48: Who you are in high school, linguistically speaking - Interview with Shivonne Gates

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2020

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

High school is a time when people really notice small social details, such as how you dress or what vowels you’re using. Making choices from among these various factors is a big way that we assert our identities as we’re growing up. For a particular group of students in the UK, they’re on the forefront of linguistic innovation using a variety known as Multicultural London English. In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne interviews Dr. Shivonne Gates, a linguist who wrote her dissertation on Multicultural London English and is currently a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research, Britain’s largest independent social research agency. We talk about her research on accents in the UK, doing collaborative research with young people, and linguistics research jobs outside of academia. This month’s bonus episode is about pangrams! Pangrams are sentences that contain all of the letters of the alphabet, like the famous "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" and the more obscure "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!". In this episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about pangrams and the further questions that they raise about the structure of various languages. How short can you get an English pangram without becoming incoherent? Which characters are hard to include in different languages? Do accented characters count as separate letters? What kinds of using-every-symbol writing can you make with non-alphabetic writing systems? Announcements: We have teamed up with Crash Course to write the 16 video series Crash Course Linguistics. We’re so excited to share this course with you! If you want to get an email when each of the Crash Course Linguistics videos comes out, along with exercises to practice the concepts and links for further reading, you can sign up for Mutual Intelligibility email newsletters. https://mutualintelligibility.substack.com/ We also have exciting new merch colours! Our International Phonetic Alphabet scarves and masks, notebooks, mugs, and socks are now available in Raspberry, Mustard, and Lilac with white IPA symbols. https://lingthusiasm.com/merch For links to everything mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/629556445433790464/lingthusiasm-episode-48-who-you-are-in-high

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:22.1	I'm Lauren Gorn, and today I'm joined by Chauphan Gates, and we're getting enthusiastic
0:26.3	about linguistic variation in the UK.
0:29.3	But first, Crash Course Linguistics is out this month, the beginning of the 16-part introduction
0:35.9	to linguistics through the Crash Course YouTube channel.
0:39.8	We'll have a link to their channel in the show notes,
0:43.2	and we'll also be doing weekly emails every time a new video is out
0:47.2	through the Mutual Intelligibility newsletter.
0:50.2	So if you sign up to Mutual Intelligenceability,
0:52.2	you'll receive a link to every new video as it comes out and some related linguistics resources.
1:09.0	Today I'm joined by J. Von Gates, who is a senior researcher at NatSEN Social Research.
1:15.1	Chauvin has a background in linguistics as well as sociology and applied social research.
1:21.2	And her linguistics research interests include language and ethnicity, sociolinguistics, and
1:26.8	critical race theory. Welcome,
1:28.9	Shavon.
1:29.9	Hi Lauren, thanks to having me.
1:31.3	That is absolutely a delight to have you here today. Can you tell us a bit about how
1:37.3	you got into linguistics?
1:39.3	Sure. So I actually got into linguistics when I was in sixth form, which is the last two years of high school in the UK. So I did A-level English language and as part of that I did a kind of mini research project.
1:55.4	Cool. Yeah, it was really cool. I did some narrative analysis of a couple of recordings of my cousin at kind of different
2:04.4	developmental stages. He was, I think, something like five and nine. And I compared kind of how
2:10.4	his narrative structures had developed over time, essentially. Cool. Had you happened to just record him as a five-year-old because he was
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.