionally completely identical to "girl, help" or "oh, Ariana, we're really in it now", and therefore nothing new.

Hybrid events should be the STANDARD. Including people who can't leave their houses should be the STANDARD. Some basic fucking consideration for the disabled should be the STANDARD.

Films have behind-the-scenes commentary tracks, Lingthusiasm now has a behind-the-scenes research article (a DOI rather than a DVD).

This new Open Access article in Language and Linguistics Compass is an introduction to a variety of evidence-based practice from linguistics, education, and psychology we have drawn upon and further developed in the first seven years of creating Lingthusiasm. We introduce you to a lot of the ways we think about framing, jargon, metaphor and putting feeling into our favourite linguistics topics. We argue that this is not just the basis of our work on the podcast, but a way of formalising the contribution that lingcomm (linguistics communication) can make to the larger field of scicomm (science communication). We also share some results from our 2022 listener survey that illustrate how our audience is receptive to the work we're doing.

We hope that it provides a bit of an insight into how we do what we do, but also inspires other linguists to communication their research - whether that's in a 3 minute thesis competition, a blog post for your institution, or "trying out [lingcomm] explanations during relevant, natural occasions in local communities" (i.e., chatting with friends and family, which is where we come up with some of our best episode ideas!).

Abstract

Communicating linguistics to broader audiences (lingcomm) can be achieved most effectively by drawing on insights from across the fields of linguistics, science communication (scicomm), pedagogy and psychology. In this article we provide an overview of work that examines lingcomm as a specific practice. We also give an overview of the Lingthusiasm podcast, and discuss four major ways that we incorporate effective communications methodologies from a range of literature in the production of episodes. First, we discuss how we frame topics and take a particular stance towards linguistic attitudes, second, we discuss how we introduce linguistic terminology and manage audience cognitive load, third, we discuss the role of metaphor in effective communication of abstract concepts, and fourth, we discuss the affective tools of humour and awe in connecting audiences with linguistic concepts. We also discuss a 2022 survey of Lingthusiasm listeners, which highlights how the audience responds to our design choices. In providing this summary, we also advocate for lingcomm as a theoretically-driven area of linguistic expertise, and a particularly effective forum for the application of linguistics.

Citation

Gawne, L., & McCulloch, G. (2023). ‘Communicating about linguistics using lingcomm-driven evidence: Lingthusiasm podcast as a case study’, Language and Linguistics Compass, 17/5: e12499. DOI: 10.1111/lnc3.12499 [OA publication]

See also:

The Lingthusiasm website

I Can Eat Glass was a linguistic project documented on the early Web by then-Harvard student Ethan Mollick. The objective was to provide speakers with translations of the phrase "I can eat glass, it does not hurt me" from a wide variety of languages; the phrase was chosen because of its unorthodox nature. Mollick's original page disappeared in or about June 2004.

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“To be happily queer is to explore the unhappiness of what gets counted as normal. It is as if queers, by doing what they want, expose the unhappiness of having to sacrifice personal desires, in the perversity of their twists and turns, for the happiness of others”