Sadie Ryan, linguist and host of the Accentricity podcasts shares her insights into different linguistic topics. Sadie is currently a university lecturer in linguistics. What languages has she been learning and is it easier for a linguist to learn languages? Listen to this conversation and learn more about it.
Table of Contents
Podcast
Audio only
You’ll find it also on Spotify, Itunes, Stitcher an
YouTube
Audiogram format (only subtitles)
Part 1
Part 2
Links
Twitter: @accentricitypod
Superlinguo (a compilation of links to a lot of linguistics podcasts and other sources – a must for linguist lovers)
The linguistic atlas of Scots: https://scotssyntaxatlas.ac.uk/
Time stamps/Topics
0:05 Introduction: Who is Sadie Ryan?
1:08 How people react when they hear of Sadie’s profession as a linguist/sociolinguist
2:52 The term “Linguist” has more than one meaning
7:20 How Sadie got involved into linguistics
10:26 Speaking with a posh accent (ep. 1 of Accentricity)
14:33 Remember: Everyone has an accent!
18:19 Schools should teach more the listening skill
29:27 The best thing Sadie learned about language (Ep. mentioned)
34:40 Sadie’s PhD research
40:01 Podcast recommendations (Linguistics)
42:58 Language documentation (a specific branch in linguistics)
47:23 The Podcast Accentricity – Every voice is valid
50:38 Speaking of a specific episode of The Podcast Accentricity (Sadie interviewed her mother)
5246 Sadie’s language journey (Polish/Gaelic)
53:42 Is it easier to learn a language as a linguist?
58:20 Accentricity got an award!
0:59:37 Future seasons of the Accentricity podcast
1:02:01 Sadie’s favorite expression: not my circus, not my monkeys.
Transcript
Who is Sadie Ryan?
Sadie: My name’s Sadie, Sadie Ryan I am from Scotland and I live in Glasgow. So one of the two, two biggest cities in Scotland, I think it’s the biggest city in Scotland. And I work at the university of Glasgow as a lecturer in languages and intercultural studies. I just started two weeks ago.
So it’s all quite new at the moment. But very exciting. And I make a Podcast called Accentricity making for a couple of years now and it’s all about language and identity. Sometimes it’s about learning different languages and what that has to do with identity. And a lot of the time it’s about accents and identity and just the different ways that we speak and what that has to do with we are as people
Daniel: I wanted to begin with the section about linguistics because you have a PhD in socio-linguistics. Right?
Sadie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daniel: First off. How do people react when they know about your profession being a linguist? To be more precise, to be a socio-linguist. What are some of the reactions?
People’s reaction to Sadie’s profession as a linguist
Sadie: I think the first reaction a lot of people have, especially if they don’t know very much about socio-linguistics specifically, is awesome.You must have loads and loads of languages. Like what languages do you speak? Or sometimes I’ve had people just start speaking to me in German or Russian or something.
Daniel: Hmm.
Sadie: And unfortunately I don’t speak lots of languages at all. I mostly just speak English and a little bit of Polish and a little bit of French and a little bit of Gaelic, but I’ve just started darting Gallic, but really mostly just English. So that’s often a bit of a surprise to people. Obviously some linguists do speak lots of languages.
And I really wish I was one of them. I’m quite jealous of that. But my work as a linguist mm depending on what kind of linguistics you do. I think it’s fair to say socio-linguists tend to specialize in one or maybe two languages and focus their research on just one, one or a few, couple of languages at a time.
I also work on multilingualism a little bit, so kind of look more broadly about how different languages interact in our lives. But yeah, so generally speaking linguistics is the study of language and it’s incredibly varied and broad. And if you’re to ask what a linguist does, day-to-day it varies an incredible amount.
Is really, really varied in terms of what we do and what our day-to-day jobs look like.
Daniel: I must confess to be honest, because at a certain point, I also thought that every linguist is able to speak many, many languages. I don’t know why exactly. But I’ve some researchers and some dictionaries online.
Sadie: Yes.
Daniel: they even write it in the explanation sometimes
Sadie: It’s not necessarily wrong. There’s kind of two meanings of the word linguists. So one definition of linguist is somebody who speaks lots of languages and is interested in languages and specifically learned like, so that is one definition of language. There’s just not one that really applies to me, unfortunately.
So it’s, it’s definitely not wrong.
Daniel: But I think that is so beautiful in general when it comes to languages, because there is no white and black, it is always more layered. Right. So that makes it really beautiful, but also difficult. Sometimes
Sadie: Really complicated. I think when I was younger and I mean, I didn’t know that studying language was a thing that you could do when I was in skill. So I knew that you could learn another language. We learned French in school, and I knew that there was a subject in school called English where, even though we all came to school speaking English, pretty much most people in their class came to school, speaking English.
Even though generally we dads, we had a class which was quite often about learning proper grammar and kind of right and wrong and then it all got mixed up with kind of spelling and punctuation. And then when I went to university I was actually studying English literature. Cause I really liked reading and writing and I had a compulsory class that went with that called English language and linguistics, which I was really not thrilled about.
I thought it was going to hate that. And I thought it was going to be about. How to speak English right. And like, I went to school where a lot of people, we were often made to think that we spoke English wrong because we had an accent that, that wasn’t, you know, it’s, it’s like you were talking about, in Switzerland and speak in German where you are like, we tended to speak in a way that wasn’t thought of as the, sort of the Queen’s English, the standardized proper way to speak.
So we were quite often being told that we spoke wrong and I thought that this class is going to be more of that. And I was really surprised to learn that one of the first things they tell us is there is no such thing as correct grammar and incorrect grammar. There’s just different types of grammar.
Even if you’re learning a language, you may have a different way of speaking than somebody who’s a native speaker doesn’t mean that. It doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, it’s just different. And we can actually talk about it and study the differences and the way that we speak. So the way that people from certain places speak differently to people from other places even when it’s an English speaking, an officially English speaking country and people, who are learning English may speak a little bit differently to people who’ve spoken out all their lives, because there are other languages are influencing the way that they speak.
And there is beauty in that variety, and it’s not right or wrong it’s just different. And that’s kind of, that’s how I like to think of socio-linguistics or the term socio-linguistics is sort of socio as in society or a sociology and linguistics as in language. So it’s the way that society in language interact.
And a lot of that comes down to different groups of people speaking differently. So sometimes it’s about what I look at, we look at social class quite a lot. So the way you’re sort of class backgrounds may have something to do with the way you speak. We look at gender quite a lot, so get gender differences in the way people speak.
We look at ethnicity, different, different ethnicities and differences in the way that we speak. Um, and yeah, so it’s, it’s a really interesting subject to me because I’ve always been really interested in identity and I’ve always been really interested in language and it’s the way that language and identity and society all interact comes together in socio-linguistics, which is, yeah.
That’s why I love it.
Daniel: And so does it mean that the fire sparkled kind of at university when you, when you took these lessons and then, then you, your passion began?
Sadie: You’ve got such a lovely term of turn of phrase. I love that. The, for the favorite sparkle, I absolutely like, yeah, definitely. So like I say, I took this class thinking that I was gonna, um, it was going to be boarding
Daniel: Yeah.
Sadie: That class was what got me interested very much, but I think I was interested beforehand.
It’s just that, I didn’t know it was something you could do for a job. So I think there was a kind of, it was already a me sweater. I remember it in a way that I think it’s kind of in all of us, like. Really spoken to anybody about my job or about sociolinguistics, who hasn’t on some level been interested in that in their own life, because it’s something we all have a stake in and we all experience when we are another.
Um,
Daniel: may be unaware of that. It’s something that
Daniel: subconsciously
Sadie: Mm,
Daniel: it, but, uh, we don’t know it right.
Sadie: Yes. Yeah. Like we all, we talk about it all the time. Like I think I say of people who study it for a living, we’re always being like, oh, you say that word like that. That’s funny. I see it like this. And oh, that person’s got a funny accent and you know, so even when I was a little kid, we would notice differences in the way that people spoke and be like, oh, that person must be from England because they speak like this.
And it was already a big part of my life before. I was studying it for a job. And I remember in French class, I remember, so it would have been maybe about 14 or 15 and we were learning French. And I just suddenly was like, oh, and it was so we were, we had a textbook, which was about a day in the life of these two French kids.
And I remember noticing they seem to be really fancy French kids. Like they, they lived in a big fancy house and they Roquette of playing, playing tennis after school. And they just seemed quite fancy to me. And I remember saying to my teacher, are we learning posh French, because I was very aware that in English, there were kind of posh ways of speaking English.
And then what’s music, like normal ways of speaking English. And I was like, is that the same in French? Like, are we learning posh French? And our teacher was like a little bit sheepish because I think she knew that we wouldn’t really necessarily I’ll want to be learning, push French. Um, but she was like, yes, we’re looking at we’re learning in French and that’s yeah, we can kind of, yeah.
Um, so at that point I was like, oh, that’s really interesting that like, that is something that happens across languages and yeah. So I was already quite interested in that. Um, and then I found it, it was something you could do for a job. I was like, oh, brilliant. This is great.
Um,
Daniel: that in one of your episodes, there was a woman who was supposed to in a posh way. And then I think she got a job and the interviewer thought of her that she was very educated or I can’t remember exactly
Sadie: yeah.
Daniel: are.
Speaking with a posh accent
Sadie: I think you’re thinking of my friend, Jenny, who was one of, yeah. She’s brilliant interview. Yeah. I love it. I love speaking to her about this. So yeah, she, that was quite an interesting one because I think that a lot of the time in socio-linguistics, the kind of messages were telling people were kind of trying to get to the public are that always are speaking are just as good at all
accents, dialects and languages are just as good as each other from a linguistic point of view. And it doesn’t really make sense to be saying that people need to speak one way and not another at all times, and we should be appreciating differences. So I think making a general way of thinking about language is that people speak differently and that often has something to do with their backgrounds, their family, where they come from.
So I was quite surprised when I spoke to Jenny and she said, my background doesn’t match the way that I sound at all. So she’s from a much more working class background , but she, and she described herself as sounding relatively posh and she feels like that doesn’t match up with her background and people make the wrong assumption when they hear her speak.
They think that she is from a more privileged background than she is. And she really dislikes that. She would rather that people did know who she was from the way that she spoke. So that kind of challenges some of my ideas about how language and identity work a little bit. I think that one of the sorts of assumptions I would have made before speaking to Jenny is that we communicate something of our identity when we speak, either consciously or subconsciously or to make sure of both.
And so I was quite surprised that Jenny was like, no, I would like to communicate more of my identity in the way I speak. And I can’t. And that was really, really ingested. So it was kind of a bold move to start. Cause that was the very start of the entire podcast. I started it with that interview with Jenny, um, which kind of went against everything that was quite surprising and confusing to me.
But I think that’s one thing that’s quite important to me in my podcasting is to lean into the bets that I find confusing, kind of almost centered those bets. Cause there’s the bits that I think are quite interesting and girl,
Daniel: Yeah, it’s incredible how I make these assumptions.
Sadie: mm
Daniel: too.
Sadie: mm
Daniel: makes it up to a certain degree. Right.
Sadie: Hmm.
Daniel: In my case, for example, when I am saying one single word in my dialect, then other Swiss colleagues, they already know, oh, you come from that district. Oh, then you must like that. Oh, then you must be like that.
Oh. And I am already in this, uh, in this box, right.
Sadie: It’s like a
Daniel: all of these assumptions.
Sadie: What, what do you think are the stereotypes that people have about the way that it’s about you? Based on the ESP?
Daniel: Well, yeah, one assumption is that we, we like a lot of wine. Right, right.
If you like to drink wine, We like to eat cheese, for example, melt the cheese. And of course we will like to ski and then, and there are many other things, just, hilarious because it’s not, not always true with me.
So, but, but they are already making all of these assumptions and
Daniel: Me too. Everyone makes it up to a certain degree. Right.
Sadie: Hmm.
Daniel (2): In my case, for example, when I am saying one single word in my dialect, then other Swiss colleagues, they already know, oh, you come from that district. Oh, then you must be like that.
Oh. And I am already in this box, right.
Sadie: It’s like a stereotype.
What do you think are the stereotypes that people have on the way you speak?
Daniel: We like a lot of wine. Right we like to drink wine, We like to eat cheese, for example, melted cheese. And of course we like to ski and then, and there are many other things. It’s just, it’s hilarious because it’s not always true, but, and some of them are open right. They like me, even though they don’t know me and others, they say, oh, no, I don’t like that accent.
Sadie: Um,
Daniel: It’s kind of funny. And it’s only because of the accent.
Remember: Everyone has an accent!
Sadie: And it’s funny that sometimes the good and the bad get wrapped up together. So, I get quite a lot of compliments on the accent from people who have a different accent for me. So recently I’ve been on the radio a couple of times, like the UK radio, talking about linguistics and accents and dialects.
And it’s incredible how often when and this would be radio that quite often would be recorded in London. So quite far from where I’m from. And it would be, yeah, so it’s quite, quite amazing. The number of times I’ve gotten the radio. And the first thing they’ve said is, oh, you’re here to talk to us about accents and you have a lovely accent and kind of comment on my accent.
And if it’s really, it’s a really funny incident because I suppose what’s very strange about it to me is that as a linguist, I’m very aware that everybody has an accent, including people who have the most prestigious, upper class kind of accent. They have accents too. So next time that happens to me. If somebody says, oh, you have a lovely accent and you’re talking about accents and you have an accent, I get that a lot. Next time. I’m going to be like, oh yeah, you have a very interesting accent too. And I think they’ll be very surprised when I say that because yeah, there’s this funny thing where some people think, oh, I don’t have an accent.
Or I think this happens a lot when you’re learning a language as well, where people talk about. Or you’re speaking English with an accent, but like everybody speaks English with an accent. Like I’m a native speaker. I speak English with an accent. The queen speaks English with an accent. David Attenborough you know, people, people who are on the BBC, these people all speak English with an accent.
Um, and that’s quite important to remember. I think it’s just, we have different accents.
Daniel: But sometimes it’s a little bit sad because it seems to me that a lot of language learners are trying to get rid of their accent. Right. But I think the goal should be to be more understandable to others. And as long as the communication works, it’s no problem. Right. So I think that there is this notion in mind that can maybe hinder you to get further, or maybe it has psychological effects on you.
For example, in my case, I get stuck because I get nervous. I began to stammer or stutter, but oftentimes it’s just because I am too nervous. Right.
Sadie: Um,
Daniel: Yeah. It’s like
Sadie: yeah,
Daniel: I am hindering myself. My toughts.
Schools should teach more the listening skill
Sadie: I think it’s a really important lesson as well for people who, well, I suppose, yeah, even people who are learning languages and people who aren’t but anybody who interacts with somebody who is learning their language when they are a native speaker. Right. So as a native speaker of English, I speak to quite a lot of people every day who have learned English.
I suppose you would be speaking to people sometime who are learning German, and maybe a different type of German from yours. And I think that there’s so much focus a lot of the time on the language learner training, you know, speak without an accent or make themselves understood. And I wish there was more focus on listening and how to listen properly.
So for me, when I’m speaking to people who are learning English, I think it’s quite important for me to try to understand and to listen properly. And I think this is maybe particularly a bit of a problem with English speakers, where we sometimes are like, I don’t know, not everybody, but sometimes people can be impatient or can be like, oh, you know, people should speak more clearly when they’re speaking English as a foreign or second language.
But, Yeah, actually, we should, we should listen better and listening is a skill like speaking and making yourself understood is a skill but listening and trying to understand people is a really important skill too, which we should be taught in school really
Daniel: Yes,
Sadie: of us.
Daniel: I agree.
Daniel: Maybe a nice fact in my case. I started out with my podcast speaking in English. Right? So for me, it was easier to start a podcast in a foreign language than in my own language,
Sadie: oh, interesting.
Daniel: I was ashamed right. To speak in standard German. I can understand it perfectly and I can communicate. The only thing is that I have a really strong accent also when I am speaking standard German. So that puts me a little bit off, but it is my fault I am a little bit ashamed or because I am afraid of the feedback, maybe that people wouldn’t like it, I don’t know.
Sadie: Is that an identity thing as well? Isn’t it? Because, I mean, would you, you sort of feel like you had the option of completely changing the way you spoke or would it feel really strange to you?
Daniel (2): I mean, it would feel strange to me if I really wanted to, I could work on that, but I just.
Sadie: I think it’s okay to not want to.
Daniel: Yeah, thank you for that. But maybe I should give it a try and just see what happens. Maybe people like it to hear a voice, which usually you never do. You never do.
Sadie: yeah, totally. I mean, are there a lot of people who make podcasts in Swiss German or,
Daniel: No. No, not at all.
Sadie: is there quite, I was just going to say, is there quite a lot of, is there quite a lot of pride in Swiss German amongst people who speak at, or is it like a mixture of pride and
Daniel: no, not really. But the thing is Switzerland is really small and the podcast community is growing slowly and steadily, but I mean, there are not that many people in Switzerland, so podcasting is not that much of a thing, but of course it has improved a lot over the last five, four years. Yeah. And also funny , because as I mentioned to you, my father comes from Argentina and Argentinians also tend to speak a little bit differently than other countries from South America or from Spain.
They have some particularities which are special. For example, they say instead of your, they say they pronounce words. Different. And so even if I am speaking in Spanish, I got spotted quite quickly,
Sadie: Hmm. Interesting. And have you, have you ever lived in Argentina?
Daniel: no, never,
Sadie: So just from your dad, that’s really interesting.
Daniel: Just from my dad. And back in the day, it was not so common to have this multilingual philosophy and stuff. And, I was living in a district surrounded by mountains.
Sadie: Um,
Daniel: people were also a little bit narrow minded so it was
Sadie: um,
Daniel: difficult for my father to be there.
Yeah. But I
Sadie: and trust him
Daniel: would be quite different from the internet and all that jazz. So the time has changed in my
Sadie: Mm
Daniel: I think in a positive way,
Sadie: It remains me. There’s lots of interesting stuff happening with language in Scotland at the moment, or I mean has been happening for a long time, but like one of the things is, with Scots. So, so when I, , I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t really count myself as a Scots speaker most of the time, although I kind of have bits and pieces of it, but there’s quite a lot of people in Scotland who would speak in a way that like, sounds very, very different from standard English.
And when I was growing up, I just thought of that as being like, just having a strong Scottish accent or you know, using lots of Scottish words or using some Scottish grammar. But even at that time and more so now there’s a lot of people who were saying. No, Scots is a separate language from English, and now it officially is, so it’s been officially recognized, under the European charter of minority languages as being a language separate from English.
But then it’s quite complicated because I think a lot of people in Scotland haven’t taken it, like don’t know that or don’t, don’t think of it as being a separate language. And there’s, there’s been like a lot of really exciting work recently that like language revitalization and work to kind of have Scots in schools as a subject in its own right. And to kind of appreciate and support Scots language, poetry and Scots language podcasts. So there’s actually quite a language now. And it’s all really exciting. But they also really, really to some day. There’s so know it’s OK again, again, it’s when I’ve come across it recently.
I think it’s been around for awhile, but there’s more and more classes where you can go and learn Scots. And sometimes that would be people who’ve moved to Scotland and they’re learning English. And then they’re also going to learn And sometimes it would be for people like me, so I could sign up for the class to go and learn Scots.
Even though I kind of already, like, I definitely understand it and I kind of already speak some of it, but kind of not it’s this really strange thing in terms of identity, it feels, it would feel really strange. I don’t know. It’s complicated. It’s not that I’ve not got my hair droned yet. Um, but it’s that really interesting thing of when you’ve got a way of speaking, that’s protect culturally.
So the idea for me of somebody who was from a different country, like somebody from England or Germany or Spain learning Scotts. And then speaking is really strange because to me it’s so attached to Scottish people.
FIFO, and I’m not saying it should be a tall, in fact, it
probably shouldn’t be, but if they find it really hard to kind of break that connection and say, well it’s like, I’ve learned French.
I’ve learned some Polish sort of like way, way, not like why could somebody, not learn Scotts in the same way that I can learn French. Obviously they can, but it feels strange. So I think sometimes, sometimes logic doesn’t really work so well with language, or you have to kind of challenge yourself and push yourself to take on new layers of logic.
If that makes sense.
I find it really interesting talking to people who are not from Scotland about this though, because, um, I think it’s something that these kinds of feelings, a lot of Scottish people would share, but then when you try and explain it, it’s hard to explain why.
Daniel: Yeah. I see. Well, I would love to see more courses and the like in Scottish English it’s coming out right now if I am understanding you correctly.
Sadie: yeah, I suspect you’ll probably, if things keep going the way they’re good and you’ll probably see more of it in the coming years or decades. , cause that’s the direction things are going in. I wonder if the feeling might be, that was where I was thinking of. I wonder if the feeling might be slightly similar to, with Swiss German, where if I was to go to classes and learn Swiss German and then speak it to you, would you find that quite weird?
Could you feel like you’re not from.
Daniel: I mean, it’s more complicated because if you say Swiss dialect, which one? Because
Sadie: right. Got you. Yeah.
Scott says the same, actually Scots says the same, like there’s different regional varieties
and yeah.
Daniel: for example, other Swiss German people, sometimes they don’t understand me, even though we both speak in Swiss German, but it’s not the same. So my dialect has unique words, for example, and other pronunciation and other grammatical structure.
So yeah, the first thing would be which course would you take there? There, there would be a lot of different courses.
Sadie: no, Scots the same. So you’d have the same. You do have the same issues with Scots or, um, the classes that I know about that I’m thinking of. are in
which the type Scots spoken the Northeast. But somebody from there might not always understand somebody speaking Glaswegian Scott and then shit, Landis is really different.
So there’s Shetland and Orkney are the islands up to the north of Scotland or off way off the north coast. there’s completely different varieties there. So yeah, so that there are the same issues. So that makes it even more interesting and complicated.
Daniel: Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, if the listeners are interested, all of these dialects you can hear in in your podcast, right?
Sadie: Hmm. And if anybody’s interested in really, if anybody really wants to hear what the, somebody sounds like. If they’re like what does Scots sound like all the different parts of Scotland? is a really resource online called the ScotssyntaxAtlas.ac.uk. So syntax as in sentence structure, but actually they’ve got samples of people’s speakings.
You can hear the accent and the words as well. And have a big map of Scotland and you can click on just different areas of Scotland and you’ll hear what the different dates has got the sound like . That’s a really good resource for learning more a bit Scots if people are interested.
Daniel: Great. I will put it on the show notes as well.
Sadie: Hm.
The best thing Sadie learned about language (Ep. mentioned)
Daniel: So I have a question. What fascinates you? What fascinates you the most about languages or let’s put it another way what is the best thing that you’ve learned about language?
Daniel (2): Actually this comes from a bonus episode of Sadie’s podcast. .
Daniel: this is the episode called the best thing I’ve learned about language in which Sadie interviews her students and everyone is talking about something that they have learned, I guess during the year.
And it’s very interesting.
Sadie: That’s a really good one. I think the best things I’ve learned about language is difficult for me to be really specific but I think it’s been incredible to learn the best things I learned about language are that that every way of speaking is equal until we start to get involved with the different power dynamics and the politics of language, the idea that what we see about the way people speak is political. If that makes sense. And when politics gets involved, because like I say, when I was younger, I did just think that there were ways of speaking that were better and easier to understand. So kind of Queen’s English, and we don’t really have a name, like a good name for it, even as linguists, but that sort of really prestigious, upper-class English.
I just always thought that that was the best one growing up. And it was the easiest to understand, and maybe the most pleasant sounding, and the most proper and the most correct. And was
blowing to me fame that that’s not true at all. And that, and I keep telling my English, cause that’s what I know.
But obviously there’s a place in lots of other languages as well, where you have like a version of that language that’s thought of as the best.
Daniel: Yeah.
Sadie: I think what blew my mind was when I realized that that is just the tape of the variety, that’s spoken by the most powerful people. And it’s usually the type of language that we associate with rich white upper-class native speakers.
It’s definitely, definitely never the way that people speak, that migrants or language learners speak. Um, and that’s a political thing. I think that’s the coolest and most interesting thing I’ve learned about language.
Daniel: yeah, because I think that up to a certain degree, the media or the politics that can decide, maybe it’s society who decides, but for example, if my dialect is never broadcasted in television, then people there . They are not used to accents.
Sadie: Yeah.
Daniel: And they won’t understand me, but if all of a sudden television is showing my dialect every day, then people will get used to it.
Right. They will be familiar with it. It’s a better right to say maybe. And I think it’s, it was the same in, in Scotland. I think, as I remember also from one of your episodes,
Female Voice: Since childhood too, sometimes we’ve been made ashamed of some of our Scots voices and particularly in television and broadcasting. When I was wee, I remember hearing a Scots voice speaking on the telly and asking my mum what was wrong with this person’s voice because I’d never heard a Scottish person speaking on television.
Daniel: The woman also said that she remembers that back in the day, when she watched something with a Scots accent, all of a sudden she thought, what is that? Uh, because it was the very first time in which she was able to watch something in, in that particular accent.
Sadie: Hmm. Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. And then it becomes this self fulfilling prophecy where it becomes this circle where you don’t heat it. So then you, you’re not exposed to it enough. So then you don’t understand it. So then you think, well, it’s just difficult to understand. And actually if exposed to more to variety and the language that we hear, we wouldn’t find it so difficult to understand.
And I think that’s really important. And I think the other thing that I’ve learned that I think is really important is that we can challenge and undermine that. And by exposing people to more variety and by questioning people’s assumptions about which types of language are good and which are bad.
And by talking to people, I think it’s probably especially important to get conversations going amongst people who speak types like English or any other language, which are marginalized and stigmatized. But if we are able to get conversations, go in about the fact that, that, those aren’t bad ways of speaking, those are really important ways to challenge that.
And I think it can be challenged and, yeah, that’s my other favorite thing that I’ve learned about language. I think.
Daniel: Cool. Thank you very much. I wanted to ask you about a typical day as a linguist but as you told us before, it’s difficult there is no typical day. So, but maybe you could tell us more about your research that you
did back in 2014.
Sadie: Yes.
Daniel: What was that all about?
Sadies PhD research
Sadie: Oh then yeah. So my PhD research, I did it, so I finished and handed in 2018. I started doing my field work in 2014, and did research in a high school in the east end of Glasgow, where there were quite a lot of kids who’d moved from Poland. And I looked at what the experiences of those kids were like, and then how that related to, or fed into their linguistic development.
So one of the big questions was so Glasgow for people who don’t know has quite a specific, well, we’ve been talking about Scots, so Glaswegian Scots, so there’s kind of within Glasgow. You’ll hear people speak in something that’s more like standardized English with a Scottish accent and you’ll hear people speaking.
Um, someone that’s a bit different. So Glaswegians got facially recognized now as a separate language from English. So if you’re moving to a high school in the east end of Glasgow, which is one of the areas where you’ll hear more, Glaswegian Scots, you’re being exposed to lots of different languages because there’s people from all over move bull here.
I’m in the end, the gloves go now. So there’s this idea that men, there’s people from all over the world move here, but you’ll also hear kind of more what we’d call a Scottish standard English and more Glaswegian Scots. And then the question is, is that, is that something that’s complicated or confusing for new arrivals?
And then what happens when people have been here to whale, especially teenagers and younger people. They begin to start to a lot of the time they begin to start to say, and Blake native speakers, but what she needs to speak is do they sound like, do they sound more like people speaking Scottish standard English, do they sound more Glaswegian and one of the big questions I wanted to look at was, do people who feel more Glaswegian end up sounding or a Glaswegian and what does it have to do with identity?
And then that opens up a whole fascinating can of worms, but what it means to feel Glaswegian. And so during that time, uh, D and the life of me as a linguist was. Not what anyone would imagine. Really. So I was running an afterschool club and did my research there. so I ran this after-school club and I gave the kids microphones.
Um, we serve Penn, these little make phones on their tops, um, while they were at that. So I was recording them, speaking for my research, but I was also, chatting to them and doing interviews. And then I was also drawing with them, pinning with them. We did dance workshops, we did Samba, drumming. We did songwriting.
So there’s really varied and really fun period of field work. And that was it. I, you know, it was fun. It was good because it was fun for the participants and it was fun for me, but it also had a theoretical academic basis because it helped me to spend time with them in a natural feeling scenario.
So it wasn’t just me showing up as a researcher and being like, hello, sit down. And I’ve got a questionnaire for you to fill in. It was us spending and we did it over a long period of time where we’d spend time together regularly. We got to know each other. They were able to relax around me a little bit.
I was able to relax around them and that helped me to understand their lives and experiences. I think a lot better than if I’d just been showing up and doing a kind of formal interview. Um, so I don’t know if you’ve, I don’t know if people in case people haven’t heard. So the term that we use to describe that would be ethnography and it just means, um, oh, I don’t know if I can give a proper definition of what ethnography means, but, and may it, cause it means lots of different things to different people, but in my context that meant spending an extended period of time, um, in a community that wasn’t my own.
Although it can be in your own community as well. Yeah. It’s a complicated word, but it’s a bit men spending a standard pedia of time there and just, normalizing my presence and observing and sort of, yeah, it was great fun.
Daniel: Okay. Yeah, that really sounds like great fun.
Sadie: Yes.
Daniel: I imagine that linguistics, if you read a book in linguistics, I imagine this could be very hard to understand. It’s just an assumption of mine. Right.
Sadie: You’re not wrong. Depends on the book, but you’re not wrong.
Daniel: Okay. And I guess that you managed to put these difficult notions from a linguistic point into a podcast so that the layman understands complicated stuff.
Sadie: Yeah. I mean, I mentioned earlier that I think that language is something that everybody’s interested in and everybody has a stake in. And I think for that reason, it’s really important for us as linguists to open things up as much as possible and invite people in who aren’t professional linguists themselves.
So, um, I’m not the only one who thinks this there’s, there’s a lot of really good linguistics podcasts and good people who are really good at communicating linguistic research
Daniel: Could you recommend some of them.
Podcast recommendations (Linguistics)
Sadie: Oh yeah, for sure. So, now I’m really nervous about accidentally leaving out. but the first ones that to mind so the podcast Lingthusiasm.
It’s really good. Again, just communicating linguistics research through a really great podcast.
the Vocal Fries is really good. I have been really enjoying podcasts called EN CLAIR, which is about forensic linguistics specifically. So if anyone is interested in true crime, I know a lot of people love true crime podcasts.
This is kind of true crime and linguistics mixed together.
Daniel: cool.
Sadie: It’s really, really, really good. And it’s just very well explained. And the person who makes that is called Claire Hardaker. She also has a really fantastic Twitter profile, which explains a lot of stuff that’s going on in linguistics really, really well.
My former colleague Rob I’ve just stopped working with them there in my old job or we’re still doing some work together. His name’s Rob Drummond he has a really great Twitter profile explaining linguistic stuff. And also runs a project called accentism, the accentism project people can share their experiences of linguistic inequality and accentism, and times that they’d been made to feel that the way they speakers is lesser or sometimes times that they’ve experienced positive linguistic discrimination as well.
So that’s really good. Oh God though. There’s so many I feel like I don’t, so there’s a few really good Twitter lists and things as well. I’m pretty sure there’s a webpage, which lists a lot of good sources for kind of public linguistics. So I can try and find that for you if you like, because that might be quite useful.
Yeah. So then that saves me given an exhaustive list.
Language documentation (a specific branch in linguistics)
Daniel (2): Exactly. So you explained to us before, some sort of fieldwork right with the community. Another way would be, for example, I am reading a book which is called don’t sleep there are snakes it’s by Daniel Everett, a linguist, and who was for decades living with,
Sadie: piraha Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daniel: And it sounded so fantastic and adventurous to me, he goes there and has zero knowledge about the language and his mission is kind of to pick up their language and write it down. So this was back in 1980, I think when it started. This sort of field work. Does it exist
Sadie: Hm.
Daniel: it still exists?
Sadie: Yeah, absolutely so it’s like this is going back to what I was in a bit linguistics being so incredibly varied. And there’s so many different branches. So this is the branch of linguistics that I think often would be referred to as language documentation, which often it’s about, so a lot of the world’s languages are really, really endangered. Languages are just disappearing all the time.
And a lot of this has to do with the fact that we have so much pressure to all speak the dominant languages of the police that we live in and the languages that are kind of officially recognized as these are the languages that are going to get you far, you know, English being a big one of them.
So that’s really posing a big threat to lots of different languages. My boyfriend, John, pointing there cause he’s doing the other room. He speaks Scottish Gaelic, which is a language which is really seriously endangered. But there are other languages, much more endangered, which are being kind of stomped out bay, English and Spanish and other big global languages.
Daniel: We have also language into Switzerland
Sadie: mm, mm.
Daniel: It is Reto Romanic
Sadie: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Daniel: spoken by about 40,000 people. I think.
Sadie: Mm. Yeah. Yeah. So, there’s, there’s kind of a big threat to this. So there’s a whole field of research, which is about supporting the speakers of these languages as much as possible. And then also documenting these languages, learning about them, communicating about them. Sometimes people who do this work will do things like, helping and supporting speakers of these languages, to make materials for schools so that kids can learn more about these languages who may not other ways.
So we have people talk about language revitalization and then also language documentation, which is kind of learning and, learning about and documenting the structures of languages like this. So it’s actually an area I know much less about, but I believe the podcast field notes are a really good example.
If people are interested in learning more about this, It’s that the episodes that I’ve listened to, you know, about language documentation. It might branch into other subjects as well, but it definitely has a lot of good interviews with people about exactly the kind of research you’re about.
And also kind of dig into a lot of their kind of tricky things in this field, a lot of the time, and the ethics of it and stuff. So yeah. Field notes.
Daniel: Thank you very much. And would you like to do something like that to go abroad and to be with another community and living with them?
Sadie: Interesting question. I mean, I guess I sort of did in research. It was just, there was a community very, close to where I
Sadie: live, but, um, Ella, the same apply, I suppose I was going and learning about the lives of teenagers and not being a teenager myself, so I could have gone further.
But, I kinda had, did have that experience of getting into a new work community slightly different from my own and kind of live within that. Yeah. I don’t know if I would or not. I think it’s tricky. I think it’s really tricky work to do in a way that isn’t like… really tricky work to do in a way that isn’t just kind of like a person showing up from a university with all their big fancy equipment.
And I suppose it’s difficult to do in a way that is respectful and equitable. And a lot of people do definitely manage a lot of people do really excellent work in that area, I think I would find it quite hard. Yeah, I don’t know. It just also must be, I mean, you know yourself had difficult learning languages as well. So the idea of going to a place where nobody speaks the same language as me and I don’t speak the language at all and just learning that
language.
Daniel: any resources maybe to,
Sadie: Yeah. I don’t really, I don’t really know. I’ve not, yeah. I’ve not thought about it that much before to be honest, but I really don’t know why people do that.
Um, I feel like my job’s a lot easier.
The Accentricity Podcast – Every voice is valid
Daniel: Let’s move on. So your podcast Accentricity which is about identity and the tagline is every voice is valid. What do you mean exactly by every voice is valid,
But you mentioned it before,
but maybe you can sum it up again.
Sadie: Yeah. I think just what we were talking about earlier there that, that there’s no way of speaking as better than and I think I wanted that to be really central to the podcast. The idea that every language, every dialect, every accent is just as important and just as valid and we should be listening to what people say, not how they say it.
Daniel: And what does identity mean to you? at this point, I wanted to mention an episode in which
you told us about remembering something about your past in which you draw yourself
and there were many colors. Do you remember it?
Sadie: Yeah. So, I grew up in Scotland, very much being Scottish, but my mum is, well, my mom was also born in Scotland but had always felt very Polish and her, she was really speaking Polish before she spoke English. And her dad was Polish and her granny who helped Liza as well with Polish. So I was raised with a feeling of not being completely Scottish.
my dad as well was Irish English. Oh, that he never would have said he was English. He was Irish, but he grew up in England. Um, so then I had this feeling of having different parts to my identity, um, with these different parts of my heritage. So yeah, I remember being like seven and drawing a self portrait and then being like, okay, so I’m coloring and like my heads and my hands are, yellow
and that means Scottish and my legs are green and that means Irish. And then my torso is um, purple and my arms are purple and that means Polish. And that felt like something I was trying to figure out. Some of that is something very complicated, but I was trying to kind of work it out with color coding.
And I didn’t know, actually at the time, that this is something that linguists do, and they’re asking people about their linguistic identities. They’ll get them to draw their body and then write their different languages within their body. But it was just something they, yeah, just did as a kid, as a way of figuring out myself,
um,
Daniel: in your case, it was really special because you didn’t speak those languages
Sadie: Right. Yeah.
Yeah, not really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I had this, I was very much raised and thinking that I was Polish, thinking I was Irish, but I didn’t have any linguistic connection to those places apart from through my parents. And none at all, really Ireland because my dad very much felt himself to be Irish. And that was his identity, but he didn’t have an Irish accent or speak Irish.
And my mum’s Polish was very important to me, but I didn’t, I didn’t learn it growing up. So there was always a little bit of a disconnect, between having this feeling of being quite Polish , but not being able to, speak Polish at all.
Daniel: Yeah. Yeah. And there is an episode with your mother actually, in which you tell her story about her identity. at a certain point you ask her, if she was proud of you when you were learning Polish, right. And then didn’t want to answer directly. You could hear it.
Sadie: Yes, it’s really funny. Cause my mum it’s important for me you know my mum is incredibly supportive and lovely and is always telling me she’s proud of me. So it was always quite a surprise when I was like, so yeah, I learned Polish to try and of basically I learned Polish when I was doing my PhD research, I was working with Polish kids and I was like, I should learn some Polish, but then it also had this other dimension where I was like, oh, I can learn some Polish to make my mum proud.
And it was really quite bizarre when I asked my mum, like, were you proud to me for learning Polish? And she was like, I don’t know, you sounded kind of weird. And this is an, I think this is unusual. They don’t, and this is particular to my mum. I’ve spoken to quite a few people who have appeared and he speaks another language and then feels strange when they don’t speak it the same way.
or when they speak it with a different accent, I think it must just be a really, and I can imagine this as well. So say that I moved to Switzerland and I had kids in Switzerland and then they spoke English with a Swiss accent. I would find that really weird because I’d be like, do you not have a Scottish accent?
I’m Scottish. How can you not be Scottish? You’re my child. So I do get that from my mom. She hears me speaking this kind of beginner’s Polish. And she’s like, but you’re Polish. Why can you not speak Polish naturally? So yeah, I had quite a nice time talking to my mum about it, but she just kept there.
She just kept laughing and being like, oh yeah, no, I mean, your Polish is very good, but in this way, that doesn’t sound like she thinks it’s very good to tell.
Daniel: And are you still learning Polish?
Sadie: Uh, No at the moment. So I should really go back to it, but I basically finished my PhD and I finished the course and had learned a little bit and was like, oh, that’ll be different now. And I think to some extent, this isn’t my mom’s fault but I think to some extent her reaction has put me off a little bit when I was like, am I ever going to be able to speak Polish in a way that sounds normal to my mum?
Um, so I haven’t been learning recently. I’ve actually been learning a bit Gallic most recently, because as I said my boyfriend speaks it and I feel like that is a really good opportunity. Like him, he speaks Gaelic a lot, so his family all speak it to each other, a lot of his friends speak it to each other.
And I think that’s a really good potential learning opportunity for me, where I’ve got the opportunity to be around Gaellic quite a lot. So I feel like I might as well take that at the moment.
Daniel: Okay. And being a linguist, do you think that it is easier for a linguist to pick up an accent or to learn a language?
Or is this, or is this again, just an assumption.
Is it easier to learn a language when you are a linguist?
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMLjSboS5/
Sadie: not for me, not for me. I don’t know. I kind of might have thought that becoming a linguist would make it easier, but I don’t think it has, I think, maybe for some people and especially people who do the kind of linguistics where you are kind of studying, like I don’t do as much work on the kind of structure of languages.
So I don’t know if that is maybe it as well. Um, the one place where it has been quite useful as I’ve learned about, phonetics and learning their like phonetic symbols and things that has been quite useful. And when I was learning Polish, that was really, really useful for things like, I kind of had an understanding of like if I knew the sort of technical phonetic, symbols or names for certain sounds that we don’t have in English, I was able to understand where to my mouth that was produced. So that was quite useful. But, um, no, I don’t know if I’m unusual or not being a linguist who is really not great at learning languages.
Um, but for me, I don’t think being a linguist has really really helped me learn other languages. Maybe it should have, but, um, yeah, that’s something, I mean, I also, I’m quite early on in my career as a linguist, so, um, you know, I’ve been, so my very first linguistic research really was 2014. Like you say, which is a wee while ago, but I think that maybe learning languages is like a step that I need to take next.
Maybe I just haven’t taken that step yet and learned more about other languages.
Daniel: So the act centricity podcast comes with two series. No two seasons, I mean comes with two seasons
Sadie: Oh, yeah. I don’t know. Which is, I think Americans often see the season and UK people often say CDs. Isn’t that true? I dunno.
Daniel: Okay. And also bonus episodes.
Sadie: Yeah.
Daniel: explain the, the main thing about the first season and what it is all about the second season? What are the differences?
Sadie: yeah. So I guess the first one was more me just stepping metal and explaining just some stuff that I’d been coming across in my linguistic research. Um, the second one second series/season was a little bit different because I wanted to do something that was more, not just me, more kind of working collaboratively with people.
So it’s, I’ve called the whole series, the moving project. And it’s specifically about language and migration, which is something that I’m really interested in. But I decided to kind of bring in the stories of different people. Who’ve experienced migration and it was something I did during the COVID-19 lockdown as like a nice community project.
I was kind of stuck in my house and I waited to have a chance to speak to people. So we ran to me and John actually met my boyfriend. We ran this online podcasting course. He makes podcasts as well. So he does know about these things too. And we ran this online podcasting course open to people from anywhere in the world who had experienced migration in any form.
And obviously migration can be lots of different things. It can be temporary, it can be permanent. It can be across the world. It can be within the same country. It can be as a child, it can be as an adult. So we wanted to get like a real range of different migration experiences. And with each person we. Kind of did a little bit of exchange where we taught them about podcasting in exchange for them teaching us about what it feels to move from one place to another. Um, so each episode is a different person’s story and talking about their experiences of language migration and identity.And yeah, one of the stories as my mom’s,
So my mum took part in the course and, uh, that was how I got to ask her about it kind of became both of our stories about our family’s experience of migration and Polish.
And yeah, it was really interesting.
Daniel: Yeah. And I can assure you, your listeners, that it is really worthwhile to listen to the podcast and even binge listen to the podcast. So your podcast even got awarded. Could you tell us more about it?
Sadie: We got, so we, first of all, got nominated for the British podcast awards. That was really exciting. It was quite just a shortlist of six and there are others were all these amazing podcasts. I was really, really proud to be kind of on that short list.
And then we got a praise, so we won their independent media awards, from a grid called steady.
Yeah, so that was, that was really exciting. There were three podcasts that got selected for that. And we kind of got profiled and got price money and some training and mentorship over the course of a year. So that was really, really exciting.
Daniel: How did you feel about it winning these of our,
Sadie: yeah, it was fantastic. I mean, it was a big surprise, quite, quite shocked. Cause it was just. You know, I, I really love the podcast and I’m really proud of it, but it is something that I’ve just done as a hobby myself in my spare time. So I wasn’t kind of expecting it to be prizes . Um, but it was really exciting.
And then it also has helped the fact that that prize came with some kind of training and mentorship has really helped the grow. So that’s been really exciting as well.
Daniel: and what will the next series be about?
Sadie: Oh yeah. Good question. So, uh, it’s not been made yet. Um, but I would really like to, so we’re actually still making a few more episodes of the moving project. So that’s what we’re doing just now. So we’re going to have a few more of these stories about migration and identity coming out over the next week while.
But after that, I would really like to make a podcast, which is kind of a deep dive into language in Scotland. So like we were talking about earlier, the kind of. Like improving my understanding of what’s happening with Scots. I’m thinking a bit about Scottish Gaelic and they may not at your languages generally, but specifically in Scotland.
And then also thinking about the languages that people have brought to Scotland as migrants, and also it’s quite late to do the video episodes about British sign language in Scotland. So basically thinking about linguistic diversity in Scotland and multilingualism in Scotland across all those different areas.
That’s what I’d like to do. Um, but obviously it’s a big, that’s a big undertaking, so there’s a lot to dive into there, but yeah, I would like to look at Scotland as a multilingual place and how the different languages of Scotland interact with each other.
Daniel: Sounds promising. Yeah, I will
Sadie: Hm.
Daniel: listen to it.
Sadie: Well, thank you!
Where to find Sadie Ryan and her Podcast Accentricity
Daniel: Sadie thank you so much. And maybe can you tell us where we can find you
Sadie: Yes. So
yes. So, the website for the podcast is www.accentricity-podcast.com. And, as far as I know where the podcast is on all the podcast streaming apps, but if anyone finds that it’s not on a particular, not in a particular place where they get their podcasts, I would love them to let me know that’d be really useful.
Um, and we’re on Twitter at ax, interests, iPads, and Instagram, and Facebook. You search for X interests at your podcast. And, um, I can be contacted through all of those. If people want to ask questions or point me in any direction
Daniel: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Sadie.
Sadie: No worries at all. Would you like to, you mentioned a bit about your favorite expression.
Daniel: Yes. That would be lovely
Sadie’s favorite expression – Not my circus, not my monkeys
Sadie: Yeah, so my favorite expression, I mean, I’ve got, I’ve got loads. But I was thinking about this beforehand and there’s a Polish expression that I really like, which is I’ve heard it being used in English a bit more recently.
So I hope I’m pronouncing it right. I’m probably not, but, *in Polish* “Nie moj cyrk, nie moje malpy”. And it means not my circus, not my monkey. And it came to mean something along the lines of, if there is a big fuss, a big mess, lots of chaos going on but it’s nothing to do if you, you want to distance yourself from
it’s not your problem Not my problem, not my problem, not my circus, not my monkey. So in Polish, it’s not my circus, not my monkey. And then when I’ve heard it in English, people usually say, not my circus, not my monkeys, so plural . But I quite like that, especially because I think there’s often a lot of focus on the influence that English has on other languages and less so the influence of other languages coming into English.
And I imagine the fact I’ve heard this expression a lot in English recently has to do with people from Poland moving to the UK quite a lot. And
kind of that being passed over. Yeah.
So I wanted to share it because of that reason I quite, I quite like it, and I think it’s just a great expression as well.
Isn’t it?
Daniel: Yes.
Sadie: It’s very useful. I use it all the time.
Daniel: Cool. Thank you so much, Sadie.
Sadie: Thank you so much.
Daniel: It was really cool to listen to you and really interesting
Sadie: Oh,
Daniel: It’s really fantastic.
Sadie: I know. Thank you so much for having me. It’s been lovely chatting
Did you like this episode?
Then episode 103 with André Müller – linguist and Klingon teacher might be something for you.
Do you have a favorite expression? Please share it with us for The Vocab Man podcast
What is YOUR favorite expression? Use the link below and send in your message (audio-only, video or text-only)
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