Episode 73: The linguistic map is not the linguistic territory (Patreon)

Maps of languages of the world are fun to look at, but they’re also  often suspiciously precise: a suspiciously round number of languages,  like 7000, mapped to dots or coloured zones with suspiciously exact and  un-overlapping locations. And yet, if you’ve ever eavesdropped on people  on public transit, you know that any given location often plays host to  many linguistic varieties at once.

In this episode, your hosts  Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about the  complications that come with trying to map languages and dialects. We  talk about the history of how people have tried to map out linguistic  varieties, and how geopolitical factors like war, colonialism,  migration, education, and nationalism influence which languages are  considered to exist and where, in the context of Inuktitut,  French, BANZSL (British, Australian, and New Zealand Sign Languages),  and the Faroe Islands. We also talk about sprachbunds, aka how languages  and dialects are more like gradients of colour rather than patchwork  pieces.

This episode was updated with a corrected definition of sprachbund [14:54 - 16:08] on 23/10/2022.

Read the transcript here.

Announcements:

November  is our anniversary month and this year we’re celebrating 6 months of  Lingthusiasm! We invite you to celebrate with us by sharing your  favourite Lingthusiasm episode by sharing a link to your favourite  episode, or just sharing your lingthusiasm. Most people still find  podcasts through word of mouth, and lots of them don’t yet realise that  they could have a fun linguistics chat in their ears every month (or  eyes, all Lingthusiasm episodes have transcripts!). If you share  Lingthusiasm on social media, tag us so we can reply, and if you share  in private, we won’t know but you can feel a warm glow of satisfaction -  or feel free to tell us about it on social media if you want to be  thanked!

We're also doing a listener survey for the first time! This is your chance to tell us about what you're  enjoying about Lingthusiasm so far, and what else we could be doing in  the future - and your chance to suggest topics! And we couldn’t resist  the opportunity to add a few linguistic experiments in there as well,  which we’ll be sharing the results of next year. We might even write up a  paper about the survey one day, so we have ethics board approval from  La Trobe University for this survey. Take the survey here!

Links mentioned in this episode available here.