Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, and today I have a bonus segment for my interview

with forensic linguist Natalie Schilling back in October, and I thought this one was especially

interesting. We talked about a really strange disappearance Natalie worked on that she calls the case of the mystery

dialect. Grammar-Paloosians who support the show get these segments right when they come out,

and maybe more importantly, give us the help we need to keep going and produce these bonus segments.

So many thanks to all you wonderful grammar-palusians. I hope when people hear what great work you're helping us make, they'll join too.

We're here with Natalie Schilling, Forensic Linguistic, an emerita professor from Georgetown.

So you have a story about a project you worked on that involved a mystery dialect, you tell me.

I do, yeah.

So I can tell you about this case, as I sometimes call the case of a mystery dialect.

This case involved, there's a cold case, involved a young girl, 12 or 13 years years old who went missing from a military base in California

in 1981. So many decades ago, she goes missing. She has siblings. So it's a little girl.

She has some brothers and sisters. The siblings are told she ran away and you are never to speak about her again.

So the parents tell the kids, no, we don't talk about it. She ran away. Don't, we don't speak of it.

So, um, for more than 10 years, there's no sign of this girl. There's no communications from the

girl. There's no report to any police. Finally, in 1994, one of the siblings of this person,

her name's Mary, the siblings files a missing person's report. So this is what about 13 years

after the girl had gone missing. At the time, the police in the military base didn't really do

much investigating because the case by then

was already so old. A few years later, 2002, there was kind of some wrap-up investigative work

being done on this military base because it was closing down. And there was a dog, you know,

a cadaver, a military, a investigative dog who was brought in. The police were given

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