Field work. It's okay.

This week I’m down at the Noongar Boodjar Language Centre in Bunbury. I’ve just finished my first interview, I’ve got a long list of interesting people to follow-up with, and every afternoon I get to go to the beach and play with my camera filters:

Field work. It’s okay.

As a feeble attempt to reciprocate the help that the Language Centre are giving me - and this barely scratches the surface as a ‘thank you’, holy crap, these women have taken it on themselves to be my PR in Bunbury and I’d be completely lost without them - I’m doing some research on the history of Noongar pronouns.

“So you're saying… you want me to go through this stack of old documents and find all the examples of pronouns and put them in a spreadsheet and look for patterns and create hypotheses and study the sources and do an analysis??”

I may have strayed into socio-linguistic-anthropology of late, but this right here is my original language heaven:

For confidentiality reasons I can’t really write about my project in terms of who I’m talking to and what they’re saying; but the other guests at the hostel, I have no ethical qualms about blogging their language views.

Sociolinguists: hostels are a microcosm of world Englishes. (Choose your own variables.) And the more people you share a dorm with, the more data you get, and the cheaper your research. It’s like the one time where funding correlates negatively with quality. You're welcome.

A case in point about language attitudes: I was chatting with this guy from Indonesia and across the table from us was this Australian bloke. These two guys were probably about the same age, same occupation, same current lifestyle; but the Indonesian guy grew up surrounded by five or six different languages, and could immediately articulate why it’s important to know your language(s) and why it’s entirely possible to learn another language, at least to get by. The Aussie guy, on the other hand - bless his determination to perpetuate all stereotypes  - the best he could manage was “in Australia people need to speak normal hey”. Like, literally that level of awareness, the monolingual mindset personified, the perfect indictment of a backwards political and education system.

Finally - I know what a pair of shoes dangling from a telephone pole means, but this is beyond my ken of semiotics. As I don't fancy waiting around under trees to find out, this will have to remain a mystery.

An (Incomplete) List Of Very or At Least Quite Important Things that Linguists Do

It’s my PhD birthday this week. Can you believe it? My baby PhD is one year old!

I don’t remember exactly why I didn’t start a PhD when I finished uni the first time around; I suspect it probably had something to do with needing to "get a real job". Unfortunately this also implies I had some sense that “doing a PhD” was Indulgent and “being a linguist” was Not Very Important In The Grand Scheme Of Things.

("Oh, do not repeat what I said then!")

As it turns out, studying languages all day is indulgent. But I am also now quite convinced that doing a Phd and becoming a linguist are Very Or At Least Quite Important In The Grand Scheme Of Things things.

Partly I am convinced of this because governments keep cutting funds for universities in general and for supporting Australian Indigenous languages (the focus of my phd) in particular, and if a government is cutting your funding you know you’re doing something worthwhile

But also, for your consideration, and in no particular order:

An (Incomplete) List Of Very or At Least Quite Important Things that Linguists Do

You might know that up to 90% of the 6000 languages spoken worldwide are predicted to become extinct (or dormant, depending on your point of view) by 2100. Linguists document and describe these languages, and work with communities to help maintain and revitalize them. Languages preserve thousands of years of human knowledge and are strongly linked to people's sense of culture and self; as if that wasn't enough, there’s also emerging research to link language revitalization with positive health outcomes in Indigenous communities.

Forensic linguists provide expert analysis of audio recordings used in the legal system. Did you know that it’s really easy to make errors about what someone is saying in a recording, and even be wrong about who is saying it? I’m not even clickbaiting you, GO WATCH THE VIDEO on Dr Helen Fraser's website. (I’ll wait.) Unfortunately, this analysis isn’t usually done by an independent expert but by detectives on the prosecution team. You can imagine how that might cause some difficulties for a fair and just legal system.

Forensic linguists also analyse things like orthography (spelling) and word choice to determine authorship. I don’t know enough about forensic linguistics one way or another to comment on the following example but I think this suggestion that the @RoguePOTUSStaff twitter account is actually a bogus account authored by Russians is an interesting read. The twitter user who came up with this analysis has (quite sensibly) made their account protected, so I hope you can still see their archived link. Part of the analysis asks 'how would a native English speaker abbreviate the word 'vacation' in a tweet?' For those of you who are playing along at home, the answer is vacay, obvs; only a non-native speaker would write 'vakay'.

Linguists promote language learning to decrease xenophobia, by teaching cultural competence and tolerance of ambiguity. (It just makes sense that learning another language makes you a more tolerant person - once you experience trying to learn and communicate in a second language, you suddenly have mad respect for anyone who can throw half a sentence together in your own.)

Remember that time we all got excited and judgey about the way some young women use ‘vocal fry’ when they speak? Yeah, it turns out that men use vocal fry as well and no one cares. Funny that. Linguists say: stop policing young women’s voices and actually listen to what they have to say, omg.

Linguists raise awareness of different communication styles in the legal system, as for example the work Diana Eades did to put Aboriginal English ‘on the map’ in Australia. This includes things like understanding different uses of silence (do you interpret silence as an admission of guilt, or as simply thinking about the question?), and uses of the word ‘yes’ (’yes’ doesn’t always mean agreement; it can also be used to mean that you’ve understood the question).

Sociolinguists study different varieties of English (e.g. African American Vernacular English, Aboriginal English) to show that, much like a ‘Standard English’ variety, these varieties are complex and quite logical. There’s nothing incorrect or wrong with the different ways that people speak English; there is something wrong with a jury discrediting a witness statement because of it

Finally - linguists tell you how to make the best protest signs. And you're gonna need them.

*

As in my PhD, so in the real world - this year is going to be hard, hard work. I don't have any words of wisdom or inspiration; all I want now is the audacity of hope.

I'm a linguist and I say NO to Roe 8

After deliberately ignoring the Roe 8 / Freight Link $1.9 billion dollar shitshow that's been playing south of the river for months (or is it years now?), using the excuse that I have finite energy to care about finite things and I cannot commit to caring about this - I finally went to a Roe 8 protest this morning, and now I want to tell everyone who cares (and anyone who doesn’t): this is a total disaster.

(At this point I’m humbly chastised by Angela People’s comment at the Women’s March last weekend: “If you’re a white woman thinking, “What’s next? Everything seems insurmountable” - welcome to the fucking party." )

If you are the one other person in Perth who hasn’t been following local politics, the Barnett government has decided it wants to extend Roe Highway through to Freo, ostensibly to speed up the route for freight trucks to get to the port. Roe 8 is that part of the extension that goes right through the Beeliar wetlands, an internationally-recognised biodiversity hotspot.

There are lots of reasons this “solution” should piss you off, and these are mine.

(If I’m wrong about any details, please let me know - I’ve been playing catch-up for the last 24 hours and I’m happy to be corrected on facts.)

One. Extending a four-lane highway is not going to speed up freight overall. Trucks are only going to get stuck in the Freo bottleneck - either on the bridges or at the port - so why spend all that money on infrastructure that doesn’t even solve a problem?

Roe 8 is a poorly-conceived, poorly-planned, and poorly-managed infrastructure disaster. I hate poorly-conceived, poorly-planned, poorly-managed infrastructure disasters. I feel personally affronted by them. It’s like, remember when you were a kid and you were taught how to make good decisions that are reasonably sound and educated and financially responsible? And then you grow up and discover the rules don’t apply to adults in government.

(Don’t even get me started on how personally affronted I feel by Donald Trump’s uneducated, irresponsible, incapable imitation of a publicly-elected official.)

And the thing is, I love infrastructure. I love traffic management. I’m a traffic management wonk. One of my secret dream jobs is to be a town planner, working in Main Roads WA, with the authority to make decisions. (I think about this a lot.) I’ve taken the same freeway exit heading south nearly every day for the last five years, and a couple of years ago they made two tiny changes to my route. The first was to make the outer-left lane, as you come off the freeway, a left-turn-only lane. The second was to install traffic lights at the Mounts Bay road roundabout for east-bound traffic. All it took was a bit of paint, a sign, and some lights, and the flow of morning peak hour traffic improved dramatically. It was the right solution for the problem. Paint, a sign, and lights. People expend more energy on New Years’ Eve party decorations for goodness’ sake. Traffic management win!

My point being, there are some really great ideas for alternative infrastructure that will strengthen the freight link. Have a look at www.rethinkthelink.com.au. Roe 8 is bad infrastructure.

The second reason of course is that Roe 8 goes straight through the Beeliar Wetlands - a significant site for the local Indigenous people - but if you’re Indigenous in this country, your voice and wishes aren’t counted and that's not okay.

At the protest this morning we listened to Rev. Sealin Garlett, a Noongar Elder, speak quietly and with great feeling about how this is another example of the government disrespecting and disregarding Aboriginal people - saying, you don’t matter, you’re nobody. This is especially poignant right after Australia Day, the ultimate celebration of a nation that says, some people don’t matter.

Hey, remember when you were a kid and you were taught to be kind and respectful to all people even if they looked different to you, and you learnt that even if you have enough money to buy a bulldozer that doesn't mean you can bulldoze other people's stuff?

Bulldozing and laying bitumen over sacred Aboriginal sites in the name of ‘progress’ is a pretty great metaphor for what’s been happening to Australian Aboriginal languages, by the way. First you bulldoze the language (a stolen generation or two should manage this), then you lay over the waste with English.

So, a question: How many Indigenous voices does it take to equal one white voice?

Actually in this instance, I think it’s okay to specify: one white voice with money.

Part of the issue the protest has had seems to be the way protesters have been portrayed by the media as a bunch of hippies with no jobs - and no one cares about unemployed hippies who want to save the trees. That’s just what hippies do.  So people have been showing up with signs saying “I’m a physiotherapist and I say no to Roe 8”; “I’m a bookkeeper and I say no to Roe 8”; “I’m a primary educator and I say no to Roe 8.” Here’s mine:

(Not that linguists are ever going to be mistaken for people with money, mind.)

Apparently if you are perceived not to have money, your voice doesn’t count either. This should worry you. It worries me.

I'd like to see the Government grow up, take responsibility, and have the courage to admit its mistakes and change its mind.

There’s going to be a silent protest at Forrest Place Mall on Sunday, and we’ve been told: no banners, no slogans, and wear “smart casual” clothes. We need to show that it’s not just Aboriginal people and ‘hippies’ who care about this stuff. So if you’re a Perthie who doesn’t necessarily want to chain themselves to a bulldozer but is disgusted by the poor management of WA’s funds and the shockingly disrespectful treatment of our city's Aboriginal heritage, please come along and show your support.

Books I Read That I Loved in 2016

(The title of this post is riffed from the Autostraddle column 'Things I Read That I Love' which is in turn riffed from the Emily Gould tumblr, 'Things I Ate That I Love', full credit.)

Big Magic - Elizabeth Gilbert 
Big Magic is about creativity and inspiration, starting with the idea that ideas themselves, like people and sand and trees and subatomic particles, are actual things that exist in the universe; and ideas are realised when they (because ideas have animacy in Big Magic) find a person to realise them. Does that sound woowoo? But the practical implications are solid. For example, if you want to be inspired, you need to show up - because ideas like to be taken seriously. You should also at least pretend to enjoy your work, because ideas aren’t interested in the miserable artist schtick.

“This is my question, and I think it's a fair one: Why would your creativity not love you? It came to you, didn't it? It drew itself near. It worked itself into you, asking for your attention and your devotion. It filled you with the desire to make and do interesting things. Creativity wanted a relationship with you. That must be for a reason, right? Do you honestly believe that creativity went through all the trouble of breaking into your consciousness only because it wanted to kill you?”

But fair warning, you also need to be prepared for massive failure - ask yourself not “what would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail?” but “what would I do even if I failed?” because ideas don’t owe you anything. They love you, but they love themselves more; they’re out to get realised one way or another and you’re just along for the ride. 'Inspiration doesn’t look at you and go, “Well that didn’t work.” Inspiration looks at you and said, "That was fun. Look at what we did!" '
 
Read this: if you want to read just one more book about creativity before you, you know, get creative.

  
Quiet - Susan Cain
The book that hailed the revolution. The quiet revolution. The quiet stay-at-home but-we-would-definitely-be-a-force-to-be-reckoned-with-if-we-ever-left-the-house revolution. Look, I don’t know if you’ve even noticed the revolution but it’s there. This book is about introversion and what it means to be introverted in what can feel like an increasingly extroverted world. It’s about what introverts look like as kids - highly reactive, actually, because everything is stimulating to introverts and then as we grow up we learn to withdraw from too much stimulation (it’s the calm kids you have to watch out for - they’re the ones who will be jumping out of planes as adults in an effort to feel something); how introverts can put our introversion on hold and be loud-mouth extroverts in service of things we care deeply about; and why introverts are buzzkills - because whenever we get excited about something, we get hypervigilant and we’re 'constitutionally programmed' to start looking for problems.

"Extroverts are better than introverts at handling information overload. Introverts' reflectiveness uses up a lot of cognitive capacity, according to Joseph Newman. On any given task, he says, if we have 100 percent cognitive capacity, an introvert may have only 75 percent on task and 25 percent off task, whereas an extrovert may have 90 percent on task." This is because most tasks are goal-directed. Extroverts appear to allocate most of their cognitive capacity to the goal at hand, while introverts use up capacity by monitoring how the task is going."

Read this: if you’re an introvert, because introverts like reading things about introversion, because we think we’re special and we find ourselves to be a fascinating object of study (and we usually are).

Deep Work - Cal Newport
Deep Work is to (intellectual) work what Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run is to running, which is about the highest praise I can give a non-fiction book. I am so excited about the ideas in this book and I hope you read it and get excited about them too. It will convince you that everything you thought you knew about work is wrong and that there is a better way to do it and that even you can excel at working. Even you can get shit done. Basically, 'deep work' is the intense stuff you do in a distraction-free state that pushes your cognitive abilities to their limits and actually achieves something of value - a kind of work that's becoming increasingly valuable, and increasingly rare. That's Part One of the book, and all of it’s commonsense, of course - the kind of commonsense that years of immersion in a culture of unhelpful work practices will have you believing is uncommon.

"There's also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you're capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It's safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle it into something better. 

 But if you're willing to sidestep these comforts and fears, and instead struggle to deploy your mind to its fullest capacity to create things that matter, then you'll discover, as others have before you, that depth generates a life rich with productivity and meaning."

 Part Two is tips and tricks for training yourself to do deep work better - such as learning to be bored (instead of covering over boredom with distractions), ritualising your work practices, and working fewer hours to decrease the amount of ‘shallow work’ you do around the edges of your deep work.

Read this: if you’re pretty sure the only difference between Leonardo da Vinci’s ability to get things done and yours is that Leonardo da Vinci wasn’t distracted by tumblr (although he would have had an amazing tumblr).



The Future - Al Gore
I have to admit that I’ve been reading this book all year and I still haven’t finished it - although on inspection, I’m closer to the end then I thought: it turns out the entire second half of the kindle edition is footnotes and references for the first half of the book, proof that Al Gore loves us and wants us to be happy.

“Eight years ago, when I was on the road, someone asked me: “What are the drivers of global change?” I listed several of the usual suspects and left it at that. Yet the next morning, on the long plane flight home, the question kept pulling me back, demanding that I answer it more precisely and accurately […] I started an outline on my computer and spent several hours listing headings and subheadings, then changing their rank order and relative magnitude, moving them from one category to another and filling in more and more details after reach rereading.”

The Future is everything you want from a book by Al Gore - brilliant and intelligent and methodical and dull. The gist of it is that we’ve reached a point in human history where we’re experiencing change - in global communications and connectivity, in the balance of power, in human population growth, in science, and in the climate - “not of degree but of kind”. For better or worse, this change is new change, and thank God we have people like Al Gore thinking about it. If only the rest of us could listen.

Read this: if your dad the famous ornithologist died in a freak bird-watching accident when you were a wee child and you don’t really remember him but sometimes looking over pages upon pages of notes squiggled neatly in his fieldwork books makes you feel closer to him.

The Babysitters' Club series - Ann M. Martin
I ain't even kidding.

The Babysitters’ Club books were my ‘secret vice’ as a kid, and like a worn-out blanket or the very first CD single you bought (Lo-Tel’s ‘Teenager of the Year’, mine was), the books are still comforting, you know? Even now. Especially now. Ann M Martin recently said in an interview with The New Yorker:

“I wouldn’t say that I had a feminist agenda, but I certainly had a feminist perspective. I think of myself as a feminist. I wanted to portray a very diverse group of characters, not only from different racial backgrounds, but from different kinds of family backgrounds, religions, and perspectives on life. I just really wanted a group of girls who were very different from one another and who became very close friends.”

It all seems so wonderfully naive; and look, if you never read the BSC series then I don’t think you’ll get it but I hope you have your own childhood book series that you return to once in a while. (If you did read the BSC, did you know that there are blogs dedicated to BSC recaps, What Claudia Wore, and illustrations of Claudia’s outfits? (Because let’s be honest, none of us had any interest in the actual babysitting.) Who can forget that outfit from Claudia and the Phantom Phonecalls with the purple pants, suspenders, white tights with clocks, and lobster earrings? You're welcome.)

Read this: if your favourite country that you’ve never been to just elected an incompetent fascist demagogue and you want to be reminded of the idyll of your childhood where hardwork and being kind to people was important.

Journal Articles I Read That I Loved in 2016

(I riffed this title from the Autostraddle column Things I Read That I Love, which is in turn riffed from the Emily Gould tumblr Things I Ate That I Love, full credit.)

In a few short days it will be Christmas. More importantly, in a few short weeks it will be my one year phd anniversary.

The first major piece of writing that I set myself to complete by the one year mark is the first draft of my literature review. I maintain that a “first draft” should be a wild and untethered thing, free from such bothersome constraints as Minimum Standards. My supervisor disagrees. We'll see. In any case, writing a literature review means trawling through everything I’ve read over the past 11 months, no small feat, to find what's relevant.

Obviously a lot of what I read ends up not being relevant to my thesis, but it would be sad to lose that reading to the depths of my Mendeley archives; so here, here I want to celebrate some of the best journal articles and Bits Of Academic Writing that I read in 2016 that won’t make it to the literature review - starting with this gem:

“It must be conceded that unusual sentences do indeed occur in natural language (who ever doubted it?) and as such may be preserved in corpora, like flies in amber.” (Hanks 2012: 405)

Would that I could write like Patrick Hanks. In ‘The Corpus Revolution in Lexicography’,  Hanks discusses the importance of using corpus data - that is, data sourced from collections of actual human language use - for dictionaries and linguistic theory. Left to our own devices, Hanks argues, our intuitions are pretty unreliable about what’s ‘normal’ in language.

For example, you might think ‘walking lamely’ is a good expression in English - and it is, in the sense that it’s grammatical and makes sense. But if you look at English language corpora, people very rarely if ever actually use the expression ‘walking lamely’, so you probably don’t want to include it as a phrase in your language learning textbook. To that end, Hanks writes

“[…] linguistics is the only scientific discipline in which it is considered acceptable first to invent data, then to explain what has been invented, then to claim that something of general validity has been ‘discovered’” (Hanks 2012: 402).

Ooh, burn.

(We do have to be careful, though - language corpora can throw up their own little weirdities - linguistic outliers, if you will. For example according to the AP newswire corpus, the phrase “remove [X] from [body part]” was statistically significant in 1998. This is not actually a frequently occurring phrase in English generally, but rather reflects the fact that in 1998, “President Reagan made several hospital visits to have a polyp or other growth removed from his nose, his leg, his arm, or some other body part, and all this was faithfully reported by the Press, before, during, and after the event” (Hanks 2012: 413).)

Moving on...

There was a time - I am so embarrassed to admit this - there was a time when I thought Joshua Fishman’s writing was convoluted and inaccessible. I was wrong. I pity myself. Yes, Fishman writes in long winding sentences, but they take you to the most beautiful vistas along the way, and he is the master of metaphor, coming from a place of deep learning and passion. (Technically this is from a book not a journal article, and of course Fishman will get heavily referenced in my lit review, but I had to share this. I had to.)

“Without an intimate and sheltered harbor at stage 6, an RLS [Reversing Language Shift] movement tends toward peripheralization from personal and emotional bonds and faces the danger of prematurely tilting at dragons (the schools, the media, the economy) rather than squarely addressing the immediate locus of the intergenerational transmission of [the language] (Fishman 1991: 95 - italics my own)

Speaking of metaphors... apparently there is a method for researching attitudes and beliefs that involves asking your participants for metaphors, the rationale being that metaphors are a window into the subconscious or something. Presented without commentary, here are some of my favourite metaphors from Ian McGrath’s “Teacher’s and Learners’ Images for Coursebooks”.

Language learning coursebooks are like:

• ladies’ handbags because we can take what we need from them and ladies tend to take handbags wherever they go
• a professional killer
• an ugly and terrible girlfriend whom you dislike but have to contact
• a bottle of chicken essence
• a fruit basket
• lions and tigers
• toothache
• nothing
• a beehive which has sweet honey and a lot of painful stings
• an angry barking dog that frightens me in a language I don’t understand
• a pair of shoes. It takes time to choose one that you feel comfortable to wear for a long time. A bad pair will kill you, give you blisters. A good one will give you confidence to run, to jump, to fly high
• my boyfriend, who I hate to see everyday, but I regret I can’t see it during exams

Bless.

And finally, regarding the social responsibility of linguists to contest the monolingual mindset in Australia and 'speak truth to power' - what is language?

“Language is central to every sphere of our lives and to all disciplines. [...] Through language we identify people as belonging or not belonging, we can represent or misrepresent people and manipulate the opinions of others, as is happening now in Australia. [...] Language is an instrument of action, through which we promise, pass judgment, complain, invite and exclude. [...] It is the deepest manifestation of culture, the key to revealing our cultural values and understanding those of others. Language, used in a particular way, can make us sick; used in another, can heal us. It can empower or disenfranchise others. So linguists have exciting opportunities for interdisciplinary research and to work in contexts personally meaningful to them.” (Clyne 2005: 2)

Nothing like Michael Clyne to write about language in a way that is both intelligent and moving, without straying into cheap sentimentality. (I have so much to learn from Michael Clyne.)

References:

Hanks, P. (2012). The corpus revolution in lexicography. International Journal of Lexicography, 25(4), 398–436. http://doi.org/10.1093/ijl/ecs026

Fishman, J. A. (1991). Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 

McGrath, I. (2006). Teachers’ and learners’ images for coursebooks. ELT Journal, 60(2), 171–180. http://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cci104 

Clyne, M. (2006). The social responsibility and impact of the linguist/applied linguist in Australia. 2005 Conference of the Australian Linguistic Society, 1–11. Retrieved from http://www.als.asn.au/proceedings/als2005/clyne-social.pdf

Day 9. One summer school, two conferences, and a three minute presentation later.

9 days ago I challenged myself to write a post per day while I attended the CoEDL Summer School, Applied Linguistics Association of Australia conference, and Australian Linguistic Society conference.

This post is technically meeting my self-imposed requirement to stop worrying and write something.

But one summer school, two conferences, and a three-minute presentation later, this is about all I can muster the energy to do right now:

I still want to finish writing about the rest of the ALS conference - I went to some really fabulous presentations - and I'll try and do that next week

But for now, it's day 9, and I've written my post. Melbourne, you've been amazing. Good night!

Day 8, ALS conference. Jane Simpson spoke about linguistic creativity in fantasy novels and it was the best thing ever.

I’m calling it. Jane Simpson’s plenary this afternoon - “Alternate world languages: Constrained creativity and folk linguistics” - is the best thing that has happened or will happen at the Australian Linguistics Society 2016 conference. Judging by the number of questions (in which a fair few conference-goers revealed their own ‘secret vice’) and the tweets about this plenary afterwards, I’m guessing I’m not alone in this. (Although I may be alone in why I loved it so much.)

Simpson took it upon herself to explore what linguistic creativity in 50 fantasy English-language novels tells us about folk linguistics, folk attitudes towards language, and folk knowledge of language ecologies. (And oh to be an established academic who gets to dabble in their own interests like that.)

I think one of the reasons I enjoyed this lecture so much is that I hate linguistic creativity in fantasy novels.

Hate is a strong word. I stand by it. And you know when you hate something so much you just want to wallow in the theory of it for an hour?

When it comes to linguistic creativity in novels, I’m a Prescriptivist. I want to see the author’s qualifications for why they think they can just Make Stuff Up, and if the author’s qualifications aren’t that they’re J.R.R. Tolkien then I’m not buying it.

Actually I need to clarify that because I’ve just remembered that I quite like JK Rowling’s names for things, like Slytherin, and Hufflepuff. (Did you know that ‘Hufflepuff’ in Welsh is Wfftipwff? (Pronounced ‘oof-ti-poof’)? Brilliant!) But then those are new names for new things and they're cute and I like them, sue me. For everything else, I agree with the critique of this fan here:

“Everyone has a seven syllable name and there are even - argh - random apostrophes. The made-up words are so complicated that it takes a separate appendix to instruct the reader how to say them: a clear victory of world-building over common sense. There’s a vast amount of info-dumping about magic and history and casual references to drinks-that-aren’t-quite-like-our-drink-because-it-has-a-made-up-name and food-that-isn’t-quite-like-our-food-because-it-has-a-made-up name and animals-that-oh-you-get-it.”

Like what’s the point? Yes, you’re very clever, well done, what an ‘exotic’ sounding name. It doesn’t make your story any more believable, go fix your plot holes.

Simpson talked about some really interesting processes by which authors create new words but as a Prescriptivist I’m going to ignore those processes and say that most fantasy names sound to me like they were created with a Random Name Generator.

This is problematic because Random Name Generators seem to be built on the phonotactics of Tolkien’s Elvish languages, which are essentially based on Finnish and Old Norse and Old English and stuff, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that these names are kinda racist, right? Like an Elvish Name Generator will give you names like Haerelwen and Flalhallalor, and an Orc Name Generator will give you names like Ghoragdush and Kzhtuqth. But good people can have pharyngeals in their names too! (I mean I love Tolkien but come on.)

(I love this excerpt on like seven different levels.)

Also can we talk about why when an English-language author wants to portray a character as being ‘simple’ or ‘rustic’, they make them sound like they’re from Yorkshire?

Linguistic creativity in English-language fantasy novels tells us a lot about folk knowledge of how language works; it also tells us a lot about how English-speakers consciously or subconsciously associate different social groups and characteristics with different linguistic patterns, which is kind of huge.

(But mostly I just hate linguistic-creativity in fantasy-novels because I’m curmudgeonly.)

It was a great lecture.