When we try to represent languages on a map, it's common to assign each language a zone or a point which represents some idea of where it's used or where it comes from. But in reality, people move around, and many cities are host to hundreds of languages that don't show up on official records.
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about urban multilingualism! We talk about a recent book we've been enjoying called Language City by Ross Perlin, about the over 700 languages spoken in New York City, as well as how we've noticed urban multilingualism for ourselves in Melbourne, Montreal, and elsewhere. We also talk about organizations that work with communities interested in reclaiming space for their languages, what linguistic rights are, and how to tell if yours are being taken away from you.
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
In this monthâs bonus episode we get enthusiastic about linguistic landscapes! We talk about contrasts between the signs in the Chinatowns of Montreal and Melbourne, renaming streets from colonial names to names in First Nations languages, how signs can show the shifting demographics of tourism in an area, and how bi- and multilingual Lost Cat signs show what languages people think their neighbours understand. We also talk about our most absurd sign stories, including the Russell Family Apology Plaque, and creative imaginings of official signage, such as the Latin no-smoking sign in a modern-day British train station.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 100+ other bonus episodes. Youâll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
'Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York' by Ross Perlin on Bookshop and Amazon
Wikipedia entry for N'Ko script
Endangered Language Alliance
The Endangered Languages Project Mentor Program
Wikitongues
Living Tongues Language Sustainability Toolkit
Living Languages
The Global Coalition for Language Rights Global Language Advocacy Days
The GCLR Statement on Understanding and Defending Language Rights
How we Created the GCLRâs Statement on Understanding and Defending Language Rights
Say it with Respect: A Journalistsâ Guide to Reporting on Indigenous and Minoritized Languages
Living Dictionaries
Gretchen's thread on Living Dictionaries
Lingthusiasm bonus episode âLinguistic Advice - Challenging grammar snobs, finding linguistics community, accents in singing, and moreâ
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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky 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, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk, and our technical editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is âAncient Cityâ 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).
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This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode âUrban Multilingualismâ. Itâs 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 thatâs enthusiastic about linguistics! Iâm Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: Iâm Gretchen McCulloch. Today, weâre getting enthusiastic about languages and cities, and how thereâre often a lot more languages that live in a city than we might realise at first glance. But first, our most recent bonus episode was about all the different ways you can read the local linguistic landscapes in the signs and other writing in public spaces. You can think of it as a second part to this episode. Here weâre talking about the unwritten ways that languages are often hidden in cities. In the bonus episode, weâre talking about some of our favourite street signs that have interesting language things on them.
Lauren: I love this topic because thereâre so many linguistically interesting street signs. Youâll never look at a street sign the same way again.
Gretchen: If youâre like me and Lauren, you probably have a bunch of photos on your phone of linguistically interesting street signs that youâve come across.
Lauren: You can head to the Lingthusiasm Discord or tag us on social media to share your favourite examples of interesting language things on signs, and maybe weâll do a second one of these episodes if we get enough.
Gretchen: Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to the linguistic landscapes episode and many other bonus episodes â and help keep the show running.
[Music]
Lauren: I live in a city. Gretchen, you live in a city. I think itâs fair to say weâre both big fans of urban living.
Gretchen: I live in Montreal. You live in Melbourne. One of the things that I remember about visiting you in Australia, which is, when I had been there for a few weeks, and I had gotten used to hearing Australian English all over the place, which is a variety that Iâm pretty familiar with from talking with you a lot but is certainly not my local language, I remember being on a bus and overhearing some people talking to each other in Chinese and having this profound sense of feeling at home. Because when Iâm on a bus in Montreal, I also overhear people speaking in Chinese, which I donât speak, but that is an experience that I wasnât having overhearing people speak Australian English because that doesnât happen very often to me in Montreal, but it does happen that I overhear people speaking a language I donât speak. That aspect of âOh, yeah, of course there are people who have immigrated to both Melbourne and Montreal and a lot of other cities who speak Mandarian, Cantonese, a whole bunch of Chinese languages,â those are experiences that are part of living in this dense, urban, multilingual environment that sometimes get ignored when we represent countries as points on a map of country of origin without thinking about the history of people moving around as well.
Lauren: Cities are these magnets, and they keep attracting new waves of migration from new places and new languages and new experiences, and itâs part of what I love about the vibrancy of urban spaces. Again, just as countries arenât points on a map, people come to cities with many different languages. Itâs part of one of the many, many reasons I think cities are so compelling as spaces.
Gretchen: Cities can not just attract people from different places with different linguistic histories but also sometimes continue those and perpetuate those. You can have groups of people who are still passing that language down onto their kids or using that language in a variety of settings because you can have not just one person whoâs using that language but a community of people who are using that language even if theyâre not necessarily being counted by traditional metrics like a census or having their linguistic expertise represented on street signs. There are a lot of languages in cities these days and perhaps have always been a lot of languages in cities because cities are these hubs and meeting places.
Lauren: Sometimes, that diversity is really visible if your city has centres like a Chinatown or a Little Italy where groups of migrants have coalesced.
Gretchen: Or an expat compound, which I think we should think of as well as a Little Expat-ily.
Lauren: Oh, absolutely. In Singapore, that was Holland Village. We would sometimes go and visit because it had really good Mexican food available.
Gretchen: So, going to the presumably relatively Western Anglo-expat community to eat the food of yet a different place because probably Americans are bringing Mexican food with them, I guess, I dunno.
Lauren: Absolutely, yes. Different ways that migrant groups can coalesce â it can be quite visible.
Gretchen: And who we think of as an âexpatâ versus who we think of as a âmigrantâ definitely has this power dynamic of the level of wealth, the level of whiteness of these different groups as weâre talking about them, but nonetheless, there are these different linguistic histories in pretty much any city that you think about even when theyâre not visible.
Lauren: Yeah, thereâs all this diversity that isnât visible. Sometimes, groups of migrants will unite around maybe the national language from where theyâve come from or a larger lingua franca because theyâre somewhere new, which might make that diversity less visible. People coming from Nepal might all just identify in Australia as Nepali-speakers to make that easier to comprehend in this new space.
Gretchen: Even if when they were in Nepal or when you start asking more deeply, they actually speak a dozen languages or a hundred languages that are all spoken in Nepal.
Lauren: Yeah, I mean, not one person â
Gretchen: No, not one person speaking a hundred languages, but as a group, yes.
Lauren: That would be very impressive. Yes, as a group you might have this richer diversity within. Nepali has this dominant status in Nepal. You get people coming into the urban centres like Kathmandu where thereâs diversity there, but then coming to Australia, thereâs this extra layer of abstraction. We have lots of Nepali migrants coming to Australia at the moment and bringing this extra layer of culture and bringing all their own languages as well as that formal language of education.
Gretchen: I think you see this sometimes happening with immigrants from Mexico or from Central America who may all get classified as âHispanicâ or âLatinoâ and yet actually speak a bunch of different Mayan languages or other Indigenous languages of the area, or people who are coming from former Soviet countries who are sort of united around Russian as a lingua franca from the area but may actually speak Tajik or something like that.
Lauren: Sometimes, thatâs just a way to make a community. Sometimes, itâs because the country that theyâre migrating to or the space theyâre migrating to (in the way that they conduct things like censuses or provide services) make it more strategically useful to align around those larger languages.
Gretchen: And theyâre not always migratory histories. One of the interesting things, for me, about learning ASL in Montreal over the last year and a half is that itâs adding this extra layer to the way in which I understand a city that Iâve lived in for quite a while because sign languages donât have written forms that are in common use. I donât see them on the street signs in that way that I know where the Portuguese people settled in Montreal or which neighbourhood has the best bubble tea â these kinds of things â but there is a layer of Deaf events that Iâm being told about which was information that I didnât have before and changes my linguistic understanding of the city. Iâve also been learning about which Canadian cities have had schools for the d/Deaf and how that maps onto modern day Deaf communities, which is also a lens that I havenât thought about Canada or North American through.
Lauren: Thatâs so nice. I think itâs part of that finding new ways into that richness of a city that can be really rewarding.
Gretchen: Iâve also recently been reading this book called Language City by a linguist named Ross Perlin. This is a book about the incredible linguistic variety found in New York City and how various people are doing different kinds of language work. He picks six specific languages to focus on for the book and then also does this earlier history of New York because thereâs a temptation to be like, âOh, well, migrationâs been happening a lot more in recent decadesâ or âsince World War IIâ or since some of the racist immigration quotas were lifted against people being able to immigrate from various countries. One of the things I appreciate about the introduction for this book is pointing even things like âNew Yorkâ was once âNew Amsterdamâ and because the island of Manhattan is so strategically located, it has also been a gathering point for Indigenous people. One of the six languages that he profiles is Lenape, which is the language that the word âmanhattanâ comes from, which still has an active language revitalisation effort going with respect to it. He profiles a woman whoâs working on that, and he profiles a specific person for each of the languages that he talks about.
Lauren: Itâs so nifty that New York has this incredibly long history as a place of confluence and a meeting point because where Melbourne has been built is at the meeting place of the traditional lands of a number of language groups within the larger Kulin Nation here in Victoria. Itâs interesting to see cities replicating these existing spaces as meeting points and points of connection, often because they are located on strategic waterways. Itâs not a complete coincidence. But itâs interesting to see those parallels between New York and other cities.
Gretchen: The same thing in Montreal actually that itâs also been a meeting place for a variety of Indigenous people. These days the Mohawk or Kanien'kehĂĄ:ka are the ones that have a reserve across the river, but when people are doing a full land acknowledgement, thereâs like, depending on whoâs doing it, thereâll be anywhere from two to ten different nations that are cited.
Lauren: What are the six languages that Perlin focuses on?
Gretchen: One of them is Seke, which is spoken by 700 people originally from five villages in Nepal, 100 of which have lived in this one apartment building in Brooklyn for a while now.
Lauren: Amazing.
Gretchen: Do you know this language â because youâve worked in Nepal?
Lauren: I do know of Seke. When you told me this chapter was in the book, I did specifically read this chapter. I love how the community refer to it as the âvertical village.â
Gretchen: Because itâs in a tall apartment building, thereâs this sense that theyâve replicated aspects of the village in a tall building in Brooklyn. NâKo, which is a new West African writing system thatâs used for several Manding languages thatâs being used also in Harlem and the Bronx for speakers of those languages. Lenape as I mentioned, the original Indigenous language where âmanhattanâ originally means âthe place where we get bowsâ â it grew a type of wood that had that. And then Nahuatl, which is an Indigenous language of Mexico, possibly notable as the language that we get words like âtomatoâ and âchocolateâ from via Spanish contact.
Lauren: Iâve heard of those.
Gretchen: Yes. Wakhi, which is a language spoken in Central Asia. And Yiddish, which is described in the description as âthe former lingua franca of the Lower East Side,â which may mean more to people who live in New York than I do. A lot of the promotional text is like, âYou can go on a tour of the world by staying in New York.â Itâs got this very granular, very detailed perspective at not just these six languages weâre using as our lens but using them as a way to talk about, well, all of the speakers that I profiled here are multilingual. What other languages do they know? What are the languages the people they talk to use? How do they make linguistic choices? What kinds of things are they doing in terms of writing things down or recording things or trying to teach other people things? How are they doing this various different kinds of language work and in what context are they doing it?
Lauren: A lot of the challenges around making multilingualism visible for these communities and for the wider community â visible in the education system, in media, in terms of access to necessary services. Part of this is also how itâs visible in official records which then feeds into all of the above in terms of allocation of resources.
Gretchen: One of the stats that stood out to me from the beginning part of this book was that the census â the official census records â showed that there are about 70 languages being used in New York City at the moment.
Lauren: Which is a lot.
Gretchen: I mean, itâs certainly more languages than I speak! But then Ross Perlin and the organisation that he works with, which is the Endangered Language Alliance, they have talked with people who use 700 languages in New York City alone.
Lauren: Okay, thatâs an order of magnitude more.
Gretchen: That is a really great illustration of what the concept of âorder of magnitudeâ means. Itâs literally 10 times as much. When you think about any of the types of infrastructural things that a city does for its residents, being only aware of, letâs say, Nepali speakers or, letâs say, Spanish speakers or, letâs say, Russian speakers and not of Seke speakers or Nahuatl speakers or Wakhi speakers as people whose Russian or Spanish or Nepali â it may not actually be the language that theyâre most comfortable in. Thatâs a whole different paradigm in terms of what languages we think of the city as speaking or we think of as being readily accessible within that city.
Lauren: This reminds me of a question that we got in our linguistics advice episode of someone who wanted to engage with Tzotzil, which is the heritage language from their grandmother, but now they live in the US, and they donât have ready access to that community anymore.
Gretchen: Something that struck me in particular when we got that question, which I think was a great question, is that Tzotzil Iâm pretty sure is a Mayan language, at least, if Iâm getting it correctly. I know people in Montreal (linguists) who have worked with speakers of other Mayan languages, which at first surprised me because I donât think of Montreal as being a Mecca for speakers of Mayan languages, but it goes, again, in that sense of like, urban environments are â and sometimes also rural environments â can be much more multilingual than we give them credit for and that if a linguist who was really dedicated to trying to work with Mayan speakers was able to move to Montreal and be like, âOh, I wanna find some more speakers of these languages that Iâve been working on for a while. How can I reach out to community groups or try to figure out who might know someone who knows someone who knows other people who might speak one of these languages?â, this is the kind of thing that is a lot more possible in bigger cities than we sometimes realise it is.
Lauren: In fact, Ross Perlin works for an organisation called the Endangered Language Alliance that does this kind of connecting with speakers of languages where theyâve migrated to New York, but they still want to engage with their language. I think the work that the Endangered Language Alliance does and the way Perlin talks about it in the book is a really great example of how thereâs this respect for urban speakers of languages. Thereâs a false narrative we can play into about authenticity and the need for language to be spoken in a particular place or a particular, often, bucolically rural setting in this imagined world. I really love that the ELA and a lot of other similar organisations respect migrants and urban language speakers as well.
Gretchen: As I was reading this book and seeing all of the examples about New York, I kept thinking, âOh, yeah, I think this is also true about a lot of other places.â The Endangered Language Alliance actually has an offshoot organisation thatâs operated out of Toronto, which is a Canadian city where over 50% of its inhabitants were not born in Canada.
Lauren: There you go. Probably a few languages spoken there.
Gretchen: Thereâs a few languages spoken there! Some of them are gonna be your relatively big, multinational languages, you know, French and Spanish and Russian and things like that, but some of these are also going to be relatively smaller or minoritised languages whose speakers might like to connect with other people who are going through similar efforts to try to revitalise them or just appreciate having access to an office space with a microphone or things like that. Thereâre some very concrete ways that connecting organisations like this can sometimes help all these smaller individualised local projects to keep working on promoting their language.
Lauren: I also love that because cities are geographically integrated but also technologically integrated, you get things like the Endangered Language Project where they set up online mentoring for people who are interested in working on maintaining or renewing their heritage languages or their own linguistic projects. They make use of the fact they have these language mentors who can easily connect through the magic of the internet.
Gretchen: And also, a lot of people have internet access these days, and so even if they are living in a smaller area, many places are still connected to the internet and can have video calls or emails with other people who are potentially doing similar things even if they are in smaller areas.
Lauren: There are also projects that are more targeted to specific groups. Living Languages is an organisation in Australia that specifically works with Indigenous language groups and can provide that really tailored language support for them and the project that they want to work on.
Gretchen: Things like taking a reference grammar of the language or a dictionary of the language and trying to convert that into materials that are actually useful for people who are trying to learn the language or increase their ability to use the language and donât necessarily have the academic background to use drier materials â thatâs what I think of Living Languages as doing.
Lauren: That kind of project is so important because a lot of work with the worldâs linguistic diversity happens in a really academic setting, but often for really academic ends that donât necessarily meet the aims and desires of community members.
Gretchen: Ideally, organisations like this can help support the actual aims of people in the communities, which may be different from each other, but are almost certainly different from outsiders who are getting supported by national funding bodies that want the contribution to scientific research or other organisations that have their own aims and goals that arenât being driven by what people who have this family connection to the language actually want.
Lauren: I also love the sustainability toolkit thatâs been put together by Living Tongues and Wikitongues â very cognate group names there. They work together. Itâs all online. Itâs all there to help people start with the project of âI want to keep using my language. How might I do that?â and not necessarily presuming people have linguistics training.
Gretchen: Wikitongues also do a lot of just videos of as many languages as they can talk to. I think they end up getting found by a lot of people who type the name of their language into a search bar and are like, âI wonder whatâs on the internet in this particular language,â and they come across a video of someone telling a story in that language, and theyâre like, âOh, cool, this is on the internet somewhere.â It can be fun to click around and see some examples of people using language in various settings. But I think they also got their start in urban environments filming people who theyâd met who had some sort of language story to tell. Theyâre not restricted to only minoritised languages. Theyâre just like, âWe wanna try to record all the languages, which are some very large global languages and some much smaller ones.â
Lauren: We got another question in that advise episode that stumped us a bit about learning local, urban languages in your neighbourhood as an outsider and not necessarily as a member of that community. We found that to be a really difficult question.
Gretchen: I think it is complicated because itâs one thing to say, âMy grandmother spoke this language; I want to try to reconnect with that.â Itâs another thing to say, âWow, languages! I just get really excited about them. But as far as I know, my ancestors, for any number of generations, has spoke Englishâ or Spanish or another one of these big, global, coloniser languages, âCan I do something with this interest that is helpful and doesnât come across as patronising or actually create more problems than it solves?â or something like that.
Lauren: Itâs true a lot of the organisations and programmes we just discussed are usually staffed by or volunteer run by a combination of people who are working on their own languages and supportive allies but always with the focus of what language speakers want as the driving interest.
Gretchen: I think a lot of this work is very relationally based. Becoming friends with a particular community and staying around long enough that youâre committed to doing something, and you arenât just coming in to do one research project and then get your degree and back out and leave and extract value from a particular community without contributing anything â I think building this type of relationship takes a lot of time and takes a lot of commitment to building that type of trust. But if you have a more casual interest like, a lot of these organisations will have something like an email newsletter that you can sign up for. Maybe they have a fund drive â you chip in a few bucks. Thatâs a way to be supportive without trying to centre yourself and your own interests. If youâre just like, âMan, I do wish people who were doing this type of research had more to work with. Maybe thatâs something that I could be somewhat informed at without saying, âOh, this needs to all be about me and my interestsâ.â
Lauren: I really liked you telling me about these examples from Language City where Perlin was explaining situations where outsider attention (and straight up financial support) is changing group attitudes to their relationship with their language and its relationship to their larger linguistic repertoire.
Gretchen: He has a couple of examples where people would come into the Endangered Language Alliance office and be like, âOh, well, of course I speak four or five languages because Iâve just had to learn to use them in various contexts, and you mean you want to pay me pretty good money to come in and record stories in the least famous of those languages (or the least prestigious of them) that I grew up speaking with my grandmother, but that isnât any of the ones Iâve had to learn subsequently in order to be able to do jobs or migration or schooling or these other types of things?â In some cases, itâs led to a renewed sense of interest on the parts of the speakers to say, âOh, maybe I do wanna do that.â Other people were already there on their own level of interest, but sometimes being like, âOh, there is this outside attention,â can be positive, according to his experience. Itâs interesting to see a dynamic there where itâs not always like the outsider coming in and polluting with their demands. Itâs also sometimes that this can really be a mutually beneficial relationship.
Lauren: I sometimes wonder what language justice would really look like. I think itâs this really complex alignment of what individuals want for their language and what policy and infrastructure can provide to support those desires.
Gretchen: I think thatâs a really hard question and not one that Iâm promising that we can answer in a 40-minute episode, but there are some interesting pointers in that direction on the website of Coalition for Language Rights. They have this concept of language rights that theyâve put together quite a short statement about it. Itâs written in quite accessible language, and theyâve got it translated into a bunch of different languages on the site. Shall we just read the statement out? Itâs pretty short.
Lauren: Yeah, letâs read it. âWhat are language rights?â
Gretchen: âYou should be able to use your language wherever and however you want.â
Lauren: âCan you use your language at school? Can you use it in hospitals and with doctors? Can you communicate with the government in your language? Can you use your language at work?â
Gretchen: âWhen you can do all this, you have language rights. If you canât, then someone took away your language rights.â
Lauren: âCan you hear and see your language on TV, radio, books, newspapers, and the internet? Can you pass your language to future generations in the ways you choose?â
Gretchen: âWhen you can do all this, you have language rights. If you canât, then someone took away your language rights.â
Lauren: âYou have language rights when you can use your language without worrying about how other people will treat you. Nobody should insult or attack you because of how you speak, sign, or write.â
Gretchen: âNobody should say that your language is worse than other languages. If you or your language are treated badly, then someone took away your language rights.â
Lauren: âYou have language rights when you and your community can make decisions about your language. You can decide what name to call your language.â
Gretchen: âNobody can say you donât have a real language. If your community canât make these decisions, then someone took away your language rights.â
Lauren: âIf someone took away your language rights, you can do something about it. You can defend your language rights.â
Gretchen: âYou need to figure out who took away your language rights and tell everyone about it. You can talk to people, protest in the street, use social media, write letters.â
Lauren: âDefending language rights can be difficult. Sometimes, it is dangerous. But it is also important. People all around the world are working to defend their language rights.â
Gretchen: âItâs good if we all work together no matter what languages we use. The Global Coalition for Language Rights works to defend everyoneâs language rights. Join us.â
Lauren: I love it so much.
Gretchen: I also really like the blog post that they have reflecting on how they constructed this statement. It was constructed by a group of people who work in language activism in varying directions. They talked about how thereâre other kinds of rights that people are aware that we should have or that we ought to have even if they arenât necessarily being respected 100% of the time. People have a sense that they ought to have a right to free speech â can sometimes protest that their free speech rights are being violated â which, you know, with free speech, thatâs really more like the government shouldnât be able to imprison you for how you speak. Itâs less like someone else canât also criticise you â exercising their rights to free speech. Sometimes, free speech rights get a little bit confused. But there isnât the same concept so much that you should have a right to use your language, to have it recognised, to be able to use it in official contexts, and to be allowed to say that itâs a real language, and that this right is much more respected for some languages than others, and for some varieties within certain languages than others, and that even raising awareness that this is something that ought to be the case even if it isnât yet the case is one important aspect of this attempt to fight for language rights.
Lauren: I think itâs also really powerful as a tool if youâre sitting here being like, âOh, yes, obviously all this is true for me and my experiences,â it shows that youâre operating from a particular privilege to which not everyone currently has the right.
Gretchen: Yeah, exactly. Itâs something that is unequally distributed at the moment.
Lauren: Another really useful resource in thinking about what it might look like to have the same opportunities for all languages is a recently published Journalist Guide to Reporting on Indigenous and Minoritised languages.
Gretchen: This is a great resource from the First Peoplesâ Cultural Council of Canada, which does a lot of this work in the Canadian context. They put out this journalist guide, again, with a lot of consultation with different groups of people. Itâs a relatively short guide. We will link to the 23-page PDF, which has lots of nice graphics. Itâs not 23 pages of dense text. One of the things that I liked which is about that guide (which is something that the Global Coalition language rights statement does) is emphasise that someone takes these language rights away. If people arenât using a language anymore, itâs not because itâs died a natural death. Itâs because there is an agent which is sometimes a government or sometimes people in positions of power that create these incentives by which people make this very rational choice to say, âActually, I donât want my kids being discriminated against the way I was, and so Iâm not going to pass this language on to them. Iâm going to pass on this more majoritarian language instead.â
Lauren: In this guide for journalists, what they point to is that minoritised and Indigenous languages are often framed in a deficit model, whereas we can do a lot to more positively represent languages by framing in them in the model that they are an asset.
Gretchen: And that people are doing things to change the situation. Theyâre working together in groups. They can have pride in the efforts that theyâre doing so far. Theyâre bringing things towards thinking about the future â rather than some of the narratives which are like, âOh, this ancient language isnât being spoken anymore.â Like, [deficit model voice] âThis ancient language isnât even surviving. Some external person is coming in and saving itâ or âsome app is gonna come in and save it.â
Lauren: Love your deficit model voice.
Gretchen: [Laughs] Thank you. I wanna make it clear that I donât endorse this. Rather than, okay, people who are in the community are working to gain more support for their language or working to claim it again or to connect with other people who are trying to use it more and that sometimes people who are outsiders can be in a supportive role, but theyâre not gonna come in externally and save it. Thatâs something that happens within the community by building those connections.
Lauren: I feel really positive this is a discourse weâre seeing shift over the last few decades. Itâs two decades ago we had David Crystalâs Language Death book, which I think was a really important part of making clear weâre going through a really massive period of change and that a lot of languages are being denied opportunities and speakers of languages are being denied their language rights. But now we have different framings. I also think about Nick Evansâ book, which in its first edition was called Dying Words (some 15 years ago) â
Gretchen: Again, this focuses us on the deficit.
Lauren: Mm-hm, and the second edition has been re-titled to Words of Wonder. You can see publishers are beginning to get their head around the damaging problems with the deficit model.
Gretchen: I feel like when I started becoming aware of this work, which was when I was doing a linguistics undergrad degree, when I was in grad school, which was some time ago now, there was some of the earlier stages of saying, âLetâs shift away from talking about âendangered languagesâ to talking about âlanguage revitalisationâ.â I had someone tell me at a conference just last week saying, âOh, weâre not saying ârevitalisationâ anymore. Thatâs too negative. Weâre saying, âreclamationâ.â âEndangeredâ itself was one step more positive than âdyingâ or âdeathâ and moving towards âsleeping languagesâ or âdormant languagesâ that could be brought back, and also this idea of reclaiming space for language thatâs not just revitalising it in terms of bringing some of the words back but also claiming spaces in which to use those words as part of everyday life or to use that language as part of everyday life. I think that thereâs been this trajectory of gradually shifting different ways that people talk about it as we think about it differently and as we try to frame it differently.
Lauren: I think in Language City, Perlin is doing something very interesting focusing on the nuance and not over-generalising and talking about individuals and their communities and their experiences as a really rich way of telling the story of how languages live in urban settings.
Gretchen: And also a way of shifting that discourse from this idea that marginalised languages tend to be spoken in these remoter communities, which is still in many cases true, but also that they can be spoken in a much closer environment to the presumably urban (although not necessarily all urban) readers of a book like this to say, actually, you might be walking down the street and cross paths with someone whoâs speaking one of these languages. You might be sharing a subway car with someone whoâs speaking one of these languages. Theyâre a lot closer to the experience of the presumed urban reader than some of the other reporting-on-language stuff. Perlinâs book brings attention to a different spectrum of these different language experiences. When we talk about minoritised languages, thereâs this interesting duality to it where, on the one hand, you have these really big international-type efforts of âWeâre going to get all of the minoritised languages together, and weâre gonna have the United Nations decade for Indigenous languages,â or âWeâre gonna have the Endangered Languages Allianceâ and these organisations with many names that feel like variations on a similar theme.
Lauren: Which are all important symbolic things in themselves.
Gretchen: Right. Doing things like raising awareness of language rights or connecting people who are working on similar types of projects who donât necessarily know each other is really valuable work â and also incredibly valuable work is the very local community-based work thatâs happening at all of the individual levels where a few speakers of a particular language, or a few signers of a particular language, are saying, âIâm gonna take it upon myself to create some materialsâ or âto have a language classâ or â to use this language with my kids even though I donât know a whole lot of other people whoâre doing that,â and do this language activism work at the language specific level. Because all of the global connections in the world arenât going to change that each of these languages is also very local. I find when Iâm thinking about this type of work, I end up zooming in and out a lot between the incredibly local and the incredibly global.
Lauren: I think thatâs what is really at the heart of the richness of the urban experience is this tension between these big stories and these really small stories as well.
Gretchen: Do you know that thing where sometimes you walk down a busy street and you see every individual person thatâs passing you by, and youâre thinking, âEach of these people is having their own day right now.â Like, âIâm having my day, and Iâm aware that Iâm late for this thing that Iâm going toâ or âthat Iâm hungryâ or âthat Iâm having this experience,â and each of these people that Iâm passing by as if theyâre just a minor player in my day, they are all each having their own days. You have to not think about this all the time because otherwise youâll never be able to walk down a street at all ever. But sometimes you can have this realisation that like, âAh, everyone has this incredibly rich inner world that theyâre living, and Iâm a bit player in the background of their day the way theyâre a bit player in the background of my day.â I think about this sometimes when it comes to languages where all of the languages that I donât know that are maybe, if Iâm lucky, a name on a page somewhere for me, that are someone elseâs entire world, and so deeply and emotionally resonant and important to that person in the way that my linguistic experiences are negligible to them. Thereâs so much that exists in the world and in the minds of people around us, and weâre lucky that books and conversations with people can sometimes let us catch a glimpse of other peopleâs realities.
[Music]
Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on all the social media sites. You can get scarves with lots of linguistics patterns on them including IPA, branching tree diagrams, bouba-kiki, and our favourite esoteric Unicode symbols, plus other Lingthusiasm merch â like our âEtymology isnât Destinyâ holographic stickers and aesthetic IPA posters â at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog are Superlinguo.
Gretchen: Links to my social media can be found at gretchenmcculloch.com. My blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. My book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk to other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include linguistic landscapes, Lauren in conversation with Eric Molinsky from Imaginary Worlds about gesture in science fiction and fantasy, and an episode where we answer your questions with linguistics advice. Canât afford to pledge? Thatâs okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life whoâs curious about language.
Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk, and our Technical Editor is Leah Velleman. Our music is âAncient Cityâ by The Triangles.
Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Craigslist job postings are filled with opportunities to "work for exposure." Online logo competitions offer graphic designers the chance to give their work away for peanuts, but only if they win. Even the foundations of wealthy COOs who write books about "Leaning In" try to take advantage of their stature by manipulating the desperate into working for free. Not only are the jobs not paid, but sometimes the employee pays the employer for the right to work. Internship placements are auctioned off to the highest bidder. Colleges pay companies to accept the free labor of their students in exchange for course credit.
The End Of Interns - The Awl
We're discussing unpaid internships on Tuesday with Ross Perlin, author of Intern Nation, and more. Info here: Will Work For Free: Breaking Down the Intern Economy with Ross Perlin and More
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The excuse that a firm "doesn't have the money" rings hollow: in the scheme of things, internships are never particularly expensive, and the question is simply whether they are valued enough to make it into the budgetn
Consider the widespread use of interns to manage web content and social media initiatives. Despite the perceived generational fit, it delays the hour when full-time employees have to learn the new tools of their trade, and puts people who know and care least about a company's brand on the front lines of communicating it.
I've heard this many times from former interns: a moment comes when the scales fall from your eyes. It might be nothing more than a boss's turn of phrase or a shift in tone. You realize that you've been had--that you're cheap labor and nothing more, a schnook, a kid entitled to favors but not rights.