Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Lauren Gawne. And I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today we're getting enthusiastic about Lauren's new book about gesture, including why we gesture and how linguists do research on it. But first, I have a little story to tell. Okay. So a little while ago, I was in a very cool cafe, restaurant, pub-type place.

Okay. And I went to the bathroom. Okay. The bathroom had a bunch of fun, like, stickers and art and graffiti on the walls. Uh-huh. And there were some stickers for podcasts. And I was like, oh, that's so cool. I should add a Linkthesism sticker. Like, maybe people who go to this cool bar would like our cool podcast. But then I realized we don't actually have a sticker or version of our logo that actually says that we're a podcast.

Oh, good point. Our logo just says Lingthusiasm, which is great if you are like, ooh, linguistics plus enthusiasm. That sounds like it might be neat, but not if you want to stick it somewhere that indicates here's what you might want to get into this for. Sure. It would be nice if it did say something like, we're a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. We have a great tagline. It just should actually go on a sticker, but like,

With the way our logo is currently formatted, there's not an obvious spot to put that. Yeah, I also realized we maybe have a bit of a design issue when a family member put one of the show stickers up and very sensibly had the wordling enthusiasm along the bottom.

Oh, yeah. I've seen this happen to people too. I give them stickers, and if they haven't listened to the show before, they will very naturally put the text reading from left to right like text normally reads in English rather than up the side like we did maybe too cleverly. Yeah, I think we were too clever for our own good, especially if people are only

passingly familiar with the show and or the logo. LESLIE KENDRICK So this inspired us. We've given out a lot of logo stickers at conferences. People like them. What if we came up with a slight variation on the existing design that was a little bit more clear about some of these factors? LESLIE KENDRICK Our artist Lucy has been making all of these really nice doodle designs that are on our website and social media, but they aren't reflected in the logo at all. LESLIE KENDRICK So we asked Lucy if she could draw us some fun little objects that

like we have elsewhere on the website, but in the shape of the classic Lingthusiasm squiggle slash glottal stop slash question mark slash ear logo. She could fill them in with some references from the past hundred episodes and other linguistics objects of assorted kinds.

I am biased, but I love the little Kiki and the little Boo-Boo in there. I thought you were going to comment on all the hand shapes. I also love those. I personally love the leaping rabbit because rabbits have come up several times on The Enthusiasm with Gavaguy and the Bilbo of Rabbit Story. I'm upset that you didn't say you love the teeny tiny silhouettes of us having a little chat together. Those are also very charming.

We'll have a link in the show notes to where you can see it and see what tiny objects you recognise from past episodes. Plus, if you want to have the sticker in your own hands to put on your own water bottle or your laptop or maybe inside the bathrooms of your favourite spot that's cool with having stickers in bathrooms –

or assorted other locations. I don't know. Telephone poles. We're also going to send a copy of this sticker with this new design on it to everyone who's a patron at the Lingthusiast level or higher on our Patreon as of July 1st, 2025.

Our regular logo has been going strong for almost nine years that we've been making Lingthusiasm, and we're excited to see this refreshed version of the logo in sticker form. Speaking of running for a long time, when we started the Patreon, we framed it as like, hey, if you buy us coffee, we can get bonus episodes, we can keep making the show.

And, like, I haven't been able to get a coffee for five bucks in kind of a while now. Yes, and we've also been getting busier behind the scenes, me keeping up with my day job as a linguistics prof. And with me trying to get back into doing some more writing again. This is something I can get behind. Nothing to announce yet, but that's because I haven't had time to work on things this much.

So we need to hire more help to keep the podcast running. And this means we need to adjust the price of our main bonus episodes tier that we haven't changed since we launched the Patreon in 2017. Patrons have told us before that if we're ever thinking of running ads, that we should just tell you first and give you the chance to make that not necessary. So here we are, I guess.

This episode is going up in April and starting on June 15th, so that's about two months away, we're going to be raising prices for the main bonus episodes tier by $2 US or the round number equivalent in other currencies. However, if you want to lock in the original price for a whole year, you can change your settings to become a yearly member before June 15th, 2025, and that will keep you at the original price for a year from then. Or if you're like, well,

I'm financially comfortable, and I wish these guys had more money to work with sooner. You can also upgrade your membership to a higher tier, and we would super appreciate that, especially now. Our most recent bonus episode, speaking of bonus episodes, was all about linguistic celebrities. We discussed famous other lives of academic linguists and the linguistics cred of some people who are more famous for their sports, music, or political careers than

but secretly did a linguistics degree or something at some point. We also talk about how to fan out academically with your favourite linguistics researchers should you happen to find yourself at a conference or event with them. For this and many other bonus episodes, go to patreon.com slash lingthusiasm.

When I was writing Because Internet, which is a book that I wrote about internet language, and I was working on this chapter about emoji, and you read my draft chapter, and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a lot of gesture research that's directly relevant to your emoji research. And I was like, cool, Lauren, great.

Can you point me to some sort of comprehensive yet relatively short, wide-ranging, reasonably easy to read but still has enough technical detail introduction to all of the gesture literature, please? Because I would love to read it and integrate it into my book. And I could not recommend a single thing to you. There are some

broad overviews, but they tend to be written about specific people's research. We don't even have a textbook in gesture studies yet that I could send you away. I was scratching my head. There was this book that a very respected gesture researcher, Adam Kendon, had written in 2004, which is

is sort of mostly related to his research agenda, but it's quite good. But that's like 20 years ago now. And so I just think that quite a lot of gesture research has happened since 2004. LESLIE KENDRICK Indeed. I think I ended up cobbling together lecture notes and a couple of key articles and a lot of chatting to you about gesture, which like

I love to do, but I can't do that for everyone who I want to make excited about gesture studies. Right. And I can't recommend that everybody take hours and hours of your time to get you to tell them personally about gesture research, even though we have talked about gesture several times on this podcast. But like,

What else is there? As far as I'm concerned, you wrote this gesture book for me. Yes. Between those initial conversations and now, only six years later, I'm very happy to be able to say that Gesture, A Slim Guide has been published with Oxford University Press. This is an Oxford University Press book, which means it's more academic than Because Internet, which was published with

Riverhead out of Penguin, which is a trade publisher. But it's somewhere on the margins between relatively technical but less technical than a full academic monograph and somewhat more accessible, especially if you don't have any background in gesture studies but you are some other kind of academic or deep-cut nerd. It's somewhere in between. Yeah, the Slim Guide format is so lovely. It's just 50,000 words of full-paced,

introduction to as much of the field as I could cram into those chapters. LESLIE KENDRICK So especially if people are sort of researchers in other areas or they're willing to approach a book, that's a bit more on the technical side. This is sort of the survey introduction to gesture that I wish I'd had. Like, I've read this and I was like, oh, I've learned so much that I wish I'd had what I was reading because internet, but I can have in the future for any time I want to refer to stuff about gesture. LESLIE KENDRICK And of course, because I did manage to cram some jokes in there too. LESLIE KENDRICK Okay. LESLIE KENDRICK

It's not entirely dry. Can we talk about the cover? Lauren, did you put yourself on the cover? You have correctly identified that. It looks a bit like you, but not entirely like you, like you maybe 10 years ago? I commissioned resident artist of Lingthusiasm, Lucy Maddox, to do a black line sketch of a person performing dance

an array of gestures all at once. It's a very energetic drawing. Because at first, I didn't recognize that this was you per se, but then I saw a clip from a video that you did in 2014 when you were doing some very early gesture research that you've done. And I was like, wait, is that Lauren from the video who has much longer hair and

you know, looked younger is that who's on the cover. She did look younger because it's not just from 2014. The publication of the research that we used the video as stimulus was from 2014. That was my honors project, which I did in 2007. So it is, in fact, a drawing of

baby undergraduate one. And it was really nice. This was an honours project that I did with Barbara O'Kelly as my honours supervisor, someone who I still miss a lot and who was really formative in shaping my research agenda at the time. So it's a nice kind of nod back to my introduction to gesture. I talk about Barb and my relationship both to her and gesture studies a little bit in this book as well. So it's just a nice kind of

Little in-joke reference for me. We will definitely link to the book. You should go and click on it and look at the cover, even if you're like, this sounds too technical to me, if you want to see the line drawing inspired by baby Lauren. But let's talk about what's in the book. One of the things that I thought was particularly interesting was the kind of

When we're looking at gesture studies and we're trying to see the communicative function of gesture, one way to do that is to change the situation and see which kinds of gestures people do differently.

say, over the phone versus in person. What kinds of studies have looked at this? There are a whole range of studies. We have lots of different tweaks to the interactional context in terms of whether you are talking to someone face-to-face. You're talking to someone who's in the room, but they can't see you. I like that there's a whole bunch of work where people have told stories

to dictaphones and they've been told to tell stories to a dictaphone where someone will listen later and tell stories to a dictaphone where no one's going to listen. It's just for practice. And even those kind of changes, the less likely someone is to think that a person is listening to them or listening to them in real time, you tend to get smaller gestures and less informative gestures. Like the shape of the gesture becomes less clear. The amount of information it's conveying becomes less clear.

But people still gesture even if no one's ever going to see them. Oh, absolutely. There's still something that is just easier for us.

to keep gesturing alongside speaking. L. So some part of gesture has to do with my cognition as the speaker and some part of the gesture has to do with my attempt to communicate with you, which is what's changed by, okay, do I think you can see me? Can anybody see me? Can anybody see me ever? So some part is communicative and some part is cognitive, I guess. G. Yeah, some part still seems to be an unavoidable thing. And I

I mean, we haven't put people from all walks

languages or cultures into these kind of experimental conditions. It has happened almost exclusively. There are a lot of languages and cultures, yes. And this kind of gesture research has happened predominantly with English speakers and a few other European languages. But it is worth remembering that we haven't come across a culture yet where there is no gesture that accompanies speech. It is something that appears to be an unavoidable

part of the package of the way humans communicate and that we are trying to be helpful to the people we're speaking to if they can see us by giving them more gestural information. Even to the point where, whether our audience is there or not, researchers have done a series of experiments where they've tried to stop people gesturing altogether. I love these because the experimental paradigms are so wacky.

They are fascinating. Why do these experimentations have to be so weird? Can't we just tell people don't gesture? Oh, you can't just tell people not to gesture because people become very quickly very sensitive to their gestures as soon as you start pointing out gesture.

Oh, okay. Because I definitely started noticing people's gestures a lot when I was talking with you about them and writing about them for Because Internet and paying attention to this gesture research. But does this also explain why a lot of researchers' gesture labs aren't called the lab for the study of gesture? Because then if you have people come in to do a study, they're like, oh, people are studying my gestures. I guess I better gesture differently. Yeah, there's nothing that will ruin your experience.

experimental data collection quicker than telling people you're recording them because you want to see their gestures. A lot of these labs are known as the social interaction lab or the narrative lab or

The Culture Lab. Okay, okay. This explains why I was like, it doesn't sound like there's actually very much gesture research, but they're all doing gesture. Okay, okay. I get it. I get it now. Yeah, we're hiding it. So if you can't tell people like, hey, we're just studying your gestures or like, please don't gesture. We want to see what you do.

you end up having to do deception studies where you have to prevent people from gesturing for some other reason, right? Yes. A lot of them do create this deception for why they are either physically restraining people or requesting them to not move their hands. Some studies have put false electrode plates in the arms of a chair and told people to just rest their hands on the electrode so they could measure heart rate or something like that.

You have cables coming out of the chair leading outside the door but actually not attached to anything. They think they're in this electrode chair, but they're actually just a decoy because they want to keep their hands still. My other favorite is the table-mounted buttons that people were told turned on the microphone for them to talk into. L.

Oh, so they had to keep their hands pressing the buttons. Mm-hmm. And they couldn't gesture. Yeah. Possibly the most extreme is, and to quote the research, a colored garden relaxed chair. What is a colored garden relaxed chair? I don't know. This is from the 80s when they didn't publish many photographs of research. Oh, no. So this is some sort of presumed beach chair, deck chair type of situation? I guess so. Some kind of like...

lounge chair that you put in your garden for the nice weather. And they had restraints for the head, arms, legs, and feet. L. So it was the kind of chair that has a foot rest so that they could also have restraints for the feet. Oh my god. The mental image here. G. And participants were told this was for a study of ergonomics. L. I'm so ergonomically comfortable right now. G. There are two things that happen when you

create this kind of restraint on gesturing. One that I find quite interesting is that people increase gestures where they can. If you stop people from using their hands, you'll see them use their feet more. If you restrain their feet as well, that one with the garden relax chair that was extremely people-tied-up, people would use their fingers more. Gesture just

Like, do they just move their noses around? You probably get more head gestures depending on how well-restrained the head is. Oh, no! So now you've got to tell them, like, we're doing eye tracking now, like, we're going to strap your head in. Okay. Yeah. I do love there is at least one paper that was just like, uh, we just asked people to, like, fold their hands and place them on the table and, like, gained much the same effect. Yeah.

So they didn't need to do the colored garden relax chair with restraints for arms, legs, hands, and feet. They could have just asked them to fold their hands nicely on the table or sit on their hands or something. Potentially. What we find is that across this survey of different studies, they all found to some extent that the person's speech in the absence of gesture became less fluent. But

Exactly what became less fluent was different across all the studies. So for some of them, it's that people's sentences got a bit shorter or were less densely informational. For some of them, people would trip up on content words. It really did seem to vary. So would people um and ah more? People would um and ah.

Again, they were measuring all kinds of different – if it's um and ah, if it's pauses, if it's re-speaking. I used this in Inverse when I was recording the audiobook of Because Internet because I had just come across this gesture research. I was like, so if I make very rhythmic gestures silently while I'm recording, then –

I could have fewer like pauses and disfluencies that they would have to edit out later. And I felt like it worked because I only started doing it like an hour in. Also, if you imagined that you were speaking to a more present audience by doing that, that might have helped you also just feel more engaged. I, I,

I did have a present audience. I had two techs and a director on the mic with me. Oh, lovely. So that someone could hear me the whole time because they were paying attention to places where I accidentally like tripped over a word or misspoke a word or repeated a word twice. And they would tell me like, go back and redo that version so they could edit it into this seamless thing. Yeah. But so people were listening to me and also sort of

engaged generally in listening. For a long time, the theory has been that your gestures are helping you as the speaker cognitively with lexical retrieval. It's helping you pull words out of your mental vocabulary. That's why

helps and preventing gestures creates these disfluencies. But there's been some really nice research in an extended series of experiments from Yagmur Kisa where Kisa

Kisa looked at whether people were present or not and what kind of restraints on gesture created disfluencies and found that what actually appears to be happening is rather than being for the speaker to pull out words, speakers do these kind of halting of gestures as a way to flag

to the listener, look, it's just a disfluency, but I'm getting there. I'll figure something out. I will get the word eventually. L – Don't worry about it. It's not that the gestures are causing the speaker to be more or less able to access a word. It's that the gestures are a signal. They're slightly delayed. They're a signal that I know I'm looking for the word, but bear with me.

Yeah, and people get really caught up in what bits of gesture are for the listener and what bits of gesture are for the speaker and what their functions are. After doing all of this research, I actually feel more chill about not – it's interesting and it's important work, and I'm glad there are people unpacking these things. But also, at the end of the day –

As a listener, I'm also a speaker. And the more useful information I can get from someone, if they're gesturing while they speak, the more useful that is to me when I become the speaker myself. Right. So it's like you don't have one person always being the speaker, one person always being the listener because you're going back and forth. And I do feel like people use gestures to manage turns in conversation as well.

A lot. Yeah. And I feel like – so sometimes I'm wearing a face mask or something. I feel like I have a harder time managing turns in conversation and initiating conversations with people when that part of my face is covered. And then you're probably drawing on a whole bunch of gestural resources instead. Right. I'm using more of my eyebrows instead of my lips to indicate that I want to be engaged in the conversation. I'm so happy with my eyebrow game and how far it's come with all of the –

public face respiratory masking that I've been doing over the last five years. That is my one positive takeaway from the good and necessary task of masking in public is that my rapport signaling with eyebrows is just vastly better than it was as a typical Westerner before this. There are a lot of cultures where eyebrows are very useful gestures. I was not raised in one. And

And so I'm finding my own way. Yeah, maybe down the line, like more interesting stylization in Western comics with eyebrows that has already been popular in manga and anime to specify a lot of things with the eyes. Who knows? Yes, please. We've been talking a lot about speakers and listeners, but gestures are also present in sign languages. For sure. And I had a real...

time in the book setting out, look, I'm going to say speakers. When I say speakers, I mean speakers of all languages regardless of modality because whether you're using a spoken language or a sign language, it was rhetorically easier to lump everyone into being speakers in terms of the interactional turn-taking. LESLIE KENDRICK And in the case of a spoken language, gesture is obviously on a sort of

easily distinguishable level because one of them involves acoustic production of sound. Well, even in that case, snapping your fingers or something can produce sound. L – Or look at you, straight to the edge cases. G – Yeah, right to the edge cases. But with signed languages, they share the use of the body. There's a modality in common, but they're doing it in different ways. L – For sure. That's because signed languages have properties that they share with

spoken languages, all languages have things like structure and grammar. That means that a word or a sign and a sentence can have some kind of shared meaning regardless of the context. If I said, like, the fluffy cat, that would be

a meaningful little referent. L. That's right out of the blue. We weren't previously talking about cats at all. There it is. But if you're gesturing to describe how you might pet the fluffy cat, then that's contextual and could refer to how you might pet the fluffy dog instead or do some other sort of gesture that might mean that in that context. That's where gesture is different from language because it's contextual. L. It's

It's contextual and because it doesn't have that structure and that grammar. That is actually an advantage because it means that the linguistic language channel is doing something very different to the gesture channel and that they can work in this integrated way to create this more sophisticated thing. What does that look like when the language in question is a signed language? I have

I have an anecdote in the book from when I was learning Auslan about what this looks like to the naive spoken modality native language person coming into a signed context, which was that we were watching

a video that was a series of events that were happening and people were signing to each other but also telling a story. We had to report back on the new vocabulary for our sign vocabulary that we had noticed in the video. We knocked over a whole heap of the really obvious ones. Then as we were getting down into the ones that were a bit more

difficult to figure out. Someone was like, oh, the sign for opening a can of soft drink, which I'm standing here with my one hand kind of holding a vessel and the other hand pulling a ring tab off the top of a can of pop or soft drink. Right. Yeah, that's how I would do it as well. Is this a sign?

Yeah, the Auslan teacher was just like, oh, that's a gesture. In a way that was just like, isn't it obvious to you? Why would you tell me that this is a sign? Right. And I had to go away and think about that. And it's just like, well, this is not something that is in an Auslan dictionary. It's not something that people recognize as a codified sign. It is not the sign for

a can of soft drink. Right. And Auslan does not have a specific verb for to open a can of soft drink. Right. It's just that in the story, and the can of soft drink wasn't even that important. It was just there to illustrate that the dude was like taking a moment to himself. And it was really interesting, always with my gesture studies hat on, to be like, oh, from the outside, it was indistinguishable to me

as an outsider to this language what was a gesture and what was a sign, but people inside the language can have very strong ideas. Signed languages obviously have a lot more to play with on the margins of what is a sign and what is a gesture, but there are very much different components there even though it's all happening in the same modality.

And it's related to this level of grammaticality, whereas the sign for a can of pop, a can of soda, soft drink would be a sign that would be in a dictionary. I've learned a sign for that in ASL as well, which could be different from what's

in Auslan, but the gesture that you make to indicate that you're opening a can of something could be the same or different depending on how the speaker is approaching the gesture, but not on a grammatical level that differs systematically across these groups. Yeah. Signed languages obviously exploit the fact that they are in this visual modality and can do things that are very iconic. The sign for a can of beverage

is most likely to look like, to have some physical similarity in a way that spoken languages are really impoverished in this regard. I mean, we have a lot of onomatopoeia. I think we should take more credit for that. But the sign for a can of pop or soda, to me, in ASL, it looks quite similar to the sign for COVID.

Okay. Because there's a sort of crown thing around the top. And obviously, those have very different meanings. So you don't want to get them confused. Like they have this sort of lexical arbitrariness. Even if you think, oh, there's something of resemblance, there's also like, well, there's another sign that looks similar to it that means something completely different. How is the ASL learning going?

Well, so I was very fascinated by the bit in your book where you talked about how there was a study of gestures produced by hearing learners of sign languages after about a year, which is about where I am, and how their gestures in their spoken languages had changed a bit. Oh, is this happening for you?

Yeah. So there's a couple of different domains where I've noticed this happening. One is that – so growing up, I always, up until the last year or so, signed the number – gestured the number three. If you're going into a restaurant and you're asking for a table for three people with the index, middle, and ring finger up and the sort of thumb and pinky stuck together because that's what people generally do in North America. I think in places

places in Europe, it may be more common to do it with the thumb out. L – It is indeed more common to do it that way. G – I've seen people do that, but I'd always done it the way most people did it with the first three fingers and the thumb and pinky folded in. But then in ASL, the way to do the number three is with

with the thumb and first two fingers. Then the sign that I've been doing for number three, which also looks sort of like a W, is the W letter or the number six. You really can't mix up your threes and sixes. It's not the case that you can – in a gestural context, you can lift sort of any three fingers to indicate three or at least any

three continuous fingers to indicate number three. I've also seen people do three as an okay hand. You can just do any three fingers. Well, I mean – Yeah, you might go, well, that's weird, but I know how many cookies they want. Yeah, it's weird, but I could go into a restaurant and do that, and they'd be like, yeah, table for three. Okay. It'd be weird, I guess, to do the rock-on or I love you gesture where it's your thumb and your first finger and your pinky. I don't think that would convey I want three table seats at this restaurant.

But there are several different acceptable forms of three as a gesture, whereas in sign, there is one specific thing because we're using the other forms to mean something else. And so I have noticed that I'm switching the way I do the number three in English to match the way I was doing it.

I'm doing it in ASL because occasionally I slip up in ASL and do it with the gesture that I had previously learned. People are like, what do you mean? Six? I'm like, oh, okay, okay, okay. So it's easier to just switch that systematically across the board than it is to try to remember to do one thing in one context and one thing in another context because English speakers don't care. And the other thing that I've noticed is more subtle, which is that I seem to be better at

using the sort of conceptual space in front of me and setting people up to talk about their relationships in conceptual space the way that I'm being taught to do in ASL classes.

Yeah, because space becomes very grammatical in a lot of signed language grammar in terms of referring to a particular person or a place. Right. I attended a deaf event where they had one signer on stage signing in ASL, and then they had a second signer on stage interpreting for them into LSQ, which is Langues des Signes Québécois, the Quebec Sign Language. But because these two signers

needed to be facing out to the audience so that we could see them – it was a room of maybe 30 people – they couldn't be looking at each other. Importantly, the LSQ signer couldn't be looking at the ASL signer to see what the signs actually were because she had to be looking at the audience. You're like, well, how are you supposed to interpret if you don't know what the signs are that the person's doing? What they did is they had another signer in the audience who was standing up and mirroring the ASL signer so that the LSQ signer could interpret that. I

I was describing this event to some hearing friends the next week, and I was describing where all the signers were in relation to each other and how they could see each other using handshapes, probably influenced by the fact that it was a deaf event that I was talking about, but using the person classifiers to discuss where people were standing, which is just something that I wouldn't have had the skills to set people up in space in such a consistent way before.

That's a thing that a lot of the research notes is that often what you're doing is stuff you've learnt from the signed modality that is maybe not being picked up by the other spoken language people but that you now find useful. Yeah, yeah. I was doing a thing that was grammaticalized in a way that it was not grammaticalized if I would be trying to convey this before. Similarly, for people who

live their daily life in places where there are multiple languages across signed and spoken modalities, you get this situation where there are a lot of

lexical signs and there's a lot of the grammar and it all comes together in this like really multilingual multimodal rich way of communicating because everyone can understand what's happening in both the spoken channel and the sign channel and there's some really wonderful work unpacking these really complex and fascinating things in narratives especially in central australia where for a lot of the language communities there is both the spoken languages and

And something that's called alternate sign, which is a sign language that is used in a context where there are also mostly people who speak as well.

Oh, interesting. What sort of context is that? From what we can tell from some limited records, these alternate sign languages probably existed in some form or another across large areas of Australia. We still only really find them actively used in central parts of Australia now and a little bit up north. But they are used a lot as a way of getting around taboos. There are some times where if you're in mourning, some people

are required to not talk for cultural taboos during the mourning period. Oh, interesting. Okay. But also for practical reasons like hunting. Right. But also just in traditional storytelling and song and culture, these are really cultures that are living in a richly multimodal way all the time. That's really interesting. So because of this, there's a lot more sign that's ubiquitous, and so there's a lot more multimodality at a societal level? Yeah. Cool.

Very cool. I do have a question for you that I've been meaning to ask for a while, which is you are learning ASL. Yes. But you are in Canada. Yes. ASL stands for American Sign Language, and yet it is also the

main sign language of Canada with a heavy asterisk because there's also other things going on. Right. So there is definitely a Canadian sort of accent in ASL. My instructors, who have all been deaf and Canadian, but our textbook is American. And so they've told me places where the sign that's in the textbook is not what they would use themselves. Right. So you get a bit of both. The

Part of my motivation for learning ASL, a large part of the motivation, is so I can go to linguistics conferences and interact with deaf linguists, like, know what's going on. And so...

I could have chosen to learn LSQ, which is Quebec Sign Language, but that wouldn't have let me go to very many linguistics conferences. So I was like, I'm going to prioritize ASL. And also, if I was learning LSQ, I would have had to do that through the medium of French. Whereas with ASL, I get to do fingerspelling in English, which is much easier on me. So that said, there's also –

So there's specifically a Montreal variety of ASL because Montreal has had a long tradition of schools for the deaf here. And LSQ, so Langues des Signes Québécoises, is descended from ASL because the first –

Mostly religious nuns and priests who came to teach in schools for the deaf here first taught ASL, but it has subsequently been more influenced by French and French Sign Language and also for sort of nationalistic reasons is called ASL.

LSQ. But ASL itself is descended from French Sign Language, so there's some sort of French influence going that far back as well. L: Yeah, that's what I thought. But the biggest difference is if your family is Anglo, you learn ASL. If your family is Franco, you learn LSQ. Yeah, right. That's the Canadian sociolinguistic context.

That's the Canadian sociolinguistic context. There also used to be a maritime sign language that was spoken in eastern Canada, especially in Halifax, which had a school for the deaf, which was descended from British sign language from back when Canada was a

British colony and wasn't related to ASL in particular, but Montreal ASL has been influenced more by maritime sign language because there were some students sent over from that school back in the day. There's this interesting socio-situation, and I think it's partially for ongoing linguistic contact reasons that people still call them both American Sign Language. I've heard one or two people argue that maybe it should be called Canadian Sign Language, but yeah, that's what we got. L –

Yeah, I find it really interesting because Auslan in Australia is part of the larger language family that BSL, British Sign Language, is part of. But it's called the Bansal family because it's British Sign Language, Auslan, New Zealand Sign Language, and South African Sign. And, like, South Africa isn't in the Commonwealth. Again, this is just those, like, historical artifacts of who learned to teach at deaf schools where. But, like,

South Africa's not part of the Commonwealth, but Canada is. But South Africa has the Banzal family and Canada has ASL. I find it very historically fascinating. My mnemonic, which I just made up right now, is I think of it as if your national version of English has an R sound in words like car or far, then...

G-E-S-T-U-R. Then you have this sort of ASL dialect continuum. If you don't have an R in those words, then you're in the Banzel family. G-E-S-T-U-R. They're going to be really upset by this analogy. It doesn't work. Don't think about it too hard. But it might be related to historical patterns of colonial settlement because that R persists in those areas because they were settled longer ago. L – I feel like people from Boston and –

the north of England are not going to be impressed with this new money. Yeah, also just makes complete sense for Canadians and Americans to share a sign language of contact. L – To be able to talk to each other, it's kind of nice. There's still apparently a few old folks left who speak maritime sign language, but they moved the School for the Deaf from Halifax to Amherst and then changed which language they taught at it, which was a whole thing. G – Right.

Uh-huh.

because it feels like the right accent for me to have. The nice thing about you learning ASL is it means we now have one video interview of Lingthusiasm in Auslan with Gab Hodge and one in ASL with Lena Ho. So that's nice symmetry.

Yeah. And it was actually seeing you signing with Gab during that interview when we were sort of setting up the logistics of it that I was like, ah, I wasn't able to do this when I interviewed Lina. And like, it would have been great. And if we do another interview like this at some point, it would be better to be able to do that logistics aspect with a bit of sign myself. And we would still have to have an interpreter for an interview because obviously we can't assume that everybody listening to Lingthusiasm knows a sign language. But that's part of my motivation for trying to learn it.

Always happy to FOMO people into learning more languages.

But we were talking about your gesture book. Is there anything else that you want to share about it? I am happy to report that the emoji work from Because Internet did make a cameo in Gesture, A Slim Guide, which I think is just a really nice full circle moment. So you have this cameo in Because Internet where I'm trying to think of the role of emoji in communication. And then I had Lauren Gaughan, podcast co-host and gesture researcher, read a draft of this chapter and she gave me all these suggestions about gesture. And

Because of that, we wrote an academic paper about emoji as gesture, which came out very shortly before Because Internet, enough time for us to cite it in that book. And then now we're coming full circle with that research also having a tiny cameo in Gesture Slim Guide. L – Yeah, I have a short section on the future of gesture and that maybe these playful ways of using language online are creating new spaces for how we think about and use gesture.

Also, I think you're selling yourself short because you were also responsible for getting a couple common and versatile gestures that we do encoded into the emoji system by writing proposals for Unicode to people.

those as gestures. Oh, yes. I used my gesture studies knowledge for good. So the palm up hand, so you can offer people things, and the palm down hand, which I like to combine with like palm down hand, something that you want to put in a bin, and then it's just like throw it in the bin. I was recently in a conversation where there was a

palm up, palm down, palm up, palm down emoji sequence used to represent that sort of like so-so, like meh gesture. Nice. And I was like, I need to screen cap this and send it to Lauren because she's going to be so delighted at her gestures. Delightful. And also the peeking eye, face peeking eye from Hyne's gesture. I was involved in that proposal as well, but that was this gesture that we identified as being not in the emoji set that could be added. Yeah.

Yes, and I'm so delighted that there is also a head nod and a head shake proposal. And I had to do a lot of work with the different emoji designers to emphasize you can't have a sad face with a head shake because that's just one culture that has the head shake as a no negative. And there are some cultures where the no and the negative is the vertical one. So they had to come up with this like,

sufficiently ambiguous facial expression. And also draw the little movement lines on there to indicate that it's going side to side or up and down. Yeah. So we also have that duo as well now. That's very exciting. Might not be on all devices yet, but should be coming. Yeah.

And so much more that I got to cram into gesture, a slim guide, including gesture and politeness, the origins of language, as well as domestic and wild animals and how they use or respond to human gestures and gesturing to robots. So is this like sort of like gesture activated commands for like your devices? Like I wish I could just sort of do a gesture to my phone to make it be quiet.

gesture-activated commands for devices, new and attempting to be more multimodal robots to interact with you in return. Are we telling you all to go out and read this book?

Not necessarily. I would say as a linguist, I learned a lot. I have a background in linguistics but not in gesture studies, and I found it understandable that way. But that said, sometimes when I'm reading a linguistics book that genuinely is for a general audience, I don't learn all that much because I did study this for years in university. L –

So, if you're someone who's done a lot of, like, linguistics reading already, whether that's, like, autodidact self-studying or at a more institutional level, it's a book that you could read. What we can tell you is that Lauren's now this big expert on gesture, and she has more fun gesture anecdotes that she couldn't fit in this one podcast. Yeah.

If there are any other podcasts that you love that could use a Jester episode, feel free to let them know that they should bring Lauren on.

Have her talk about gesture. If we end up with a little list of other podcasts that you've been on to talk about different aspects of your book, we'll make a list and share it with you so there are other places that you can hear from other aspects of this book that are a little bit more on the lighter side. Indeed. I wrote this book as an introduction for colleagues who were writing about, say, internet language, and I just wish they had more gesture in there. LWF.

Thank you for writing a book for me particularly. Or for students or collaborators or other linguists and social scientists who want to think about gesture as part of what they're paying attention to. But I also wrote this for myself so I could collect all those anecdotes and I'll get to share them with you on the podcast. We will continue to hear things about gesture from you long into the future. Indeed you will.

For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, including my new book, Gesture – A Slim Guide, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com, and you can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com slash transcripts. And you can follow at Lingthusiasm on all the social media sites.

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