Nightnight at Laura's

So I had someone else on, today.

This one’s a conversation with my friend Giulia — Jules — the friend I dedicated episode two to, who heard episode one and decided she let me know how much she liked it and how she always wanted to have a podcast herself. We’ve known each other for the better part of twenty years, and we picked right back up like no time had passed at all.

Her topic is one I’d never thought about much but it does make sense, about how the TV shows and movies you watch can quietly rewire the way you speak another language. Jules learned her English not from school — she’s very clear on how useless that was — but from binge-watching at sixteen with the subtitles on, and she didn’t just pick up words. She picked up a whole accent off a character she loved. She started swearing more because a show retrained her register, until her sister told her to cut it out.

We get into all of it — the shows that shaped us, the ones we refuse to watch until everyone’s stopped talking about them, the teenage crushes that doubled as language teachers (one of whom, it turns out, ended up named in one of my first books). And Jules, being Jules, also let some real life into the room — lightly, bravely — with more to come if she wants to.

It’s looser than the first two. No thesis, no big turn — just two people and the strange, lovely fact that we’re both partly made of the television we grew up on.

If there’s a character secretly living in your accent, tell me which one.

The soundtrack for today’s episode: Ræyne - Loss of Faith

Ræyne’s Insta for those who are interested in the music.

My book: Angels and Nightmares

…if you’re interested in reading it.

A little science, if you’re curious

Jules isn’t imagining it — there’s a whole research literature on picking up a language from the screen:

* Peters, E., & Webb, S. (2018). Incidental vocabulary acquisition through viewing L2 television and factors that affect learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 40(3), 551–577. — You absorb real vocabulary just from watching, no studying required.

* Pujadas, G., & Muñoz, C. (2019). Extensive viewing of captioned and subtitled TV series: A study of L2 vocabulary learning by adolescents. Language Learning Journal, 47(4), 479–496. — Especially as teenagers — exactly Jules’s sixteen-year-old origin story.

* Montero Perez, M., et al. (2013). A meta-analysis on captions and L2 vocabulary learning — subtitles measurably help. (The accent-catching part — soaking up a character’s pronunciation — is less formally pinned down, but well documented anecdotally by basically every bilingual who learned from TV.)

Did you know that if you speak multiple languages, you also have multiple personalities? Okay, calm down. No. It’s not that we’re special…

This episode is about why the switch between language and personality is real — and why it’s not a glitch, or a mask, or a disorder. There’s actual research on it: people who take the same personality test in two different languages come out as measurably different people, in ways that line up with each language’s culture. There’s a name for it. And there’s a quieter, harder layer underneath, about which language your feelings actually live in, and what that means when you finally try to face the heavy stuff. I won’t give away the turn.

I also talk about that Modern Family scene where Gloria (Sophia Vergara), fed up, asks if anyone has any idea how smart she is in her own language. If you’ve ever been met as the translated version of yourself, you’ll feel it.

This one’s for Jules, who told me episode one made her want to make her own. Giulia — vai.

Make yourself a coffee. Or if you’re going to bed, a soothing chamomile. Press play.

— L. Buona notte.

Things I mention in this episode

* Ramírez-Esparza, N., et al. (2006). Do bilinguals have two personalities? A special case of cultural frame switching. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(2), 99–120.

* Caldwell-Harris, C. L. (2014). Emotionality differences between a native and foreign language. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1055.

* Dewaele, J.-M. (2004). The emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in the speech of multilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25(2–3), 204–222.

* Pavlenko, A. (2005). Emotions and Multilingualism. Cambridge University Press.

Here’s something I’ve never said out loud properly: my coffee order comes out wrong almost every time. Different city, different barista, Boston, Melbourne, here. Doesn’t matter and I was completely sure the problem was me. My energy. My face. Something I was doing wrong and couldn’t find.

Turns out the thing I’d been searching for was never on my side of the counter.

This is the first episode of the Nightnight at Laura’s… PODCAST! Lol, more a wannabe podcast really, but oh well. It’s also the first time I’ve put my actual voice out there instead of hiding behind the page, which, you know, is not a small thing. In Italian we say metterci la faccia: to put your face on it, to show up and let yourself be seen. I tried to avoid that my whole life. So, here we go.

This one is about accents, and being misheard, and the reason it keeps happening, with two pieces of research that explained it all. Maybe. I won’t spoil the turn. But maybe it makes sense for others like me, out there, who thought they were the ones doing everything wrong, when, in fact, they were not.

PS. It’s raw and real. It’s my first attempt. Please, be kind. I’ll get better, with practice.

Things I mention in this episode

If you want to go down the same rabbit hole I did:

* Donald Rubin (1992). Nonlanguage factors affecting undergraduates’ judgments of nonnative English-speaking teaching assistants. Research in Higher Education, 33(4), 511–531.

* Lev-Ari & Keysar (2010). Why don’t we believe non-native speakers? The influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093–1096.