93: How nonbinary and binary people talk - Interview with Jacq Jones

Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics

Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne

Science

4.8 • 743 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2024

⏱️ 45 minutes

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Summary

There are many ways that people perform gender, from clothing and hairstyle to how we talk or carry ourselves. When doing linguistic analysis of one aspect, such as someone's voice, it's useful to also consider the fuller picture such as what they're wearing and who they're talking with. In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about how nonbinary people talk with Jacq Jones, who's a lecturer at Te Kunenga ki Pūrehuroa / Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. We talk about their research on how nonbinary and binary people make choices about how to perform gender using their voices and other variables like clothing, and later collaborating with one of their research participants to reflect on how it feels to have your personal voice and gender expression plotted on a chart. We also talk about linguistic geography, Canadian and New Zealand Englishes, and the secret plurality of R sounds in English and how you can figure out which one you have by poking yourself (gently!) with a toothpick. Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice: episodes.fm/1186056137/episode/dGFnOnNvdW5kY2xvdWQsMjAxMDp0cmFja3MvMTg1MzMwODQxMA== Or read the transcript here: lingthusiasm.com/post/753857624894849024/transcript-episode-83 Announcements: In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about three of our favourite kinds of linguistic mixups: spoonerisms, mondegreens, and eggcorns! We talk about William Spooner, the Oxford prof from the 1800s that many spoonerisms are (falsely) attributed to, Lauren's very Australian 90s picture book of spoonerisms, the Scottish song "The Bonny Earl of Moray" which gave rise to the term mondegreen, why there are so many more mondegreens in older pop songs and folk songs than there are now, and how eggcorn is a double eggcorn (a mis-parsing of acorn, which itself is an eggcorn of oak-corn for akern). Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds about your favourite linguistic mixups: patreon.com/posts/105461156 For links to things mentioned in this episode: lingthusiasm.com/post/753857305290915840/episode-93-how-nonbinary-and-binary-people-talk

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics.
0:22.3	I'm Gretchen McCulloch.
0:23.6	And today, we're getting enthusiastic about non-binary speech with Dr. Jack Jones.
0:28.4	They're a lecturer at Tekuniga, Kipura-Massie University in Auckland, New Zealand.
0:33.9	But first, our most recent bonus episode was about various kinds of fun, mishearings and mis-sayings and mis-parsings that people make with words in songs, in phrases, in idioms, all sorts of like, you know when you hear an acorn and you think it might actually be an egg corn because it's like the egg of the tree?
0:56.3	Well, we talk about what strange things that you miss hear or miss parse can tell us about how
1:01.3	language works. Go to patreon.com slash linkthusiasm to listen to this bonus episode, many more
1:07.5	bonus episodes and help us keep the show running.
1:28.2	Hello, Jack. Hi, Gretchen. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. It's awesome.
1:34.9	So before we get into all of the cool research that you've done about how non-binary people talk that you're working on,
1:38.9	let's talk a little bit about your origin story. How did you get into linguistics?
2:01.6	Okay, well, yeah, it's, I mean, how far back do you want to go, I guess? I was a high school dropout. So I was, you know, in my teens, I was going around North America in Canada and the United States working and this and that. And I decided I wanted to go back to school. And I did get into kind of an adult education program and finished up my high school. And it was a really small town in rural Alberta,
2:07.1	had a community college. And they didn't have that many classes. So I went into geography.
2:13.8	That's super related to linguistics. Yeah. You'd be surprised. Great. Yeah, because I had spent time, you know, in the southern United States and in Alberta and in Ontario and things.
2:18.9	And so I liked seeing all the different places.
2:21.4	And so I went into geography.
2:22.5	Yeah.
2:23.5	And for people who don't know, geography sort of has these two big branches.
2:27.1	There's physical geography and human geography.
2:29.3	Okay.
2:30.3	And physical geography is like rocks and trees and mountains and weather.
2:33.9	And human geography is how
	...

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