Prof Catherine Travis launches “Life in a New Language” at ALS2024

The annual conference of the Australian Linguistic Society (ALS) is a gathering of like-minded academics and presents a wonderful opportunity to see old friends and meet new ones, and to be intellectually encouraged to engage with language in all its forms and context. This year’s conference at the Australian National University was no different and offered an exciting program.

Our new book Life in a New Language featured prominently, including receiving a second launch (to learn more about the first launch, go here). At ALS, our book was launched by Professor Catherine Travis, the Chair of Modern European Languages in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the ANU.

Catherine’s reflections on the book were a thoughtful heart-warming invitation to read Life in a New Language. This is part of Catherine’s testimony:

Many of the stories told are very familiar to me, as I’m sure they will be to all of you – many of you are migrants to Australia, and may have had similar experiences yourselves, and all of you will have been made aware of these kinds of experiences from migrants in your own families, close friends and colleagues.

And the message equally rings true to me, as I hope it will to you. I will just highlight three elements here.

Migrants are too often seen through a deficit lens – what is highlighted is their lack of English that adheres to a standardised norm; their lack of appropriate qualifications; their lack of local experience. This is in contrast to what they bring, which is their multilingual repertoire, qualifications in different settings, and their international experience. We need to address this deficit narrative and recognise that migrant families are raising the multilingual communication mediators of the future; and we need to support them in that endeavour, as our future depends on it.

Life in a New Language already has a veritable fan club

The responsibility for communication is too often placed on the migrant. As the authors state, language is viewed as a “cognitive skill, the level of which can be measured through proficiency tests. But it is also a communicative tool that interactants share to collaboratively achieve common goals” (p.124). This perspective shifts the burden of responsibility onto both parties involved in the interaction, and the authors call for more attention to be given to what it means to communicate well in a linguistically diverse society, to be more aware of the importance of inclusive communication.

And, crucially, the conversation needs to be taken out of the academy. This book goes a long way to doing that, as a highly readable and rich account of migrant stories. I hope that it is read widely, that the migrant stories here are heard, and are listened to.

Life in a New Language is an ethnographic data-sharing and re-use project and so it was also appropriate that we engaged strongly with the themed session on The Wealth of Resources on Migrant Languages in Australia organised by Professor Heike Wiese (Chair of German in Multilingual Contexts in the Humboldt University in Berlin), her doctoral researcher Victoria Oliha, and Dr Jaime Hunt (University of Newcastle).

This themed session aimed to provide a centralised forum for researchers on migrant languages in Australia to connect and present their findings as well as spark a conversation around the resources created through their projects. The following central questions were discussed:

• What empirical resources on migrant languages in Australia have been created? How can we make these resources accessible to the wider research community?
• From what theoretical and conceptual perspectives have migrant languages in Australia been studied? How can such studies inform each other?
• What methods have been used to study migrant languages in Australia? What can we learn from each other methodologically? What new methods could we use to gain further insights?

It is wonderful for Life in a New Language to be part of this conversation. As one of our biggest fan says in this unboxing video: “it teaches you how people develop.”

‘That’s not what the dictionary says!’, the pedant bleats.

‘Ah’, retorts the wise linguist, ‘but a dictionary is simply a record of usage, not a rule book’.

Fun fact by the way:

The earliest English dictionaries in the early 1600s, like Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall, didn’t actually list all the words, only the most difficult ones, including the rush of words being borrowed into English from French, Latin and Greek – which were much more scientifically and culturally interesting back then than boring old backwater English.

Dictionaries change

Contemporary dictionaries do change their definitions, as language itself changes. Take the English words shall and will, which used to occupy very different territories (for example shall typically appeared before ‘I’ and ‘we’, will after other grammatical subjects) but nowadays will has largely usurped shall. That’s just natural language change, and the Cambridge English Dictionary now marks shall as ‘old-fashioned’. Will is hot; shall is not.

And this is still happening today. In 2019, a petition was launched for the Oxford English Dictionary to update its definition of ‘woman’, to remove various sexist wording and to include “examples representative of minorities, for example, a transgender woman, a lesbian woman, etc.”. This caused quite a stir at the time, but the dictionary folk did what they always do – investigated changing language usage.

The Cambridge Dictionary moved first, adding an entry to its definition ‘an adult who lives and identifies as female though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth’. The OED has also moved but rather more circumspectly, simply adding an example of usage under its definition, ‘Having trans women involved added so much to the breadth of understanding what it means to be a woman.’ In this case we’re witnessing dictionaries catching up in real time, at different paces. But they do catch up. That’s their job, not telling us how to speak proper!

‘Cambridge Dictionary’s definition of ‘woman’, updated to be transgender-inclusive’

Prescriptivists and descriptivists

In academic parlance, those who wish language would just sit still and behave itself are prescriptivists. They prescribe how language should be used (just as your doctor prescribes the medicines you should take).

Linguists, by contrast, are descriptivists, simply describing language as it is actually used without passing judgement.

Or are they?

And/or, do they have to always be?

Naming no names, I have heard unguarded comments from professional linguists, irked by this or that slang term their teenage offspring come out with. Linguists are humans, and they live in human society that is full of that kind of sneering. Some of it slips through. But strictly speaking this is very much the faux pas, and might provoke a subtle change of subject at the conference dinner table.

Quotative like

A widely discussed example from recent decades is a new use of like to quote someone (‘He was like, I don’t care!’). I reviewed and modelled the research into this new ‘quotative like’, which showed teenagers leading the innovation. This new usage quickly ruffled pedant feathers far and wide. Indeed, many schoolteachers heavy-handedly banned its use under the pretence of reinforcing standard literacy. ‘You’ll never get a job speaking like that!’ etc. etc.

But the linguistic research told another story. Quotative like was doing something very special, and more importantly something previously unavailable in English. It allowed you to relate what someone said, but without claiming those were the precise words they used. Compare ‘He was like, I don’t care’ and ‘He said, I don’t care’. The first is a less explicit claim that he said exactly that, simply that he said something like that.

It’s actually a very efficient and strategic conversational device; and linguists sprung to its defence as a novel and intriguing innovation. For those few linguists who continued to privately grumble about it, and other youth lingo, eyebrows were increasingly raised.

A strip in the webcomic XKCD about research on quotative like

Evasive so

But other linguistic innovations garner more divided opinion among linguists, particularly some quirks of politicians, corporate bigwigs, and other denizens of elite circles. A widely discussed example which gained pace in the early 2010s is the use of the word so to begin a sentence. Historically a rather dull grammatical bolt simply plugging together chunks of sentences, this unassuming two-letter word has been promoted to higher tasks in recent years, much to the dismay of the pedants. As a 2015 NPR article notes,

Many of the complaints about sentences beginning with “so” are triggered by a specific use of the word that’s genuinely new. It’s the “so” that you hear from people who can’t answer a question without first bringing you up to speed on the backstory. I go to the Apple Store and ask the guy at the Genius Bar why my laptop is running slow. He starts by saying, “So, Macs have two kinds of disk permissions …”

British journalist and BBC radio presenter John Humprys long marshalled opinion against this use of so. Indeed his listeners frequently echoed the same grumble. Others went on the defensive, urging that so has been used to begin sentences for centuries.

But that defense somewhat misses an important nuance of this irritation. The new usage here is not simply beginning a sentence, but beginning a reply to a question, especially a challenging question, often with something that is not really an answer at all, and often uttered by someone in a position of power, who really should know the answer.

A famous example of that little nuance was a 2015 New York Times interview of Mark Zuckerberg in which he gibbered out some bizarrely rambling answers to very straightforward questions, for example what his new toy ‘Creative Labs’ was supposed to be. Simple question. Define the product. He responded:

So Facebook is not one thing. On desktop where we grew up, the mode that made the most sense was to have a website, and to have different ways of sharing built as features within a website. So when we ported to mobile, that’s where we started — this one big blue app that approximated the desktop presence.

But I think on mobile, people want different things. Ease of access is so important. So is having the ability to control which things you get notifications for. And the real estate is so small. In mobile there’s a big premium on creating single-purpose first-class experiences.

So what we’re doing with Creative Labs is basically unbundling the big blue app.

This spectacularly circuitous response not only patronised a professional journalist and their audience – who might just understand what a website is – but it also did something more sinister. It shirked responsibility and accountability; it kicked up a cloud of corporate haze when a simple product definition was required.

Slippery circuitousness, after all, is an important corporate skill, whether you’re not answering a journalist or not answering a Senate committee.

One reactionary pedant, Bernard Lamb, President of the Queen’s English Society, retorted of this new so: “It’s not being used as a conjunction to join things up, which is how it should be used. … It’s just carelessness, it doesn’t have any meaning when used this way.”

But he was wrong. It does have meaning, just in a new and rather more sinister way.

Doing bad things with words

‘So’, as it’s used here and in other such corporate media interviews (‘How can you justify this kind of oil spill?’ – ‘So oil spills are uncommon and we work very hard to prevent…’) is doing a huge amount of ultimately rather grubby work. Its former career as a conjunction (‘X happened so Y happened’) conditions us to see logical relevance between X and Y. Zuck and other corporate and political bigwigs use this to their advantage, to imply relevance when there is none.

And in the process, in a small but important way, that adds to their aura of elite untouchability.

Powerful people using language to trick their audiences is of course not new. Classical rhetoric gives us the term paradiastole, when a reply to a question turns a negative into a positive, or otherwise deflects and diffracts the focus of the question. (Socrates famously hated political rhetoric, inspiring his student Plato similarly.) Reply-initial so could simply be the new rhetorical kid on the block, the latest ruse in a very long tradition of ruses to distract from not having a good answer, or having one but wanting to avoid it.

Statues of Plato (left) and Socrates (right) by Leonidas Drosis at the Academy of Athens (Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-4.0)

And this brings us to where linguists might get justifiably annoyed, more so than at their teenage kids’ slang.

If a linguistic innovation is achieving something sinister, then perhaps it’s ok to hate on it. Linguists, after all, are not simply interested in sanctifying any and all words as precious gems. Linguists skillfully dissect other language use that is more obviously doing bad things – racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic, and other discriminatory discourse.

Calling out nefarious language is ok

Laying bare when a linguistic innovation is doing something sinister, calling it out for what it is, can simply be an extension of that same important critical insight.

Funnily enough, that reply-initial so has actually been picked up by media training organisations. Corporate elites are always carefully groomed on their language, and since this particular innovation has picked up so much ire, it is now carefully ironed out. You may be hearing it less nowadays as a result.

You’ll still hear ‘I was like…’ though, because teenagers don’t have spin doctors to manage their comms, nor are they interested in fooling the public to buy their widgets or vote for them. Their interest is in being cool, as it should be.

So, criticising linguistic innovations does have its place when there are more shady forces at work. It’s like the principle in comedy that a joke is funny as long as it’s ‘punching up’, i.e. poking fun at those higher on the social ladder. As soon as the jokes begin ‘punching down’, mocking those who are already looked down upon without a comedian piling in, then it’s veering towards criticism.

New words can be fun and useful, or they can hide other more nefarious intentions. For the latter, linguists should feel comfortable punching up. It’s part of the job, alongside calling out more obviously discriminatory language. Linguists are ideally placed to pick those apart – celebrating the grammatically ingenious irreverence of teens while also throwing tomatoes at sneaky elites. So there.

This book offers a highly readable, concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods.

In the conversation we focus on the national aspects of the story of modern linguistics: the emergence of the discipline in 19^th century Germany and the passing of the baton to make it an American science in the 20^th century.

James also shares the story of writing the book and how it grew out of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast he hosts.

Enjoy the show!

This is early days for the Language on the Move Podcast, so please support us by subscribing to our channel on your podcast app of choice, leaving a 5-star review, and recommending the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends.

Transcript (by Brynn Quick, added 12/04/2024)

Welcome to the New Books Network.

Dist Prof Piller: Welcome to the Language on the Move Podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller, and I’m Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

My guest today is Dr James McElvenny. James, is that how you pronounce your name?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that is how I pronounce my name, but I actually do like to encourage varying pronunciations because I think that will give philologists something to do after I die.

Dist Prof Piller: (laughs) Fantastic, so we’ll try another pronunciation like “Mackelveeney”.

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, that’s perfect.

Dist Prof Piller: Dr McElvenny, or James, let’s just do it like that – James is a linguist and an intellectual historian at the University of Siegen in Germany. He is the author of “A History of Modern Linguistics” and also of “Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism”. He also hosts the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast.

Today we are going to talk about his new book, “A History of Modern Linguistics”, which has just come out from Edinburgh University Press. Welcome to the show, James.

Dr McElvenny: Thanks for having me on.

Dist Prof Piller: James, can you start us off by telling us how you got to write a “A History of Modern Linguistics”? Aren’t there enough histories of linguistics already?

Dr McElvenny: There are plenty of histories of linguistics. So, what happened is I was doing a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh, and I was teaching their course in the history of linguistics while I was there, and the Linguistics editor at Edinburgh University Press came to me. I had already published my first book with them, and the Linguistics editor said that they would like a text book in the history of linguistics for their linguistics series. So, I thought, “Gee, that should be relatively easy. I can just base it on the course I’ve been teaching.”

And I also long had had the ambition of doing a podcast, so I thought that I might be able to imitate Peter Adamson who does the podcast “History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps”, and he’s produced books with Oxford University Press based on that podcast. So, I thought, “I could just turn my lectures into a podcast, and I could turn the podcast into a book.”

It didn’t turn out to be quite as simple as that. So, moving from one text type to another, in my experience, was actually quite complicated. Podcasts have their own format and affordances, which I had to adapt my lectures to. And then turning that into a book was also a huge amount of work to make it into a coherent written text. But it’s done now, so… (laughs).

Dist Prof Piller: And it’s eminently readable, I really enjoyed reading the book so much. I think the process you’ve just described of trying out the text with your students and then turning it into a podcast and then turning it into the book really shows in the readability of the book. So, I enjoyed that immensely.

Dr McElvenny: I’m glad you think so.

Dist Prof Piller: Tell us – how did you actually choose where to begin and where to end, because it’s not a history of the longue durée from the Greek and Sanskrit grammarians to the present day. It’s actually a much narrower project. So, can you tell us about the beginning and the end?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so it’s meant to be a history specifically of disciplinary linguistics. By that I mean this modern discipline of linguistics that we study at universities. So, I think that there’s a great deal of value in a longue durée history of linguistics which is the modes that most histories that have previously been published are written in. They go back to ancient Greece and follow things through the medieval period and the early modern period, right up to the modern era.

That’s very good, but it’s more of a sort of old-fashioned history of ideas kind of approach. And I think there are some problems with that, like it sort of is based on the assumption that there are facts about the nature of language and that we’ve discovered them and that it’s a story of simple progress of us building on what has happened in the past. Of course, we do know a lot of things about language that are the direct result of the research that we do today at universities, but we’ve also forgotten a lot of what has come before. We also have, as university researchers in linguistics departments, we also have a very specific perspective on language. There is much, much more that could be said.

So, I think that it can be problematic to assimilate everything that has come before to say that that is all a prelude to what we do now. All of those things that have come before need to be understood on their own terms. Each of those need their own book, and they have their own books. So, I thought I would start when this modern discipline starts. And I don’t say that nothing came before. I actually do refer back to things that came before when they’re relevant to what is happening in the modern discipline. But I do place a boundary there and say, “This is when the modern discipline starts”. And I say that it’s around the beginning of the 19^th century when modern research universities came into being, the first of those being the University of Berlin, and linguistics as a modern university discipline started to develop.

As for the end point, well that has its own story as well. I actually wanted to come much closer to the present, but I also wanted to get the book finished before my funding ran out. This is one of the contingencies of being a researcher in modern linguistics. So, I decided to end it with WWII where there’s a major shift that the sort of centre of gravity of linguistics as a discipline, and of lots of other university disciplines, shifted from Europe to America. There’s the beginnings of that shift in the book, so I talk about figures like Bloomfield and Sapir, and the so-called American Structuralists, but I don’t venture into the sort of Cold War period when America became preeminent.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and look, I think that makes a whole lot of sense, even if it was sort of an extraneous reason. So, you just stated that essentially the book starts with the foundation of the modern research university in Germany in Berlin University. I’d still like to go one little step before that because your book actually starts with Sir William Jones and the discovery, if you will, of the Indo-European language family. Can you tell us a bit about Sir William Jones and why you started there and what was novel about his work?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean I think it’s easy to over-emphasise the role of Sir William Jones. So, this is the traditional fable of how modern Linguistics came into being. So, I repeat it in the book, but I mark it as the traditional fable. I mention that as soon as Linguistics started to form as a discipline, people started writing histories of Linguistics, and this story that started to develop that there was Sir William Jones and then Schlegel and Bop and then Grimm, and so I repeat it, like I rehearse this story because this is designed as an introduction to the history of Linguistics so that people are aware that this is the traditional narrative.

But at the same time, I try to poke holes in it. So, Sir William Jones is well known because he was a British judge in Calcutta and was very interested in philology. In fact, he probably went to India to pursue his philological interests. He studied Sanskrit, and he gave a famous address where he pointed out the similarities between Sanskrit and ancient Greek and Latin and said that this must mean that they came from a common ancestor. Then this has sort of been taken as the beginning of historical comparative Linguistics.

But if you actually read Sir William Jones’ address, you immediately see that this is not modern Linguistics as we understand it. The framework that he’s putting this genealogical narrative into is actually a Biblical framework. He’s talking about the sons of Noah spreading across the Earth, and that’s how he identifies the families of languages in the world today. So, it’s a sort of medieval hangover.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I really like that idea of the medieval hangover as you put it, and that still we have medieval ideas baked into modern Linguistics. So, let’s then go from William Jones to the German foundations of modern Linguistics. Essentially, you are telling a story of a national discipline that’s grounded in two nations, if you will. The beginnings in Germany in the 19^th century and then the passing of the baton, if you will, to the United States in the 20^th century.

So, why Germany? What was going on in Germany at the time that provided this fertile ground for the creation of this new discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, above all it’s the creation of the research university which is in no small part an achievement of Humboldt, Wilhelm Humboldt, who was himself very interested in language and made sure that professorships in language were represented in the new research university in Berlin and brought Bop to Berlin to pursue his comparative approach to grammar.

But there’s also a broader social and political context which comes out very clearly in the story of Grimm of German nationalism, of trying to show that people who speak German are a unified national group. This is before the days of Germany as a political unit, so it was a project to try and raise German national consciousness as a way of forging a political unity, and also to create a history for the German nation because the great rivals of the Germans at this time, the French, could trace their own intellectual history back to classical Rome, back to the ancient world, whereas the Germans had nothing. They just had barbarians as their ancestors.

But through historical comparative Linguistics, you could show that the Germans actually belonged to this bigger Indo-European family, you know, that links them up with Sanskrit, an even older, more prestigious tradition as was understood in 19^th century Europe.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, that’s amazing. So, can you maybe talk us through some of the key linguistic ideas about what’s new in language now? So, if we start with, you’ve mentioned Bop and Grimm – what’s key for Bop and Grimm and maybe the neogrammarians?

Dr McElvenny: Ok, what’s key? Well, the key methodological breakthroughs that they made – so Bop went through the meticulous task of comparing in excruciating detail the conjugational forms across the European languages, and thereby provided a basis of reconstructing to the ancestor that they could have come from. So, instead of talking in sort of general terms about similarity, you could actually show in detail what the ancestral forms would have looked like.

And then Grimm is usually credited with establishing the principles of sound laws, so showing how specific sounds have changed historically over time.

Dist Prof Piller: And I guess this methodological innovation really was new in a sense and was not necessarily well-received by all the key players at the time. Many people sort of thought that Bop in particular was really pedantic. You cite this nice little limerick of sorts about how he’s really a pedant. So, what’s the tradition against which Linguistics established itself as this very formal and very narrow discipline?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, so I mean these grammatical tasks, or these details of grammar that people like Bop were interested in that form the basis of comparative grammar were traditionally considered just to be something that you had to know about in order to read texts in an ancient language. The real task was understanding the culture and the literature that is written in these ancient languages and not to obsess about the grammatical forms.

But Bop, for the first time, spearheaded this tradition where grammar becomes the really important thing. You can make your entire career just out of comparing forms, and the literature, what is actually written in the language, is completely irrelevant. Or is of secondary importance.

I think it’s probably fair to say that this is something that characterises Linguistics as a discipline, that Linguistics as a discipline has this sort of fetishisation of form, by which I mean that Linguists want something that their discipline is about. They want an object that they study that is different from what everyone else has. The traditional philologists have literature and culture and so on.

But the linguists have the language itself. They have the grammar. They have the forms. So it’s all about separating the form off. This is what Bop has done, and then with the neogrammarians who you mentioned, they turn this into an art that the sound laws of how languages change become THE key thing. That’s what it’s all about.

Then even if you move into the structuralist era, you could understand Saussure’s distinction between la langue and la parole as being a further manifestation of this desire to hive off language as a special thing that linguists study themselves. La langue is the formal system of the language –

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, and it’s an imagined system, right? I mean, he claims or posits this exists and parole is not interesting, but really –

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I mean it is controversial whether Saussure thought that there could never be any – whether Saussure thought that parole was not interesting at all as a scientific object, but definitely he is usually understood as saying la langue is where all the action is.

Dist Prof Piller: So your book covers these 200 years of intellectual history. There are 15 chapters, and we don’t really have time to go into all of them, but I think you’ve told us very nicely about the German context and where this obsession with form really starts. Let’s maybe jump close to the end of your story, but not quite to the end, not quite to structuralism which is the logical conclusion of the formal obsession. But one step before Sapir and Whorf.

One thing that I’ve noticed, I mean obviously not for the first time, but it’s very clear that the history of modern Linguistics is the history of monolingualism, of national languages, and that there really, because of the way it got started, there really is no interest in language contact and multilingualism and linguistic diversity.

Sapir and Whorf are actually credited with being interested in linguistic diversity. That was actually very important to them, and also drawing on Boaz. So maybe can you tell us a bit about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in quotation marks for everyone who can’t see us. How is that sort of close to the end of your story?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, sure. I’ll quickly say too on the topic of 15 chapters – yeah so there are 15 chapters with content that tell the story, and then an introduction and a conclusion. But I think saying 15 chapters sort of misrepresents the style of the book because it makes it sound like it’s a gigantic tome, but it’s actually a really short book. It’s like, 200 pages, and the chapters are really short. It’s made to be very snappy.

Dist Prof Piller: And it is snappy! It’s really very readable. Sorry to kind of create an impression as this being – I mean I guess we can’t really cover all of these developments here in our conversation.

Dr McElvenny: On the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, yeah, and linguistic diversity, I mean this is a very interesting question. It depends a little bit on what you mean by linguistic diversity, but perhaps what you’re getting at with Sapir and Whorf is this interest in indigenous languages of America and other parts of the world. So, indigenous as opposed to the written standardised languages familiar from the European countries, and that is definitely something they were interested in.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is well known, and you put it in inverted commas because neither Sapir nor Whorf formulated a hypothesis in the sense of something that could be tested, like something could be tested with experiments.

Dist Prof Piller: Could you maybe just tell our audience how the name came about? So, neither of these two men ever claimed that they had formulated a hypothesis, and still that’s all we can think of now. I mean, it’s one of the most well known linguistic facts, if you will, outside the academy.

Dr McElvenny: Well, I mean, the first attestation of the term as far as I’m aware, in print, comes from Harry Hoijer, who had been a student of Sapir’s from the 1950s, so after both Sapir and Whorf had died. Hoijer used the term in the context of a conference that he had convened on the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, so on the idea that there’s some sort of connection between language and thought, or perhaps that even language influences thought.

Sapir and Whorf didn’t formulate a hypothesis as such, but they definitely wrote lots of things about the interplay between language and thought. Whorf perhaps more so. I think one of the most, well there’s a few interesting things that can be said about the background to both Sapir and Whorf’s ideas on linguistic relativity as you could also describe it. One is that there is a German tradition which Sapir was directly in touch with, and Boaz as well who was Sapir’s doctoral supervisor and mentor. This goes back to Humboldt and so on, and that’s also something I talk about in the book.

But there’s also a contemporary context for Sapir emphasising linguistic relativity, that language creates a worldview and shapes how we see the world, and Whorf too for that matter. This contemporary context is there was a lot of discussion on a political level on propaganda in the period between WWI and WWII. This was the era in which totalitarianism arose in central Europe and eastern Europe as well. There was a feeling that propaganda often had a linguistic basis, that it was a deliberate abuse of language to shape the way people think, to sort of brainwash them.

This finds an expression also in the philosophy of the period, so in early analytic philosophy or in the earliest works that fed into what later became analytic philosophy of people like Bertrand Russell, but even Wittgenstein, you can see this discourse that we need to purify language in order to be able to think clearly and logically. So, this is what motivated Russell’s Logical Atomism. He says this as much in his scholarly writings but also in his popular writings where he’s presenting his ideas.

And there was a whole ecosystem of popular books, so like The Meaning of Meaning by Ogden and Richards, which forms the basis, or is one of the major works that I talk about in my first book Language and Meaning in the Age of Modernism. But also Korzybski with General Semantics, and so on. There’s a whole heap of these.

So, I think that it’s fair to say that Sapir in emphasising linguistic relativity was picking up on this discourse, and you can find Sapir also directly referring to this discourse of how language can be abused to brainwash people. I believe that Sapir was picking up on this discourse and using it as a justification for doing linguistic scholarship. So, Sapir says by studying diverse languages, so languages that have a very different structure from the familiar European languages, such as the indigenous languages of America, we can get a completely different view on the world. We can see how what we assume to be a fact is just an illusion created by our language. This also comes out very clearly in Whorf’s writings, and Whorf is perhaps more explicit about it too.

Dist Prof Piller: Yeah, I was fascinated by how you describe that. Partly the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a form of language critique, and of course that feeds into another key tension that runs through modern Linguistics, the tension between descriptivism and prescriptivism and whether we just describe language or we actually engage with the meanings of language.

Before we end, I’d like to quickly draw one other kind of dichotomy or tension that also comes out really nicely in your book, and that is sort of the establishment of Linguistics as a scientific discipline, and the ambition to be scientific, but at the same time the constant undercurrent of all kinds of romantic ideas. There is the German Romanticism but also the romanticisation of ancient India for instance, so that’s a big topic. Or then Whorf and his spiritual world view.

So, can you maybe talk about this tension a bit more as Linguistics as a science, but Linguistics also as a romantic philosophy or the spiritual undercurrents?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, definitely. This is actually a topic that is much broader than disciplinary Linguistics itself. It has to do with what is considered in this period from the 19^th century to the present, what is considered legitimate scholarship and what is considered science.

So, the English word “science” generally only refers to natural science. We make a clear distinction between the sciences in the sense of the natural sciences and the humanities. I can’t really think if there’s a superordinate term that would cover both of those. I don’t know in English; I don’t think so. Scholarship?

Dist Prof Piller: Hmm, “research”?

Dr McElvenny: Research, yeah, research perhaps. But in the European context, like Wissenschaft, can also be, it can be Geisteswissenschaften, Naturwissenschaft – well do they have their own methods? And do they have their own objects of study? Or are they both two different manifestations of the same thing? This is a debate that ran throughout the 19^th century and influenced Linguistics.

So, by the end of the century, well, if we start at the beginning of the century, the Humboldtian university was very much oriented towards the humanities, the Geisteswissenschaften. They were the more important ones, and the natural sciences were considered to be less prestigious. But as the century bore on, the natural sciences could show all sorts of amazing discoveries in fundamental physics in chemistry, and all sorts of really interesting and useful applications of these discoveries in the development of technology – so electricity and new medicines and new chemicals that were synthesised and so on.

So, the natural sciences grew in prestige during the 19^th century, and by the 1880s this became a bit of a sticking point for the humanities, and in Linguistics there was this question of whether Linguistics should orient itself towards the natural sciences or whether it should claim its own special method as one of the humanities. The neogrammarians, of course, were very strongly on the natural science end of this debate with their emphasis on sound laws, saying that these are a kind of natural law.

But critics of the neogrammarians, people like Schuchardt, were saying that that doesn’t make any sense, that the sound laws are not like natural laws because they have limited applicability. They only work in a single language or a single dialect, and they only work for a certain period of time. They go to completion, so they can’t be equated to things like the law of gravity, which applies everywhere in the universe. So, someone like Schuchardt argued it’s just trying to grasp at the prestige, incorrectly, of the natural sciences by importing this to Linguistics.

I say that this came to a head in the 1880s, but it was already building up through the century. Schleicher, another figure who I talk about in the book, in mid-century was already going down this path where the debate was more in terms of materialism, as I described in the book, which is more a debate about whether laws of matter, like laws of physics, tell us everything we need to know about the world, or whether there is a special world of the soul or world of the mind that exists separately from this.

This debate continued after this period. It didn’t end in the 19^th century, but it’s probably fair to say that the model that has won out in Linguistics is very much a scientistic model that wants to orient Linguistics as a discipline to a sort of natural scientific conception of the world.

Dist Prof Piller: One question maybe. So, for a sociolinguist like myself, one thing that is very noticeable in your history is that there really was no place in the story of the birth of modern Linguistics, there was no place for linguistic diversity. There was no place for language contact. There was no place for multilingualism and all those kinds of things that weren’t clearly tied to “one nation, one language”, if you will.

So, can you maybe talk a bit about this history that is not there and how that got back into Linguistics again? Or how it was written out?

Dr McElvenny: Yeah, well I think it was written out because of this form fetishism, of this obsession with the language as the object of study that is an entity in its own right, and the job of the linguist is to describe its grammar and so on. Because if you make the language into the thing that you are studying, then there’s no space for speakers. It’s not about people speaking language, it’s about this abstract thing that exists independently of them.

But even in the 19^th century, you know, I talk about William Dwight Whitney. Even William Dwight Whitney in the mid 19^th century started to talk about diversity in texts, so he still had a philological method where he was analysing written texts, but he looked at the distribution of different sounds in the texts. He produced tables and calculated statistically how sound was distributed, not using the sophisticated statistical methods that we know today, but still talking in terms of percentages and using that to describe tendencies in the development of languages. On a theoretical level he also talked about the individual speaking subject and how people interacting with each other in language will influence each other, and how an individual might innovate a change, but then it has to be ratified by the speech community to become part of the language.

There were other figures as well into the latter half of the 19^th century who talked about the speaking subject and their place in the community of speakers. But it is definitely true that this was a minority, an oppositional position that you could take in studying language because the default position in Linguistics was to talk about the language as an abstract thing.

The introduction of modern sociolinguistics, or the advent of modern sociolinguistics, is probably, I think it’s fair to say, a phenomenon mostly of the post WWII era. So, it definitely has roots that go back earlier than that, but as a sub-discipline in its own right it’s a post WWII thing. So, you’ll have to wait for volume II of the book to be able to find out about that.

Dist Prof Piller: That’s brilliant. So is that what’s next for you, James? Volume II? Post World War?

Dr McElvenny: Well, if I get funding, yes. (laughs)

Dist Prof Piller: Brilliant. So looking forward to that and very much hope you’ll get the funding. Thanks again, James.

Thank you for listening, everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a 5-star review on your podcast app of choice, and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast and our partner, the New Books Network, to your students, colleagues and friends.

Until next time!

Piller, I. (Ed.) (2016) Language and Migration. London: Routledge.

Humans are a migratory species. Although in modern society the dominant imagery we have created about ourselves is that it is normal to be sedentary, nothing could be further from the truth. Prior to the advent of farming about 12,000 years ago, humans were constantly on the move. Even then, not everyone settled and someone or other was always pushed out and had to go and look for new livelihoods elsewhere. It is thus no exaggeration to say that mobility is part of our DNA – it is a species characteristic.

Language is obviously another.

But how do these two species characteristics go together? What does our propensity to migrate mean for the way we use language? And how does language play out in our mobilities?

In 2015, I was offered the opportunity to compile a collection of the key research on “language and migration” for the Routledge Critical Concepts in Linguistics series. The resulting four-volume edited collection Language and Migration has just been published.

In selecting critical contributions to research in language and migration, I aimed to strike a balance between the socially-relevant and topical issues of wider concern raised by migration on the one hand, and disciplinary conceptual and methodological concerns on the other. In doing so, Language and Migration is intended both as a showcase of the most important work in the field as well as an intervention in contemporary debates. To meet this challenge, Language and Migration has been structured around four themes:

• Languages in contact
• Identities and ideologies
• Linguistic diversity and social justice
• Education in linguistically diverse societies

Volumes One (“Languages in contact”) and Two (“Identities and ideologies”) take language as their starting point and explore how migration affects language. Two major perspectives on what constitutes the nature of the central research problem can be identified here: one perspective focusses on the ways in which migration affects language structure and the other situates linguistic diversity in indexical orders and seeks to illuminate how linguistic diversity constructs identities.

Migration is a species characteristics of homo sapiens (Image credit: crystalinks.com)

Volumes Three (“Linguistic diversity and social justice”) and Four (“Education in linguistically diverse societies”) take migration as their starting point and ask how language affects migration. Different language issues in relation to migration arise for first-generation adult migrants and their offspring. Consequently, Volume Three explores linguistic diversity and social justice against questions of adult language learning and in domains that mediate social inclusion for adults such as employment, health and community participation. Volume Four then focusses on education and the challenges of language learning and medium of instruction in linguistically diverse societies.

In addition to topical selection of the most important research, it has also been my aim to showcase research from a wide range of geographical, regional and historical contexts. Throughout, an attempt has been made to strike a balance between general overview articles and contextually-situated case-studies.

Language and Migration is intended for the library market. However, readers without access to a university library might find the table of contents and my editorial introduction useful. These are available for open-access download here. The editorial introduction, also entitled “Language and Migration” spells out the selection principles, surveys the key research issues in the field and identifies future research directions. Happy reading!

Piller, I. (2016). Language and migration Language and migration, 1-20

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913)

Procrastination is a fact of academic life, particularly during the PhD period, as every academic supervisor knows. However, judging from ever-increasing institutional efforts to control procrastination or from the many self-help guides intended to cure procrastination, it would seem that procrastination is endemic today. Furthermore, every delay is now treated as stemming from procrastination and sanctioned accordingly. The nature of these sanctions (not meeting deadlines triggering reviews of the candidature; automatic unenrollment if no thesis has been submitted after a certain period) is also evidence that procrastination has been upgraded from a minor failing to a serious failure of the individual: a lack of talent, commitment and capability. The institutional message is clear: procrastination is a sign that you don’t have what it takes to be a successful academic.

Everyone with a nagging sense of self-doubt induced by finding themselves procrastinating over this or that writing assignment will find a 1990 article about Saussure’s time in Leipzig immensely therapeutic. “Documenti saussuriani conservati a Lipsi e a Berlino” by Paola Villani surveys Saussure’s four years as a doctoral student in Germany, mostly Leipzig, which, at the time, was the world capital for the study of linguistics. The article’s appendix includes a reproduction of all the materials relating to Saussure that are kept in the archives of Leipzig University, where Saussure studied between 1876 and 1878 and obtained his doctorate in 1880.

Everyone knows that the ‘father of modern linguistics’ did not publish much and certainly not the work that constitutes the basis of his fame, Cours de linguistique générale, which was published posthumously by his students Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye on the basis of their lecture notes. Up to now, I had never given much thought to the question why Saussure might not have published the Cours during his life-time. I had simply assumed that he died prematurely.

However, the Leipzig archives contain a number of short letters Saussure wrote to Wilhelm Streitberg, one of the founding editors of Indogermanische Forschungen. These letters throw a different light on the matter and provide a unique insight into Saussure as an academic writer. Over a period of more than ten years, from 1892 to 1903, Saussure wrote a total of 22 letters to Streitberg asking repeatedly for extensions on an article he had promised Streitberg. In the end, the article was never written.

The reasons that Saussure cites for his tardiness and the grounds on which he continues to seek extensions over such a long period are most unlikely when one considers Saussure’s obvious talent and lasting influence. Saussure excuses himself to Streitberg by explaining that he suffers from “incurable graphophobie” (“incurable fear of writing”). Other colourful turns of phrase he uses to describe his problem include the following: “paresse scripturale” (“scriptorial laziness”); “horreur d’écrire” (“abhorrence of writing”); “une horreur maladive de la plume” (“a morbid horror of the pen”); and “toute rédaction me procure un supplice inimaginable” (“all writing causes me unimaginable torture”).

Contemporaries were well aware that after a brilliant little book as a 21-year-old – Mémoire sur le Système Primitif des Voyelles dans les Langues Indo-Européennes (Note on the Primitive System of Vowels in the Indo-European Languages) – Saussure had never again published anything. Streitberg, for one, simply thought that Saussure was insane. In a letter to Karl Brugmann he says that he has heard that Saussure is suffering from “unheilbarer Geisteskrankheit” (“incurable insanity”).

Other colleagues were more charitable: Antoine Meillet attributed Saussure’s reluctance to publish to an obsession with perfection and Émile Benveniste argued that the nature of the discipline was changing in a way that Saussure felt called for entirely new terminologies and concepts.

The most intriguing explanation was put forward by Georges Mounin, who suggested that Saussure’s inability to write was due to the trauma of studying abroad in Germany. Fanciful as this suggestion may sound, some of the letters in the archive provide evidence of a problematic relationship between Saussure and his peers and teachers in Leipzig. After Saussure’s death, Brugmann, for instance, wrote to Streitberg:

Übrigens ging mir jetzt ein paar mal durch den Kopf, ob bei Ihrer Darstellung des Entwicklungsganges von F. de Saussure richtig zur Geltung kommen werde, dass dieser gescheite Gelehrte die Hauptanregung in Leipzig […] bekommen hat. Merkwürdig ist mir immer erschienen, dass de Saussure selbst meines Wissens nie offen diese Abhängigkeit eingestanden hat. Meine Auffassung ist die: das etwas derbe und rauhbeinige Wesen von Osthoff hat den zartbesaiteten Jüngling abgestossen, und als Franzose (so dürfen wir wohl sagen) war ihm eben die Form die Hauptsache. […] Auch die Pariser Schüler von de S. haben nie diese Abhängigkeit offen eingestanden, und ich bin fast überzeugt, dass da nationale Gegensätze hineingespielt haben. […] Kurz: ich hätte es für anständig gehalten, wenn de S. seinem Buch eine Vorbemerkung vorausgeschickt hätte, in der zum Ausdruck gekommen wäre, dass er von seinen Leipziger Lehrern mehrfache Anregungen erhalten habe. Er empfand eben nie wie wir Deutsche empfinden, sondern fühlte sich uns gegenüber als – Franzmann.

By the way, I have recently been wondering whether your obituary of F. de Saussure will emphasize that this intelligent scholar received the most important impulse in Leipzig. I’ve always found it strange that, as far as I know, de Saussure has never openly admitted this dependency. My view is this: Osthoff’s somewhat coarse and uncouth manner repelled the delicate feelings of the young man. As a Frenchman (and that’s what we may call him) manners were of prime importance to him. […] His students in Paris never admitted this dependency, either, and I am almost convinced that national conflicts played a part in that. […] In short: I would have considered it a matter of decency if de Saussure had prefaced his book with an acknowledgement of the multiple impulses he received from his teachers in Leipzig. The truth is that he never felt like we Germans feel but, with us, always felt himself to be – a Frenchman.

We’ll never know whether Saussure’s experience in Leipzig was in any way connected to his “graphophobia” but it is intriguing to speculate about the difficulties of finding one’s academic voice if one is predominantly seen and treated as a member of a national group. (Writing in an additional language – as most international academics must today in English – was a non-issue for Saussure: theirs was a multilingual world and Saussure happily wrote in French (although there are also some German and Latin notes he wrote in the archive) and, read in German, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and probably a dozen other languages (one of his doctoral exam subjects was Gothic!)

What is Saussure’s lesson for today’s procrastinators? The likelihood of not publishing and still ending up one of the most preeminent scholars in your field is one in a million – so don’t jump to the conclusion that procrastinating will make you the next Saussure! The lesson is that procrastination is normal and you have to work hard to overcome it – just like the best!

Paola Villani (1990). Documenti saussuriani conservati a Lipsia e a Berlino Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure, 44, 3-33

Professor Bob Hodge

When I was a PhD student, I read two books in Discourse Analysis, which were to become fundamental to my understanding of the field, namely Social Semiotics and Language as Ideology, both co-authored by Bob Hodge and Gunther Kress. Bob Hodge is Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at the University of Western Sydney and despite the fact that we are both based in Sydney, we’d never met until a few days ago. Bob had contacted me a few weeks ago to say how much he enjoys Language on the Move and so we finally got to meet up for a lunch conversation.

Meeting someone whose work you have admired since being a PhD student is quite special and I prepared by catching up on Bob’s amazingly diverse work, which, in addition to discourse analysis, includes research in Australian multiculturalism, Chinese Studies and the application of Chaos Theory to areas such as Language Teaching and Management Studies, to name a few.

On his website, Bob describes himself as “a radical transdisciplinarian” and, as someone who also feels that linguistics is never quite enough to understand the research problems I am interested in, one of the first questions I asked Bob was about his trajectory into and out of Linguistics (and, currently, back in, as I’ve learnt).

His way into linguistics was relatively easy to explain, particularly to someone who shares the same obsession: a deep and abiding fascination with human language and the ways in which it shapes who we are while we use it to shape the world. We also discovered that, in both cases, this fascination had been fostered at a young age by a Classical Education.

Bob’s way out of linguistics surprisingly also resonated with me – I say ‘surprisingly’ because Bob’s trajectory out of linguistics has to do with the nature of the discipline and one could expect that our experiences would have been quite different seeing that we entered the discipline about a generation apart. However, at different times and in different countries, Bob and myself entered Linguistics precisely to be repelled by its disciplinarity.

Linguistics, as a discipline, has been fundamentally shaped by the so-called “linguistics wars,” which since the 1960s have pitted generativists against functionalists. A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers this view of the discipline:

Linguistics is populated by a deeply factionalized group of scholars who can’t agree on what they’re arguing about and who tend to dismiss their opponents as morons or frauds or both. Such divisions exist, to varying degrees, in all disciplines, but linguists seem uncommonly hostile. The word “brutal” comes up again and again, as do “spiteful,” “ridiculous,” and “childish.”

While “actually existing” Linguistics is not that bad Linguistics is obviously not a great home for free spirits. “It’s the problem that is central to my work,” Bob explained, “and you have to be capable to take on board whatever concepts, frameworks and bodies of knowledge are pertinent to solve the problem.”

“How do you do that in practice?” I asked. “How do you actually manage to stay on top of all the areas in which you’ve been engaged in?” This question must be understood against the background of Bob’s broad area of research expertise as described on his website:

Professor Bob Hodge has many active research interests: in analytic and conceptual toolkits for social and cultural research (critical linguistics, discourse analysis, social semiotics); in major theoretical traditions in humanities and social sciences (Marxism, psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, post-modernism, critical management studies, chaos theory); in radical transdisciplinarity (including science in the mix) and engaged research; and in specific areas of study (globalisation, cyberculture, Australian Studies, Indigenous Studies, Mexico and Latin America, Chinese language and culture, education, popular culture, literature (classical, early modern, contemporary). He has published in all these areas, and has supervised doctoral studies on all of them and more.

As someone who is constantly struggling with the fact that my interests and commitments are much more wide-ranging than I can squeeze into my time, maybe I partly expected a response that would be some sort of ‘how-to’ fix, an instruction on how to practice interdisciplinarity more efficiently. Bob’s response was much more basic and, hence, inspiring:

You have to understand that interdisciplinarity is always a promise. It’s a commitment you make to go where your research problem takes you. You don’t start with interdisciplinarity because you can never know enough. If that’s what you did, you’d never start your research because you never know enough.

I love the idea of interdisciplinarity as promise. It’s the pledge that undergirds all our inquiry.

Bob is currently writing a book that is partly a fresh intervention into the linguistics wars from an insider-outsider perspective. He will talk about this most recent development in his interdisciplinary project himself in the Applied Linguistics @MQ series on August 14. So, mark your diaries and, of course, we’ll also broadcast the seminar on our Ustream Channel to the global Language on the Move community.