Beyond the Page
A Wug-tonne of Advice: An Interview with Because Language Romany Amber and Kitty Liu, second-year Linguistics students at Cambridge, interview Daniel Midgley and Hedvig Skirgård from Because Language: a podcast about linguistics, the science of language. We get a rundown of the podcast, their thoughts on linguistics and social issues, and a tonne of advice for young linguists.
Q: Tell us who you are and describe the podcast for people who don’t know you.
D: My name is Daniel Midgley. I’m a linguist. I taught linguistics at the University of Western Australia and Edith Cowan University for many many years, and now I am a co-host on Because Language. I also do [other linguistics-related] gigs on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). I’m also a dad. I like listening to music and long walks on the beach. H: My name is Hedvig, I am from Sweden originally. I’ve been doing linguistics for quite a while now, [and have] just finished my PhD. I wrote my PhD thesis about Pacific languages and language diversification, in particular when it comes to grammar. I have an interdisciplinary leaning with my linguistics; I like to collaborate with people from cultural evolution, evolution of biology, and things like that. I also manage a project called Grambank[1] that will be released hopefully later this year. Outside of linguistics I like role-playing games, I like comics, I like to take lots of pictures of my cats.
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Because Language podcast site: http://becauselanguage.com Daniel’s site: https://danielmidgley.com/ Hedvig’s site: https://sites.google.com/site/hedvigskirgard/home
D: Not joining us is Ben Ainslie, our third member, whom we love dearly. He’s not here because he is doing some travelling, he’s taking a well-deserved pre-vacation. He’s a school teacher. He’s tremendously funny, tremendously smart, and this is exactly what he would say if he were here right now. Q: How did the podcast start?
D: It started about 2009, when my supervisor/mentor Alan Dench, professor at UWA (University of West Australia), offered me to take over his linguistics segment called Talk the Talk on RTR, a community radio station. It was a short segment with whoever happened to be in the studio that day, but over time I decided I would like to have more control over it and do it as a pre-recorded show with the DJ that I liked the best and had done the most shows with. That was Ben Ainslie. We did lots and lots of shows, the show grew on RTR community radio to about an hour-long show. And then —
