that process is going to have to take a very long time whereas other cultural practices can come and go much more fluidly and they only affect some portions of the popular but how far do you extrapolate from that relationship the fact that english and to some extent russian and both adding to their quick to assign blame or responsibility doesn't have anything to do with the incarceration rates in the united states and then russia being among the world's highest it's really hard to draw a straight line from language to a statistic like that because there are so many other factors that also all play and so we would have to do a very careful study trying to or a lot of is that even possible do you think you can design a study like to prove that connection the reason it would be hard to do in the real world is because if we're going country by country there aren't actually that many countries in the world and so you very quickly run out of statistical power that's a technical answer to your question but you could do expect some smaller scale experiments where you ask people to make judgements about. blame and punishment

when they're speaking one language or not there or when they've been exposed to more intent and language or less intent of language and see if they make different judgments we use the example of justin timberlake and janet jackson having a wardrobe malfunction at the super bowl if we say timberlake rips the costume. people are much more likely to blame timberlake and they also want to charge him 53 percent more in fines than if we say the costume ripped even though they're watching the same video now you mention. language to universally distribute certain practices in english clearly is the lingo of all. times. do we understand the are there any indications of why it has been able to gain such a status isn't because it's relatively easy to learn compared to other languages are other perhaps other. factors contributing to that. probably economic factors

are the most important where english speaking countries are driving a lot of economic growth and a lot of innovation that spreads to the rest of the world a lot of places want to then speak english so they can participate in the trade or participate in the tourist industry whatever whatever it is that makes sense for them but you know lots of other languages have held sway at other times so often we look at a particular historic moment and say oh english has taken over soon every religious speak english came out of time that english has been dominant has actually had very tiny portion of historical time compared to say the greek empire or the roman empire obviously of all other languages english comes with its own cultural baggage and i wonder as a both a scholar a speaker of english is there anything in it. you either don't like or perhaps find to imposing. well you know in any language. they're going to be some

things that are required and then they're going to be some things that are optional and. for example right now there's a big debate in english about gender pronouns right so. 3rd person singular pronoun he and she in english are gendered and some people are arguing that we shouldn't have them or. we should introduce mutual pronouns or use that singular day. i think a nice design for a language in that situation would be to make gender optional so that you can mark it when it's necessary or relevant and not mark it when it's not relevant so it would be interesting to see what english would look like if you could get rid of gender marking on 3rd person pronouns the same way that english already does it mark gender on 1st person pronoun like i and we or 2nd person for. thank you so do

the same thing for a 3rd person pronouns but that make it optional to be able to market when you really want this is actually very interesting subject because. there are a lot of efforts of the we policing the language that english language their political correctness but actually law just plating it for example in canada there where there was a controversy a few years ago about monday being certain pronounce why do you think. controversial category for english speaking world because arguably this is you know a part of the world where janitor quality is at its highest. well i think one reason is that we tend to believe that the structures of our language reflect reality and so if in your language there are 2 categories he and she male and female most people then believe that those are the 2 relevant categories and everyone should be divided into this. but if people come around and say hey i don't

feel like i fit into either category i want to be some other category that creates a lot of conflict interpersonal conflict in the moment social conflict and if the issue is simply linguistic preference that's a very simple thing to fix you just have it a neutral neutral way what you say it's a simple thing to fix and yet i heard you say that pronounce as close close class words are particular difficulty is super imposed we also i think how the similar cases within the one they're trying to introduce the the neutral pronoun. so in the swedish case that they introduce 10 as this singular therapist and it's neither male or female and there actually were some recent studies showing that if you remind people of the use of pen in makes it easier for them to imagine people who are not men in positions of power so for example if you give them a neutral story like this person is consider. running for public office government

office tell me more about this person the likelihood that they'll imagine a woman goes up if they've heard the use of the word hen recently so it's it's suggests that that kind of study suggests that introducing a neutral option kind of opens people opens people up to think about things that are beyond what it is not exactly a country where women can know of progress of the career and that letter i mean in terms of again their representative most women the harp positions i think it's pretty good when i was a matter of degree i mean even in really good situations and can still i mean that leads me to kind of wonder if english is increasingly becoming a vehicle for progressivist politics because when i was studying it and i was studying it as an adult than ever studying it together with turkish and with turkish you just learn you know vocabulary and you know grammar but with english you have to learn

a lot of political concepts like gender equality sexism male hierarchy or male dominance whatever i mean all those ideas that are near and dear to the american left is but not necessarily universal is it even possible these days to separate english as the language of international communication from english as a language of them american political worldview you know languages and living things where they're always changing to reflect the needs of the people who are crafting them and so when you're in the middle of one of those changes it always feels uncomfortable because it's a negotiation and one group of people may be pushing for one thing and then a group of people are pushing for another thing but english hasn't been english in its current form for a very long so it's the most normal thing in fact in the history of any language that it should change and should continue to change in english english has been very very dynamic and so. i hope that as any living object is key. to news

to reflect the values that people want and things that stick around in the language of the things that people find useful but then those can still continue to change and so if a change in pronouns happens now and then in 200 years people decide actually won a different set of pronouns altogether there are some new set of things we discover or decide about types of humans you can build those into but it's one thing whether it happens naturally as a matter of when with the evolution and it's another thing when you try to mend a it's the law actually i mean in this obvious history in the early history we have some examples of that and it wasn't very effective do you general believe in forcing thoughtful change through. or mandating changes in the language. i think it's extremely unlikely that a change would stick on less people the people who actually use the language find it useful or helpful right so lots of things can be mandated but they don't actually get used in everyday life and history is full of examples like that where

there is some change that's forced from on high some decision that's made and it just doesn't stick and it doesn't actually get used by people in real conversation or people if people do use it it's only to make fun of it only ironically right and so the things that will actually stick around language ultimately are things that people find useful for communicating things that they want to communicate to professor brady askew we have to take a very short break now but we will be back in just a few moments stay tuned. to the. box. really.

really really. you want to. know. all. of american men and women choose to serve in the country's military and the decision. every song came to a complete. the day that i was very strong. you know told

a shot to kill me and i see how it destroyed my life any screamed at me and he made me come in and he grabbed my own arm and he write me. if you take into account that women don't report because of the extreme retaliation and it's probably somewhere near about half a 1000000 women have now been sexually assaulted in the us military rape is a very very traumatizing tat happen but i've never seen trauma like i've seen from women who are veterans who have suffered military sexual trauma reporting rape is more likely to get the victim punished and the offender and almost 10 year career which shows very invested in and i give the sex offender who was not even put to justice or put on the registry this is simply an issue of tower and violence male sexual predators for the large part of target whoever is there to prey upon whether that's a man or woman. welcome

back to worlds apart with the other but i did ski associate professor of science at the university of california san diego professor bird this guy know that you are very passionate advocate of linguistic and cultural diversity as well as multilingual is mezzeh way all experiencing live. to bouts of your ability how many languages were enough for you personally to maybe got transition from what you call and i released them to a relative one that's where the definitely made that transition and i think it's very hard to it's hard to get away from name field isn't a group speaking russian is my native language and then i had to learn english from my family immigrated to the us and i speak some terrible french and some very poor indonesian and little bits and pieces you are

a very humble person as well well into neat indonesian speakers are very high and so they said they say that my intonation and that's good but french speakers are less kind so. speaking about your russian i heard you say during one talk. when your family moved to the united states you refused to speak russian for one year because you want to dust for it the 2 fit in. did you have a chance to overcome the teenage rebellion and did you have a chance to appreciate or sort of really learn russian again you grew older i definitely learned to appreciate speaking russian later in life certainly when a immigrated i felt like i wanted to be like an american and a. it was important for myself identity to be able to communicate through italy or even just to be able to make a joke to it feels. when you're in a new place where you can't express yourself it feels like you're trapped inside

your head that there is like a person in there and no one can see that person and so the it the idea of being able to express myself lewdly it was very important but then once i felt like i could do that i appreciated the whole while having a rich they're rich freshman language and all of those references available to me for sure to a 14 year the russian like rich may sound very harsh are once heard actress mila kunis say that when she has a conversation with her dad over the phone her american friends think that they're fighting even though they may be exchanging pleasantries or speaking to each other very nicely and. i think spanish maybe talian may have the same impression is it clear why so languages tend to appear mole emotive than others. while some languages sound harsher because they have a lot of fricative consonants like if you have a lot of sounds in your language people tend to associate that with harshness and

some languages sound very emotional because they use tone as part of the word meaning so for example mandarin or cantonese if you hear people speaking that sometimes it sounds very emotional but it's just because you use rising and falling tones to change the meaning of the words it's not actually meant to communicate emotion so we tend to take certain sounds as needing things even though they don't this is what i think content wise russians are far more. comfortable with a good heated argument even the altercation than some of our british or german friends do you think the political tensions that russia sometimes. pass with the west may have anything to do with the fact that rio is simply enjoying a good fight much more than they do. the russians definitely. love being direct and that directness can be an argument well yeah and the question is whether that.

argument becomes emotional or personal or whether it's just the joy of the argument . certainly in an english speaking context i had to learn for example to start my answers to even simple questions with i think or it might be and i had to learn to do that even in math class where to be more indirect to soften it so you have to hedge it someone says what is 2 plus 5 it's more polite to say i think it's. been 7 just to say it 7 sounds rude. and that takes a little while to learn that it seemed to me like it's obvious what the answer is and i don't need to say i think it's 7 it just is 7 in my personal life i have to interact with a lot of muslim people from various cultural backgrounds and they all have this common denominator of angel logwood railing so they're very non-committal in outsiders when you are trying to arrange for them think of it always makes it hard to believe that you can a drawer and answer do you think it's a it's a more

a cultural denominator or is it something the. language superimposes on them. sometimes those things are flexions of the world that you live in right so if you live in a world that's very predictable then you could feel comfortable making promises about the future but if you yourself live in the world that's not predictable and people around you are not reliable and all kinds of events can occur then only a fool would be willing to promise things far in the future right so think about. the american context it's possible to go and get a loan for your house that it's a 50 year loan now anyone who's willing to give you a 50 year loan believes that the economy will be stable enough in his 2 years that the money that they've loaned you now will be worth a reasonable amount and there are lots of places in the world. it would be an absurd thing to do so how reliable yourself can be has to depend on how reliable

the world is around you so the use of i think often is a reflection of living in the world that isn't stable itself it's very interesting i heard you say once the western cultures have a stronger bias for progress that's partially a function of how the conceptualize time time not only is moving but moving in a positive direction do you think this may be something that contributes to how they engage with the rest of the world being more certain of being perhaps more expansion is both linguistically we talked about english being so widespread but also in the other demain sic nomic political etc it's definitely normal in english to think that you are the agent in your life and that the way that anything is going to happen is that you have to make it happen and and that's your role is to try to make things happen and to make change and to make progress and that's often

how we define what is good is how much change and progress has been made as opposed to for example how much things have stayed the same or how relatively calm things have been or how much you preserve. so that is a set of cultural norms and it's reflected in some structure and in the language it's definitely the way that we have been defining good. in cultural. time for for quite a while in the west i also heard you say that. you were in your new acquaintances of your russian heritage fairly early in the in your conversation otherwise they would be suspicious has it always been the case or is it a relatively new phenomenon for your following 2016 elections and russia gave gumbo you know it's a it's a long standing thing the way you speak english now it sounds like an. in english speaker to most people i have a slight accent but most people don't hear it. and so if someone has met me and has

known me for a couple weeks and they then later learn that i spent the 1st 12 years living in the soviet union they feel like they're something like secretive or strange about me it's almost like i'm putting on an american accent even though this is really the only way i know how to speak english i don't have another way of doing it do you think that filling the suspicion that was there even before the 2016 election got amplified following. the election of the long term. i don't feel that definitely russia has more on the minds of people now than it was before that and. i think it's more that people very strongly associate the way that you use language with your identity so you expect very quickly it can make lots and lots of decision social decisions about someone by the way that they talk and so we expect to be able to tell lots and lots of things about people in their identity by listening to

them talk and so it's shocking when the language that someone is speaking in the way they're using language that somehow seems at discontinuity with their identity then you feel like well what else is this person hiding how can they sound so i frantically american when in fact it's a lie now since you mentioned sophisticated kevlar let me ask you a question about donald trump as the linguistic phenomenon because. many people would argue the work everywhere is somewhat simple even primitive i know a lot of english learners who feel proud of all progress when they hear it to the american president that the that kind of the matter of speech has proved very effective with his own base how do you explain that perhaps the alec once as a prerequisite for american politicians. has been all right well i think different politicians appeal to different groups of people so they eloquent politicians

appeal to a different segment of the popular i really i mean he didn't. strong competition the part of the population that was very excited for example for the eloquence of barack obama are not the same people that are excited for the in the eloquence of donald trump right those are probably 2 separate groups of people so different different people and different things but. he he's a master of using very simple emotionally loaded language that is creates very quick sound bites for people to hold on to and he's also a master of possible deniability where he can say something and claim to both mean it and not mean it at the same time so he can say we're going to build a wall and he could say well it's a metaphorical wall and really i'm just talking about border security but the next breath he'll say it'll be made of cement and it'll be 30 feet tall and it'll have do you think he's deliberate that you're causing hume of this linguistic

manipulations or do you think that's just a human being very articulate i think we expect different things from different speakers and he has created a persona where he's allowed a lot more than lots of other people so if your identity as a speaker is that you are you have 100 percent for acidy that your or your very technical or you're going to be correct in the details then when you make a little mistakes people are going to hold you to that standard that is set for yourself but that's not the standard that he set for himself and so he has asked us to engage with him as this much more loose speaker and so that gives him incredible latitude to say things that he that he can claim he both meant and didn't mean and i think he's not alone i think of it that may go beyond some because there was an interesting study by grammar only recently which found the the use of last complex language correlated with higher poll numbers at least for the republicans and i think that's a very interesting phenomenon because we're kind of used to politicians trying to appear smarter than they are but. for the politicians to appear. linguistically

sophisticated than they are of them putting it in terms is pretty unusual do you think that's a big challenge to lou dobbs you are in reality i mean you can use simple language and say really smart things it's a simple language the idea i think is to say things that people can understand. importantly will remember most people who are thinking about politics aren't thinking about it most of the day they're thinking about their life and the things they need to do to feed their families and do their job and all that and so those little sound bites that they get have to be both understandable and ball and so whichever way you can achieve that either through simple language or invented language or language that really connects with people's lives in whatever way i think that's going to be affected. finally a lot of people are blaming twitter on both the success of trump the emergence of this hashtag culture when you are under obligation to compress very complex ideas

into a couple if you characterize them that. not only stimulates your to be more eloquent but i think it also develops a certain appetite among the public for very simplistic processing of ideas are you concerned about that or is that a natural phenomena. well i think it's wonderful that lots of people are participating in the public square and are able to state their opinions and participate in. the conversation i think it does change very much the nature of the conversation when it is so abbreviated and so decontextualized where you don't know who you're talking to you don't know where they're coming from also the end and emitting a lot of the interactions leaves a lot of room for aggression aggressive behavior that you know you feel like if you can act like a jerk because people won't know who you are and what they won't punish you so i think they're both pluses and minuses with any platform with any technology it's

a matter of how we use it professor brady it's been a great pleasure talking to you thank you very much for thinking so much for having me encourage our viewers to keep this conversation going in our social media pages and hope to see same place same time here in a while it's a part of. medical use downs to leaks last only guarded.

when your. pool doesn't preclude pool so the look at that is to close most of the book called the back. to school stuff still it's about seeing me yet there's. just too little chef.

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