New article out in The Conversation

A few months ago, I wrote a reflection on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever that focused on the presumed politics of language use in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Specifically, why do the Talokanil speak only Yucatec Maya, while the Wakandans almost exclusively use English?

I kept thinking about that idea, and after I watched Avatar: The Way of Water, I also began thinking about language use in other science fiction films. Eventually, I had the idea of writing a linguistics article about all of this, except I wanted to write an article for the general public, not an academic article. The type of linguistics I do professionally doesn’t usually tie in with entertainment and pop culture much, but film has become a pretty big passion of mine over the past two years or so, and I thought this would be a fun opportunity to apply what I know about language to the wonderful world of cinema.

Inspired mostly by a post I saw on Twitter that criticized Avatar 2 for using English (I believe the author of the post misinterpreted the narrative structure of the film, but that’s beside the point), I drafted a fairly long piece, over 1500 words, that described the use of non-English languages and subtitles in recent films, particularly Oscar-nominated films like CODA and West Side Story.

I wasn’t sure who would publish a piece like this, and I tried cold-emailing editors at various well-known magazines that might be interested in this mix of linguistics and pop culture, but I got no responses. After a few months, I thought about just dropping the project or perhaps posting to Medium, but then I got a tip from a film professor at Arizona State University that I might try The Conversation, a magazine specifically for scholars to write layperson-friendly articles in a way that combines academic themes with current news. So I reached out to an editor with the same pitch, and it was accepted!

After that, it took a few weeks of back-and-forth to get the article ready for publication. In particular, I needed to cut the word count almost in half, which was very difficult for me. If you read this blog regularly, you’ll notice right away that I am a very verbose writer; I’ve struggled with keeping my word count down for my entire life. But I had to learn to let go of a lot of things in order to get this published, including allowing the editor to reorganize paragraphs, cut entire sections, and simplify the language as much as possible. I also had to find tons of related content online, like academic articles and relevant YouTube videos, to use as hyperlinks in the article, which is something one never has to do for academic journal writing!

The final push came on Sunday night and Monday morning. Since the piece is about movies, we wanted it to be published right after the Academy Awards (which took place last Sunday). This meant a lot of last-minute edits and phone calls last Monday, made especially hard because I wasn’t in town that day (*cough* ski lifts… *cough*). But I am happy with the final result! You can read it here.

(As an aside, I’m very pleased that they used for the article’s banner image a photo of Michelle Yeoh winning her Oscar for Best Actress in Everything Everywhere All at Once, another film I raved about on this blog last year.)

From this experience, I learned that it can be tough to get one’s foot in the door for non-academic writing, and once you do begin the process, it’s wildly different from the academic writing I’ve been trained in. But I hope this is just the first of many pieces I can write to help Linguistics reach a broader audience!

And finally, immediately after the piece was published, I was contacted by a producer for a morning radio show in Calgary who wanted to have me on air for a quick interview! That was the most surprising thing to me. I got up at 7am and got on a phone call with Sue and Andy to chat a little bit about “linguistic realism” (the theme of the piece I wrote) and recent films!

As the interview was only a quick five-minute chat, I didn’t get to say everything I’d prepared, and I also got an unexpected question about how trends toward realism in Hollywood might also be related to changes in casting decisions. But otherwise, I enjoyed this experience as well, and again, I’m hoping that this is a stepping-stone to more public engagement in my ongoing career.

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Word of the Day: Camber refers to the slight convex curvature on an otherwise flat object, such as a ski or snowboard (or the asymmetry in curvature on an airplane wing), that helps with lift and control. In automotive engineering, camber angle also refers to when wheels are angled inward or outward, not exactly perpendicular to the horizontal x-axis or the road.