#slim guide

Lauren: Our regular logo has been going strong for almost nine years that we’ve been making Lingthusiasm, and we’re excited to see this refreshed version of the logo in sticker form.

Gretchen: Speaking of running for a long time, when we started the Patreon, we framed it as like, “Hey, if you buy us coffee, we can get bonus episodes, we can keep making the show,” and like, I haven’t been able to get a coffee for five bucks in kind of a while now.

Lauren: Hmm, yes. We’ve also been getting busier behind-the-scenes – me keeping up with my day job as a linguistics prof.

Gretchen: And with me trying to get back into doing some more writing again.

Lauren: This is something I can get behind.

Gretchen: Nothing to announce yet, but that’s because I haven’t had time to work on things as much. We need to hire more help to keep the podcast running, and this means we need to adjust the price of our main bonus episodes tier that we haven’t changed since we launched the Patreon in 2017.

Lauren: Patrons have told us before that if we’re ever thinking of running ads that we should just tell you first and give you the chance to make that not necessary, so here we are, I guess.

Gretchen: This episode is going up in April. Starting on June 15, that’s about two months away, we’re gonna be raising prices for the main bonus episodes tier by $2.00 US or the round number equivalent in other currencies. However, if you want to lock in the original price for a whole year, you can change your settings to become a yearly member before June 15, 2025, and that will keep you at the original price for a year from then.

Lauren: Or if you’re like, “Well, I’m financially comfortable, and I wish these guys had more money to work with sooner,” you can also upgrade your membership to a higher tier. We would super appreciate that – especially now.

Gretchen: Our most recent bonus episode – speaking of bonus episodes – was all about linguistic celebrities. We discussed famous other lives of academic linguists and the linguistics cred of some people who are more famous for their sports, music, or political careers but secretly did a linguistics degree or something at some point. We also talk about how to fan out academically with your favourite linguistics researchers should you happen to find yourself at a conference or event with them.

Lauren: For this and many other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm.

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Gretchen: When I was writing Because Internet, which is a book that I wrote about internet language, and I was working on this chapter about emoji, and you read my draft chapter, and you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of gesture research that’s directly relevant to your emoji research,” and I was like, “Cool, Lauren, great. Can you point me to some sort of comprehensive-yet-relatively-short, wide-ranging, reasonably easy to read but still has enough technical detail introduction to all of the gesture literature, please? Because I would love to read it and integrate it into my book.”

Lauren: And I could not recommend a single thing to you. There’re some broad overviews, but they tend to be written about specific peoples’ research. We don’t even have a textbook in gesture studies yet that I could send your way. I was scratching my head.

Gretchen: There was this book that a very respected gesture researcher, Adam Kendon, had written in 2004, which is mostly related to his research agenda but, you know, it is quite good. But that’s 20 years ago now. I just think that quite a lot of gesture research has happened since 2004.

Lauren: Indeed. I think I ended up cobbling together lecture notes and a couple of key articles and a lot of chatting to you about gesture, which I love to do, but I can’t do that for everyone who I want to make excited about gesture studies.

Gretchen: Right. And I can’t recommend that everybody take hours and hours of your time to get you to tell them personally about gesture research, even though we have talked about gesture several times on this podcast, but like, what else is there. As far as I’m concerned, you wrote this gesture book for me.

Lauren: Yes. Between those initial conversations and now – only six years later – I’m very happy to be able to say that Gesture: A Slim Guide has been published with Oxford University Press.

Gretchen: This is an Oxford University Press book, which means it’s more academic than Because Internet, which was published with Riverhead out of Penguin which is a trade publisher. But it’s somewhere on the margins between relatively technical but less technical than a full academic monograph and somewhat more accessible, especially if you don’t have any background in gesture studies, but you are some other kind of academic or deep cut nerd. It’s sort of somewhere in between.

Lauren: The slim guide format is so lovely. It’s just 50,000 words of full-paced introduction to as much of the field as I could cram into those chapters.

Gretchen: Especially if people are researchers in other areas or they’re willing to approach a book that’s a bit more on the technical side, this is the survey introduction to gesture that I wish I’d had. I read this, and I was like, “Oh, I’ve learned so much,” that I wish I’d had while I was writing Because Internet but I can have in the future for any time I wanna refer to stuff about gesture.

Lauren: Of course, because I did manage to cram some jokes in there, too.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Okay. It’s not entirely dry. Can we talk about the cover, Lauren? Did you put yourself on the cover?

Lauren: You have correctly identified that.

Gretchen: It looks a bit like you but not entirely like you – like you maybe 10 years ago.

Lauren: I commissioned resident artist of Lingthusiasm, Lucy Maddox, to do a blackline sketch of a person performing an array of gestures all at once. It’s a very energetic drawing.

Gretchen: Because at first, I didn’t recognise that this was you per se, but then I saw a clip from a video that you did in 2014 when you were doing some very early gesture research that you’ve done. I was like, “Wait, is that Lauren from the video who has much longer hair and looks younger? Is that who’s on the cover?”

Lauren: She did look younger because it’s not just from 2014. The publication of the research that we used the video stimulus was from 2014. That was my honours project which I did in 2007. It is, in fact, a drawing of baby undergraduate Lauren.

Gretchen: Amazing.

Lauren: It was really nice. This was an honours project that I did with Barbara Kelly as my honours supervisor, someone who I still miss a lot and who was really formative in shaping my research agenda at the time. It’s a nice nod back to my introduction to gesture. I talk about Barb and my relationship both to her and gesture studies a little bit in this book as well. It’s just a nice little in-joke reference for me.

Gretchen: We will definitely link to the book. You should go and click on it and look at the cover even if you’re like, “This sounds too technical to me,” if you wanna see the line drawing inspired by baby Lauren. Let’s talk about what’s in the book. One of the things that I thought was particularly interesting was the – when we’re looking at gesture studies, and we’re trying to see the communicative function of gesture, one way to do that is to change the situation and see which kinds of gestures people do, say, over the phone versus in person. What kinds of studies have looked at this?

Lauren: There are a whole range of studies. We have lots of different tweaks to the interactional context in terms of whether you are talking to someone face-to-face, you’re talking to someone who’s in the room, but they can’t see you. I like that there’s a whole bunch of work where people have told stories to Dictaphones, and they’ve been told to tell stories to a Dictaphone where someone will listen later and tell stories to a Dictaphone where no one’s gonna listen, it’s just for practice. Even those kind of changes – the less likely someone is to think that a person is listening to them or listening to them in real time, you tend to get smaller gestures and less informative gestures, like the shape of the gesture becomes less clear, the amount information its conveying becomes less clear.

Gretchen: But people still gesture, even if no one’s ever gonna see them.

Lauren: Absolutely. There’s still something that is just easier for us to keep gesturing alongside speaking.

Gretchen: Some part of gesture has to do with my cognition as the speaker, and some part of the gesture has to do with my attempt to communicate with you, which is what’s changed by, okay, do I think you can see me, can anybody see me, can anybody see me ever. Some part is communicative, and some part is cognitive, I guess.

Lauren: Yeah, some part still seems to be an unavoidable thing. I mean, we haven’t put people from all languages or all cultures into these kind of experimental conditions. It has happened almost exclusively –

Gretchen: There are a lot of languages and cultures, yes.

Lauren: This kind of gesture research has happened predominantly with English speakers and a few other European languages, but it is worth remembering that we haven’t come across a culture yet where there are no gestures that accompany speech. It is something that appears to be an unavoidable part of the package of the way humans communicate and that we are trying to be helpful to the people we’re speaking to – if they can see us – by giving them more gestural information – even to the point where, whether our audience is there or not, researchers have done a series of experiments where they’ve tried to stop people gesturing altogether.

Gretchen: I love these because the experimental paradigms are so wacky.

Lauren: They are fascinating.

Gretchen: Why do these experimentations have to be so weird? Can’t we just tell people, “Don’t gesture”?

Lauren: You can’t just tell people not to gesture because people become very quickly very sensitive to their gestures as soon as you start pointing out gesture.

Gretchen: Oh, okay. Because I definitely started noticing people’s gestures a lot when I was talking with you about them and writing about them for Because Internet and paying attention to gesture research. But does this also explain why a lot of research gesture labs aren’t called the “lab for the study of gesture” because then if you have people come in to do a study, they’re like, “Oh, people are studying my gestures. I guess I better gesture differently”?

Lauren: There’s nothing that will ruin your experimental data collection quicker than telling people you’re recording them because you want to see their gestures. A lot of these labs are known as the “social interaction lab” or the “narrative lab” or the “culture lab.”

Gretchen: Okay, okay. This explains why I was like, “It doesn’t sound like there’s actually very much gesture research, but they’re all doing gesture.” Okay, okay, I get it now.

Lauren: We’re hiding it.

Gretchen: If you can’t tell people like, “Hey, we’re just studying your gestures,” or “Please don’t gesture. We wanna see what you do,” you end up having to do deception studies where you have to prevent people from gesturing for some other reason.

Lauren: A lot of them do create this deception for why they are either physically restraining people or requesting them to not move their hands. Some studies have put false electroplates in the arms of a chair and told people to just rest their hands on the electrodes so they could measure heart rate or something like that.

Gretchen: You have cables coming out of the chair leading outside the door but actually not attached to anything, so they think they’re in this electrode chair, but they’re actually just a decoy because they want them to keep their hands still.

Lauren: My other favourite is the table-mounted buttons that people were told turned on the microphone for them to talk into.

Gretchen: Oh, so they had to keep their hands pressing the buttons, and they couldn’t gesture.

Lauren: Yeah. Possibly the most extreme is – and to quote the research – “a coloured garden relax chair.”

Gretchen: What is a “coloured garden relax chair”?

Lauren: I don’t know. This is from the ’80s when they didn’t publish many photographs of research.

Gretchen: But this is some sort of, presumably, beach chair/deck chair type of situation?

Lauren: I guess so. Some kind of lounge chair that you put in your garden for the nice weather. They had restraints for the “head, arms, legs, and feet.”

Gretchen: So, it was the kind of chair that had a footrest so that they could also have restraints for the – oh my god. The mental image here.

Lauren: Participants were told this was for a study of ergonomics.

Gretchen: “I’m so ergonomically comfortable right now.”

Lauren: There’re two things that happen when you create this kind of restraint on gesturing. One that I find quite interesting is that people increase gestures where they can. If you stop people from using their hands, you’ll see them use their feet more. If you restrain their feet as well, that one with the garden relax chair that was extremely people-tied-up, people would use their fingers more. Gesture just wants to happen.

Gretchen: Do they just move their noses around?

Lauren: You’d probably get more head gestures depending on how well restrained the head is.

Gretchen: Oh, no. Now, you’ve got to tell them, “We’re doing eye-tracking now. We’re gonna strap your head in.” Okay.

Lauren: I do love there is at least one paper that was just like, “Uh, we just asked people to fold their hands and place them on the table and gained much the same effect.”

Gretchen: So, they didn’t need to do the coloured garden relax chair with restraints for arms, legs, hands, and feet. They could’ve just asked them to fold their hands nicely on the table or sit on their hands or something.

Lauren: Potentially. What we find is that across this survey of different studies, they all found, to some extent, that the person’s speech, in the absence of gesture, became less fluent, but exactly what became less fluent was different across all the studies. For some of them, it’s that people’s sentences got a bit shorter or were less densely informational. For some of them, people would trip up on content words. Really did seem to vary.

Gretchen: Would people “um” and “uh” more?

Lauren: People would “um” and “uh.” Again, they were measuring all kinds of different – like, if it’s “um” and “uh,” if it’s pauses, if it’s respeaking.

Gretchen: I used this in inverse when I was recording the audiobook of Because Internet because I had just come across this gesture research, and I was like, “So, if I make very rhythmic gestures silently while I’m recording, then I could have fewer pauses and disfluencies that they would have to edit out later.” I felt like it worked because I only started doing it, like, an hour in.

Lauren: Also, if you imagined that you were speaking to a more present audience by doing that, that might’ve helped you also just feel more engaged.

Gretchen: I did have a present audience. I had two techs and a director on the mic with me, so that someone could hear me the whole time because they were paying attention to places where I accidentally tripped over a word or misspoke a word or a repeated a word twice. They would tell me, “Go back and redo that version,” so they could edit it into this seamless thing. So, people were listening to me and also sort of engaged, generally, in listening.

Lauren: For a long time, the theory has been that your gestures are helping you as the speaker, cognitively, with lexical retrieval. It’s helping you pull words out of your mental vocabulary. That’s why gesturing helps, and preventing gestures creates these disfluencies. But there’s been some really nice research in an extended series of experiments from Yağmur Kısa where Kısa looked at whether people were present or not and what kind of restraints on gesture created disfluencies and found that what actually appears to be happening is rather than being for the speaker to pull out words, speakers do these kind of halting of gestures as a way to flag to the listener, “Look, it’s just a disfluency, but I’m getting there. I’ll figure something else. I will get the word eventually.”

Gretchen: Like, “Don’t worry about it.” So, it’s not that the gestures are causing the speaker to be more or less able to access a word, it’s that the gestures are a signal – they’re slightly delayed – they’re a signal that like, “I know I’m looking for the word, but bear with me.”

Lauren: Yeah. And people get really caught up in what bits of gesture are for the listener, and what bits of gesture are for the speaker, and what their functions are. I – after doing all of this research – I actually feel more chill about not – it’s interesting, and it’s important work, and I’m glad there’re people unpacking these things. But also, at the end of the day, as a listener, I’m also a speaker, and the more useful information I can get from someone if they’re gesturing while they’re speaking, the more useful that is to me when I become the speaker myself.

Gretchen: Right. You don’t have one person always being the speaker, on person always being the listener, because you’re going back and forth. I do feel like people use gestures to manage turns in conversation as well.

Lauren: A lot.

Gretchen: I feel like, you know, sometimes I’m wearing a facemask or something, I feel like I have a harder time managing turns in conversation and initiating conversations with people when that part of my face is covered.

Lauren: And then you’re probably drawing on a whole bunch of gestural resources instead.

Gretchen: Right. I’m using more of my eyebrows instead of my lips to indicate that I wanna be engaged with the conversation.

Lauren: I’m so happy with my eyebrow game and how far it’s come with all of the public face respiratory masking that I’ve been doing over the last five years. That is my one positive takeaway from the good and necessary task of masking in public is that my rapport signalling with eyebrows is vastly better than it was as a typical Westerner before this. There’re a lot of cultures where eyebrows are very useful gestures. I was not raised in one, and so I’m finding my own way.

Gretchen: Maybe down the line more interesting stylisation in Western comics with eyebrows that has already been popular in manga and anime to specify a lot of things with the eyes. Who knows!

Lauren: Yes, please.

Gretchen: We’ve been talking a lot about speakers and listeners. But gestures are also present in sign languages.

Lauren: For sure. I had a real time in the book setting out, “Look, I’m gonna say ‘speakers.’ And when I say ‘speakers,’ I mean speakers of all languages regardless of modality.” Because whether you’re using a spoken or a sign language, it was rhetorically easier to lump everyone into being “speakers “in terms of the interactional turn-taking.

Gretchen: In the case of a spoken language, gesture is obviously on an easily distinguishable level because one of them involves acoustic production of sound. Well, even in that case, snapping your fingers or something can produce sound.

Lauren: Look at you – straight to the edge cases.

Gretchen: Yeah, right with the edge cases. But with signed languages, they share the use of the hands and face. There’s a modality in common. But they’re doing it in different ways.

Lauren: For sure. That’s because signed languages have properties that they share with spoken languages. All languages have things like structure and grammar. That means that a word or a sign and a sentence can have some kind of shared meaning regardless of the context. If I said, “the fluffy cat,” that would be a meaningful little referent.

Gretchen: That’s right out of the blue. We weren’t previously talking about cats at all. There it is. But if you’re gesturing to describe how you might pet the fluffy cat, then that’s contextual and could refer to how you might pet the fluffy dog instead or do some other gesture that might mean that in that context. That’s where gesture is different from language because it’s contextual.

Lauren: It’s contextual and because it doesn’t have that structure and that grammar. That is actually an advantage because it means that the linguistic language channel is doing something very different to the gesture channel and that they can work in this integrated way to create this more sophisticated thing.

Gretchen: What does that look like when the language in question is a signed language?

Lauren: I have an anecdote in the book from when I was learning Auslan about what this looks like to the naïve spoken-modality-native-language-person coming into a signed context, which was that we were watching a video that was a series of events that were happening, and people were signing to each other, but also telling a story, and we had to report back on the new vocabulary for our sign vocabulary that we had noticed in the video. We knocked over a whole heap of the really obvious ones, and then as we were getting down into the ones that were a bit more difficult to figure out, someone was like, “Oh, the sign for opening a can of soft drink,” which, I’m standing here with my one hand holding a vessel, and the other hand pulling a ring tab off the top of a can of pop or soft drink.

Gretchen: Which is how I’d do it as well. Is this a sign?

Lauren: The Auslan teacher was just like, “Oh, that’s a gesture,” in a way that was just like, “Isn’t it obvious to you? Why would you tell me that this is a sign?”

Gretchen: Right.

Lauren: I had to go away and think about that, and it’s just like, “Well, this is not something that is in an Auslan dictionary. It’s not something that people recognise as a codified sign. It is not the sign for a can of soft drink.” Auslan does not have a specific verb for “to open a can of soft drink,” it’s just that, in the story – and the kind of soft drink wasn’t even that important. It was just there to illustrate that the dude was taking a moment to himself. It was really interesting – always with my gesture studies hat on – to be like, “Ah, from the outside, it was indistinguishable, to me, as an outsider to this language, what was a gesture and what was a sign. But people inside the language can have very strong ideas.” Signed languages obviously have a lot more to play with on the margins of “What is a sign?” and “What is a gesture?” but there are very much different components there even though it’s all happening in the same modality.

Gretchen: It’s related to this level of grammaticality, whereas the sign for a can of pop, a can of soda, soft drink, would be a sign that would be in a dictionary. I’ve learned the sign for that in ASL as well, which could be different from what’s in Auslan, but the gesture that you make to indicate that you’re opening a can of something could be the same or different depending on how the speaker’s approaching the gesture but not on a grammatical level that differs systematically across this group.

Lauren: Yeah. That is – signed languages obviously exploit the fact that they are in this visual modality and can do things that are very iconic. The sign for a can of beverage is most likely to have some physical similarity in a way that spoken languages are really impoverished in this regard.

Gretchen: I mean, we have a lot of onomatopoeia. I think we should take more credit for that.

Lauren: We try.

Gretchen: The sign for a can of pop or soda, to me, in ASL, it looks quite similar to the sign for “COVID” because there’s this sort of crown thing around the top. Obviously, those have very different meanings, so you don’t want to get them confused. They have this lexical arbitrariness even if you think, “Oh, there’s something resemblance,” it’s also like, “Well, there’s another sign similar to it that means something completely different.”

Lauren: How is the ASL learning going?

Gretchen: Well, so, I was very fascinated by the bit in your book where you talked about how there was a study of gestures produced by hearing learners of signed languages after about a year, which is about where I am, and how their gestures in their spoken languages had changed a bit.

Lauren: Oh, is this happening for you?

Gretchen: Yeah. There’s a couple different domains where I’ve noticed this happening. One is that – growing up I always (up until the last year or so) gestured the number “three” – like, if you’re going into a restaurant, and you’re asking for a table for three people – with the index, middle, and ring finger up, and the thumb and pinky stuck together because that’s what people generally do in North America. I think in places in Europe, it may be more common to do it with the thumb out.

Lauren: It is indeed more common to do it that way.

Gretchen: I’d seen people do that, but I’d always done it the way most people did it with the first three fingers and the thumb and pinky folded in. In ASL, the way to do the number three is with the thumb and first two fingers, and then the sign that I had been doing for number three, which also looks sort of like a W, is the W letter or the number six. You really can’t mix up your threes and sixes. It’s not the case that you can – in a gestural context, you can lift any three fingers to indicate three – or at least any three contiguous fingers to indicate number three. I’ve also seen people do three as an “okay” hand. You can do any three fingers.

Lauren: You might go, “Well, that’s weird, but I know how many cookies they want.”

Gretchen: Yeah. It’s weird, but I could go into a restaurant, and do that, they’d be like, “Yeah, table for three. Okay.” It would be sort of weird, I guess, to do the “rock on” or “I love you” gesture where it’s like your thumb and your first finger and your pinky. I don’t think that would convey “I want three seats at this restaurant.” But there are several different acceptable forms of “three” as a gesture, whereas in sign, there’s one specific thing because we’re using the other forms to mean something else. I have noticed that I’m switching the way I do the number three in English to match the way I’m doing it in ASL because occasionally I slip up in ASL, and do it with the gesture that I had previously learned, and people are like, “What do you mean? Six?” And I’m like, “Oh, okay, okay, okay.” It’s easier to just switch that systematically across the board than it is to try to remember to do one thing in one context and one thing in another context because English speakers don’t care.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: The other thing that I’ve noticed is more subtle, which is that I seem to be better at using the conceptual space in front of me and setting people up to talk about their relationships in conceptual space the way that I’m being taught to do in ASL classes.

Lauren: Oh, yeah, because space becomes very grammatical in a lot of signed language grammar in terms of referring to a particular person or a place.

Gretchen: Right. I attended a d/Deaf event where they had one signer on stage signing in ASL and then they had a second signer on stage interpreting for them into LSQ, which is “Langue des signes québécoise,” the Quebec sign language. But because these two signers needed to be facing out to the audience so that we could see them – it was a room of maybe 30 people – they couldn’t be looking at each other so, importantly, the LSQ signer couldn’t be looking at the ASL signer to see what the signs actually were because she had to be looking at the audience. So, you’re like, “Well, how are you supposed to interpret if you don’t know what the signs are that the person’s doing?” What they did is they had another signer in the audience who was standing up and mirroring the ASL signer so that the LSQ signer could interpret that. I was describing this event to some hearing friends the next week, and I was describing where all the signers were in relation to each other and how they could see each other using hand shapes – probably influenced the fact that it was a d/Deaf event that I was talking about – but using the person classifiers to discuss where people were standing, which is just something that I wouldn’t have had the skills to set people up in space in such a consistent way before.

Lauren: That’s a thing that a lot of the research notes is that, often, what you’re doing is stuff you’ve learnt from the signed modality that is maybe not being picked up by the other spoken language people but that you now find useful.

Gretchen: I was doing a thing that was grammaticalised in a way that it was not grammaticalised if I would be trying to convey this before.

Lauren: Similarly, for people who live their daily life in places where there are multiple languages across signed and spoken modalities, you get this situation where there are a lot of lexical signs and there’s a lot of the grammar, and it all comes together in this multilingual, multimodal, rich way of communicating because everyone can understand what’s happening in both the spoken channel and the signed channel. There’s some really wonderful work unpacking these really complex and fascinating things in narratives, especially in central Australia where, for a lot of the language communities, there is both the spoken languages and something that’s called “alternate sign,” which is a sign language that is used in a context where there’re also mostly people who speak as well.

Gretchen: Interesting. What sort of context is that?

Lauren: From what we can tell from records, these alternate sign languages probably existed in some form or another across large areas of Australia. We still only really find them actively used in central parts of Australia now and a little bit up north. They are used a lot as a way of getting around taboos. There are some times where, if you’re in mourning, some people are required to not talk for cultural taboos during the mourning period but also for practical reasons like hunting, but also just in traditional storytelling and song and culture these are really cultures that are living in a richly multimodal way all the time.

Gretchen: That’s really interesting. Because of this, there’s a lot more sign that’s ubiquitous, and there’s a lot more multimodality at a societal level.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Cool.

Lauren: Very cool. I do have a question for you that I’ve been meaning to ask for a while, which is – you are learning ASL. But you are in Canada.

Gretchen: Yes. “ASL” stands for “American Sign Language,” and yet it is also the main sign language of Canada with a heavy asterisk because there’s also other things going on.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: There’s definitely a Canadian accent in ASL. My instructors, who’ve all been d/Deaf and Canadian, but our textbook is American, and so they’ve told me places where the sign that’s in the textbook is not what they would use themselves. So, you get a bit of both. Part of my motivation for learning ASL – a large part of my motivation – is so I can go to linguistics conferences and interact with Deaf linguists, like, know what’s going on. I could have chosen to learn LSQ, which is Quebec Sign Language, but that wouldn’t have let me go to very many linguistics conferences. I was like, “I’m going to prioritise ASL” Also, if I was learning LSQ, I would’ve had to do that through the medium of French, whereas with ASL I get to do finger spelling in English, which is much easier on me. That said, there’s also – there’s specifically a Montreal variety of ASL because Montreal has had a long tradition of schools for the d/Deaf here. LSQ (Langue des signes québécoise) is descended from ASL because the first (mostly religious nuns and priests) who came to teach in schools for the d/Deaf here first taught ASL, but it has subsequently been more influenced by French and French Sign Language and, also, for nationalistic reasons is called “LSQ.” But ASL itself is descended from French Sign Language. There’s some sort of French influence going that far back as well.

Lauren: That’s what I thought.

Gretchen: But the biggest difference is, if your family is Anglo, you learn ASL. If your family is Franco, you learn LSQ.

Lauren: Right. That’s the Canadian sociolinguistic context.

Gretchen: That’s the Canadian sociolinguistic context. There also used to be a Maritime Sign Language that was spoken in eastern Canada, especially in Halifax, which had a school for the d/Deaf, which was descended from British Sign Language from back when Canada was a British colony and wasn’t related to ASL in particular. But Montreal ASL has been influenced more by Maritime Sign Language because there were some students sent over from that school back in the day. There’s this interesting socio situation. I think it’s partially for ongoing linguistic contact reasons that people still call them both “American Sign Language.” I’ve heard one or two people argue that maybe it should be called “Canadian Sign Language.” But, yeah, that’s what we got.

Lauren: I find it really interesting because Auslan in Australia is part of the larger language family that BSL (British Sign Language) is part of, but it’s called the BANZSL family because it’s British Sign Language, Auslan, New Zealand Sign Language, and South African Sign. South Africa isn’t in the commonwealth. Again, this is just those historical artefacts of who learnt to teach at d/Deaf schools where. But like, South African’s not part of the commonwealth, but Canada is, but South Africa has the BANZSL family, and Canada has ASL. I just find it very historically fascinating.

Gretchen: My mnemonic, which I just made up right now, is I think of it as if your national version of English has an R sound in words like “car” or “far” – “gesture” – then you have this ASL dialect continuum. If you don’t have an R in those words, then you’re in the BANZSL family.

Lauren: Or /d͡ʒɛt͡ʃə:/.

Gretchen: [Laughs] They’re gonna be really upset by this analogy. It doesn’t work. Don’t think about it too hard. But it might be related to historical patterns of colonial settlement because that R persists in those areas because they were settled longer ago.

Lauren: I just feel like people from Boston and the north of England are not gonna be impressed with this mnemonic. Also, just makes complete sense for Canadians and Americans to share a signed language of contact.

Gretchen: To be able to talk to each other it’s kind of nice. There’s still apparently a few old folks left who speak Maritime Sign Language, but they moved the school for the d/Deaf from Halifax to Amherst and then changed which language they taught at it, which was a whole thing. A lot of differences seem to also happen around the city level where you have specific d/Deaf community. It’s really interesting for me to be learning ASL specifically in Montreal because I’m acquiring a lot of local stuff there, and then I’m sure I’m gonna go to linguistics conferences, and people are gonna tell me that I’m signing wrong because I’ll be doing it the Montreal way. It’s very satisfying to me that I’m developing a Montreal accent because it feels like the right accent for me to have.

Lauren: The nice thing about you learning ASL is it means we now have one video interview of Lingthusiasm in Auslan with Gab Hodge and one in ASL with Lina Hou. That’s nice symmetry.

Gretchen: It was actually seeing you signing with Gab during that interview when we were setting up the logistics of it that I was like, “Ah, I wasn’t able to do this when I interviewed Lina, and it would’ve been great! If we do another interview like this at some point, it would be better to be able to do that logistics aspect with a bit of sign myself.” We would still have to have an interpreter for an interview because, obviously, we can’t assume that everybody listening to Lingthusiasm knows a signed language, but that’s part of my motivation for trying to learn it.

Lauren: Always happy to fomo people into learning more languages.

Gretchen: But we were talking about your gesture book. Is there anything else that you wanna share about it?

Lauren: I am happy to report that the emoji work from Because Internet did make a cameo in Gesture: A Slim Guide, which I think is just a really nice, full circle moment.

Gretchen: You have this cameo in Because Internet where I’m like, trying to think about the role of emoji and communication, “[…] and then I had Lauren Gawne, podcast co-host and gesture researcher, read a draft of this chapter, and she gave me all these suggestions about gesture.” Because of that, we wrote an academic paper about emoji as gesture, which came out very shortly before Because Internet in enough time for us to cite it in that book. Now, we’re coming full circle with that research also having a tiny cameo in Gesture: A Slim Guide.

Lauren: Yeah, I have a short section on the future of gesture and that maybe these playful ways of using language online are creating new spaces for how we think about and use gesture.

Gretchen: I think you’re selling yourself short because you were also responsible for getting a couple common and versatile gestures that we do encoded into the emoji system by writing proposals for Unicode to include those as gestures.

Lauren: Oh, yes, I used my gesture studies knowledge for good. The palm up hand – you can offer people things – and the palm down hand, which I like to combine with palm down hand, something that you want to put in a bin, and then it’s just like, “Throw it in the bin.”

Gretchen: I was recently in a conversation where there was a palm up, palm down, palm up, palm down emoji sequence used to represent that “so-so,” like “meh” gesture. I was like, “I need to screencap this and send it to Lauren because she’s gonna be so delighted at her gestures.”

Lauren: Delightful.

Gretchen: Also, the face peeking eye out from hands gesture, I was involved in that proposal as well, but that was a gesture that we identified as being not in the emoji set that could be added.

Lauren: Yes, and I’m so delighted that there is also a head nod and a head shake proposal. I had to do a lot of work with the different emoji designers to emphasize you can’t have a sad face with a head shake, because that’s just one culture that has the headshake as a “no” negative. There’re so cultures where the “no” and the negative is the vertical one. They had to come up with this sufficiently ambiguous facial expression.

Gretchen: And also draw the little movement lines on there to indicate that it’s going side-to-side or up-and-down.

Lauren: Yeah. We also have that duo as well now.

Gretchen: That’s very exciting. Might not be on all devices yet but should be coming.

Lauren: Yeah. And so much more that I got to cram into Gesture: A Slim Guide including gesture and politeness, the origins of language, as well as domestic and wild animals and how they use or respond to human gestures, and gesturing to robots.

Gretchen: Is this like gesture-activated commands for your devices? I wish I could just do a “shh” gesture to my phone to make it be quiet.

Lauren: Gesture-activated commands for devices, new and attempting-to-be-more-multimodal robots to interact with you in return.

Gretchen: Are we telling you all to go out and read this book? Not necessarily. I would say, as a linguist, I learned a lot. I have a background in linguistics but not in gesture studies. I found it understandable that way. But that said, sometimes when I’m reading a linguistics book that genuinely is for a general audience, I don’t learn all that much because I did study this for years in university. If you’re someone who’s done a lot of linguistics reading already, whether that’s autodidact self-studying or at a more institutional level, it’s a book that you could read. What we can tell you is that Lauren’s now this big expert on gesture, and she has more fun gesture anecdotes that she couldn’t fit in this one podcast, so if there’re any other podcasts that you love that could use a gesture episode, feel free to let them know that they should bring Lauren on and have her talk about gesture. If we end up with a little list of other podcasts that you’ve been on to talk about different aspects of your book, we will make a list and share it with you so there’re other places you can hear from other aspects of this book that are a little bit more on the lighter side.

Lauren: Indeed. I wrote this book as an introduction for colleagues who were writing about, say, internet language, and I just wished they had more gesture in there.

Gretchen: [Laughs] Thank you for writing a book for me, particularly.

Lauren: Or for students or collaborators or other linguists and social scientists who want to think about gesture as part of what they’re paying attention to. I also wrote this for myself, so I could collect all those anecdotes. I’ll get to share them with you on the podcast.

Gretchen: We will continue to hear things about gesture from you long into the future.

Lauren: Indeed, you will.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode – including my new book, Gesture: A Slim Guide – 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 – like “Etymology isn’t Destiny” t-shirts and aesthetic IPA posters – at lingthusiasm.com/merch. My social media and blog is 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 want to 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 with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include linguistic celebrities, the results of our 2024 listener survey, and an interview with Julie Sedivy about the science of beautiful writing.

Lauren: You can also get a snazzy new Lingthusiasm sticker with tiny linguistics-y objects on it by joining our Patreon at the Ling-thusiast tier or higher by July 1st, 2025. If you can’t afford to pledge, that’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.

Gretchen: 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 “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]