Lisa's Story — Accentricity

Sadie (voiceover): Before we begin, we wanted to let you know about some of the ways you can support Accentricity. We've recently asked the incredible artist Cat Ingall to design our first Accentricity t-shirts. If you’d like to get yourself one, you can find a link in the episode description where you’ll also find links to our Patreon and Steady subscription pages where you can pledge a small monthly donation. You can give one-off donations via the support the podcast page on the website. Thanks to our current supporters and past donations, we've been able to run the Moving Project without any additional funding and at no cost to the participants. We'd like to keep doing things like this in the future and your support will help us to do so.

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Sadie (voiceover): This is Accentricity Series Two: The Moving Project. Stories about migration, language, and identity from around the world.

Over the past year we've been teaching a free online course on how to podcast and helping a group of people to tell personal stories about the experience of moving from one place to another. This is Lisa’s story.

Lisa moved from Hamburg, in Germany, to Bamberg, which is also in Germany, but is in many ways a million miles away. It was a migration that happened to her, rather than one that she sought out and she had to negotiate cultural differences and linguistic differences, as well as the challenges of being separated from the people and places she knew. First, you’ll hear Lisa’s 10-minute audio piece in which she focuses in on some of the regional linguistic differences between Hamburg and Bamberg, as a way of telling her migration story. Afterwards, you’ll hear a conversation we had shortly after she finished it, where we talk a bit about temporary migration, the compulsory mobility that’s built into certain careers, and the affect that has on people’s lives. And very excitingly, she’ll also tell you about her own podcasting plans for the future. But first, here’s her audio piece.

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Lisa (voiceover): Hi everyone. I’m Lisa and I’m going to tell you a story about moving across Germany, home, and different regional ways of greeting someone in German.

In the spring of 2017, I was working at the University of Hamburg in Northern Germany, and I had just started my PhD in linguistics. Then one day my boss told me that she had found another job at a different university in a city called Bamberg, or in German [German pronunciation] Bamberg. She said that she would love to take me and my colleagues with her and that I should think about moving with her. To Bamberg. To the other side of the country. The news came as a shock.

At this point in time, I had been living in Hamburg since I had started my bachelor’s degree more than seven years before. Most of my friends lived there. My family was close by. I had also lived in northern Germany all my life and to be honest I had not planned on living anywhere else ever. Also, I didn’t know the first thing about this new city Bamberg. Well, I had heard the name before and I figured it had to be somewhere in Bavaria, so southern Germany. And that probably meant it was quite Catholic, so like the opposite of Hamburg. Doing a little research didn’t help all that much with calming my nerves. Bamberg’s a small city, supposedly very beautiful, but still four and a half hours by train to see my friends, and at least five and a half hours to see my family. After a lot of thinking, I did decide to move to Bamberg but from the moment I had made that decision my anxiety started to build. Would I like living in smallish Bavarian city? How could I possibly fit in there? And I wasn’t alone with my concerns.

Nele: I remember I thought it’s kind of unfitting.

Lisa (voiceover): That’s one of my oldest friends Nele, recalling what she thought when I told her the news.

Nele: I don’t know, you just belong to Hamburg. You’ve lived there for so long and it really suited you. Like it was just a much better fit. And I couldn’t really imagine you going to Bavaria. And on to such a small town where there’s not this huge cultural scene and all the stuff that you enjoy.

Lisa (voiceover): One of my biggest concerns was the language barrier. Bavarians are known to be very proud of their heritage and their dialect. Would I be able to understand the people in Bamberg? And would they be able to understand me? It’s not like I speak and have a dialect all the time. In fact, I am not even a competent speaker of Lower German, which is the regional variety of northern Germany but still my language gives me away. I’m decidedly northern, you can ask anyone, and I was afraid that I would be ridiculed for it.

To give you a bit of context, the different regional dialects of Germany are quite different from one another. If someone is a speaker of say the Saxonian dialect of eastern Germany, they will have a really hard time understanding someone talking in Swabian or Bavarian. As a rule of thumb, the farther south you go in Germany the more people are fluent in a dialect.

Vincenz: The standard has widely eliminated dialect in most parts of northern Germany.

Lisa (voiceover): That was Dr Vincenz Schwab. He’s a former co-worker of mine who now works at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and as a Bavarian himself, he knows a bit more about Bavaria’s relationship to its dialect.

Vincenz: For example, old dialects of the Berlin region or the Ruhr area are retreating and there are only traces of the regiolect with it there right now. Whereas in most parts of southern Germany, lots of speakers tend to use their dialect in everyday conversation. It’s widely accepted to speak dialect in different occasions. You can even use a dialect at work or use slang, use some dialect terms and phrases as well. That’s kind of specific for the Bavarian or southern German region.

Lisa (voiceover): It is even used in the Bavarian Parliament like it’s no big deal. It’s part of their brand so to say. Even though a lot of Germans do not speak a dialect, you can pretty much always figure out where someone is from by the greetings they use. In an introductory German class, you would probably learn that the standard formal way of greeting someone hello is guten Tag, which translates to good day. The informal standard way is hallo, which corresponds nicely with the English hello. For goodbye you can use either the formal auf wiedersehen or the informal tschüss. In addition, there are a lot of regional ways of greeting someone.

Vincenz: It works like an identifier. The first time we met I can remember the first thing you said was moin. Didn’t need a lot of time to identify where you come from. Southern parts would tend to greet themselves by saying servus.

Lise (voiceover): And then there’s also grüß Gott, which is a very popular way of greeting someone in southern Germany. This translates to “may God greet you.” And I have to admit, that somehow makes me feel a bit uncomfortable. Granted, it is not the only German greeting that has religious roots.

Vincenz: Talking about tchüss, and nobody is aware of what it actually means, as the etymology leads us to the same result as vor ade. It means ad Deum, the French adieu, and that is the same as grüss Gott, so it means to god.

Lisa (voiceover): Even though I get that both tchüss and grüss Gott are etymologically religious greetings, I still feel grüss Gott is way more on the noise. But then again, as someone from northern Germany I have also not spent years and years and years of saying grüss Gott dozens of times every day. If you say something as often as hello it kind of automatically loses all its lexical meaning.

Vincenz: It’s a part of the identity here. If you hear people greeting their selves by grüss Gott, you know they come from southern parts of Germany. That’s a typical Bavarian thing and if you don’t use it, it even shows that you don’t identify with this part of the culture here.

Lisa (voiceover): Thankfully when I came to Bamberg, the language barrier did not in fact present itself as the huge problem I had feared it would be. It turns out when you work at a university in a relatively small city, most people you come in contact with are not actually from there. Lots of people who work at the university are originally from somewhere else just like me. The students of course are from all over Germany, or rather, all over the world and even the locals who work at the university don’t use the dialect at work. Maybe an educational facility like a university just does not feel like the right place for a dialect.

Also fortunately, no one is taunting me for the way I speak, at least not to my face. But they definitely do pick up on my way of talking. Sometimes my landlord or co-worker will comment on some particularly northern words I use but in general, they seem to find it rather charming, thank goodness. But even outside of work I have not found the dialect to be as widely used as I had imagined, except for one thing: the greetings. I’m still very confused when people actually say grüss Gott to me even though I was prepared for this. But I did not anticipate that Bamberg also has a hyper local way of saying goodbye: adela.

Vincenz: You would never say this anywhere else in Germany and it’s typical of this Franconian region. It is a variation of ade. Ade is not only Franconian, it’s in south west Germany a very common form as in for example the Allgäu region. Everybody would use ade.

Lisa (voiceover): But the people in Bamberg don’t say ade, they say adela. The la ending is very typical for the city and the surrounding area. It is what we call a diminutive: it makes a word smaller or cuter. For example, a bag would be Sack and a small bag would be Sackla. And so adela is a small goodbye so to say. It is a fun, endearing quirk of the Bambergians that they even try to make their goodbye cuter. It makes the farewell seem not as long and not as bad as a short tchüss can make it seem. Adela is also an immediate identifier of where you come from, and it fits well with what I have learned about the town and the people so far. Traditional, down to earth, approachable, loveable. But it is also a reminder that I can never be one of them. Out my northern mouth, adela does not seem half as cute, not as earnest. It is a reminder to me that I only live here temporarily and that that is fine.

As of today, I have been living in Bamberg for more than three years. It is still very hard for me to be so far away from my friends and family. I still miss living in a big city. Right now I’m working on finishing my PhD. I hope it will be done sometime in 2021 and maybe then I will be able to move back north to my family, my friends. To a place where people talk like me. To a place where people say moin.

Thank you all for listening to my story, to Vincenz Schwab from the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities for taking the time to talk with me, and to Nele for remembering her reactions. Tchüss.

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Lisa (to Sadie): I have moved for work, and I work at a university. I don’t know if the listeners are aware but working at the university is always very, very short term. I’ve moved here to Bamberg for a particular job. Now I’ve got a different job at the same university but still it will be maximum one and a half years more here and then hopefully I will be able to move back.

Sadie: So the temporary nature of that move, does that make it different do you think from if you were moving for good?

Lisa: I guess so, yeah. Because I think now that I’m thinking short term, I think I’m not getting as involved with the community here as I could. I am really not that good with doing that anyway. It takes me a long time to get somewhere and really start getting involved but now that I know that I’m moving back anyway at some point, I’m more reluctant than I would have been anyway. That of course ties in with using my language down here and with people who come from here and you don’t just work at the same place I work, yeah.

Sadie: I can definitely relate to this I think, this feeling of how do you put roots down in a place when you know that you’re not going to be there for very long? Are there any ways that you’ve put down roots in Bamberg?

Lisa: Well, I’ve made a few friends here so that’s great, but I have not joined any clubs or anything outside of university really. No, I have to say I’ve not really put down roots here yet. No but that’s also because I moved here with a good friend and co-worker of mine, so I always had someone from back home with me as my support system here. I didn’t really have to look for someone here, for people to be my friends here because I always had people from back home.

Sadie: And are they still in -- are they still with you, your moving buddy?

Lisa: No. She moved back actually in 2020 because she was living with me but also with her boyfriend in Hamburg. She got back at the end of the winter semester last year and she never came back because of Corona. --

Sadie: -- Of course.

Lisa: -- And then she found a job and finished her PhD earlier than expected. So now I’m all alone here.

Sadie: Oh no. And how’s that been during Covid? Because that’s one thing that for me -- so I moved to Manchester in February and I thought okay I’m moving to a new place, I’m going to get out there, I’m going to meet people, I’m going to see the city. And then almost immediately we [laughs] had a pandemic. I think I have found it really difficult being unable to visit. The plan was that I was going to be able to go and see my friends and family and now for one thing, there’s no point in me being in Manchester because I’m working online. [laughs] And for another thing, we’re not able to go see people. How are you finding that?

Lisa: Well, I thank goodness every day for the internet and for the great internet I have. Because all day every day I’m Skyping with my friends in Hamburg who are working at universities. Right now, there’s some people at a university in Hamburg and another friend in Stuttgart, the university. Every morning we get together and talk about our plans for the day. So I’m keeping in touch with people and I’m so grateful because otherwise I would not have been able to get any work done in 2020. I’m pretty sure of that. Thankfully for the most part of last year I was able to meet with a friend who’s from a neighbouring town here. We would eat outside or take a walk and have a coffee so I could meet someone in real life every week. That was great.

Sadie: I wondered what you thought about -- because you were saying jobs -- university jobs but I think a lot of jobs for our age group in different fields are getting more temporary and it’s more common to have a series of temporary contracts rather than a permanent job. It’s also pretty common to be asked to move for work. I love my job, I should be clear about that, I absolutely love my job and I was willing to move for this job because I knew it was the job for me, but I sometimes feel a little bit resentful that there’s such an expectation that you will just move for work and that your personal life isn’t going to matter.

So you talked about there your friend living in Bamberg but having -- also living with her boyfriend really, really far away. For other people you would have to be moving children as well and maybe moving a partner who has a career as well.

Lisa: Yeah. Actually, another friend and co-worker of ours was living with her husband in Hamburg and she decided she couldn’t afford a second apartment. So she would take the train for four and a half hours every week to get down here and sleep on our couch two nights a week and drive back. Then she got pregnant, and she did that until she was in her 8th month.

Sadie: Wow.

Lisa: Thankfully she now has a different job and could afford not to come down here to Bavaria every week but that was very hard.

Sadie: Yeah. It’s something that I sometimes feel a little bit resentful about and I wondered if -- was there ever a point where you thought about not leaving Hamburg?

Lisa: Yeah. I thought about that but really, I did not see any alternatives, as stupid as that may sound. I had just started my PhD and I was all set and ready to go and really motivated. I was like okay, my boss is going to Bavaria, she’s taking my job and my data and my employment and everything I need for that job with her. I really didn’t know what else to do. I had not lined up another job and at that point didn’t know what I wanted to do apart from doing a PhD. I really didn’t see a choice there, I guess.

Sadie: Mm.

Lisa: And at that point I had a boyfriend who was living in the north western end of Germany, so that was three and a half hours away from Hamburg in a different direction actually.

Sadie: Oh my goodness. So before you moved you already had a long-distance relationship?

Lisa: Yeah.

Sadie: So this just made the distance even further?

Lisa: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Sadie: Wow. So that must have been really difficult?

Lisa: Yeah, it was, it was. And it didn’t work out in the end.

Sadie: Do you think the distance had anything to do with that or was just growing up and moving on?

Lisa: Well, it didn’t help.

Sadie: Mm-hmm.

Lisa: Even though in the beginning I wasn’t teaching so I was able to spend a whole week somewhere else and then come back here for a week. Which I would not have been able to do in 2019 but when I first came here it was possible.

Sadie: Do you feel like there ever is a tension for you between -- I just don’t think there should be a tension between choosing your personal life and work. But do you think there ever is for you?

Lisa: Yeah. The rules for academic employment in Germany are quite strict. There is this thing where you’re only allowed to be employed six years while you’re doing your PhD and after that you’re only allowed to work on a project -- on projects but not directly at the university. Once you get your PhD you get six years to get a tenure professorship and if you don’t, you’re out. So that’s another factor and that is kind of the reason why I decided that I will probably will not stay in academia because postdoc positions are usually for one year, or one and a half, or maybe two if you’re lucky. And then you have to move like three, four, five times in the span of six years and at the end of six years they say goodbye, now find another career altogether. And I’m not willing to take that risk.

Sadie: I really wish that we lived in a world where you could just follow the things that you’re interested in without having to -- without having to adopt a particular lifestyle to suit that. I have friends with all kinds of different jobs who have similar experiences, but I think there are quite a lot of careers where you really have to buy into a lifestyle in order to follow it. Even if you would quite like to be someone who just -- oh I just study language but also work a 9-5 and see my friends at weekends. [laughs]

Lisa: Yeah, in particular because I work directly for the state and it’s not like the need for my job to be done is going away any time soon. It’s not seasonal employment. There really is no reason for my contract to be that short. There isn’t. When I’m done, they will just get someone new off the rack and then I will be gone with my years of experience. Someone completely new will have to do my job and once they’re all worked in and know what they’re doing, they will leave again and someone entirely new with no work experience at all is going to come in. That’s just not tenable in my opinion. I think we’re doing a disservice to the students there, but the students mostly don’t know about the way it works in academia. Thank goodness. I didn’t know about it until I started working in academia actually.

Sadie: And unfortunately, I don’t think I necessarily see the temporary contracts -- the proliferation of temporary contracts in academia and elsewhere going away anytime soon. Because I think it works out quite well for employers higher up the chain. --

Lisa: -- Oh yeah.

Sadie: -- In that it means we’re constantly on our toes and thinking about ways to make sure that we get another job after this one. But I do wonder if the expectation for you to move around for work might change now that we have proved how much we’re able to work remotely during Covid.

Lisa: I think that might depend on the teaching load and if they want people to teach in person. A friend of mine just got the temporary job at a university for the next 12 months and with she was explicitly told that she does not have to move to the place, she doesn’t even have to come there. Well, I guess once or twice but that’s all. That’s great.

Sadie: I know some people say it’s really bad for their mental health to be working from home and not seeing people every day. Personally, I think it’s been great for mine. Obviously, the pandemic has not but not having to commute has been fantastic.

Lisa: Oh yeah.

Sadie: I actually currently live in a place very, very close to my workplace but in -- so I -- it would have been -- yeah it would have worked out really well but in Glasgow I was commuting quite far into work, and it was just really exhausting so I don’t miss that. [laughs]

Lisa: Yeah. At the beginning I was missing my commute a bit. It’s only 12 minutes on foot because Bamberg is a small town, you can get anywhere really fast. The office I had before that is just across the street. But when covid hit and I was able to work from home, I was really missing that commute because it’s also time to power down and to really get your head clear from all the work stuff. When you get home and once you close the door behind you, you’re home and it’s fire armed as we call it in German. That’s just the time after work, the time that’s just for you. And now I don’t have that anymore because I’m working in my home, there’s no door to close. So I have to figure out how to make a different kind of commute for myself from one room to another or something like that.

Sadie: [laughs] It’s tricky.

Lisa: With my roommate moving I was able to for the first time have a -- I really do have an office in my home. I make a point of actually commuting from my office to the kitchen or to the living room at the end of the day.

Sadie: At least then there’s some kind of door you can close --

Lisa: -- Yeah.

Sadie: -- even if it’s an internal one.

Lisa: Mm-hmm.

Sadie: I sometimes think about -- try to imagine -- when I’m looking at the expectations of people of our age group in terms of working and moving, I sometimes try and imagine who this ideal person is. I suppose someone with no social life, someone with no ties, who’s happy to just -- who puts their career above everything and is happy to just pick up their belongings and go. And then it got me thinking about there’s a cultural idea I think of rootlessness as being this aspirational thing. If you think about kind of like Instagram influencers it’s kind of like yeah, I’m a globetrotter. One day I’m in Paris, the next day I’m in Tokyo, who even knows where I actually live. [laughs] I think that just more and more if I’m being honest -- like at points in my life I might have been like yeah, who knows where I’m going to live when I’m older, I don’t even care. But if I’m honest being rooted in a community is actually quite important to me. Maybe that’s quite uncool but I think that I want to have a place that is a physical, geographical place that is my home. I wondered for you is that -- is that something you feel you’re looking for longer term or are you happy to keep moving from place to place? Or do you already know exactly where home is?

Lisa: That’s definitely what I’m looking for. That’s one of the reasons why I definitely plan on moving back north to Hamburg. That would be ideal because that’s where my friends live. Well, they live there now, who knows where they’re going to work next year but right now, that would be ideal. Or somewhere near there just because everyone I know basically and everyone I like lives there. Most of the people, yeah.

Yeah, but I see what you mean, and I think there’s two sides to this. I think on the one hand there’s this romanticized notion of that lifestyle and living everywhere at once but on the other hand, from what I’ve gathered, within academia at least, that is a thing. That expectation really works well for men but really not that well for women because we are all expected to move anywhere. I think it’s really suited for married men actually because there’s the expectation that their spouses will just pack up and move with them. --

Sadie: -- Yeah like married men.

Lisa: -- But with unmarried women it’s all like who knows when you’re going to find a spouse and want to settle down. And then who knows if you’re going to get pregnant at some point and won’t be able to move around so much and that’s really -- it feels really conservative while looking very progressive on the surface.

Sadie: I think you’re terrifyingly right. It’s really true and I think that -- yeah so, I’m talking about this ideal person, so I guess I mean an ideal version of myself, like how could I? But actually, the ideal person is probably a straight white man in the past or in a very conservative -- yeah, I’ve noticed in recent years a lot of younger women leaving academia much more so and that’s a little bit of a worry, I think. I do worry that at some point academia might just be three men. [laughs] Working out how things work together. Three rich, white men.

Lisa: Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Sadie: I do. I hope not.

Lisa: Thankfully I know of some people who are not rich, old, white dudes who have got permanent positions.

Sadie: Yup there are still some of us hanging in there. [laughs] But you’re absolutely right. I think that there’s -- the expectation of rootlessness makes certain assumptions about who you are and your position in society, and it does assume a kind of privilege. But do you feel that Hamburg is your home and it’s the place that you’ll return -- it’s the place where your roots are?

Lisa: Let’s say north western Germany more broadly, maybe. My home home is not Hamburg, but Hamburg has become my home so to say. So let’s say anywhere between Hamburg and let’s say Bremen, I would consider home, but I think it would be easy for me to settle down anywhere between there, between those places.

Sadie: Is Bremen your hometown?

Lisa: Not even actually that but it’s the next biggest town from the village where my parents live.

Sadie: And does that --

Lisa: -- It’s like 40 kilometres.

Sadie: Oh, that’s quite far. Does the village still feel like home to you in some sense? Do you feel like you have a home in Hamburg, and you have a home there?

Lisa: In a way. Like of course that’s where my family is, that’s where I’m from but none of my friends are there still because everyone went to the big city to get jobs. Some people are returning but really not that many. Quite often when you’re from a small village your friends are not from that small village but from small villages from radius of 20-30 kilometres around it. It’s really not -- well my support system in so far as my family is there of course but the rest of my community not so much, I guess. That has become Hamburg. My parents have accepted that actually quite a few years ago. [laughs] They weren’t happy about that, but they were like yeah okay, we kind of think you’re not coming back.

Sadie: Did they want you come back initially when you were younger?

Lisa: I think so. I think that’s just what all parents want, right? When the children leave the nest, at first, they -- well at first, they’re probably a bit happy to have some alone time and then of course they miss their children and hope that sometime they’re coming back. But well, no they’ve accepted that. There’s really not that much for me in my old village I guess because I used to love going to concerts for example. To do all kinds of cultural stuff and there’s just nothing of that sort where I come from. That’s not a thing that happens in small towns really. And well Hamburg is heaven in that regard. I remember moving there and I could not believe that there were several alternative indie concerts at the same evening, and they were both sold out. That was crazy to me.

Sadie: Because I guess in a way you’ve had -- have you had two big migrations in your life? The first one to Hamburg and the second to Bamberg. How do they compare, those two experiences?

Lisa: Oh, they’re really, really different because when I migrated to Hamburg, at first, I came home every weekend. It was the first time that I left home and I -- well I did the typical college student stuff. I brought my dirty laundry home every weekend and was glad that my mother and father cooked for me. Well mostly my father on the weekends. Most of my friends actually hadn’t left for university yet, only very few and a lot of them were still home, so I was able to meet them when I came back home on the weekends. The ties between my home village and Hamburg were stronger in that time and now that I’ve moved so far away it’s really hard to keep in contact with anyone from my old life. Except for my roommate who is -- well who has left now but who I’m talking to quite regularly actually so that’s nice.

Moving from Hamburg to Bamberg was a much bigger break, even though the first move was -- it was more -- it felt more monumental in a way because it was the first move, and it was my first time living alone and all that. I’m quite accustomed to living alone by now but it’s weird to -- it’s different living alone when you have a community around you and living alone when there’s no community around you to support you or at least not that big of a community. It’s not like I don’t know anyone here and if I needed help I would get it I’m pretty sure but it’s still quite different, yeah. But it gave lots of my friends a good reason to do a little vacation in Bavaria there, so that was nice.

Sadie: And you’re absolutely right: thank god for the internet. This whole pandemic would have been an entirely different proposition. I know for a lot of people it is because obviously a lot of people don’t have -- don’t have good -- don’t have internet connection or don’t have good internet connection and just don’t have that technology. It must be an absolute nightmare.

Lisa: Oh yeah.

Sadie: Yeah, I just can’t imagine being -- feeling that cut off from everybody.

Lisa: Oh yeah. Actually, in a weird way I’ve gotten closer to a lot of people during Covid because it’s so easy to get in contact now. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were all panicked to keep in touch with everyone because we were all fearing we would lose contact with everyone. Going into isolation that’s how we -- how and why we set up the daily Skype meeting. But also, I’m scheduling phone calls with my friends way more often and more rigorously, I guess. Every few weeks I go through and think who haven’t I talked to in the last two weeks. That would not have happened otherwise I think, or it didn’t happen in my life at least. I’m actually quite thankful for that now

Sadie: You’re absolutely right. I think I’ve become a bit of a better digital friend during Covid, and I think that digital friends -- my digital communities have definitely grown stronger than they used to be. That’s been one thing that’s been really nice.

Lisa: Yeah, I’ve always been really bad with reaching out to people for no particular reason, if you know what I mean. If there wasn’t a reason to call someone or to text someone, I always felt kind of stupid because I don’t know. It’s always weird when someone texts you like “hi, how are you?” and you’re like okay “hi, how are you?” and then that’s that.

Sadie: Yeah, do you have any news? No, because nothing’s happened --

Lisa: Yeah --

Sadie: -- because there’s a pandemic.

Lisa: Yeah, but during Covid I think that’s -- we’ve all -- we’re all making more of an effort and I see that in myself and I’m really glad about that. I’m getting to be a better friend through Covid which is a really weird thing to say but I think it’s true.

Sadie: No that’s great, yeah. I think I feel the same and it’s been -- it’s been nice to go through that, that particular change.

One other thing I wanted to -- well I wanted to chat to you about podcasting a bit in general. So we absolutely loved the way that you tell your story in your podcast episode.

Lisa: Thanks.

Sadie: We thought it was so, so warm and so much of your personality in it but also you incorporate lexicography and really -- as a really interesting part of your story. I can’t remember if I said this to you before but when you first pitched the idea [laughs] well John -- I was like lexicography and John was like is that going to be interesting? And it really, really is. Because you made it interesting --

Lisa: -- Yeah, he said that to me in one of the last meetings.

Sadie: Yeah, he was like is this? I’m not sure. But it has -- it obviously has worked really, really well. I know that you’re interested in science communication. I think that really shows in your piece.

Lisa: I’ve gotten a bit of -- I think and hope I’ve gotten quite good at making core linguistics topics interesting to people who are not that into linguistics because I’ve been writing a blog with a friend of mine for I think the last four years. Oh, I think it’s turning five this year which is really weird thing somehow. We’ve been writing this linguistics blog for lay people for the last five years apparently. And thank god over those years I have picked up some skills, I guess.

Sadie: I think one of the things that was -- I thought was particularly successful in this episode that you made is the way that you link the science of lexicography to the human element and the human experience in a way that works really, really well. I don’t know, I thought it was just a really clever piece of storytelling. The fact that you’ve been blogging about language for a non-specialist audience for so long I’m sure has really -- has taught you quite a lot about how to communicate things.

Lisa: But I still made the same mistakes at first because I always start way too big. My co-writer always has to say nah, that’s too many things at once, just pick one thing. Or yeah, I know this tangent is interesting to you, but it really reads like a tangent, don’t put that in here.

Sadie: I’m the same though, I always start way too big. I think that’s the instinct that I’m always fighting against. Are you going to be continuing with podcasting?

Lisa: Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Sadie: Yeah.

Lisa: I have actually been talking to different friends about that for the past two or three years, I think. I’ve always planned on having my own linguistics podcast since there really aren’t that many linguistics or language podcasts in German. There are a few and half of those are very new and I’ve always seen a niche there for me to slide into. This year finally is going to be the year. If I can’t visit with friends and go to concerts, now’s the time to really start that podcast to fulfil a cliché here.

Sadie: Yes. No, you’re absolutely right. And yeah, it is -- certainly there have been a lot of podcasts popping up. It’s going to be a question of which ones endure but -- and who still has the energy for it post-pandemic. I think that -- I don’t know, I’ve loved podcasting during the pandemic because it just is such a great way to feel connected to the world and to other people and to sort of incorporate interesting conversations into your day. I love that.

Lisa: I really think knowing about language and linguistics is so important for people who are not in academia and very few people realise that. Like it’s so important for policy making and all the different things but people just don’t know because they aren’t getting taught at school. At school they’re getting taught a bit of rhethorics and then how to write properly. Nobody tells them why and that all -- well you have to write this way otherwise it’s bad, which is really not true from an academic standpoint. I’m really against that. It’s really hard to change people’s minds afterwards and that’s why I think it’s really important to do a lot of linguistics communication and to find a way in and to change people’s minds there.

Sadie: Language is just such a -- such a huge part of who we are, isn’t it?

Lisa: Yeah, and it’s so interesting.

Sadie: I do think it’s something that pretty much everybody’s interested in. I think if you were to do a graph of the number of people who have some kind of interest in language and the number of people who think they’re interested in linguistics, there would be a huge disparity there because so many people if you said the word linguistics to them would be like ugh nah. If you talked about studying language, they would assume that it was going it be -- that the study of language would like “i before e except after c” or some kind of weird spelling or grammar rules that you get taught in school. But actually, when you talk to people about the way humans speak to each other it’s something most people are interested in in some capacity. Even if it’s just to be like I like that accent and I don’t like the way these people speak or…? It’s still an interest and I think you’re totally right. I think the communication -- and it’s so much to do with social justice as well.

Lisa: Oh totally. Like the work you do with the accents, especially, and the multilingualism. When people talk about language stuff here in Germany, in the public it’s always about oh so and so many kids don’t speak German at home, that’s terrible. I’m like no, that’s not just totally fine, that’s actually great. We love it. Just give us more multilingual kids. Why not? But people don’t understand the science behind it and so they’re maybe afraid I guess of what might happen. That would be a way -- that would be a point where it would be important to tell people what’s really going on.

Sadie: Absolutely. Language policy has a huge, huge effect on people’s lives and yeah, linguistics isn’t just for linguists, I think.

Lisa: Yeah.

Sadie: And it doesn’t belong in textbooks, it belongs in the world. I mean it does belong in textbooks too. [laughs]

Lisa: Actually, I would love for there to be way more linguistics in textbooks. In Germany, all the German textbooks are literature basically.

Sadie: Okay, I didn’t realise that.

Lisa: There’s really not that much grammar involved at all.

Sadie: Ah, very interesting. And always written language gets put above spoken language, doesn’t it? Which I know it happens for a reason but…

Lisa: It’s so funny in a way because orthography is the only part of the language that really has rules. Well, of course everything about a language has rules but rules that can be sanctioned. Like there is a certain way you have to write and that is right and that’s wrong, and nothing else about language works that way. Nothing. Not the way we sound or talk or the way we put a sentence together in spoken language, that’s really not it.

What I really loved about learning about linguistics the first time is it’s like looking behind the curtain of language and now finally you understand why you say that thing. Even the realisation that there can be a reason why you use language a certain way was an epiphany for me back then. I told everyone who wanted to know and everyone else as well and everyone like okay, calm down. But that was just because they didn’t know that there really is a scientific reason why you put the words and the sentence and the order you do, and why we all make the same mistakes when we learn a new language or when we learn how to write. Even if you are a bad speller there’s reason why you’re a bad speller and it’s not because you’re not as intelligent but because you’re just using different rules.

Sadie: Absolutely. I think that learning about language has made me understand myself better. It’s made me understand other people better, the relationships between other people and society, culture, my community. Like --

Lisa: -- It makes me way more tolerant.

Sadie: -- Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody should do it but not everybody should have to be reading lots of textbooks and doing courses to do it, which is why linguistics podcasts are great. [laughs] But obviously if people want to do courses or read textbooks then, yeah, I’m not bad-mouthing textbooks, I’m just saying… [laughs]

What is your podcast going to -- have you got ideas about -- have you got a name for it? Have you got thoughts about what you’re going to cover?

Lisa: Oh yeah. The name is going to be Ausgeshcrieben, that’s a German verb. It’s past participle of ausschreiben, that’s to write down and to write it all down. Basically, if you had an abbreviation and then you would write the whole word. I don’t know if there’s -- is there a verb for that in English?

Sadie: There are so many verbs in German that we don’t have an English equivalent for. You guys have so many more -- I don’t know, I’m sure there are ones that go the other way where we have a word in English and there’s not one in German, but I don’t know of any.

Lisa: Okay, yeah.

Sadie: I don’t think we do. Kind of like extending…

Lisa: Like when you would not write UK but United Kingdom and is there a way to tell someone no, don’t write UK just write the whole thing? Is there a way to say that?

Sadie: You’d maybe say longhand rather than shorthand but yeah, I don’t think there really is. I think --

Lisa: -- Okay.

Sadie: -- I think you guys have that one.

Lisa: Ha! Alright yeah. So that’s the name of the podcast and my plan is to explain the way we write today through language history. Through the history of German because German is such an old language, and the writing system is so old that there are fossils to be found in todays writing. It’s kind of like in English, you know how you never know how to write a word, an English word, you haven’t seen before. It’s really hard to know how to write a word and especially in England it’s really hard to know how to pronounce a word if you see it written down. Especially with place names because they are so old that the rules for writing stuff down were so different back then.

A lot of stuff is enshrined in the way we write today, and I want to have a look and find a few of those fossils. To explain to people, for example, I want to look into the way we use upper-case letters in German. You probably know that we use a lot of upper-case letters for every noun for example. That’s actually the topic of my PhD, to figure out the way the upper-case letters emerged and how they spread. There are good reasons why we do that today. Or the way we use -- we write long vowels and short vowels, how we signal that. There are reasons for that and -- or where the Eszett (ß) comes from. That weird letter we have in German that is the ‘ss’ sound. I don’t know if you’ve seen -- looks like the beta, like the Greek… --

Sadie: -- Yes. Yeah, I do know it yeah.

Lisa: -- letter. Beta. Yeah. This has a fun origin story and stuff like that. Why nobody knows how to pronounce my name is going to be in there. Because German speakers -- I’ve never met a German speaker who pronounced it right on the first try because it’s one of those things where the consonants signal that the vowel’s going to be short but it’s not.

Sadie: Okay.

Lisa: And there’s reason for that. --

Sadie: -- That’s really exciting.

Lisa: -- And I’m really excited just talking about talking about it.

***

Sadie (voiceover): A million thank yous to Lisa for telling her story in such a dynamic, fun, and engaging way. We’re really excited to be part of the story of how she started podcasting.

Thanks as always to the Accentricity team: John McDiarmid and Martha Ryan, to Seb Philp for the music, and Aileen Marshall for the transcription. Remember to follow the links in the episode description to buy a t-shirt, to become a member on Patreon or Steady, or to make a one-off donation. Thanks for listening.