Click here to listen to ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are’
On Lingthusiasm, we’ve sometimes compared the human vocal tract to a giant meat clarinet, like the vocal folds are the reed and the rest of the throat and mouth is the body of the instrument that shapes the sound in various ways. However, when it comes to talking more precisely about vowels, we need an instrument with a greater degree of flexibility, one that can produce several sounds at the same time which combine into what we perceive as a vowel. Behold, our latest, greatest metaphor (we’re so sorry)… the meat bagpipe!
In this episode, your hosts Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne get enthusiastic about what visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are. We commissioned Dr. Bethany Gardner to make custom vowel plots for us (which you can see below!) based on how we say certain words during Lingthusiasm episodes, and we talk about how our personal vowel plots let us easily see differences between our Canadian and Australian accents and between when we’re carefully reading a wordlist versus more casually talking on the show. We also talk about where the two numbers per vowel that we graph come from (hint: that’s where the bagpipe comes in), the delightfully wacky keywords used to compare vowels across English varieties (leading us to silly names for real phenomena, like “goose fronting”), and how vowel spaces are linked to other aspects of our identities including regional variation as well as gender and sexuality.
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In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about making visual maps of our own vowel spaces with Dr. Bethany Gardner. We talk about Bethany's PhD research on how people learn how to produce and comprehend singular "they", how putting pronouns in bios or nametags makes it easier for people to use them consistently, and how the massive amounts of data they were wrangling as a result of this led them to become good at making all sorts of graphs.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds.
The Lingthusiasm Vowel Plots:
Here are the links mentioned in the episode:
See larger versions of our vowel plots on Bethany's Github, which also contains a tutorial on making your own if you're excited about an intermediate-level coding project
Previously on vowels: Lingthusiasm episode 'Vowel Gymnastics'
Previously on visualizing sounds: Lingthusiasm episode 'Making speech visible with spectrograms'
Previously on "meat clarinet": Lingthusiasm episode 'Various vocal fold vibes'
Make your own bagpipe! - 'The World's Greatest Latex Glove Bagpipes || DIY' from World By Charlie on YouTube
A Voder in action - 'VODER (1939) - Early Speech Synthesizer' from VintageCG on YouTube
Australian kit/fleece vowel (Wikipedia entry on Australian English phonology)
'Australian English Monophthongs' by Robert Mannell and Felicity Cox
'The influence of sexual orientation on vowel production (L)' by Janet B. Pierrehumbert et al.
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Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Here’s the link again to ‘What visualizing our vowels tells us about who we are’
Thanks for listening, and stay Lingthusiastic!
Lauren & Gretchen