That there are forces that imposing certain structures on ourselves you know we all take the language that we speak for granted its like the air that we breathe we dont notice it and in fact most of us believe that we simply perceive reality the way that it is in fact we know through many years of psychological experiments so thats very far from the truth we dont see things just the way that they are instead the world that we the internal world we live in is highly constructed by the structures of our brains but also by the structures of our languages and cultures that tell us how to put things together we often talk about the symbiotic and reinforcing relationship with bin language and culture and its very hard for me personally to resist thinking about that relationship in cheek in that terms enough to sort of struggling with it for some time i wonder if its actually a fitting metaphor or not in terms of what comes 1st but the terms of how the to encapsulate reproduce one in. There yeah so i think of language as a part of culture language is a really good way to make a part of culture very long term and universally distributed so if i make Something Like dramatically gender a part of the language well all speakers of that language are going to have to use that structure its not going to be optional if youre speaking russian you cant just speak russian and not use grammatical gender no ones going to recognize you as a real russian speakers and so it becomes something thats then universally distributed through the culture the languages can lose genders can add genders 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 body but how far do you extrapolate from that relationship the fact that english and to some extent russian and both added to their quick to assign blame or responsibility does it have anything to do with the incarceration rates in the United States and the russia being the worlds highest its 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 a lot is that even possible do you think you can design a study like this to prove that connection the reason it would be hard to do in the real world is because if were going country by country there arent actually that many countries in the world and so you very quickly run out of statistical power thats 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 theyre seeking one language or another or when theyve been exposed to more attentive language or less attentive 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 arm. Much more likely to blame timberlake and they also want to charge him to 53 percent more in fines than if we say the cost and risk even though theyre watching the same videos now you mention the ability of language to universally distribute certain practices in english clearly the lingo of franco of all of our times. Do we end this band are there any indications of why it has been able to gain such a status is because its 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 militia speak english the amount 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 escolar speaker of english is there anything in it. You either dont like or perhaps find to be imposing. Well you know in any language. Theyre going to be some things that are required and then theyre going to be some things that are optional and. For example right now theres a big debate in english a badge and or pronouns right so. 3rd person singular pronoun he and she in english are gendered and some people argue. We shouldnt have or. We shouldnt add introduce neutral pronouns or use that singular they. I think a nice design for a language in that situation to make gender optional so that you can mark it when its necessary a relevant and not market when its 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 printer its the same way that english already does it mark gender on 1st person pronouns like i and we or 2nd person like you said 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 lading it for example in canada there where there was a controversy a few years ago about monday evening so why do you think john days such a controversial category for English Speaking world because arguably this is you know a part of the world where gender equality 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 those. But if people come around and say hey i dont 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 thats a very simple thing to fix you just have it a neutral neutral way to what you say its a simple thing to fix and yet i heard you say that close to. Words are particular difficulty is super imposed the we also i think how the similar cases within the one theyre trying to introduce the the neutral pronoun. So in the swedish case that they introduce 10 as this singular 3rd person its 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 considering running for Public OfficeGovernment Office tell me more about this person the likelihood that theyll imagine a woman goes up if theyve heard the use of the word hen recently and so its said jess 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 the hudson is not exactly a country where women can know the progress of the career in that letter i mean in terms of their representative most of women in higher positions i think its pretty good when i was a matter of degree and even in really good situations one can still go through that i mean that leads me to kind of wonder if english is increasingly becoming a vehicle for progressive politics because when i was studying it and i was studying it as an adult than ever studying it together with turkish with turkish you just learn you know a cabbie lariam you know grammar but the thing with you have to learn a lot of political concepts like gender equality sexism male hierarchy or or a male dominance whatever i mean all those ideas that i knew your own dear to you the american left his brother not necessarily universal is it even possible because they to separate english as a language of International Communication from english the language of the american political world view. You know languages are living things were theyre always changing to reflect the needs of the people who are crafting them and so when youre in the middle of one of those changes it always feels uncomfortable because its a negotiation and one group of people maybe pushing for one thing in the group of people are pushing for another thing but english hasnt been english in its current form for a very long so its 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 a new living object it continues to reflect the values that people want the things that stick around in the language and 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 all together there are some new set of things we discover and decide about types of humans you can build those into but its one thing when it happens naturally as a matter of when with the evolution and its another thing when you try to mandate it through law actually i mean in this obvious history in the early soviet history we have some examples of that and it wasnt very effective do you general believe in forcing thoughtful change through manipulating or mandating changes in the language. I think its 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 dont actually get used in everyday life and history is full of examples like that where there is some change thats forced from on high some decision thats made and it just doesnt stick and it doesnt actually get used by people in real conversation or people if you do use it its only to make fun of it only ironically right and so the things that will actually stick around are language ultimately at things that people find useful for communicating. Professor brady is going to have to take a very short break now but well be back in just a few moments stay tuned. For the buzz the but if she warned you posted by you can i do the dishes at the balls more than those. New speeches see me we need to be true she. Doesnt know about that so much and when it does you key. In the news i mean guys are that in such a ball. A lot of you will see sawing your info as if parts of the 2 kids each other both for the most school. Discipline but as the adults to me as if archer. These but out. Here in chief if you will god knows what i think of these doing he says. In English Media you think people who simply knew. Little. Welcome back to worlds apart with all the other but i did ski associate professor of cognitive science at the university of california san diego professor burd this guy know that you are very passionate advocate of linguistic and Cultural Diversity as well as multilingual. As a 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 thats where the definitely made that transition i think its very hard its hard to get away from naive realism i grew up speaking russian as 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 theyre very kind to so they said they say that my intonation and thats good but french speakers are less kind so. Im 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 wanted to dust for it to fit in did you have a chance to overcome the teenage rebellion and did you have a chance to appreciate or sort of. Russian they 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 fluidly or even just to be able to make a joke to it feels. When youre in a new place where you cant express yourself it feels like youre 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 through that was very important. But then once i felt like i can do that i appreciated the whole while having their rich their rich freshly 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 theyre fighting even though they may be exchanging pleasantries or speaking to each other very nicely and. I think spanish maybe talian maybe have the same impression is it your wife that 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 language just sounds 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 its just because you use rising and falling tones to change the meaning of the words its not actually meant to communicate emotion so we tend to take certain sounds as needing things even though they dont 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 Tension that russia sometimes. Passive 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. Being correct in that directness can be and argument as well yeah and the question is whether that. Argument becomes emotional or personal or whether its 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 so if someone says what is 2 plus 5 its more polite to say i think its. To say its 7 is just to say it 7 sounds rude. And that takes a little while to learn that it seemed to me like its not the obvious what the answer is and i dont need to say i think its 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 mailing so theyre very noncommittal in. Trying to arrange for them things it always makes it hard to bear that the joy and mounts or do you think its. More a cultural denominator or is it something. Langridge superimposes on them sometimes those things are flexions of the world that you live in right so if you live in a world thats very predictable then you could feel comfortable making promises about the future but if you yourself live in the world thats 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 its possible to go and get a loan for your house that its a 50 year loan now anyone whos willing to give you a 50 year loan believes that the economy will be stable enough in his 2 years that the money that theyve loaned you now will be worth a reasonable amount and there are lots of places in the world that would be an absurd thing to do so how reliable you yourself can be has to depend on how reliable the world is around use the use of and shall i think often is a reflection of living in a world that isnt stable itself its very interesting i heard you say once the western cultures have a stronger buy for progress thats partially a function of how they conceptualize time time not only of 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 bowl also another demain sic nomic political etc its definitely normal in english to think that youre 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 thats your role is to try to make things happen and to make change and to make progress and thats 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 relative. Really calm things have been for how much you preserved. So that is a set of cultural norms and its reflected in some structure in the language its 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 wanted your new acquaintances of your russian heritage fairly early in your conversation otherwise they would be suspicious has it always been the case or is it a relatively new phenomenon for your following did you call them fixed in the elections and russia gave gumbo you know its its a longstanding thing the way i speak english now it sounds like an american english speaker to most people have a slight accent but most people dont hear it. And so if someone has met me and 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 theyre Something Like secretive or strange about me its almost like im putting on an american accent even though this is really the only way i know how to speak english i dont have another way of doing it do you think that filling the suspicion that was there even before the 2016 election got up with 5 following. The election of donald trump. I dont feel that it definitely rushes more on the minds of people now than it was before that and. I think its 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 decisions 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 its shocking when the language that someone is speaking in the way theyre using language then somehow seems at discontinuity with their identity and then you feel like well what else is this person hiding how can they sound so i frantically american when in fact its a lie now since you mentioned sophisticated kettler 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. 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 didnt. 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 theres a probably 2 separate groups of people so different different people and Different Things but. He hes a master of using very simple emotionally loaded language that is that creates very quick sound bites for people to hold on to and hes 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 were going to build a wall and he could say well its a metaphorical wall and really im just talking about Border Security but the next breath hell say itll be made of cement and it will be 30 feet tall and itll have do you think hes deliberate that youre accusing him of these linguistic manipulations or do you think thats just the humor being very articulate i think we expect Different Things from different speakers and he has created a persona where hes 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 or youre very technical or youre 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 so. For yourself but thats 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 then can claim he both meant and didnt mean and i think hes not alone and i think that may go beyond some because there was an interesting study by grammar only recently which found that the use of last complex language correlated with higher poll numbers at least for the republicans and i think thats a very interesting phenomenon because were kind of used to politicians trying to appear smarter than they are but. For the politicians to appear. Linguistically sophisticated than they are in them putting it in terms is pretty unusual do you think thats a big challenge to look dumb or that you are in reality i mean you can use simple language and say really smart things its a simple language the idea i think is to say things that people can understand and importantly will remember most people who are thinking about politics arent thinking about it most of the day theyre 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 never will and so whichever way you can achieve that either through simple language or invented language or language that really connects with peoples lives in whatever way i think thats going to be affected. Finally a lot of people are blaming twitter on both the success of trump and the emergence of this hashtag culture when you are on the obligation to compress very complex ideas into a couple of if you characters and that. Not only steam with 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 phenomenon. But i think its 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. Everybody hated and so decontextualized where you dont know who youre talking to you dont know where theyre coming from and also the end emitting a lot of the interactions leaves a lot of room for aggression aggressive behavior that you know you feel like you can act like an shark because people wont know when you are unable they wont punish you so i think theyre both pluses and minuses with any platform of any technology its a matter of how we use it professor bird its been a great pleasure talking to you thank you very much for thinking so much for having encourage our viewers to keep this conversation going in our social media pages and hope to see same place same time here are worlds apart. Of american women she was just seen as a countrys military decision. Every thing came to a complete. The day that i was very struck. To kill me and i see how destroyed. Any screamed at me in. My own. Right means. If you take into account that women dont report because of the extreme retaliation and its probably somewhere near about half a 1000000 women have now been sexually assaulted in the us military rape is a very very traumatizing. Recent trauma like ive seen from women who are veterans who have suffered military sexual trauma reporting rape is more likely to get the victim punished dont be offended and almost 10 year career or chose very invested in and i gave a sex offender who was not even going to justice or put on the registry this is simply an issue of our in violent male sexual predators for the large part of charge of whoever is there to prey upon whether thats a man or women. Under the. Current. Top u. N. Official says the United States is jailing of whistleblower Chelsea Manning for refusing to testify against the wiki leaks founder has tons amount to torture. New years day in hong kong these hundreds of the arrests as an estimated 1000000 turn out for the 1st of a county beijing protest of 2020. The pushback against the dry january Health Initiative as french wine producers and the government announced the annual alcohol abstinence as an attack on the countrys culture