Hello and welcome to In Our Spare Time, quite a language is not just words, it's a culture, a tradition, a unification of a community, a whole history that creates what a community is, unquote, worth of. Noam Chomsky, our four panellists today are organising a conference here in Oxford in March entitled Language, Mobility and Belonging as a Quartette.
The research ranges right across the discipline of social linguistics from studies of the Polish diaspora to the use of Hebrew in Palestinian refugee communities, to the accent and dialect usage of the inhabitants of Bermuda and to the language learning in migrant integration programmes. In Germany, the present age is one of ever increasing international migration and displacement from war zones and other ones and issues of cultural integration. And never be more pertinent, no more complicated.
And having an understanding of the interplay between use of language and the dynamics of social identity has never been more important. With me to discuss the conference on that research are Rosemary Hall, a second grade student at Morton College. Dr. Nancy Walker, a postdoc in Paris who really shows a first year student at Green Temperton College and Dr. King at Kosminski, a recent graduate, beautiful student from Somerville College. Thank you very much for joining me.
I think we just start this podcast by talking to you individually about the fascinating research that you're doing and don't care. You have studied the Polish diaspora and how language affects their sense of social identity, is that correct? Yes. So in my difficult study, I looked at a group of Polish speaking migrants in the UK and I was interested in their identity construction process.
So how they make sense of the world around them and how they what role language plays in it and how they construct their identities and interactions, how they try and different languages that they know in order to index their social cultural positioning in the world. I interviewed a group of 30 speakers who came to the UK to study, but prior to that they receive part of their education in Poland.
They came to the UK to study and then they were proficient in both English and Polish at a similar level. And I was interested in these stories and how those stories build into structured experiences of life in the UK and how that was represented in the languages. So I looked at both the social discourses in which my participants participated and and the language used. So how the social discourses were represented in the tiny little detail of the speech.
So this social discourse, meaning the richness of social interaction, they talk to you by those social discourses. I kind of mean discourses on language, nationality, culture, what they are. So how they understood Polish ness and how they understood Britishness and how that interacted in daily lives and how that influenced their understanding of the own position in the British context in relation to the Polish context as well.
So if that makes it a bit easier because it's a technical term, it may not come across before. So you said you interviewed this person. So I conducted in one to one interviews with them, which centred around these stories in the UK and what so they told me all about their reasons for coming here, why, how they lived here, how they are. They told me a lot about their social networks as well and about their views and culture and language as well.
And then those individual stories build into different identities that they expressed. So there were people who were more nationally oriented. So there were people who found their place in the social structure in the UK by being part of the Polish diaspora community. So they would be more oriented towards the diaspora community in Poland itself. So Poland would be still a point of reference for them in their daily lives.
And the Polish language played an important part in their daily lives because that was in the language that allowed them to express themselves as really Polish. And they said that they understood this Polish ness is the national identity. So that was an essential part of who they were. And these were people who were very active in the Polish Diaspora community in those Polish organisations here, and who many times said that they wanted to go back to Poland and here they were, gender differences.
So most of the men said that they would like to go back to Poland, whereas women, not so much, even if they were initially oriented, but apart from those nationally oriented individuals, in the other end of this extreme, there were people who are very cosmopolitan, who kind of rejected nationality as a basis for identity and who oriented themselves more towards.
The global economy and the English speaking world, and that was represented in the language used in that, that they were developing new speaking styles in Polish because they would their Polish websites. When you say representing their language use, we're talking quite a technical level of the. Yes. So how so? They were using certain linguistic features.
So certain phonetic features, they pronounce the consonants and they used new intonation patterns in Polish that I wasn't familiar with as a speaker of Polish. And that had to do with their new position in the sociocultural metrics if you want to kind of look at it that way. Right. Because they were trying to express their new positioning in the world by being Polish, but in the UK and being a member of this of this transnational community, that is a new sort of cultural formation.
Right. Because they want to say, yeah, we're Polish, but we're also here. And that it doesn't necessarily result in us being mean nationally Polish because we have different strategies for life so that, for instance, the social networks were more international, they would be less willing to go back to Poland many times.
And that also influenced the way they spoke. As I kind of show them, I, I you know, maybe to someone who is used to doing a lot of scientific studies, 30 participants might sound like a rather small sample size, but there are quite good reasons why it's not feasible to retain people. So it might seem as a small sample because usually people doing sociology or they coming from a different social science would say that they want big samples.
But in linguistics, it is quite impossible many times for practical reasons as well, because as a researcher, you you have to transcribe the data. It usually has to be thoroughly done. So in a way, you have to transcribe all the little tiny detail of someone's speech and that takes a lot of time. So like one hour of an interview, you can take up to 15 hours of transcription.
So that basically means that for the purpose of mind field project, I wasn't able to interview one participants because they wouldn't have had time for that. Clearly, you're looking at some other immigrant populations, but in a slightly different context. You correctly you focus on language learning in Germany and particularly these migrant integration programmes that have been set up in the last 10 years.
Yeah, yeah. So I'm basically doing the opposite of working as doing as I mentioned before, a while, Kinga and my other colleagues are trying to understand how speakers might be challenging, take it for granted relationships between nationality and languages. I'm looking at how Germany on a political level and an educational level and a policy level is trying to enforce this idea through language requirements for migrants and refugees.
In 2005, Germany introduced this idea of integration or something to get more serious about it, and they introduced so-called integration programmes that required migrants and refugees to learn German and to learn about German history and politics and to pass an exam. And this is facilitated through government funded courses that run for six to nine months. And they're all over Germany and they run under a nationwide curriculum.
And what I found really striking was this idea of integration where the concept actually mean, because what we're finding is that it's not very clearly defined in German official discourse. There's no very clear definition of what that entails. So my general question is, if we take a look at these classrooms, there hasn't been any research on this. What can we find about the interaction that takes place in these spaces?
How are migrants going on this journey of integration and how do they come out at the end? And more specifically, how does this concept of integration become embedded within this interaction? So I'm looking at this firstly on a an ethnographic level, spending time in these classrooms, assisting in the teaching, interviewing teachers and migrants and refugees. But I'm also looking at a linguistic level to see how far this idea becomes embedded within people's ideologies of belonging to Germany.
So because as I understand it, these programmes have to developments outside of the purely language learning acquisition, but also these elements of learning cultural history of Germany. And there certainly is a broader mission to simply learn the language. Absolutely. I mean, Germany is not unique in this context. Most countries in the world have language requirements for migrants and refugees, and surely it serves a functional purpose.
And learning the language of your host country is definitely a resource. I do challenge the idea that this should be a requirement and I challenge it because it's unclear how this affects migrants and their trajectories in the host country. And what it might be instilling in them about their position in this new country, because as a linguistic anthropologist, I can't remove language from culture and from identity and from ideology and politics and so on.
So I find it very difficult to say we're purely going to look at language or something functional, saying it has to be learnt as a tool. Rather, I say no, it's a social practise. So we have to understand the cultural and political implications that go along with learning a language, especially in this context. It is something that you discovered can please give me cut this out.
This is not a question that you have maybe a large American population that might be really quite proficient in a few words in English, but doesn't yet have any German. And how that plays out, I just it's a purely anecdotal evidence for myself.
But I have a friend who is doing the Austrian version of Teach First before that is quite difficult situations school, where you have some very, very bright immigrant and refugee children who are extremely fluent in English but are put in very low sets just because at that point when they arrive in Germany and I don't know where you're from is a widespread phenomenon. That's an interesting question, but I think it's very complicated and I think it depends on how you approach it.
On the one hand, if you look at urban spaces in Germany, English is becoming the language, the lingua franca of young urban start-ups and things like that. So speaking English is a really important tool in Berlin, especially where I'm looking at. But this also depends on where you're coming from. If you're an American, a white American and you speak English, that's different.
But if you're a Syrian or if you're Iranian or if you're a person of colour, there might be different issues that are facing you. So I don't really know what to say. But I what I can say is that whether you speak English or not, you have to learn German. So it's a requirement for everyone unless you're from the EU. Does that answer your question or are they found in other contexts that actually these immigrants and refugees come with their own multilingualism,
which will include a European language? If it's from Africa? They might know French and other parts of the world. They know English, but that is not valued when they come to the host country. They still have to be categorised in a separate group, which means that they have to integrate on on a different playing field than if you come as, let's say, a privileged.
I know somebody with a degree, let's say from from Europe and North America, that multilingual isn't just English language skills are valued differently in a kind of economic market point of view. Yeah, I guess what I was trying to say is that when you ask a question like that, you have to think about what what kind of belonging we're talking about.
So on a local level and that's why I mentioned sort of multilingualism in Berlin and speaking English that actually has a lot of capital, that cultural capital, speaking English or speaking French and other European language will mean something if you're living in urban space. But if you want to become a citizen or you want to be a permanent resident on a national level, speaking those languages isn't necessarily useful.
So there's different forms of movement that we have to consider and different forms of belonging that we have to consider within that question, because that can be huge variation within a single country, of course, between Britain and Germany. Yeah. And of course, there's different requirements for different countries and for different regions of the world. And generally the problem in Germany is that foreign degrees are generally not recognised.
I think it's only within the EU and some other maybe the U.S. I'm not quite sure, actually, but if you have a fine degree, that won't translate into it and to a degree in Germany. So these are a lot of hurdles that are facing you on top of it. Rosemary. So you're looking at another immigration issue in the news, but you say everything's kind of slowly turned his head of the border and again,
be kind of well, whether you can have every opportunity to end up somewhere different. But I think you're opposite again. Absolutely. And I think one of the things that's become clear in in the conversation we've been having so far is that in contexts where immigrant populations are people of colour are disadvantaged in some way, usually economically. These tend to be in Europe, in the US, in the U.K., you have one type of linguistic situation.
You have policy and to a large extent policing going on about the way people speak, about the way immigrants speak. And a lot of the time those goalposts are removable. You know, it's very convenient for governments, native speakers of English in the UK to be the judge of whether an immigrant is proficient in the host language. And as Nancy said, whether or not they're multilingual in all kinds of other ways is largely ignored.
But I work on Bermuda, and that's an interesting context, because it's a place in it's a post-colonial context and it's a place in the world where immigrants or a large part of the immigrant community is white and very wealthy. Bermuda is a tax haven. What you have in Bermuda is you have white, wealthy immigrants who come to work in the financial sector in Bermuda. And usually they are because of what linguists call a you can't really do scare quotes on the radio, but standard variety.
So you'll have immigrants coming to Bermuda from the U.K., from Canada, from the US, and now tend to speak of a variety of English that's privileged around the world. So it makes it easy to get a job, makes it easy to get housing or those kinds of things. And I research the ways in which expats, as they're called, the Bermuda whitewalls, wealthy expats, use Bermuda and English, which is a very unusual dialect as a way to try to construct belonging in their new place.
So I'm interested in the ways in which expats in Bermuda perform basically perform black English in Bermuda. They it kind of speaks for itself. If you if you hear some I'm definitely not going to perform any for you on the radio.
Right. But basically I look at the ways in which these expats appropriate features, linguistic features of Bermudian English in order to seem authentically Bermudian, in order to I guess on the surface, in order to try to seem like they belong and assert some kind of authentic Bermudian identity. But also at the same time is that you've got mockery and racism going on in those linguistic performances, if that makes sense.
Yeah, so it goes both ways. It's maybe on a certain surface a level of conformity, of appropriation to assimilate to the environment that they find themselves in, but at the same time, something slightly lesser. I think as linguists it's always important to we learn, he said. We can't separate culture from language and the context of somebody who speaks a variety that will open all kinds of doors for them in life.
Appropriating features of another dialect is very, very different from somebody who's moved to Berlin and that their livelihood depends on on the government's perception of of the language proficiency and so the social context in which the language makes all the difference. Yeah. So we're also talking about learning how to perform a dialect rather than learning a second language, which in many ways is a lot easier.
It would be difficult for, say, a British expat in Bermuda like me to fully acquire a real Bermudian accent. But my research has shown that it's quite easy for them to pick up on a few iconic features and reproduce them in a periodic way. I thing I picked up, so I'm very sorry that we lost nothing. But this use of appropriation of language from Mochrie reminds me a lot research.
So you're working on language on Israel and Palestine and particular about the use of Hebrew by the Palestinian community. So the expectation is that these are two monolingual groups and that the language is a use of Palestinians, Arabic for Israelis, Hebrew index their nationality. And because of the conflict is this equation is exacerbated and made very salient. But then there's also, apart from the conflicts, also points of contact.
And what I was looking at was a mass phenomenon of migrant workers, of Palestinian manual labourers who go to Israel to work and then come back home. And they've acquired Hebrew in the process or some Hebrew. I mean, how many people are we talking roughly? So before before the second intifada, so before the year 2000, it was estimated that about one hundred and eighteen thousand Palestinian workers from the West Bank. So this is out of a population of about two point two million.
So it was a large proportion has always been. So, for instance, in the West Bank, it was 35 percent of the labour force was working inside Israel for many years. Now it's greatly reduced due to due to movement restrictions. So now it's about 16 to 18 percent of the workforce, predominantly male and predominantly in construction and and cleaning jobs for manual labourers.
And so these people learn some kind of what I thought would be functional basic Hebrew in order to have these jobs and access this economy and also to get through the checkpoints in order to access the economy. So they'd have to also deal with some kind of military administration. So that I thought that it would be precisely this kind of functional use that we expect somehow from migrants in order to get by.
And then I was going out to document this. And then what I found was something you allude to, that they have many different uses for Hebrew. And some of them, in fact, were to poke fun at its positions of authority or positions of power, so they would be, for instance. So there was one woman who was criticising. She was criticising a man she knew for being like thinking he's just, you know, just the best. He's the big cheese in his little community. And he's such a big head.
And he's not only married, one woman is married to women. Can you imagine that? And he's a university professor. And the word she she called him, he thinks he's he's he's the big boss and the big boss. She used Hebrew for in it. In Hebrew, in Israeli, Hebrew. That word just means the boss, the director. And when Palestinians use it, it means the guy who thinks he's the big boss. So it's got that parodic added sarcasm just by virtue of using Hebrew.
And so this there are these political connotations which obviously link the way people use language then to the, you know, the socio economic and political context and interesting and surprising ways. And and obviously, this mockery was one of them. Yes. In your case, it's a mockery of authority. Yes. Not necessarily Israeli, but by association. She drew Hebrew, gets associated with that quote is from from Rosemary's.
It's the reverse. It's I would say what my white appropriators of Bermudian English are doing is mocking Raith. There are all sorts of clues in the content of their performances and in things like the voice quality of their performances that show that they're not just mocking a kind of generic Bermudian. That very definitely is a racial element to these performances.
But I think what what Nancy and I have in common, in fact, all of us in our examinations of of language in this context is that we see it as sociolinguist now do as we see language as a resource rather than as something that naturally happens to all of us. We see speakers as agents who make use of language in order to construct identity. You're you that's something that you. I agree with that. Yeah.
Maybe I paused earlier. We should go into a few more of the specifics of actually how the research is collected in the field. I know you personally. You went out to Bermuda for several months and went around with a microphone recording people. Yes. It's a very nice place to do fieldwork. Well, someone's got to do it yet. So the classic way of collecting fieldwork for sociolinguist and it's very different for linguistic apologists and depending on your subdiscipline.
But what I did was the classic sociolinguistic interview with a twist. So the classic sociolinguistic interview is a way of collecting a large amount of high quality speech data in a relatively short amount of time. So you sit down with a speaker, you try to make them comfortable.
You have a long conversation about their life, their views on anything, really anything to get them speaking against Geekcorps naturally, because, of course, if people know they're being listened to, they may well change the way that they speak. So the aim is to have a comfortable, long conversation.
And then depending on which linguistic variables you're interested in, you may include a reading task or a word list or something for somebody to read so that you can go away and analyse those linguistic variables. What I found, because I'm interested in this linguistic performance of race of black Bermudian English, often I didn't need to prompt people to do this because as a white Bermudian interviewer, they came out on their own.
There was an assumption that I was complicit in these strategies of mocking black comedians so often I didn't even have to ask. But one thing I did do in my interviews was ask speakers, what does a comedian English accent sound like and can you do a bit? And these really rather problematic performances would flow out.
And so you felt that because of being the person you were, you could get a sense just by doing one on one interview of how what immigrants might speak to each other, because I guess you all were. I guess so. I mean that I'm looking at older white Bermudian men so that there's an age difference and there's a gender difference between me and the people I'm interviewing. But the type of linguistic performances I'm interested in do seem to take place only in white spaces.
So I'm talking about a very theatrical, um, we all do it. And I think it might be interesting to have a conversation generally about when people mock an accent. It happens all the time. Um, actually, I was I was reading an article in a book that's recently been published by Nick Shukla and one of the writers in that kookier. And it talks about I don't know if. Listeners will know the YouTube sensation, one pound fish.
I think they made it was it was a hit. It was a target. And it's I think it's a good example of how easy it is to miss that. Linguistic mockery can be incredibly offensive. The humour of that piece basically rests on somebody living in the UK, not having a British accent. And the Yates says there's something in the article like this is a chart hit that the success rests on mocking the dialect of my grandfather. Know, it's really not that funny.
I've lost my thread a bit now that you're asking about what I was saying, so I just can continue his theme of discussing methods and research. So naturally, you but you said you'd be going after Israel and Palestine for many years. And what this particular field work to do that the research book on how long did that take you to?
So I was in the field on that occasion for nine months, the way it works is I tried to then make a network of Connexions in refugee camps because that's where the highest proportion of these manual labourers live due to the specific conditions in the refugee camps, in Palestinian refugee camps, in the in the West Bank.
So what you do then is you try to get to know people gradually, usually I'd offer to help with, let's say, NGO funding applications for which they'd need maybe somebody who speaks English and get to know people a bit better and through introductions. That way, I'd start off by talking about work in Israel, which I had identified as the greatest source of Hebrew acquisition for these Palestinians.
And from that. Somehow, gradually, you'd have to obviously, I couldn't mention directly that what I was hoping for was that they would discuss the Hebrew or show me how they use the Hebrew, because then that makes people very self-conscious.
And so what I got in the in the research then was in these interviews where I'd ask them about their life experience really in kind of general terms and get what Hebrew is appropriate for them to mention to a foreign researcher who comes to their refugee camp.
And so, you know, maybe knows something about the conditions, but can ask very seemingly material basic questions about so what tools do you use in your in your daily work or how do you actually get to your workplace in the morning and where do you get your permit to access?
So I'd ask some kind of questions which would then lead to a narrative about their daily life, hoping then that some of the terminology and some of the most interesting data you'd get would be after a few months of living with these people and you get invited to a communal dinner and you get to witness some conversations between the people when they're more at ease. And and then you get out a little ethnographic radar and try to remember as much as possible to take notes afterwards.
So I guess it's a combination then of participant observations and and interviews whereby the function of the interview is not only to gather data, then it is also to make yourself known and your kind of interests known in the community, which is a very, very close knit community.
So the word spreads quite fast and make yourself a bit more approachable and not ingratiate yourself, but make it possible then for other sorts of situations to come about like like dinner time or outings to the shopping centre. So sometimes it's also important to notice that your participants have certain expectations from you as a researcher and from they kind of think about you as a person and being interested in this in one particular thing.
And I'm thinking about my study where I was interested in multiplicity of voices and multiplicity of experiences of life. So I was I've observed that during my participant observations, I observed that there were people who were developing new speaking styles and that they existed. But then I started doing my fieldwork and at the beginning I thought I would use this snowball technique.
So you ask the person to give you contact details to a person who could meet your criteria and then you go and interview their friends. So a friend of a friend technique, of course, but then was a bit useless for me simply because because of the fact that there was tension in my community. So people who were speaking in new ways were perceived as unreal and weird people by people who are more nationally oriented.
And when I asked them to give me contact details to other people, to other participants in a nationally oriented individuals would be like, oh, I know a good person for you study. And then they would give me contact eaters to people who are like them. And at some point I was just stuck with all the like like in a circle of friends who were very similar and had very similar life stories. And that was interesting on its own.
It's fascinating, but I had to develop other ways to get to the people who are actually also part of this community who existed, but who were not easily approachable in a way because the other people didn't want me to interview them. They were like, oh, no, you should not talk to them. They're not alone.
So then you have to find your other ways to get to them, which is also quite I think that shows you that research in general when you're conducting research and social sciences can be skewed because of your very methods. So sometimes researchers may not be aware of like all the discourses that there are just because they use certain methods. So you use this friend of a friend technique and then you're like you have just one story in a way, right?
Yeah. It's an illusion that you have multiple channels and you can end up making very big claims, but it may not be the full picture. That's what I'm trying to say. Well, I didn't have the very divide that your research suggests might exist.
Was what was making it hard for you in the first place to. Yeah. Find the individual to express that, because also, like I said during my interviews, I would talk with those people about other members of the Polish transnational community who would meet my criteria. And they often said, yes, there are those people who speak in new ways and they would reflect the language you use and they would make comments about them.
But then when I asked them about contact details through these people, they were like, no, we're no longer friends. It's difficult, but, you know, you you have to work harder to get to those people actually and to make them interested,
and they have other reasons to participate. So you can see that some people, for instance, in my case, some people participated because they wanted to participate because they were so naturally oriented, interested in politics, and they felt obliged to share their stories because of the very topic of my research. And then there were people who were like those cosmopolitan speakers, participated for other reasons. So they said, oh, I really value education, I want to help you.
And that is that you can see that they're guided by different values, I guess a different reason. How are you going about finding migrants and refugees in the German immigration system to talk to you? Are you going in by the authorities? Are you going by a back door? So I'm just designing my methodology at the moment. I go into the preparing to go into the field and a year from now, so I'm still in the early stages. That being said, I have concentrated my master's research on the same topic.
So in my master's, I got in touch with several language instructors at these government funded schools, and I conducted some structured interviews with them to understand their perspective on the system. And I've stayed in touch with them. And they're going to try to help me get access to the schools as a volunteer.
The challenges I'm going to be facing is getting approval from from the schools, I might have to get approval from the federal Office of Migration and Refugees because they fund these courses. And I might it'll be challenging to actually get fully informed consent of everyone in these classrooms if I'm going to be doing recording. So I have a lot of methodological details to tease apart.
But in general, my methods will be very similar to Nancy's so very long field work between a year and a year and a half in these schools, spending as much time as possible with migrants and refugees to develop a relationship so I can spend time with them outside of school, try to understand their journey more clearly, but also mixed in with interviews so that I can get more pointed questions across.
Fascinating for me as an outsider. Well, that sounds exactly what anthropologists would do, but it is the mixture of the two disciplines you talk about that you can't really separate the two from each other. Well, I think I have an interesting education. Instead of studying linguistic anthropology at a US institution where that's much more established, I studied linguistics in my undergrad and in my MFL and then I moved into the anthropology department.
So I'm really taking the two methods and bringing them together rather than the streamlined approach of actually studying the field. I mean, one of the main aims of the conference that we were organising at the moment is to promote linguistic anthropology as a discipline. Well, let's discuss more about this conference in the final 10 minutes or so. So this is happening at the end of March, just as a back story.
This is our second conference. We ran one at the beginning of this year in April, and it was originally Nancy Canga. And I was another colleague who was no longer on our team. And this year we have a chance to work with Rosie.
And our idea basically was that our research wasn't really getting enough platforms in the UK and we wanted to provide one for people in our field to have a bigger discussion, be able to have a discussion about these topics that are really not being covered enough, in our opinion, in European academia, not to do feel the subject is much bigger than in the US. I think it is a bit bigger in the US, but the more platforms, the better.
I guess in general in Europe, it's not there. It's probably growing. It's growing. There is interest, you can tell. And that's what we kind of saw last year, that we had a lot of people interested in the conference and we got a lot of abstracts all over the world and in many people participated in the conferences auditorium as well. So we're hoping that we were like provoking further discussion on those topics and that we can make it more established.
It's already established in a way like more in Europe.
We've inherited knowledge from our disciplines which are to do with anthropology and part of the European history of colonial expeditions, et cetera, that we have acquired this this baggage of, especially in area studies whereby we've acquired a lot of knowledge about the world, but in a way connected to European power that now we are still grappling with and trying to, yeah, really challenge our disciplines in light of different perspectives maybe from around the world.
But Europe does have a tradition of knowing a lot about language and then and also about anthropology is just making it into a modern discipline that would reflect maybe some of the new ways of looking at identity and interaction and constructed categories like what we are going to try and look at, which is immigration and national identity, and then how these are actually fluid and challenged and contested and also replicated and and used to include and exclude certain categories of persons.
So I don't as the European and the American US I mean, North American experiences are slightly different due to our history, but we do have a lot of very, very rich scholarship over the centuries from various studies. And I think there are actually many people in Europe who do similar things to what linguistic anthropologists in the US would do, where they've called differently many times. And we have those multiple names for the same.
So maybe that's where we are coming from and we wanted to bring them all together. I mean, would you say there is any useful distinction that can be made between sociolinguistics linguistic anthropology or are they just two sides of the same coin? I think there is a there is a significant difference, but they are very, very related fields with the risk of being attacked by my colleagues. I would say that. And general sociolinguistics is interested in how social factors affect languages.
So if you think about traditional variation and studies and things like that. So how do things like gender and religion and ethnicity, anything like that, play into the language we use? Whereas I think linguistic anthropologists start from the premise that language is social practise already. So it's it's always an interaction with all of these all these factors.
So I think there's a slight chance I might get moving in the same direction that these disciplines and there are other related disciplines like philosophy of language. And we I mean, we wouldn't monitor these borders very, very carefully. Maybe would we'd see it more as an project of bringing what is necessarily a complex way of looking at language and society and bringing all these themes together.
But I think the distinction would which we would make is that these categories, these social categories, we would not say that they are distinct and then related to language. What we see is that they are constitutive of each other. And what does what does unite all of our approaches, I think, would be definitely the emphasis on field work.
So as opposed to, let's say, theoretical linguists, we do require that anybody who participates has been in the field, recorded how people speak, and then try to both familiarise themselves with how the speakers see their own categories in their place in society and use language to maybe perform that in certain ways that are relevant to this immediate context and then also how everybody else receives that performance.
So we are we are definitely looking at the performance. So we want that material from the field. We want that data, which we would call them the linguistic data. We don't we we cannot accept things that are, let's say, you know, found in a laboratory or in the imagination of a specific linguist. I think I think that where sociolinguistics where sociolinguistics has moved into what we call its third wave.
It's where it has drawn on anthropology. It's where it has borrowed concepts around topology and become more open to anthropology. So the boundaries are fluid. And Nancy's right. We wouldn't want to monitor them. And that's why we want to bring them together in this process of things and on. But there's a lot more about linguistics and popular culture with this film Arrival, which you feel is terribly old fashioned.
A single disappear wolf hypothesis is not where the field is moving at the moment. No. So this is a pure hypothesis is a little bit of an outdated theory in linguistics. It proposes that the structure and content of your language affects the way that you think and see the world. So the classic example is if you're from a cold country, you may have several more words for white and for snow. Then if not, then you would have twenty three words for snow. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of thing.
So in arrival, the aliens that Amy Adams playing a linguistics professor has to learn the language of and translate have something called nonlinear syntax. And what that means in the film is that the handwriting or their orthographic system has lots of circular symbols that represent entire phrases rather than,
say, an alphabet like we might have in English. And the hypothesis in the film is very sort of Pavlovian in that this circular syntactic orthographic system means that the aliens can see into the future and into the past, and which, when Amy Adams learnt the language, means that she becomes all knowing. So having attended this film with a bunch of linguists, we went away and had a laugh about it.
But I think probably the most accurate thing about the film was the representation of the linguistic professor's office, which looked very like a linguistics office. It left reality, but yeah. Well, I hope you forgive me for that slightly less, but thank you very much for listening. Join us next week on In Our Spare Time.