Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And today, we're getting enthusiastic about non-binary speech with Dr. Jack Jones. They're a lecturer at Te Kuniga Kipureroa Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand.

But first, our most recent bonus episode was about various kinds of fun mishearings and missayings and misparsings that people make with words in songs, in phrases, in idioms, all sorts of like – you know when you hear an acorn and you think it might actually be an egg-corn because it's like the egg of the tree? Well, we talked about what strange things that you mishear or misparse can tell us about how language works.

go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to listen to this bonus episode, many more bonus episodes, and help us keep the show running. Hello, Jack. Hi, Gretchen. Thanks for coming on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for inviting me. It's awesome. Before we get into all of the cool research that you've done about how nonbinary people talk that you're working on, let's talk a little bit about your origin story. How did you get into linguistics?

Okay, well, yeah, it's, um, I mean, how far back do you want to go? I guess I was a high school dropout. So I was, you know, in my in my teens, I was going around North America, in Canada, in the United States, working and this and that. And I decided I wanted to go back to school. And I did get into kind of an adult education program and finished up my high school. And it was a really small town in rural Alberta had a community college, and they didn't have that many classes. And

So I went into geography. That's super related to linguistics. Yeah, you'd be surprised. Great. Yeah, because I had spent time, you know, in the southern United States and in Alberta and in...

Ontario and things. And so I liked seeing all the different places. And so I went into geography. And for people who don't know, geography sort of has these two big branches. There's physical geography and human geography. And physical geography is like rocks and trees and mountains and weather. And human geography is how people affect the world and how the world affects people. So like cities and stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, right. So I was sitting in a class and we were talking about how goods move across borders and how a lot of human influences, including language and political borders, can affect the movement of goods. And alternatively, how languages can be stopped by things like mountains. Oh, okay. So you'll have dialects that won't go over top of a mountain because you have this physical barrier. And I was like, that's amazing. Yeah, absolutely.

Somehow, something about this interaction between this natural world and something like language, which is very in your heads and like – but of course, you're not gonna walk up a mountain to go talk to the person on the other side. I live in Montreal, which doesn't even really have a mountain by proper mountain people standards, and I don't wanna walk up that mountain just to talk to someone at the top. I totally understand that prehistoric people also did not wanna do this.

Yeah, exactly. And people, you know, live along rivers. So you have languages and language change and language contact all along these sort of natural systems. And that was kind of the bug. That's fascinating. That's so cool. Yeah. And then I went from this community college, this like adult education program to university, took a linguistics class and

You know, as they say, that was kind of it. Fell in love with phonetics and acoustics and all the sort of meaty bits inside of you that create language. And here we are.

So you do sounds, phonetics, how people talk. Specifically, I first encountered your research when I was in New Zealand last year at the New Zealand Linguistic Society Annual Meeting in Dunedin. You were giving a talk about your dissertation on how non-binary people talk. How did you get into that topic? Yeah, sure. I think for most linguists, if you can press them, for most people in academia –

what you're into, there's always something personal in it. There's always something in what you're doing. And as a non-binary person navigating, you know, the 2010s, the late 2010s, trying to navigate what gender means, I kept sort of catching myself really interrogating, really thinking about how I interact with people around me and what assumptions they're going to put on me, what assumptions I'm putting on myself.

you know, I'm getting on the bus, how low do I want to talk to the bus driver? Like, just really silly stuff like that in some... Like, are they going to sir or ma'am me to, like, show how they're parsing my gender? Exactly. And do I want either of those options? Not really. Yeah, which are both wrong. But if I can barely figure out what being non-binary means to me as a non-binary person, how can I expect the, you know...

60-year-old parent that I'm talking to or random person at the coffee shop I'm talking to to understand all these backflips that I'm trying to do in presenting my gender. And I mean, I'm into phonetics. I'm into acoustics. I've always been interested linguistically in this

this sort of space between this is how people talk because they are from Canada. This is how people talk because they're a woman or because they're a certain socioeconomic class or this versus this is how a jock or a burnout talks. This is how somebody asserts their identity and,

And when you're looking at gender, that's really this difference between a lot of stuff that we're taught growing up and a lot of stuff that people might argue is inherent, a lot of stuff that is constrained by physiology in some ways, by like your existence in a meat suit, but you still always have control over it. And so that's where this is. Part of it is, you know, being non-binary and wanting that

legitimacy of examining the numbers and proving that like I exist and non-binary people exist which are not represented historically that's changing now and so wanting that you know studying me and people like me to show hey we exist this is a thing that we can measure this is a thing that we can look at and studying why and yeah and

And if you study all the other non-binary speakers, then they'll just tell you how you need to talk now. So that'll be really handy. Yeah, I mean, that's part of it too, right? It's something that's really exciting about studying non-binary people during my dissertation. And I think that this is very much changing for the better. And I'm so happy that there are so many more options for young people in terms of gender and for old people in terms of gender and for anybody in terms of gender.

But at the time, it really felt like all the templates that were out there were very binary. All the methodologies for studying speech, all of variation studies, everything was, this is how men talk, this is how women talk, this is how you're supposed to talk if you're a man or a woman or you want to present yourself. It was all binary.

I remember even just when I was being trained in grad school, everything was very binary. People weren't even really questioning that. And even 10 years later, it seems like there's been a lot more people thinking that through. L. Yeah, exactly. And so that is so amazing. From the point of view, putting on the researcher hat, studying it at the point where the speakers are making these first decisions without any templates, without a YouTube person to look at to model this kind of language on, felt really exciting. G.

Yeah. And then somebody else who's doing this study in another 10 years or 20 years or something when possibly non-binary identity may have coalesced a bit more, then they have this to compare to as a baseline to see – it's not often we get to watch a new gender evolve in real time. I mean –

that's not quite true because non-cis people have always existed. But this coherent, legible, non-binary category, we get to watch it evolve in real time. Yeah, exactly. And traditionally, in these kind of linguistic studies of dialect formation, that's the $10 word, you're looking at something that's very geographically bound. So you have a group of people from one dialect that are moving to another place for another dialect, and you have this contact, and you can study

things coming out of that. But for non-binary gender, even now, you know, I can say, oh, there's so many more non-binary people out there. I mean, realistically, if we think about our own networks, we do not have, I mean, I guess I can't say this about everybody, but most of us don't have a huge amount of non-binary people in it compared to how many, you know, other LGBT people or how many other men or women. There just aren't that many non-binary people. We do tend to find each other, but we don't have these big communities. Yeah.

Yeah, there's a certain clustering, but it's also not absolute and there's lots of other stuff. Do you feel like the internet has an influence on how non-minority people talk?

I think it does in the sense that the internet and in particular, that kind of American sphere of the internet influences everything that everybody does all of the time in some ways. But I also think that gender, sex and gender in particular, these sort of core identity things interact so strongly with where we are and our immediate context that it's not quite as, in terms of speech, I don't think it's quite as strong. I

I did have one participant, if I can talk about my dissertation a little bit. Oh, yeah, please. No, tell us about how the non-binary people talk. So one of my participants, Istis, is non-binary and very femme. And so this is one of the things I talked about at that conference talk that you saw me. The slides are on my website if you want to take a look. Excellent. We can link to those.

Sweet. So Istis is non-binary and also very femme. And this is something that really challenges the stereotypes that we have. So even me as a researcher coming into this had this idea of you have these men and women, and then you have these non-binary people that are challenging these stereotypes. But non-binary is not necessarily non-femme. And so Istis' femininity was very non-binary. And when she talked about trying to construct her voice, this femininity that she wanted to get across, she

she would talk about putting on basically a Californian accent. And she would say, you know, I can talk like this, and I sound very feminine, but I also sound like I'm smiling all the time, and I'm not that nice a person. And is Istis a New Zealander because you're doing your PhD in New Zealand? Yes. So all of my participants were from Christchurch, Otatahi, New Zealand. And

And they were mostly between the ages of 18 and 22. So this really specific first year of university cohort where you're sort of learning your identity and kind of really stretching out from under your parents' wings for the first time.

I also had a couple of participants that were over 40. And that's interesting because it also challenges our stereotypes of gender as this static thing that you're a man or a woman. And when we look at how language can change over time, we don't always think about how the people that are speaking can change over time.

A lot of the most visible non-binary people are younger, but there are also older people who are saying, oh, these young people have described a word for this thing that I felt my whole life, and actually, I'm also this identity, and now there's a word for it. L – Yeah, absolutely. I mean, being a 45-year-old non-binary person, you don't necessarily want to speak like a 20-year-old non-binary person, right? G – Yeah, totally. L – And so if 20-year-old non-binary people are –

trying to navigate what sex and gender is. If you're 40, there's that much more history of trying to figure all of this out. L – Yeah, absolutely. Going back to Istis, who is the subject of the talk that you gave at the New Zealand Linguistic Society, one of the things that struck me about this talk when you were doing it is that you had participants take selfies of what they were wearing at the same points as they were doing recordings. They did a bunch of recordings

with different people in different environments. You could see how they changed how they talked in relation to both what they're wearing and also who they're talking to.

Yeah, absolutely, because I think all of us have this experience of thinking about how we're perceived by somebody else, and that perception for many of us isn't limited to just our voices. We don't exist as a voice that wanders around in the ether. We are not disembodied voices, we are meat suits wearing clothing suits. Yes, which is super frustrating for many people to do.

So I called these recordings in the wild, because I had this idea of David Attenborough, you know, following and, and here he encounters the cis person. But yeah, knowing that how, how we choose to present ourselves in that way is going to change the way that we talk. This is pretty established, um,

And also, the person that we're talking to is going to change the way that we talk. If you're talking to your parent, you're going to talk to them differently than if you're talking to your boss. And we know this, but I was particularly interested in the way that these gendered relationships are navigated for non-binary people.

Yeah, absolutely. Do you have an example of how some of your participants talked differently with different people? Yes, absolutely. So one example is Istis would play with makeup in really interesting ways. So when I had the participants come, they would show me their selfies of these recordings. And I'd say, you know, describe this outfit to me so I could see what they found really important because what you choose to wear has a lot more different, like, you know what is significant to what you're wearing versus...

you don't know if I'm wearing my lucky socks, right? That kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know if your socks are lucky. I don't know if this is the same shirt I've been wearing for three days, which gives it a different sort of valence to me compared to, "Oh, yeah, this is my favourite shirt that I never wear and I only wear on special occasions," kind of thing. Yeah, absolutely. Istis didn't have this in a picture, but she described her stealth outfit

which was every aspect of the outfit presented very masculine, like sort of a suit jacket and loafers and this kind of thing. But every minute aspect of the clothing was actually feminine. So the buttons were on. I can't remember what side buttons are supposed to be on, but the buttons were on. Neither can I.

The buttons were on. The feminine side. Yeah. And the shoes were from the women's section. And so there was this whole sort of stealth coding that Istis was doing for herself, right? Like, not for other people, unless they're sort of cued in. If she needs to go about as someone who, you know, doesn't want her remarked on that particular day. Yeah, then she can kind of choose where that gets presented. Yeah.

She would also wear different kinds of makeup. She would describe it as enough eyeshadow so you can't see the bags under my eyes was one of her quotes. Love it. And the other quote was makeup for the sake of wearing makeup versus kind of makeup that you would wear sort of a more natural face. You'll forgive me if I get any of this wrong. I am not a makeup person.

And it was interesting because the sort of in her voice, the feminine cues that she used would change based on how overt her makeup was.

This is something that stood out to me about actually your talk, the makeup thing, because I'm very femme. I'm very cis. To me, I want all of my gender vectors or all of my gender points in the femme tally. But what Istis did in this thing was if she was wearing makeup, she would do less femme gender vocal cues.

She's sort of counterbalancing the gender points. As long as you have enough in the femme category and enough in the mass category, then it's sort of balanced in her head for whatever her personal definition of balanced is, which isn't how I approach gender, but is a really interesting thing that I learned from your talk. L. Yeah. Thank you. I'm glad that you found it interesting. L.

Yes, it's this. And this is a theme throughout all of the participants. And I should say that I also interviewed binary participants, men and women, and there were certain themes there too. I don't want to leave them all the way out. Totally, you've got to have a control group. Yeah, but for the non-binary participants, there was...

In my dissertation, I called it incongruence, but this idea that if you want to create some kind of mixed signal, or if you want to create something that isn't quite in the two boxes that the people who are listening to you maybe have, then you can either take cues from both,

Or you can try to find some kind of middle ground. And those are two quite different things. And so something very overtly feminine in your physical presentation, combined with something a little bit less feminine or more masculine in maybe your vocal presentation, that can still get to something that isn't binary in a way different than being very neutral sort of middle ground is. Yeah.

So the sort of neutral middle ground is like, I'm just gonna wear a hoodie and jeans because every gender can wear a hoodie and jeans, and then nobody will be able to perceive me as any gender at all. Whereas in a clothing way, doing something that has mixed signals would be like, okay, I'm gonna have a beard and also this super sparkly eyeshadow or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And that wasn't quite where any of my particular participants went. But yeah, but the idea that if you only have these two options, and you need to create a third option, there isn't only one way to do a third option, there isn't only one way to be non binary. And a lot of how you do that is

I found in my dissertation is based on your own personality, which is like, oh, surprise. People have agency in how they talk. And some people don't like wearing super sparkly eyeshadow. Yeah, totally. Totally.

But also, sometimes you need to do the academic version of establishing that baseline because you could say, well, based on my friends, which are non-binary, people seem to do these sorts of strategies. But having written it down in this academically legible place and gone through and done it with some statistics or something lets you say, okay, here's what we have

in terms of what we know now, and maybe this would change in another decade if there becomes a more socially legible category of non-binaryness. L – Yeah, absolutely. I think also part of including binary participants in this work is to bring non-binary people into both an academic conversation that's already happening, which is, again, that talk of legitimacy and saying, here's an established body of work, and

bringing a new population, I'm making finger quotes, they're not actually new, but bringing a different population, an understudied population, let's say, into the fold,

at the same time, that allows you to interrogate what's already there. So we have this whole body of literature that ignores that non-binary people exist. L – But that also doesn't ask cis people or people that are presuming are cis, how do you know that you're cis? How do you know your gender? What are you doing to signal your gender with your voice? And how much of that are you doing deliberately? G – Yeah, and I think that that's really valuable too. The idea that

I mean, there's nothing that says a cis person isn't allowed to think about masculinity or how they present masculinity or how they present femininity or what that means. And I mean, personally, I think it would be really useful if more cis people did that. If more people just thought about gender in ways that weren't binary. Talking to the binary men and women in my study, I was surprised.

a little bit surprised, but it was amazing to see. I mean, some people never thought about it. You know, there's questions about how do you feel about being a woman or being a man? And people said, I don't know. I never thought about it. It just felt right.

But not everybody. Some of the participants that I spoke to did deeply interrogate their gender at some point in their lives. One of my cis male participants talked about thinking that maybe they were trans for a while and then realizing they weren't. And I think the fact that we as people and also we as linguists doing these studies on language can interrogate even binary gender from these perspectives is really valuable.

Yeah, this is something that came up in a recent episode that we did about the vowel space and how gender affects the vowel space, which we can link to. But one of the things that I find neat about that research is that even kids who haven't gone through puberty yet, who still have all identical –

vowel spaces, which have as much variation as they have in heights, but nothing specifically affected by the physical changes of puberty, are still doing social genders and actually have different vowels based on the genders in their heads, even though their bodies aren't affecting what sounds they can produce yet. L. Yeah, absolutely. And that works the other direction, too. We often think of puberty as this thing where a bunch of stuff happens to you, and then you pop out the other end like

talking and looking like a gender now a gender you are this

But that's not, I mean, the variation that almost any given human can produce is so much wider than the constraints of physiology. And I'm not the only person to look at this. I know that Victoria Papp has done really excellent work with transmasc people. Lal Zimman also works with transmasc populations a lot too. So you can take testosterone and it can thicken your vocal folds and it can

create a drop in pitch, but that's not what it means to talk like a man if you're transmasc. That's not the end of it. And at the risk of summing up someone else's research in two sentences...

What you tend to see, I think, in Wietse's work is a drop, an initial drop from testosterone, and then it kind of pops back up again with the idea that as people become more comfortable in their bodies and in their lives and in their situations, there's less pressure to perform some stereotypical masculinity and more to just be the person they are, the transmasc person they are, or the non-binary person they are.

That sounds neat. We can link to that study so that if people want to hear more than the two-sentence summary version, they can follow up on that. Lyle Zimmon's work is amazing. Every single thing that Lyle has written is fantastic, too. Yes. Everyone's in the Lyle Zimmon fan club. You have a corpus which is delightfully called, I think, the Rainbow Corpus.

Yeah. Recorded audiovisual interviews with non-binary and binary orators. So it's rainbow without a W. Oh, and it spells rainbow. That's so good. For the sake of the acronym. That's such a beautiful acronym. And you have six non-binary participants in there and six binary participants. And they have all this speech that you've looked at the pitch of it, and you've looked at how they do their vowels and things. And you also have a talk and a paper I think you're working on

that's co-authored with one of those research participants who then de-anonymized themselves from the previous anonymous corpus work that they were in. And it's really interesting because there's this interesting sort of balancing act in academia between, oh, I've got a research participant, they've got sensitive data, I'm going to preserve their anonymity –

And also, sometimes when people are telling us really interesting things about their lives or their language choices or their identities, giving them credit for that intellectual contribution to the work which names them. Yeah, can you talk about this balancing act about participant and researcher collaborations?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I would love to. I've been thinking about it a lot. I don't want to portray myself as an expert. There is a whole other body of work where your collaborators, your language consultants work very closely with the researcher. But that's not always the same methodology as these sort of bigger picture, what we call variationist studies, where we're trying to look at large groups of people and how they speak differently.

And so, yeah, Casper is the name of the person that I worked with. And I got their permission before this episode. I asked them how they wanted to be referred and they said, OK, we'll call them Casper, which is great because that's their name. So it's super easy for me to remember.

Great. But they also had a pseudonym in the study originally. Yeah. In the study, if you read my dissertation, which you don't have to, if you do – in the study, they were called Alex. Dissertations are notably very long. Often, in the years after a dissertation comes out, people will write some shorter papers that summarize small bits of the dissertation. Keep an eye on Jack and their website.

and maybe there'll be shorter versions. But if you really want to read the whole dissertation or skim through it and pick out the bits that look interesting to you, we will link to it. L – Yeah. But yeah, so I had set up for my dissertation – I think there's something else. Dissertations are sort of a long work, and you're learning as you go. That's kind of the point. And so –

when you're planning these ethics and all of the things in planning this dissertation, you go through the process that has already been established. And so I did that and it's fine. And Casper came and was recorded and it ended up as it happens after I had done my data collection, Christchurch is not a huge place. And Casper and I were in the same social circles and we became friends after the data collection happened.

And every once in a while, we would talk about the work that I was doing and stuff I was studying because they were super interested. And they have a background in mathematics, and they're familiar with linguistics. So it's not like they knew nothing about linguistics, right? They had kind of known. So when you were showing them some pretty graphs, they were like, oh, cool, graphs, I like those.

Yeah. And then I can't remember if I asked them or they offered to do some proofreading before I had submitted it. And I sort of sent them a draft and I got it back. And there were sort of smiley faces and frowny faces on a lot of stuff. And then we had, you know, because we're friends, we went and hung out and talked about it. And there's something different, right? You're participating in research, you're getting recorded, and then research comes out.

And you know that you're maybe non-binary, you're this population, right? Yeah. And then you see yourself on a graph that plops your pitch somewhere and you know what the stereotypes about feminine pitch and masculine pitch are. And that's, I mean, I did a bad thing in that sense. I hurt somebody, right? Yeah. Not earth shattering ways, I don't think, or at least Casper didn't tell me it was earth shattering. But in frowny face ways, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, and from, you know, we share this perspective of the importance of examining new populations using established methodology and these sort of like traditional ways of doing things to grant whatever you want to call it, some kind of legitimacy from the academy or however we want to navigate this. But then this is still like real people that are given little dots or little diamonds and plopped on a graph and...

I can say in 300 words how this isn't meant to tell people how gendered they are. This is meant to examine non-binary people and compare them on equal footing with binary populations. But of course, non-binary people don't come to the table with nothing, with no baggage, with nothing behind them, right? And you come and you come with, you know, a gendered upbringing, a gendered

you exist in a world, right? You can't just not. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And so that was really hard. And we had a lot of conversations about that through the course of, you know, proofreading a dissertation and submitting it and trying to get to a point. And I didn't have because of the way that the ethics kind of works, I couldn't contact every other participant after word and get kind of the same insights and things.

But it's not all bad. So Casper expressed to me how interesting it was and how amazing it was to see

to see their plots there and to see the joy of seeing themselves not in the sort of ASAB cohort that they expected versus the sadness when they kind of came a little bit too close or that kind of thing. So we gave a talk about this and hopefully a paper that examines that a little bit more. And the other benefit is that now I have a collaborator and a co-author, it means that we can do a lot more really interesting stuff with data.

Well, and if they know all this math, you can do such cool math. And we can track them over time and we can do new recordings and even stuff about how these interviews with people or these recordings are still a snapshot in time and things aren't static and people change and people's interpretations of themselves are reinvented constantly and

Yeah, so I'm really excited. So watch for that paper. That sounds really cool and really exciting. We will look forward to the Jack-Casper collaboration. Casper-Jack collaboration. You can keep swapping your names for who goes first if you do a whole bunch of different co-authorships like people do. It made me glad that I wasn't recording myself. Were you sometimes interviewing or the interlocutor? Yeah, so we did these in-the-wild recordings, and then we had the traditional sociolinguistic interview with all of these questions. And we recorded me at first thinking there might be accommodation stuff –

But then it's also just like I can't transcribe 400 million hours of – L. Linguistic accommodation is the thing where when you're talking with someone, especially if you like them or you're trying to get along with them, you talk more like the person you're talking to, which happens to lots of people lots of the time. I certainly do it. You were thinking, well, maybe if people are talking more like you when they're talking with you, then that might shift things. But also, you end up with a lot of data. G.

Yeah, that's true. And it ended up doing a little bit of spot checking. It didn't seem quite there because of these sort of outsider insider relationships of I am Canadian sitting in New Zealand interviewing people. There was like enough of a gulf that it didn't seem. They didn't all start sounding Canadian when you were interviewing them? I'm shocked. Yeah, they weren't like, oh, hey, thanks for being interviewed me.

So maybe this is a good segue, actually, because you're a Canadian, a fellow Canadian. Hello. Welcome to the podcast. Who's been living in New Zealand for like nine years now? Yeah, almost a decade. Amazing.

We've had a previous interview with Ake Nicholas talking about Cook Islands Maori. If people want to hear someone with a more New Zealand accent. The actual New Zealand accent. The actual New Zealand accent. But this is presumably a linguistic experience for you. Do you want to say anything about what it's been like? Do you talk differently to people other than me who don't have a similar Canadian accent? It's kind of hard –

I think there are a few things. I noticed about four or five years in that I was losing my Canadian raising. We had gone somewhere and I said, "Oh, look at those three houses." And I was like, "Oh! What did I just do?" Instead of saying, "Houses," I said, "Houses." And I was like, "Oh!" Which is funny because when I lived in Canada, I never noticed Canadian raising. It was one of those things that was so – So, Canadian raising, which we actually haven't talked about on Lingthusiasm yet, so maybe someday in the future. What?

is the thing that is responsible for the differences between how I say the vowel in house versus house or in height versus high. Height, high, house, house. I will say I don't Canadian raise that much. It's a difference in terms of how you say the vowel between T and D or S and Z.

But there are some people who say something like about more like a boat. There's a stereotype that Canadians say a boot, and that's not true. And I want to correct that right now. So people in lots of other English-speaking environments don't do this Canadian raising, and you notice that you were stopping doing it.

Anecdotally, I also noticed people that move to Canada do start doing more Canadian raising. This seems to be one of the ones that's flexible in people's speech. Yeah, I think that's true. It's funny because it's so stereotyped in Canada. I don't think it's as strong as the stereotype, but it's definitely sticky in a weird way.

Yeah, and so I did lose it, but probably in this interview, it's back. It clicks back in. Yeah. Any other things that you've noticed? Yeah, so I remember when I first landed in New Zealand. So New Zealand is non-rhotic, there's no R, and words that are spelt E-A-R, like ear, and words that are spelt A-I-R, like air, have merged, so they're pronounced the same. Okay. And I was sitting on the airplane, waiting to disembark, and the announcer came on, and they said...

could everyone exit via the rear steers? Oh. And I had this moment of like cows stacked up at the back of the plane. And it's just sat with me. And I think it's because the context wasn't quite enough for me to get

But I was like, "Rear stairs, rear stairs." What? Well, it's when you exit the airplane by, obviously. When you exit the airplane by the rear stairs, or alternatively exit the airplane by the rare stairs, which are the stairs that they don't bring out that often. You have to save the rare stairs in the fine china for guests. Exactly.

That's exactly the kind of thing that, especially when you're hitting something out of context, and they seem to be more fond of using that. So if you weren't used to that particular phrase either, it would sort of catch. Yeah, and I mean, you're also like New Place and all of this, and you're trying to pay attention because you have to do what the airplane people tell you because that's the rules. I have one more anecdote that is very deeply only Canadian and New Zealand overlap. Please, I want to hear it.

So maybe this is only Western Canada. We'll see. So Gretchen, what do you call the front row of seats in the classroom? Oh, that's where the keeners sit. That's where the keeners sit, right? That's the keener seats, right? I don't know if I have keener seats specifically as a phrase, but like absolutely totally understand you when you say this. So if somebody is a keener, that's like the person at the front of the class. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I have told people about this Canadianism myself. Yeah.

Amazing. I'm glad it's a super salient Canadianism. Yeah, I've introduced Lauren to it, in fact. So it's not a thing in New Zealand. They don't have keeners, but New Zealanders say keen all the time. Oh, but for something different. Yeah, so you'll say, you know, and apologies to any New Zealanders if I get these pragmatically a little bit wrong, but you'll say, oh, you know, I'm going for coffee. Is anyone keen? Oh, okay. Or you might say,

oh, the movie's coming out next week, and someone else might say keen, like they're keen to go. L – Oh, okay. Yeah, I think I could say I'm keen to go, but not keen by itself in a phrase like that. G – No, and I think that my impression, my eight-year-old, nine-year-old Canadian impression is that you don't really use keen because it has a little bit of that odd negative – I mean, it's a keener thing. So unless you're really claiming –

that you're a big fan of Star Wars and you're a Star Wars keener and you definitely have to go see the new one. So if you're keen to go to Star Wars, you want to be in the front row? Oh, of course. Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah, I sort of get that. It's not as neutral. It's like you're really actively excited. You

you're not just like, oh yeah, I'd be good to go. Or like, I'd be down to go. Like, I'd be keen to go is like, I'd be so keen to go. That would be great. Not just like, it'd be fine. Yeah. But if you're keen and you're like, yeah, I could. If you wanted to be extra, you could double up the New Zealandisms. Oh. And you could be keen as. Oh, yeah. I've heard the as. You could be keen as, but I don't know. That's where my knowledge of New Zealand lexical items stops is at as. Yeah.

I love keener as a Canadianism because my prof friends will be like, oh, one of my keeners came to my office hours today. And they'll mean that student who's always asking really good questions and is really excited to be there and stuff like that. And it's very positive when my prof friends who were all themselves keeners back in the day use it. Maybe some people use it negatively, but I sure don't know any of them. Yeah, if you are a keener, then keener is quite positive, but maybe less so.

Maybe less so. So you finished your PhD and you're teaching now, and I have been told that you make students stab themselves with toothpicks for science. Can you tell us about that? I would love to tell you about that. With a caveat, I tell students to very carefully try not to stab themselves with toothpicks, but it doesn't quite translate. So...

So I teach phonetics, which involves sort of learning about all of the sounds and how we make them. And if you're a speaker of English, you might be familiar with this little sound called R. R is a sound, yes, that I'm familiar with. The alveolar approximant, the R noise.

So the R sound, the R can be made about 16 million different ways. There's something like eight or nine different things that you can do with your mouth that will get you close enough to R for people to understand you. Oh, wow. So when I was learning phonetics, they told us there were two different ways. So there's actually like six or eight of them.

So there's two different tongue positions. Okay. And that's where the toothpick comes in. But you can also do – there's different stuff with the back of your mouth. Some people have lip rounding and some people don't. And some people raise this and that. Like, yeah, there's different ways to do it. But you were right when you were learning phonetics. But because it all produces, like, approximately the same sound, like, kids just hear adults making the sound and they experiment with their mouths to produce the sound and –

because the meat suit part of our throats is kind of squishy, you can manipulate it in different ways and end up with the same thing that comes out. You get close enough. And in English, we don't have a lot of other stuff in that

area, too. And when you think about it, if you're a kid, if you think about something like a "puh", if you're a baby looking at a caregiver going "puh", you can really see that, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. But you sort of get a face and you don't really know what's going on. Yeah, you just get a blank face, you can't see what they're doing. And with something like a "cah", you can't necessarily see what they're doing, but the sound is very distinct that they're making. "Ruh" is this sort of approximate sound. Yeah.

Which is why it's called an approximate in the International Phonetic Alphabet, because it's just sort of like, I don't know. Close enough. Yeah. So what you get is you have this sound where there's a bunch of different ways to make it and also a bunch of speakers that don't really know how they make it. So when you say something like a ka, you make that sound and you're like, oh, my tongue goes here. But when you're making a ra, it changes in depending on where it is in the word, all this stuff.

So as you learned in your phonetic class, there are two ways that your tongue can be shaped when you're making a R sound. And this may blow some people's minds because they never thought about it before and didn't realize that the other way is possible. And so the two big ways are they have a million different names because of course they do. But like one is kind of called the bunch R usually.

so this is when your R, the back part of your tongue, crunches up or gloms up into a bit of a shape at the back that doesn't actually touch the roof of your mouth. so the back of your tongue is all crunched up and the front of it is down at the bottom of your mouth. the other way to do it is often called the retroflex R or the curly R. so you have bunchy R and curly R. cute. the curly R, the retroflex R, the front of your tongue is curled up and back a little bit.

So it's almost like the tip of the bottom of your tongue is touching or almost touching the roof of your mouth. Yes. And which one do you make? It's hard to – I know which one I make. Awesome. One of the important points of science is confirmatory analysis. So you should replicate this finding and see if it still holds true.

If you want to know which R you make, there's a way that you can do this with just a toothpick. And it's really easy. All you do is you take a toothpick, a clean one, and make sure you wash your hands. Great. And then you take your toothpick and you make an R sound. Rrrr.

Or you can pretend you're a dog and go... Something like that. Just make your... noise. And then you take your toothpick and you kind of... You can rest it like on your bottom teeth or however you want to kind of have it centrally into your mouth. And as you go... slowly and carefully and not stabbily, put the toothpick into your mouth.

And then go, stick your tongue out. And the toothpick will either be touching the top of your tongue or the bottom of your tongue. Whoa. And this tells you which R you have.

Yes, and if it's touching the bottom of your tongue, you're making a retroflex, you're making a curly R. And if it's touching the top of your tongue, you're making a bunched R. So you're either a curler or a buncher, and you can tell this based on which side you are. I actually went looking for toothpicks so that I could try this, and ended up finding a cotton swab, like a Q-tip, before I saw my toothpicks. And so I tried this with a cotton swab and did not stab myself. So this is the safety conscious version you can do if you like. Awesome. Because it also works.

As long as it's clean and your hands are clean, that's a good, safe way to do it. Yeah, so I'm a buncher, which I thought I was, and I have just confirmed that.

Anecdotally, in Canada, it was usually about 50-50 when we go through classes or we try it. This is in Alberta. And in New Zealand, is it also 50-50 or is it different? So in New Zealand, there are a lot more bunchers. I think this might have to do with New Zealand being non-rhotic. I don't have a paper on this. I don't know anything about it.

But there's also a lot less lip rounding. In Canada, lip rounding is almost universal. It's on ours a lot. L: Yeah, I lip round. Yeah. But in New Zealand, that's not the case. Most people don't round their lips. Jack, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. As we ask at the end of every interview, if you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would it be? It would be that

You're the boss of your language. How you communicate with people, it's all on you. Like people can tell you how they think you should talk. Even linguists can say, well, this is how people talk. But if you're not feeling it, do something different. You can change it. You can do whatever you want. Communicate however you want to communicate. Don't let anyone tell you what to do.

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