In a Manner of Speaking

Podcast favorite David Crystal returns to In a Manner of Speaking for the September 2024 episode. The legendary linguist is back to discuss his new website, TraceThatPlace.com, which allows users to enter a British place name and learn all about its origin and history. You’ll also be able to hear the place’s (often bizarre, ambiguous) pronunciation.

Billed as the site that allows you to explore “the story and sound of place names on the road signs and railway stations of Britain,” TraceThatPlace took David about three years to create. On this month’s podcast, he and Paul discuss not just the site but the fascinating etymology and evolution of place names.

This is David’s sixth appearance on the podcast. His prior appearances:

For more information about David, visit DavidCrystal.com and ShakespearesWords.com. And visit his YouTube channel.

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

On the August 2024 episode of In a Manner of Speaking, Paul discusses dialect coaching with IDEA Associate Editor and successful dialect coach Joel Goldes.

They focus on two of Goldes’ many projects: Come from Away, an award-winning musical set in Newfoundland, about the hospitality that Newfoundlanders afforded airline passengers stranded by the terror attacks of September 11, 2001; and The Woman King, a 2022 epic film directed by Gina Prince-Bythwood and starring Viola Davis.

To learn about Joel, visit his IDEA page, or check out TheDialectCoach.com.

For more information on Come from Away, visit Apple.TV.com, and to learn more about The Woman King, visit Wikipedia. and IMDB.

And for prior podcast episodes that address similar topics, see

May 2022 (Episode 52): How To Do Accents, with Edda Sharpe and Jan Haydn Rowles

Joel visits the Anthony Gilardo Acting Studio:

BUZZCast interview:

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

Cinephiles and time-travel enthusiasts are in for a treat with the July 2024 podcast, as the topic is the American dialect known as Transatlantic, Mid-Atlantic, American Stage Speech, or Upper-class American. Paul’s guests are Barrie Kreinik (dialect coach, IDEA associate editor, actor, singer, writer, and audiobook narrator) and podcast co-producer Cameron Meier (film critic and historian, and executive editor of IDEA).

Barrie has a unique take on the dialect, as she has just released The Queen of Fourteenth Street, an audiobook celebrating the life of actress Eva Le Gallienne, who spoke in a dialect similar to Transatlantic. And Cameron’s movie background adds another dimension to the conversation, as the three discuss the accent in the context of older Hollywood movies.

Barrie’s theatre credits include The Dead, 1904 (Irish Rep), When I Was a Girl I Used to Scream and Shout (Fallen Angel Theatre), 39 Steps (Union Square Theatre), Fiddler on the Roof (Goodspeed Musicals), and The How and the Why (Trinity Rep). As a singer and songwriter, she has performed at Birdland, 54 Below, The Bitter End, and the Laurie Beechman Theatre. A recipient of two Audie Awards and ten Earphones Awards, she has narrated over 200 audiobooks, including numerous national bestsellers and one of The New York Times Best Audiobooks of 2022. She specializes in accents and dialects, particularly those of the British Isles, and has been a freelance dialect coach for nearly two decades.

Barrie’s original audio drama, The Queen of Fourteenth Street, was released by Hachette Audio in June 2024. As a playwright, she’s been a semifinalist in the Bay Area Playwrights Festival, the Ashland New Plays Festival, and the Garry Marshall Theatre New Works Festival, and her plays have been workshopped at Trinity Rep and the Bechdel Project. She has also written and performed in two solo shows, a short film, and an episode of the web series Love in NY. Her essays have been published by LitHub, Months to Years, and Theaterhound, and she writes a creative nonfiction blog called Points of View.

A native of Hartford, Connecticut, and longtime resident of New York City, Barrie holds an MFA in Acting from Brown/Trinity Rep and a BA in Theatre and English from Cornell. Find out more at BarrieKreinik.com, on Instagram (@barriebarriepix), and on her IDEA editor page.

To learn more about Cameron, visit MeierMovies.com or his editor page on IDEA.

Snippets of most of the clips below were featured on this month’s podcast under the copyright doctrine of fair use. They are presented here in more complete form for your enjoyment and research. We also suggest listening to Mo Rocca’s “Death of an Accent” episode from his Mobituaries podcast, on Apple podcasts.

Eva Le Gallienne interview with Dick Cavett, 1977:

William F. Buckley on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson:

Singin’ in the Rain, 1952:

Bringing Up Baby, 1938:

Now, Voyager, 1942:

The Third Man, 1949:

Bette Davis interview with Dick Cavett, 1970s:

Eleanor Roosevelt speech on human rights, 1951:

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, 1963:

Eva Le Gallienne, in Resurrection, 1980:

And for an interesting contrast between the Transatlantic of Katharine Hepburn and the General American of Ginger Rogers and others, watch Stage Door, from 1937, below. (Rogers, adept at dialects, also parodied the Transatlantic dialect in Once Upon a Honeymoon, with Cary Grant, from 1942.)

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

Welcome to the June 2024 episode of Paul Meier’s In a Manner of Speaking podcast. This month’s guest is celebrated Danish-American actor, writer, and director Lukas Hassel, who has forged a unique path to success in film and television.

Paul and Lukas are joined by film critic and co-producer of this podcast, Cameron Meier. The three discuss Lukas’s career, life on the film festival circuit, and the challenges of acting in a second language. Accent modification or “reduction” is central to this discussion.

Currently living in New York City, Lukas was born and raised in Denmark. He studied acting at the Samuel Beckett Theatre School, Trinity College, in Dublin, Ireland. He is perhaps best known to American audiences for his recurring role on The Blacklist, on NBC, as Elias VanDyke in seasons eight and nine. Lukas has also appeared on Blue Bloods, Elementary, Law and Order and other shows, and in feature films such as The Black Room, Slapface, The 7th Secret, and Art of the Dead. Early in his career, he was known to Norwegian audiences as Mr. Melk, the popular spokes character for Norwegian Milk.

As a writer, he has won the ScreenCraft and CineStory fellowships and many more writing competitions with his screenplays across genres such as horror, sci-fi, drama, and psychological thriller. As a director, Lukas created the award-winning short films Into the Dark (a sci-fi movie being developed into a feature) and the psychological horror The Son, the Father…., both of which screened in hundreds of film festivals around the world. He just wrapped filming on his feature screenplay, the psychological thriller House of Abraham, starring opposite Natasha Henstridge and Lin Shaye.

For more information on Lukas, visit LukasHassel.com and watch the clips below:

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

The topic of the May 2024 podcast is African-American English, which Paul discusses with American Dialect Society President Patricia Cukor-Avila. Paul and Patricia principally listen to and analyze historic Black dialects in the United States, from Colonial days to the early 20th century. Gullah is discussed in depth.

Recordings come from Patricia’s own research, done over several decades in a small Texas town (nicknamed “Springville”), plus IDEA, YouTube, and the Library of Congress’s Voices Remembering Slavery.

In addition to her role with the American Dialect Society, Patricia Cukor-Avila is professor of linguistics at the University of North Texas. Her primary research focuses on the study of linguistic change and variation, specifically grammatical change over time in African-American English. Her longitudinal study (1988-present), with Dr. Guy Bailey, of a rural Texas community has provided much of the data for presentations and articles concerning approaches to sociolinguistic fieldwork, transmission and diffusion, and language change over the lifespan, as well as documenting innovations in African-American English. This research was included in the 2004 PBS documentary by Robert McNeil Do You Speak American?

She is one of the associate producers of the award-winning documentary series Talking Black in America and was interviewed in the 2017 documentary Talking Black in America and the 2022 documentary Talking Black in America: Roots in that series. She is co-editor (with Guy Bailey and Natalie Maynor) of The Emergence of Black English: Text and Commentary (1991) and author of several articles and book chapters, most recently a co-author (with Guy Bailey and Juan Salinas) of a monograph Inheritance and Innovation in the Evolution of Rural African American English in the Cambridge Elements World Englishes series.

To learn more about Patricia, visit UNT’s website. For more information on the American Dialect Society, visit their website.

To listen to the full sound clip of Wallace Quarterman, referenced in this podcast, click or tap the triangle-shaped play button below. And go here for a transcript.

To listen to the complete audio clip of IDEA’s South Carolina 12, go here.

Listen to the entire recording of Booker T. Washington that Paul and Patricia discuss:

Other podcast episodes referenced in this episode, or those with similar themes, include:

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

For the April 2024 podcast, Paul explores loudness, or the lack thereof. Just as he examined extremes of the human voice’s pitch and speed in past episodes, this month Paul discusses the extremes of volume, specifically  looking at world records for loudness while reflecting on the rarity of true silence.

You’ll learn what Guinness World Records considers the loudest human sounds while contemplating the infrequency of quietness. Past podcasts referenced in this episode include episode 34, It’s All Greek To Me, with Rush Rehm; episode 48, Pitch, with Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher; episode 57, How We Learn to Talk, with Jenny Saffran; episode 59, Exploring Roy Hart’s Legacy, with Enrique Pardo and Linda Wise; and episode 62, Fast-Talkin’ Dudes.

Check out the following clips and articles for more information on this month’s topic:

TikTok video on the loudest scream

Guinness World Records article on the loudest scream

Audiology article on the eruption of Krakatoa

Volume image (iStock-174789753) courtesy of SKrow.

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

Welcome to the March 2024 episode of In a Manner of Speaking, in which Paul discusses folk linguistics with dialectologist Dennis Preston, professor emeritus at Oklahoma State University and former president of the American Dialect Society.

Often defined as the study or examination of language from a non-professional, non-academic, or uninformed perspective, folk linguistics can yield fascinating insights into how the average person perceives language, dialects, and accents. Paul and Dennis discuss this topic in detail, including the truths, misconceptions, and fallacies related to our understanding of the spoken word and regional speech.

Dennis Preston is an adjunct professor of linguistics at the University of Kentucky; regents professor emeritus at Oklahoma State University, where he was director of research on the dialects of English in Oklahoma and co-director of the Center for Oklahoma Studies; and distinguished professor emeritus at Michigan State University. He has been a visiting scholar at Osaka Shoin Women’s College and the universities of Canterbury (New Zealand), Hawaii, Arizona, Michigan, Copenhagen, Colorado, Indiana University Southeast, SUNY Oswego, Berkeley, Chicago, Kentucky, UC Davis, and UMass Amherst. He was Fulbright researcher in Poland and Brazil.

Dennis was director of the 2003 Linguistic Society of America Institute and president of the American Dialect Society, and has served on the executive boards of those societies and others, as well as the editorial boards of numerous journals and panels of granting agencies. He is a member of the advisory committees of several international research projects and is invited frequently for presentations in both academic and popular venues.

Professor Preston’s work focuses on sociolinguistics and dialectology, including four recent NSF grants, two in folk linguistics and two in language variation and change. His most recent book-length publications are Folk Linguistics (2000) with Nancy Niedzielski,  A Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume II (2002) with Daniel Long, Needed Research in American Dialects (2003), Linguistic Diversity in Michigan and Ohio (2005) with Brian Joseph and Carol G. Preston, Variation in Indigenous Languages (2009) with James Stanford, A Reader in Sociophonetics (2010) with Nancy Niedzielski, Responses to Language Varieties (2015) with Alexei Prikhodkine, and Changing Perceptions of Southernness (American Speech 93:3&4, Fall-Winter 2018) with Jennifer Cramer.

He is an Erskine Fellow of the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and a fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Linguistic Society of America, and he was awarded the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic in 2004.

For a fascinating collection of Dennis Preston’s interviews, go here. And visit OKState.edu.

More with Professor Preston:

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

The February 2024 episode of In a Manner of Speaking is all about the American Dialect Society, which was founded in 1889 to study English and other languages in North America. Paul’s guest is Betsy Evans, the new executive director of the society and associate professor of linguistics at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Paul and Betsy discuss the history and mission of the ADS and explore the latest trends in accents, dialects, and vocabulary of the United States.

Betsy’s research concentrates on perceptual dialectology and draws heavily on perceptions and attitudes to language variation with an aim to explore how language variation relates to the function of language in marking identity, status, group solidarity, and cultural values. She is also director of the Folk Linguistics Online Mapping (FLOM) project, which works on developing a free, open-source, online tool for conducting perceptual dialect research. She is a co-founder of the Linguistic Bias Working group at the University of Washington and the executive director of the American Dialect Society.

For more information on the American Dialect Society, visit AmericanDialect.org.

Check out the videos below for further discussions of topics related to this podcast:

For further discussion of Amy Stoller’s question about “milk/melk,” visit  A Way with Words.

Betsy Evans’ selected research:

Evans, Betsy, PI. Seattle to Spokane: Mapping English in Washington State.

Evans, B. E., Benson, E. J., & Stanford, J. (Eds.). (2018) Language Regard: Methods, Variation and Change. Cambridge University Press.

Fridland, Beckford Wassink, Kendall & Evans (eds.). (2017) Speech in the Western States, Volume 2. Publication of the American Dialect Society (PADS) 77:1.

Fridland, V., Kendall, T., Evans, B., & Wassink, A. B. (2016) Speech of the Western States. Vol. 1, The Coastal States. Publication of the American Dialect Society, 101.

Mooney, Annabelle & Evans, Betsy. Language, Society & Power. 6th edition. London: Routledge.

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

Paul begins 2024 with a discussion about the fundamental nature of the core topic of this podcast: the word. Specifically, he discusses the concept of the word itself, with Victor Boucher, professor of linguistics at the University of Montreal.

Piggybacking on last last month’s episode, which discussed spaces between words,  Victor and Paul focus on the definition of a word and how words are viewed, written, and spoken in various languages.

Victor is a senior professor of speech science at the Université de Montréal. The focus of his research has been the sensorimotor systems that underlie speech processing, with applications extending to the processing of voices, chunking, speech breathing, and verbal memory. This work has led him to examine the writing bias in the study of spoken language and its processing in terms of units that reflect constraints on sensorimotor systems rather than conceptual linguistic units that link to writing such as phonemes, words, and sentences.

A complete list of his scholarly works is to be found at Google Scholar link.

To learn more about Inuktitut, watch the following video:

Also see Wikipedia for a more in-depth discussion of Inuktitut.

For the study on the memory benefits of repeating text while talking to someone, Professor Boucher discusses the findings on pages 214-216 of the 2021 article The Study of Speech Processes, Addressing the Writing Bias in Language Science. Cambridge University Press, UK.

Further References

Terrace, H. S. (2001). Chunking and serially organized behavior in pigeons, monkeys, and humans. In R. G. Cook (Ed.), Avian visual cognition. Retrieved from https://pigeon.psy.tufts.edu/avc/terrace/default.htm.

Boucher, V. J., Gilbert, A. C., & Jemel, B. (2019). The role of low-frequency neural oscillations in speech processing: Revisiting delta entrainment. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 31, 1205-1215. doi:10.1162/jocn_a_01410.

Lowe, R. (1981). Analyse Linguistique et Ethnocentrisme. Essai sur la Structure du Mot en Inuktitut. Ottawa, ON: Musée National de l’Homme.

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)

For the last episode of 2023, Paul talks to Paul Saenger, curator of rare books, emeritus, at Chicago’s Newberry Library, about the history of silent reading (versus reading aloud) and the evolution of inserting (or not inserting) spaces between words.

They discuss the physiological processes required for decoding a written text written without spaces between words and how that practice influenced the long tradition of reading aloud.

From 1985 to 2013, Paul Saenger directed collection development at the Newberry Library in Chicago. His publications include Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading (Stanford University Press, 1997) and A Catalogue of Pre-1500 Western Manuscript Books at the Newberry Library (1989). He is also the author of numerous articles, including recently “Comment Lire est Devenu un Jeu d’Enfant,” L’Histoire (no. 454, 2018), “Orality and Visible Language” in The Oxford Handbook of Latin Palaeography (2020), “Des Blancs Entre les Mots,” Écriture et image (December 2021), and “Augustine as Reader: Prospects for Collaboration Between Palaeography and the Neurosciences” in Textual Communities, Textual Selves: Essays in Dialogue with Brian Stock (2023).  His monograph-length essay, The Fifth-Century Patristic Page: The Implications of Space, Symbols, Numeration and Color for the History of Reading was in press at the time of the recording of this podcast.

Other recent articles include “Henri-Jean Martin and the Birth of the History of Reading: a Memoir,” in Histoire et Civilisation du Livre, 16 (2020); “The Twelfth Century Reception of Oriental Languages and the Graphic Mise en Page of Latin Vulgate Bibles in England” in Eyal Poleg’s and Laura Light’s collective volume, Form and Function of Latin Vulgate Bibles in the Late Medieval Bible (London, 2015), and “Jewish Liturgical Divisions of the Torah and English Chapter Divisions of the Vulgate,” in Pesher Nahum, Texts and Studies in Jewish History and Literature Presented to Norman Golb (Chicago, 2012).

EXERCISE

The following approximates, in English, what ancient Roman readers would have experienced when opening a familiar codex (of Livy, for example) written in scriptura continua (continuous script with no spaces or punctuation). What is the experience like for you? Do you find yourself reading it aloud? Perhaps sounding it out in your head? Do you notice your lips moving sometimes? Are you longing for spaces between words? Do you welcome the freedom to phrase this as you wish?

totheSupremeJudgeoftheworldfortherectitudeofourintentionsdointheNameandbyAuthorityofthegoodPeopleoftheseColoniessolemnlypublishanddeclareThattheseUnitedColoniesareandofRightoughttobeFreeandIndependentStatesthattheyareAbsolvedfromallAllegiancetotheBritishCrownandthatallpoliticalconnectionbetweenthemandtheStateofGreatBritainisandoughttobetotallydissolvedandthatasFreeandIndependentStatestheyhavefullPowertolevyWarconcludePeacecontractAlliancesestablishCommerceandtodoallotherActsandThingswhichIndependentStatesmayofrightdoAndforthesupportofthisDeclarationwithafirmrelianceontheprotectionofdivineProvidencewemutuallypledgetoeachotherourLivesourFortunesandoursacredHonor

(Bach’s Cello Suite #1 in G Major BMV 1007 Prelude (by Ivan Dolgunov) is courtesy of Jamendo Licensing.)