Episode 0: Meet Your Hosts

In this mini episode of Speaking of Us, meet your co-hosts: Daniel Bögre Udell, executive director and co-founder of Wikitongues, and Kristen Tcherneshoff, programs director at Wikitongues.

This is a transcript of Episode 0 of “Speaking of Us”. To listen to this episode, visit Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts. If you enjoy it, please leave a review and subscribe for new episodes! Thanks to Ula Adamska for transcribing this episode for us.

KRISTEN: Hello, and welcome to “Speaking of Us,” where we explore how language teaches us about who we are and where we come from. I’m Kristen Tcherneshoff.

DANIEL: And I’m Daniel Bögre Udell. And this podcast is by Wikitongues. Wikitongues is a global network of grassroots linguists. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken around the world, only a handful are taught in schools or supported by mainstream technology. So Wikitongues helps people keep their languages alive. We’re crowdsourcing a seed bank of every language in the world, archiving oral histories, dictionaries, and other relevant content in as many languages as possible, making them freely available online and safeguarded in perpetuity of the U.S. Library of Congress.

We’re also working with language activists around the world to develop easy to understand frameworks for anyone to start keeping their language alive in their community, because endangered languages aren’t necessarily endangered. In this podcast, you’ll get to know people from every culture on earth. You’ll learn about their languages, their history, and how they navigate our rapidly changing world. Kristen, you’re the Programs Director at Wikitongues, what’s your linguistic heritage?

KRISTEN: Well, I identify as an American [laughs]. On my dad’s side of the family, on my grandfather’s side, it’s Russian, my grandfather is Russian, and we have roots and connections to Saint Petersburg. And then my dad’s mom side, they’ve been in Alabama for centuries, so my heritage there is Appalachian. And on my mom’s side, I have Welsh heritage that I’ve started exploring recently with my mother.

DANIEL: How has reclaiming Welsh been?

KRISTEN: Well, so far I’ve only reclaimed “good morning,” and a couple other words, most importantly “I want coffee” — that’s a very important one! But my mom and I decided that it was time — we’re recording this podcast for you guys during a time of staying at home and practicing social distancing. And so my mom and I were looking for something to do where we could have an activity. We live in different countries, so something we could do digitally together. And throughout my life my mom has always felt a disconnect with her personal history — she doesn’t have much access to her heritage or to her family, and so she’s always felt a disconnect and has always wished that she could share that with me. I have a much stronger connection to my dad’s side of the family and have met my Russian family members and grew up speaking Appalachian English, so I have all of those connections.

So my mom has always felt a part of that was missing, so we decided that it would be a good time to learn the language of her grandmother, which was Welsh. So my great-grandmother grew up speaking Welsh and when she moved to the U.S. she stopped speaking it. Probably actually stopped speaking it before because of what we know of the history of Welsh, and we’ll talk about that in future podcast episode.

But, yeah, now seems like a really good time, so we started using a couple of different language programs and we send each other WhatsApp messages every day and we’re not doing great, but we’re having fun! And it’s been really nice to just discover that other side and try to explore different aspects of Welsh culture. We’ve been making dishes, cooking together and sending each other photos, and things like that, it’s been fun.

DANIEL. That’s fun! What is Welsh food — you’ve been cooking Welsh food?

KRISTEN: I’ve been trying! [laughs] Yeah, we made this type of leek thing that I can’t entirely describe. I wanted to make a Welsh dish called Welsh rarebit. I tried to make it with different vegetables on top — it’s like a bread with cheese, basically like a fondue…

DANIEL: Mmhm.

KRISTEN: That was pretty good. That was a nice little brunch/breakfast type thing, I don’t know if that’s when it’s actually eaten, but that’s when I went for it. [laughs] Yeah, it’s been good. I would like to do more, like to try some things popular in Welsh cuisine. [laughs]

DANIEL: So in the future episode we’ll absolutely have to talk about Welsh food, as a pretense to the Welsh language. But in the meantime, in Episode 0 of “Speaking of Us”, you, unlike me, are an actual linguist. What does that mean? Because I think linguist is an often misused word. Like, people find out I speak a bunch of languages, they go, “Oh, you’re a linguist!”, and I say, “No. No, I’m not!” [laughs].

KRISTEN: Mmhm [laughs]. Yeah, it’s definitely a misused term. But I think also the journey to being a linguist can take different paths. So I feel at this point you have started becoming a linguist in your own right, after working in this field for so many years.

DANIEL: Thank you.

KRISTEN: So, yeah, a linguist often gets confused with a polyglot, and vice versa. So a polyglot is someone who speaks multiple languages and someone who enjoys language learning. And sometimes these fields cross over, but not always. Polyglots often — it’s often a hobby, there are people who make their careers out of that, but it’s usually a side that people enjoy doing. Whereas a linguist, that is a scientific field that focuses on different aspects of language, coming from either grammar, how languages develop, how they are related to each other — so like the genetics of languages, how language influences out culture, our surroundings, and our livelihoods.

In sociolinguistics, looking at the influence of language in politics and politics on language. And different aspects like that. So there’s many different branches of linguistics, just like in these other scientific fields. So if you have a… I’m going to destroy this so I don’t need to make that example… Just like with doctors [laughs]. In the medical field, you have different types of doctors. You have an OB-GYN, or you have someone who focuses, works in the ER, you have someone who does optometry, or childhood practitioner. So just like that, within linguistics there are different fields or routes you can take. And so I am primarily interested in sociolinguistics and also in sign linguistics.

DANIEL: Sign linguistics… And that, I think, touches on not yet mentioned aspect of your linguistic career, is that you’ve spent a lot of time with American Sign Language growing up, is that right?

KRISTEN: Yeah, when I was a really young girl. My parents both speak American Sign Language. My dad was very fluent, and still is, and my mom has a high level of use, also I would say she’s fluent. My parents are both hearing and they have a lot of friends who are either Deaf or Children of Deaf Adults, and so they started learning American Sign Language to communicate. And when I was young, my parents taught it to me quite passively at first but then when I started, you know, getting older and getting more interested in it, I would use more of it. And I remember we had — and I don’t think it was on any type of regular basis — but we had nights when the three of us would sit around the table with this sign language book that my mom had, and we learn new signs together. I don’t think my parents were learning, I was probably the only one learning, but they would teach me and we would pretend to have a situation in public. Like we would pretend we’re in a restaurant or something and have a conversation.

And my parents taught me songs in American Sign Language and it was a really fun way to learn. I think the problem for me was I didn’t have anyone to regularly converse with, except my parents. And when you become 8 or 9 or 10 years old, or 11, that’s not really cool to talk to your parents as much. So I stopped using it. And that’s something that I really regretted that I stopped using that. And that’s something else I’ve been working on in the past few months, is getting it back. And it’s been really fun taking online classes and just having those, you know, light connections when there’s a sign that you recognize and it recalls a lot of memories or really nice associations from my childhood. I’ve enjoyed that a lot and so I’m hoping to get much better at American Sign Language during the rest of this year. And hopefully start finding someone to converse with regularly.

DANIEL: Beautiful!

KRISTEN: Yeah.

DANIEL: And sign linguistics is sort of how you ended up as the Programs Director at Wikitongues. Right?

KRISTEN: Yeah, in a roundabout way. I was doing my master’s degree at Helsinki University and I was taking a class on language documentation and I was looking for a specific language that I couldn’t find. And I found it on the Wikitongues YouTube channel. I wasn’t able to find it in any other library archive or anywhere else online, so I was really excited about Wikitongues. And then something else that drew me to Wikitongues and really made me want to volunteer was that you did have sign languages besides American Sign Language. So when I first came to Wikitongues, I know there was [videos of] Russian Sign Language and Hong-Kong Sign Language, and I think one or two other sign languages. And I was really excited there was universal representation on Wikitongues so that made me want to sign up and be a part. I joined as a volunteer and forced my way up —

DANIEL: [laughs]

KRISTEN: Into Daniel’s daily life [laughs]. And here we are now. [laughs] Yeah, so it’s been exciting and, Daniel, over the past… How long has it been now since we’ve known each other? I guess like four years?

DANIEL: Hmm… I think it’s actually closer to three but I think you found us in 2017…

KRISTEN: Yeah, I guess three…

DANIEL: Right?

KRISTEN: Oh man, I was so excited about four because I was gonna be like, man, almost half a decade, it sounds so big… [laughs]

DANIEL: That would be cool.

KRISTEN: Yeah!

DANIEL: But we’ll get there.

KRISTEN: We’ll get there.

DANIEL: We’ll still be here in two years… One year… Two years… Whatever, sorry.

KRISTEN: [laughs] Over the past three years we’ve spent a long time getting to know each other and I’ve always really enjoyed your story with your heritage languages and what you’re working on right now.

DANIEL: Sure. Well, I was born in New York City and I grew up in the Pocono Mountains, Pennsylvania, or PA, as Pennsylvanians call it. And, you know, that is an increasingly linguistically diverse place because it is equal distance between Philadelphia and New York City, so there’s just a lot of traffic coming from two very culturally diverse places. It was less so when I was growing up, there was, for the most part, English; there is a Russian community up there, and Spanish speakers. There is of course the local heritage language of Pennsylvania, German. And while I had friends who were ethnically Pennsylvania German, they weren’t speakers. To find speakers you really need to go down more to like Lancaster, Reading, and that part of PA.

But my linguistic heritage is none of that. My mother’s side of the family, or my mother’s maternal family is Scottish, and Highland Scottish too, so very likely Scottish Gaelic speakers when they came to the U.S. in the 1870s, 1860s. And her paternal family is Hungarian. And funny enough, her father always told her that his last name, Bögre, was German and she didn’t learn it was Hungarian until much later. And she’s done some genealogical work and proved it’s not a coincidence. They were Hungarian. I guess her father just didn’t want to be Eastern European.

And my father’s family is all Ashkanazi Jews by way of Russia. So the ancestral language there is Yiddish, which is sort of like a mix of Old German and Hebrew. His parents spoke Yiddish. He grew up around Yiddish and his English is very influenced by Yiddish, so he speaks a lot of Yiddish. He would say things to me, like he wouldn’t tell me to clean up my room growing up, he would tell me to clean my hazarai, you know. He would say things like “gornisht helfen” or instead of saying “this is very nice”, he’d say “what a mechaye.” He had all of these wonderful words and phrases that I always understood to be different but I don’t think… Like I knew they were Jewish and I knew they were ours, but I didn’t understand that they came from a full language. And, you know, growing up I was pretty assimilated into mainstream Anglo-culture. I completely identified with English as my mother tongue, even though I have no English ancestry. Or almost no English ancestry, I’m sure there’s some since my mother has Scottish.

But it wasn’t really until I lived in Spain in high-school through an abroad program, that I started thinking more proactively about linguistic diversity because I first went to Zaragoza where I learned to speak Spanish. And then from there I went to Barcelona to study Catalan. And Catalan, for the uninitiated, is original language of Spain and France, and the national language of Andorra, just a tiny country between Spain and France. And between 1939 and 1978 in Spain, Catalan was illegal to speak. That’s because those years were the years of the Franco dictatorship and he had a very…kind of culturally homogenizing view of Spain. We’re gonna be Spanish speaking, Catholic, conservative, you know, that’s what it meant to be Spanish. And you either had to assimilate or disappear.

So this wasn’t true just for Catalan, it was true for Basque, which is another regional language of Spain that a lot of people have heard of. It’s very interesting to me because it’s actually older than Latin, so Basque people are what you can call indigenous, an indigenous culture of the Iberian Peninsula, before the Romans colonized it so many years ago. And then also true for Galician, or gallego, which is how a lot of people know it as. But there’s more languages than that in Spain. There is Extermaduran… Asturian, Leonese, Aragonese… There’s a lot of languages and all these language communities struggled to exist under the way of Franco’s policy. And, you know, in 1980 Spain formalized its transition into democracy and heavily decentralized, and regions where there was a strong unanimous pride in the language, set out on the hard task of bringing their languages back. And the Catalan-speaking parts of Spain, especially Catalonia (because Valencia and the Balearic Islands also have their own varieties of Catalan), were very successful.

So in Catalonia, Millennial and Gen-Z people are far more fluent and literate than their parents’ generation. And Catalan has returned to a status of prestige in Catalan society. So like, you can move there and not learn Catalan but you will not be better off for it, professionally, socially… And this is hard because most times minority cultures try to bring their languages back, getting their language back on an equal footing with the dominant language that displaced them is really, really hard work. There’s also like a booming media industry in the Catalan language. There were actually one of the first non-English versions of Wikipedia to have articles. It’s Catalan-speakers that decentralized top-level domains for websites — because it used to be .com, .org, .net, .info, and then .<national handles>, but they didn’t want to use .es, which is the one for Spain, and so they lobbied ICANN to get .cat.

And now, these days there’s like website endings for Kurdish, Basque, all different kinds of languages. Welsh too actually, your people. And they’re very, very involved with language activism across Europe. Because Spain’s history is not unique. France, the UK, Italy — have all invested a lot of money and time over the past century enforcibly assimilating their cultural minorities. And so I was…

KRISTEN: And the cultural minorities of their colonies or former colonies overseas, too.

DANIEL: Yes! And that’s most true for France because Spain doesn’t really have any overseas territories anymore. Although when they did, they were very into that, which is why you find a lot of Spanish in Filipino, for instance.

KRISTEN: Mmhm.

DANIEL: And you know, it’s important it bears mentioning that even though there was a lot of success in bringing Catalan back, and Basque back, and Galician back, like things are not all good in Spain. And especially kind of conservative politicians on the national level are often hostile to revitalization at scale. Like one thing that happens in Catalonia a lot is conservative politicians on the national level are consistently pushing back against linguistic immersion in Catalan, which is essential to keeping a language alive. They consistently push back on making even learning Catalan mandatory in Catalan schools. So they consistently… They no longer say “we want to eradicate this language,” but they do say “we want to do everything possible to maintain its subaltern status to Spanish.”

And it provokes a lot of reactionary stuff in Catalonia. Anyone who’s followed the politics over the past several years, I mean Spanish politics for the past ten years, has seen, although the separatist movement in Catalonia is kind of orthogonally related to the language, it’s not all good. Things are not totally better. And Catalan speakers, because they’ve been so successful in bringing their language back are very prominent among cultural activism in France, in UK, in the rest of Spain. They’re like an inspiration, a success story, right? So just being there, learning Catalan, doing an internship through a political party there actually, I ended up getting really immersed in European language activism as a whole. Which of course because of perpetuation of European colonialism, also extends to places like Greenland, which is technically part of European language activism, even though the Greenlandic people are Inuit.

So I just got really, really excited about the scope and scale of cultural diversity, which is, you know, lightyears beyond what I have been taught about the world. You know, I have been taught there are 200 countries and every country has a language [laughs]. Right? And so I came back to the US wanting to participate in this growing movement to keep global linguistic diversity alive. And I didn’t know how to do that. I was studying Design and I did my masters in History, so this was not — I wasn’t a linguist. So instead I decided…

KRISTEN: Can you tell he is a historian now? [laughs]

DANIEL: Yes. A historian.

BOTH: [laugh]

DANIEL: So I decided that I would…that a project encouraging people to get started documenting and sharing the world’s linguistic diversity would be a great way to start because the internet had such potential. And so that’s how Wikitongues started. I started recording people in New York City. From my immediate circle of folks, and that already started including like K’iche’ Mayan speakers, and all different kind of languages… Hessian which is a minority language in Germany… And posting them on YouTube. And I put out a call to action for people to join me and that is how, that was the genesis of Wikitongues.

Today, you know, we’ve grown to being a proper archive for linguistic diversity and we’re now working on use frameworks for language revitalization. Because people write to us a lot, “How do I keep my language alive?”. It’s a very good question and very important question and doesn’t have a structured answer. Yet, we’re working on that with another wonderful organization, called the Living Tongues Institute. We’ll be interviewing their programs director, Anna Luisa Daigneault, in the next, and first, episode of “Speaking of Us.”

And I think that in recent years, working with people all around the world to keep their own languages alive has made me reconsider my own linguistic heritage. So I’ve been very into learning more about that. My Jewish identity has always been really, really strong. And I think that’s just because growing up, my dad always made a much bigger point of emphasizing that we were Jewish than my mom did emphasizing that we were Hungarian, right? [laugh]. I think that the difference there is that Jewish people wherever we settle, you know, it’s a long history of keeping that alive. Whereas my mom’s ancestors came to the U.S. and became American.

KRISTEN: You and your mom have had a recent, over the past few years, cultural awakening together. Not awakening but re-awakening, in the sense of trying to explore more of your Hungarian identity, especially through your name.

DANIEL: Yes! Because our last name, Bögre, is traditionally spelled with an umlaut. I added that back to my Facebook page. And I think that, as I started learning Hebrew last year, which is kind of the common ancestral language of all Jews, and then Yiddish, which is specifically the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews, I think this has gotten her also more excited about the prospect of me learning Hungarian. And so I think that when I inevitably do start learning Hungarian, I’ll loop her into learning with me, as you’ve done with your mother and Welsh. So that’s been really transformative and wonderful. I think it’s improved my own self-confidence and definitely made me feel more grounded about my place in the world. When you grow up only with a language of another culture, that does a lot of subconscious things to you psyche, that I don’t think you even realize until you start learning your family’s languages.

KRISTEN: Nowadays we have so many, it’s a wonderful era for reclaiming your language and your heritage because we have so much available online and so many tools. As you mentioned earlier with Catalan, there being a lot of push back from politicians, and it comes from a place of fear because people are scared of the idea of linguistic diversity that’s gonna topple structures — and that’s not what happens. More, it would create, you know, equal human rights, and support, and people feeling more self-love and confident in themselves and their identity.

One of the good things about media that we have now, like social media and different online forms of media, is that it really breaks down those barriers to people being able to put their language into the public sphere. Put their culture into the public sphere, because it’s much easier these days. Although not everyone has access to the internet or high-speed internet, it’s getting more and more, it’s growing rapidly each day. And so with low-barrier to entry, low-cost or no cost at all, and easily done from a computer or phone, really all the time, it’s created opportunities to spread your language and to bring people into the community, and also engage with the language you want to reclaim.

I know you’ve been following a lot of people who tweet in Hebrew and you’ve added your Hebrew name on your Twitter account, and I follow a lot of people in Finnish Twitter, even though that’s not one of my heritage languages. Well, I did take the DNA test and I have 1.3% Finnish…

DANIEL: Congratulations!

KRISTEN: … whatever you call it, Finnish DNA in me. Thank you, thank you, I’m pretty proud [laugh]. I’m not gonna claim it as my own, but, you know, that’s a good way for us to become more aware of the languages out there and to support languages. Engage with them and see how they’re used and help support them. And that’s something that we’re excited to do at Wikitongues, is to work with people that are doing just that.

DANIEL: Keeping their language alive. Absolutely, it’s a great time for this. Over the past 30 years or so there’s been a groundswell of language activism. And there is a change on the political level too. Most countries, with the few exceptions, have at least renounced official policies of forced assimilation. And some countries even have started making reparations for the damage they did to Indigenous or marginalized cultures. So there’s a lot more political freedom to keep your language alive. And as you pointed out, a lot more infrastructural possibility because of the internet. It’s just so much easier to share your language, to find other people who speak it if you’ve been culturally displaced.

So, on this podcast, on “Speaking of Us,” we’re gonna be interviewing people about this. Some of them are gonna be language activists on the frontlines of communities whose languages are really endangered. And some of them are gonna be people just like you and me, who are rediscovering ties to their ancestral languages. That’s the kind of celebration of culture that inspires you. We invite you to join us. In Episode 1 of “Speaking of Us”, we’re going to be interviewing Anna Luisa Daigneault, Programs Director at the Living Tongues Institute, whose linguistic heritage spans from Brittany in France to the Andes of Peru. And a few places in between. So we’ll be learning about her heritage as well as the work that she does at Living Tongues and we hope that you’ll join us.

KRISTEN: And for any accompanying media for this podcast, if you would like to find more guest information or links to their articles, blogs, social media, transcripts, and so on, you can visit wikitongues.org/podcast. And we really appreciate it if wherever you get your podcast you could subscribe, leave or review, and help us continue to grow this.

DANIEL: And in Yiddish we would say “a dank,” or in other words “thank you.”

KRISTEN: And in Welsh I think we would say “diolch.” I might be wrong though — but in other words, thank you!

DANIEL: In a few episodes, though, Kristen will have that one down pat. So thank you for stopping by and we’ll see you next time on “Speaking of Us.”

If you would like to donate to support the work of Wikitongues or if you would like to get to know our work, please visit wikitongues.org. To watch our oral histories, subscribe to our YouTube channel or visit wikitongues.org to submit a video.