20: Speaking Canadian and Australian English in a British-American binary

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 791 Ratings

🗓️ 17 May 2018

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Australian and Canadian English don’t sound much alike, but they have one big similarity: they’re both national varieties that tend to get overshadowed by their more famous siblings. In this episode of Lingthusiasm, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch use Lynne Murphy’s new book The Prodigal Tongue as a guide to the sometimes prickly relationship between the globally dominant British and American varieties of English, give a mini history of English in our own countries, and discuss our national quests to find space between and around US and UK nationlects. On the way, we ask the big, country-dividing questions like, is soup more likely to be brothy or puréed? Does “please” make a request ruder or more polite? What’s a prototypical bacon? Where on your face is a frown? This month’s bonus episode on Patreon is about what you should know if you’re considering linguistics grad school: whether to apply, tips on applying and choosing a school, and some of the differences between the North American and UK/Australian systems. We also announced that our Patron goal bonus art will by done by Lucy, who is not only a great artist but also an English language teacher with a Masters in Applied Linguistics. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to the bonus episodes and see behind-the-scenes updates about the art. To see this episode's shownotes, go to https://lingthusiasm.com/post/173999864106/lingthusiasm-episode-20-speaking-canadian-and

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Leithousand, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:21.8	And I'm Lauren Gorn.
0:23.2	And today we're talking about the two biggest and most dominant varieties of English in the global language landscape.
0:29.7	I'm talking about Canadian and Australian English.
0:32.2	Obviously.
0:33.2	But first, we are in the latest issue of Babelzine, which is really exciting. So Babel is a magazine
0:40.6	about linguistics, which you should totally check out if you haven't heard of it already. They
0:44.3	do lots of fun linguistics content that's accessible for general audience. We're big fans,
0:48.6	and we're in their Meet the Professionals series. So they did an interview with us about this
0:53.4	very podcast. If you're
0:54.9	listening to the show, you've already met us. But you can hear a little bit about how we got
0:58.8	the show started and why we love doing it so much. And you can see our faces. Something you
1:03.9	can't do on this podcast, that is true. She was very exciting. We also announced our artist for
1:09.5	the art goal that we hit on Patreon. So Lucy is going to be doing art for us and we linked to her art portfolio from our website and from Twitter. And it'll be in the show notes as well. You can see what that'll look like.
1:21.4	We are really excited. As we mentioned in the Patreon episode, we'll be sharing kind of progressive art updates and images of like early sketches with our patrons.
1:33.0	They'll also be getting a high-res digital copy of the art when it's finished.
1:37.4	And we'll be sharing it with everyone else as well in low-res.
1:40.7	Yeah, and we're making it available on various objects.
1:43.2	I should say the art itself is not
1:44.5	available. You can just see other stuff that she's done for other people. Which is super cute,
1:48.3	and we're super excited. We also have our most recent Patreon bonus episodes. We have one on
1:55.5	the Roses Are Red and other poetry memes. I love a good poetry meme,
	...

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