Accentricity

This episode is Accentricity’s first audio research paper. In April this year, I was really excited to have an article published in a linguistics journal, telling people about some of the findings from my PhD research. But… not all people. Because although I did my best to write the article as clearly and simply as possible, it’s only really accessible to other linguists. That’s fine, of course – journal articles are for talking to other people in your field. But I think my findings might be interesting to people who aren’t linguists, too. So I’ve made this podcast episode to accompany it. It contains the same findings as the journal article, but explained in a more accessible way, and with some voices and ideas other than mine included.

I’ve left out some detail which might be interesting to other linguists. If you are a linguist and want this detail, you can find the article here, or you can find the pre-publication version here. If you are a linguist who is much too busy to read the article, then give your eyes a rest and enjoy having information delivered to your ears instead :)

This is a new thing that I’m trying out, and I’d love to hear what you think. Should I do this for every piece of research I do? Want to chat about the process of making it? Feel free to drop me a line on [email protected] with ideas or questions.

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* Leon Żydowski moved from Poland to Scotland when he was 5. He lived there for 13 years, before moving back to Poland last year, aged 18. He’s now studying Tourism & Recreation at University in Wroclaw at weekends and working during the week. 

* Julia Stachurska moved from Poland to Scotland when she was 7. Now, at 21, she’s a student at the University of the West of Scotland, a caseworker at the Scottish parliament, and an SNP (Scottish National Party) council candidate for Murdostoun, North Lanarkshire.

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Our Accentricity t-shirts are out now! Get yours here. 

They’re designed by artist Cat Ingall, who also makes other cool things that you can buy from here Etsy shop.

You can also support the podcast on Patreon or Steady, or with a one-off donation to help keep Accentricity going.

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You can find a transcript for this episode on the website. Our transcripts are made my Aileen Marshall: contact her at [email protected] for all of your transcription needs!

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We’re launching series 2 on the 20th of June! Here’s what you can expect to hear…

For this episode, we bring you something a little bit different.

A few months ago, we were invited to work in collaboration with the podcast Refugee Voices Scotland, and make a guest series for a new podcast called The Sounds of Integration.

We decided to make a series on the theme of community. It’s a series celebrating the power of community, but also thinking about what happens when communities are put under strain. When people move from one place to another, moving away from the community they know and into a new one. When borders and visas separate us. When being within two metres of another person becomes dangerous. Can communities survive physical distance? How can we support each other when we can’t stand beside each other?

We’ve called the series ‘What does community mean to you?’, and it features lots of short interviews with interesting people. This is the first episode from the series, which we’re releasing on the Accentricity feed as a taster. If you’d like to hear the rest of the series, you can subscribe to the Sounds of Integration podcast using this link, or through your podcast streaming app of choice. The Sounds of Integration is made by the UNESCO Chair for Refugee Integration Through Language and the Arts at the University of Glasgow. You can find them on Twitter @UofGUnescoRILA.

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This episode is called We’re All Allowed To Be Who We Are. It features stories from five Glasgow residents. Below is some information about each of them, in order of appearance. The conversations in this episode took place in October and November 2020.

* Marzanna Antoniak is a culture animator, community development worker, and a language teacher with a special interest in working with people who have had little experience of formal education. Originally from Poland, she made Scotland her home in 2008. She is the cofounder of the Cosmopolis Creative Group, and has programmed cross-cultural festivals and events around Glasgow and beyond.

* Dio Anemogiannis is a cultural practitioner and the founder of NACUSSO, a collective exploring active citizenship, and community building through sound, storytelling and media-based practices. Find out more on Instagram (@nacusso_stories), and Facebook (@nacusso).

* Aga Paulina Mlynczak is an Artist/Curator who has delivered successful independent exhibitions in Copenhagen and Glasgow - most notably in Tramway - ‘RELAY’ (July’19). While holding a Curator/Director position at 16 Nicholson Street Gallery, she produces and specialises in media and installation art. She has a Masters degree in Fine Art (GSA), graduated from ‘Fatamorgana’ School for Art Photography and collaborated with Copenhagen Film Workshop. Her art practice is informed by research into participatory practices and language. Now, Mlynczak is developing an online iteration of her project which concerns democratisation of communication in multicultural environments - ‘Teach Me a Word You’re Afraid to Forget’. 

* Nell Cardozo is a Glasgow-based curator. She currently works in the curatorial collaborative of three that directs 16 Nicholson Street Gallery. Previous to, or alongside this role she has worked at the Scottish National Galleries as a Gallery Assistant and at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow curating GROWTH: an exhibition of youth artists. Cardozo graduated with an English Literature MA and a Museum Studies MSc at Glasgow University, where her thesis focused on investigating accessibility in online databases. She has also led educational activities with family and lower-income audiences at schools and museums in Albany, NY.

* Shobhita Achraya is a university student studying physics and working with the Ensemble songwriting project. She is also involved with the Hidden Rhythms project, where her and her friends have fun together while making music and drama.

* The songs that can be heard in this episode are ‘We Are The Sun’ and ‘You Are Enough’ from the Hidden Rhythms EP, which is available on Soundcloud . Hidden Rhythms is a project run by YCSA, a group which supports young people in Glasgow Southside.

 * The languages you can hear in this episode are, in order of appearance, English, Polish, Malayalam, Farsi, Pashto, Shona and Greek.

If you would like to take the Wug test (or test the tiny people in your life), I’ve done a blog post it which allows you to do the test here. Remember that it’s not a test of intelligence! It tests a kid’s stage of linguistic development, and also their willingness to play along with the weird world of adults.

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In this particular episode, I’m focusing on the stories of kids who are acquiring spoken language, and who are moving towards communicating in the same kind of way as I am now. Of course kids are much more diverse than this. Not everyone learns to talk, and some people develop communication strategies which involve single words or sounds, rather than phrases or sentences. Some people learn to speak using sign languages, and in these cases the story is in some ways similar to this one, and in other ways quite different. This episode is just about one of the many ways of growing up and learning language. I hope to visit some of the other ways in later episodes.

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A million thankyous to all of the new patrons of the podcast: Sinead Callaghan, Mitchell McKee, E Jamieson, Isabel Papadimitriou, Helen Nolan and Wendy Kelleher. All money raised will go towards making a second series of the podcast.
If you’d like to support this podcast financially, click here or here. If you have enthusiasm but not cold hard cash, tell a pal about it, or give it a rating and review. These things are just as helpful!

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The contributors:

* Harris, aged 1. Thanks to mum Angie and dad Braxton.

* Mila, aged 2. Thanks to mum Nichola.

* Connie, aged 2 and a bit. Thanks to mum Kat, dad Andrew and gran Sheila.

* Martha, aged 2 and a half. Thanks to mum Jennie and dad Euan.

* Kira, aged 3. Thanks to mum Joanna.

* Emilie, aged 4. Thanks to mum Jenn.

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Thanks to Professor Jennifer Smith of the University of Glasgow for help with the content. Jennifer Smith is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow. At the moment she’s working on two big research projects: One Speaker Two Dialects and The Scots Syntax Atlas. You can find more information about her research and publications here.

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Big big thanks to John McDiarmid for production and editing support. John is a freelance radio producer, documentarian and journalist. You can find his company on Instagram @teltmedia. He recently finished his first feature-length documentary, St Mungo’s Approval. 

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Big big thanks too to Seb Philp for the music. He doesn’t have a website, but if you’d like to talk to him, send me a message! 

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* Carrie Gillon and Megan Figueroa make The Vocal Fries, a podcast where they investigate and dismantle linguistic prejudice in all its forms. They have loads of episodes about different linguistic issues and varieties. If you fancy learning more about different varieties of American and Canadian English, you could start with this one about Southern American English, this one about Newfoundland English, or this one about Philadelphia English.

* Lauren Gawne is a Lecturer in linguistics at La Trobe University. Her work focuses on understanding how people use grammar and gesture, with a particular focus on Tibetan languages in Nepal. Lauren writes By Lingo, a regular column for The Big Issue in Australia. She lives in Melbourne, Australia. Lauren is co-host of the linguistics podcast Lingthusiasm. Their episode ‘Sounds you can’t hear - Babies, accents, and phonemes’ is a great companion to this one, for those who want to know more about why we find it so hard to do other people’s accents.

Whether you’re a linguist looking for teaching resources or someone who loves learning about language, Lauren’s Mutual Intelligibility newsletter will help you find the resources you need during the Covid-19 lockdown (and the rest of the time too). Find out more here.

* Conor Reid is the creator of Words To That Effect, a podcast that tells stories of the fiction that shapes popular culture. There are loads of great episodes, but this one about post-apocalyptic fiction feels particularly relevant right now!

* Stephen Lucek is Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in Linguistics at University College Dubin. His research on the language of teenagers in Dublin asks questions about educational disadvantage and the influence of media on language attitudes.

* Alister McCarty is the founder of Al’s Action English. He teaches actors how to do Northern Irish accents, and he also teaches English as an additional language. He has a Youtube channel with loads of interesting content, including this playlist about Northern Irish accents. You can get in touch with him at [email protected].

* Nic Redman is an internationally successful voiceover artist and voice & accent coach based in the UK. She trained (twice!) at the prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, once in performance and again as a voice practitioner. She started her coaching career teaching voice & accents at many of the major drama schools in the UK including RADA, Arts Ed & LIPA. Nic now runs a thriving 1-2-1 practice providing voice, presentation and accent training to all kinds of professional voice users with a client list including actors, comedians, public speakers, business professionals and more. She is the founder of Voice & Accent Hub group on Facebook and co-founder of Northern Voice Collective, both created to offer tailored voice & accent coaching to specific groups of voice users. As a voice actor, Nic works internationally voicing commercial, corporate and character scripts with a client list including Tesco, NSPCC & the BBC. She also co-runs VO Social North, the first VoiceOver meet-up for voice and audio professionals in the North of England, and the Facebook group Voice & Accent Hub. You can find out more and contact her via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Nic co-runs The Voiceover Social Podcast. It’s a fantastic resource for voice actors, but also really interesting for those who are interested in language in general. Their episode on the mid-atlantic accent is a real treat.

* Roanna Davidson is an actress, writer and theatre maker. She starred in Glasgow Girls, a musical by Cora Bissett, and she talks about the role in more depth in this interview. Theatres are closed just now due to lockdown, but when they reopen she’ll be performing in Rona Munro’s play Donny’s Brain at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. You can find her on Twitter here.

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If you’d like to find out more about the real-life Glasgow Girls and their story, you can watch this award-winning documentary, filmed in 2005.

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Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes. You can support us on Patreon, on Steady, or with a one-off donation, to help keep Accentricity going.

The students featured, in order of appearance, are:

* Jo Pearce is a Masters student in English Language & Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. They are currently working on their dissertation, which looks at how voice quality contributes to listener perception of speaker gender. You can find them on Twitter @_Jo_Pearce.

* Davie Wallace is from Cumbernauld and has just completed his Senior Honours in English Language & Linguistics. He recently completed his Dissertation, focusing on sociolinguistics, with specific regards to the use of the 'hoose' variable amongst Scottish working-class adolescents across varying contexts.

* Frankie Macleod is from the Black Isle, near Inverness, and has just completed her final year of English Language and Linguistics at Glasgow Uni. She hopes to continue her studies next year by doing a Masters in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.

* Anna Virtanen is a Finnish student soon to be starting her final year of undergraduate studies in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Glasgow. She is especially interested in bilingualism and linguistic identity. If you like to see pictures of mainly cups of coffee, you can follow her on Instagram @seikkailumielella.

* Edward Marshall is a postgraduate student taking a taught Masters at the University of Glasgow. He is about to embark on his Master's dissertation in which he is going to investigate singer-to-singer accommodation of brightness. He will begin his PhD investigating choirs and accents in September.

* Aaron Quigley is from Paisley and has just finished his first year at the University of Glasgow where he is studying English Language and Linguistics. In his first year, he also studied Italian and French as he has aspirations to work abroad in Europe teaching English after his university studies.

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Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes. You can support us on Patreon, on Steady, or with a one-off donation, to help keep Accentricity going.

The students featured, in order of appearance, are:

* Sinaed Callaghan is from Glasgow. She has just completed her joint honours degree with English Language and History. Her dissertation looked at the linguistic variable (ing) and how it was used differently throughout a speakers life span. You can find her on twitter at @SinaedC.

* Ryan Shaw-Hawkins is from Stevenage in Hertfordshire, and has just completed his third year. He hopes to continue on into postgraduate study in sociolinguistics. 

* Mitchell McKee is a Glasgow native and has just finished his second year . He has enjoyed studying historical and contemporary linguistics and hopes to continue his studies into the future. 

* Niklas Thielking is from Hanover and is a postgraduate student in linguistics He is currently working on his thesis, investigating the articulation and acoustics of /s/-retraction in Glasgow. For this work he combines ultrasound tongue imaging and audio recordings.

* Vanessa Rust is from Germany and is a postgraduate sociolinguistics student soon to finish. She is working on her dissertation, with which she wants to find out the difference in native and non-native use of discourse markers, with a focus on German speakers’ English. You can find her on Instagram and twitter @vanrust.

* Isadora Bueno is from Brazil and has just finished her first year. She is a Theatre Studies and Literature student and hopes to continue on to her PhD focused on the representation of minorities on stage and screen. 

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In this episode Ryan talks about place names, and how they often contain traces of languages and parts of language that have long fallen out of day-to-day use. If you’d like to learn more about the roots of some place names in Scotland, have a look at the website of the SWAP project.

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Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes. You can support us on Patreon, on Steady, or with a one-off donation, to help keep Accentricity going.

Why is it that despite all of the evidence that using multiple languages is good for you, multilingualism is still sometimes treated with suspicion? In this episode, I examine the concept of verbal hygiene, and how the policing of linguistic borders affects our lives.

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The contributors:

* Agnieszka Wodzińska is a writer. She has a zine about the experience of moving to Scotland, which is out now and available on Etsy. It’s called ‘One Of The Good Ones’. Her essay ‘When The Curtain Falls’ is going to be featured in the anthology The Bi-ble volume II: New Testimonials, which will be published by Monstrous Regiment in the summer. It’s about growing up queer in Poland.

* Alison Phipps is Professor of Languages and Intercultural Studies at the University of Glasgow, and the UNESCO Chair in Refugee Integration through Languages and the Arts. She is also co-convenor of GRAMNET, the Glasgow Refugee, Asylum and Migration Network. Her book ‘Decolonising Multilingualism’ will be published by Multilingual Matters in June 2019. If you would like to read more about her ideas on multilingualism before June, a good place to start is here. She also recently released a book of poetry written with Zimbabwean writer Tawona Sitholé, which you can find here. You can follow her on Twitter here.

* Eva Hanna is a PhD student who studies multilingualism. She is also the parent of two multilingual children. She also has a couple of excellent blog posts about the value of multilingualism which you can read here and here.

* Natalie Findlayson stopped speaking German as a kid, but once she’d left school she ended up studying it at uni, spending some time in Germany and becoming completely fluent. Her parents might have felt at the time like they hadn’t succeeded in raising a bilingual kid but, ultimately, in a roundabout way, they did. She now teaches German and French at the University of Glasgow.

* Harry Josephine Giles is a writer and performer from Orkney and based in Edinburgh. Their poetry collections Tonguit (2015) and The Games (2018) were both shortlisted for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award, and Tonguit for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection. Harry Josephine was the 2009 BBC Scotland slam champion, founded Inky Fingers Spoken Word, and co-directs the performance platform Anatomy. Their participatory theatre has toured widely, including Forest Fringe (UK), NTI (Latvia), CrisisArt (Italy) and Teszt (Romania). Harry Josephine’s performance What We Owe was picked by the Guardian's best-of-the-Fringe 2013 roundup – in the “But Is It Art?” category.

* Andrew Macdonell lives in Brussels and tells people how to apply for research funding from the EU.

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The song at the end is ‘There Is No Ending’ by Arab Strap, used with permission from Aidan Moffat.

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Thanks to everyone I spoke to while making this series, including the many people I spoke to whose interviews haven’t yet appeared: Andreas Wolff, Peter McCune, Oisín Kealy, Jamie Liddell, Stacey Keen, Sean Sweeney, Colin Reilly, Karen Corrigan, Bruce Eunson, Claire Needler, Derrick McClure, E Jamieson, Karen Lowing, Laura Green, Michael Hance, Pavel Iosad, Robert McColl Miller, Ben Kinsella, Flora and Morgan Livingstone, the good people of The Bold Collective, and Kamil from Polska Skola. Even if your voices don’t appear, your ideas and influence do – and I hope to include your actual voices at a later date!

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Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes. You can support us on Patreon, on Steady, or with a one-off donation, to help keep Accentricity going.

The contributors: 

* Antonella Sorace is Professor of Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. She is a world leading authority on bilingualism over the lifespan.

* Kyle Bettley is a Senior Lecturer at Glasgow Clyde College, teaching British Sign Language Studies and ESOL.

* Diana Lugo López is a PhD student studying multilingualism at the University of Edinburgh.

* Eva Hanna is a PhD student who studies multilingualism at the University of Glasgow. She is also the parent of two multilingual children. She has a couple of excellent blog posts about the value of multilingualism which you can read here and here.

* Agnieszka Wodzińska is a writer. She has a zine about the experience of moving to Scotland, which is out now and available on Etsy. It’s called ‘One Of The Good Ones’. Her essay ‘When The Curtain Falls’ is going to be featured in the anthology The Bi-ble volume II: New Testimonials, which will be published by Monstrous Regiment in the summer. It’s about growing up queer in Poland.

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Antonella is the founder of Bilingualism Matters, a research centre at the University of Edinburgh which has partner branches all over Europe and the US, run by an international team of researchers. They study bilingualism and language learning, and communicate what they know to enable people to make informed decisions based on scientific evidence. You can follow them on Twitter here, and you can read about some of the research they’ve been involved in recently here and here. Look for upcoming events here.

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The social enterprise Lingo Flamingo run a programme of language classes for older people living in care homes across Scotland. Their paid-for classes for all ages help to fund the care home classes. You can sign up to learn Spanish, Italian, French, Portuguese, English, German or Polish with them, or you can volunteer to be a language teacher. You can follow them on Twitter here.

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Find us @accentricitypod on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or sign up to our newsletter for updates on what’s going on behind the scenes. You can support us on Patreon, on Steady, or with a one-off donation, to help keep Accentricity going.