Episode 4 - Erez Levon

Hello and welcome to Linguistics Now. A podcast where we discuss everything linguistics, with linguists from all over the world. I'm your host, Vicki Loras and I am delighted to welcome you to another episode. Welcome to Linguistics Now, where we delve into the intricate ways language shapes are world. I'm your host, Vicki Loras and today we're honored to have Professor Ares Levin with us. As a professor of social linguistics at the University of Bern, Professor Levin's research delves into how linguistic variations convey social meanings, particularly concerning gender, sexuality, social class and national identity. In this episode, we'll explore the subtle ways our speech patterns influence perceptions and contribute to broader social dynamics. So, welcome Ares. Thank you very much for being my guest today. Thank you. And here's a question I ask all my guests. What drew you into linguistics and especially the field you're working in? Yeah, I mean linguistics is not, I think, is not something that you necessarily know about before you actually get into doing it. So it's something that most people sort of stumble into and that was definitely the case for me. I started off in my undergraduate studying French and as part of my French degree, I know I've been thinking I really love the language, I love thinking about language, I was less interested in the literature side, but for me, I just thought if you study a language, you do both language and literature. And then in sort of the first semester of my undergraduate French degree, I had to take an introduction to linguistics course. And I remember just sitting in that lecture hall and just being sort of amazed at this entire field. And I was like, oh, wow, this is, this is definitely what I want to do. So I started, I ended up double majoring then in my undergraduate in French and linguistics and was able to start exploring what linguistics was all about. And then I guess for my own specific interest, you know, as a sociolinguist interested in identity and nationalism and language, I think a lot of that came from my own personal background. And that was even the reason why I was so fascinated by languages to begin with. You know, I was born in Israel, my family is Israeli. We moved to the US when I was very young and I grew up then in America. But you know, in a situation where there was a different language at home, then there was in public life or in school and with my friends. And so always having this, I did this sort of awareness that, you know, what you see in public is not necessarily what you see at home in my own sort of negotiations of how this all works through language. I think it was interested in me. And that's what then drove me to study this in other people. Fantastic story. Then you really fit, which is, I think it's not a stereotype anymore. When we ask a language, how many languages do you speak it? You speak a lot. Yeah. Second, not that many. I mean, I did, yeah. So Hebrew was my first language in the English, obviously. And then I've been living in France for 20 years now. So obviously, French. And then, yeah. And then I've studied a lot of languages and work in a bunch of other languages and can sort of get by in other languages. But I wouldn't say that I'm very, very fluent in that many more. Okay. A very interesting story. Okay. So I'd like us to start with language and identity. First of all, you said that your own background pulled you into this field. Was there something that you discovered along the way that you thought I really want to study this? Yeah. I mean, I think it was, it was actually a result in some ways of kind of, you know, traumatic experiences that I had growing up. You know, I had growing up. I was always, I've always been sort of, you know, sort of a feminine or feminine in my, in my mannerisms and my behavior and in my speech. And from pretty much as old as I can remember, as young as I can remember, this was always been a subject of commentary and mockery and things like that. If people say, you know, you sound gay, why do you talk like that and things like that? And then that actually became a sort of intellectual question, you know, both what do people hear as sounding feminine or masculine or gay or straight? And, and why do I talk like that? Is this something that I that I acquired? If so, how did I acquired? Is this something that I'm enacting whether consciously or not? And if so, how did I learn how to do that and how do I decide when to do that and when not to do that? So that really got me interested in in both how people perceive language, how they assign these to different identity categories. And then also, you know, on the production side, what is it that people are doing? Are they, are they making sort of active conscious choices? Or is it more complicated than that? And I, I guess I always assumed it was more complicated than that. And so that's why it got me interested in doing the work I do. And you've written some books on this topic on gays and lesbians in Israel. I'm going to add all your books in the show notes so people can read more about that. Did you, while you were writing these books, while you were doing this research, did you discover something that was way beyond what you had imagined? And why did you specifically choose Israel? Okay, obviously, you grew up there, but was there another reason why you chose that country? Yeah, I guess so the interest that I had, because of, you know, my own personal experiences and then also in my reading of the literature, there were two things that I think I was trying to, to engage with. The first was, you know, the research on particularly gay and lesbian speech, and even more so gay men speech, which was really what the majority of the research in the sort of 70s, 80s and 90s had been about, sort of made these assumptions that, you know, there was a gay style of speaking that got associated with gay men almost as if, you know, if you are a gay man, you must speak this way. And if you are a non gay man, you will speak this other way. And I always found that a bit too simple, a bit problematic, this sort of conflation of an identity category and a way of speaking. So part of my goal and that project was to really look at diversity within gay and lesbian communities and see if, you know, is it actually the case that all gay men and all lesbians speak in a similar way? And then I did this in Israel because, yeah, both certainly, you know, my own personal experience gave me access to the language and access to the communities that I was interested in. But also because Israel, I think, was a useful place to look precisely at this notion of diversity within communities. I was very interested in the ways in which, you know, Zionism and this sort of ideologies and discourses that the entire state of Israel was built upon brought a very gendered idea with them. There was always, from the foundation of this state of Israel and even before that, from the beginning of European Zionism in the 19th century, it was a very strong idea, a gendered idea of what it means to be Israeli. And it includes a particular way of enacting masculinity and enacting femininity. And so I was interested in how gay and lesbians in Israel navigate that. What, you know, if people, some, maybe some gay men, are happy to enact this, this masculine, this normative masculinity that's associated, stereotypically associated with Israelis, whereas other gay men are not. And then I was interested in whether that kind of diversity then correlated with different ways of using language. So that was really the goal. And in terms of the sort of overall, the big finding that you asked about, that's essentially what I found. And I found then different ways of speaking were actually more linked to people's political positioning. So so whether you were positioning yourself on the left wing of Israeli politics or the right wing of Israeli politics, sort of pro Zionist versus somewhat more ambivalent about Zionism, that really determined the extent to which you used what is heard as gay sounding speech or not. So it really, I made the argument that when we talk about gay language, we're really talking about sexuality in interaction with other things. And the bit that I'm interested in is that interaction with politics. Is this what you've written about masculinity being policed through language? Is this what you mean? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there's definitely, you know, certain ways in which we have these, these ideas, these stereotypes about what men are supposed to sound like, all different kinds of men, you know, a heterosexual man, a gay man. And as soon as you don't do that, as soon as you're an individual who, who doesn't abide by these expectations and by these, these rules in a sense, then it's very easy to become marginalized, to be criticized, and even in, you know, more severe cases to be excluded from a particular community. So it's really the ways in which language functions as this kind of signal that allows this to you to check the boundaries of who's, who's in our group and who's not in our group. And I'm very interested in how language does this kind of boundary function. Very interesting. When you're doing research on something as personal sexuality and gender and all that, and you've done it in a few countries, are there any challenges if you can speak about it that you faced and in which places did you find it more challenging, researching, finding material, writing about it? Yeah, definitely. I mean, it is, it's a very, you know, it's a very personal topic for a lot of people and some more personal person than for others. It's certainly, you know, first of all, a challenge to get access to people who are willing to talk to me, you know, usually a complete stranger and divulge details of their, of their very sort of private experiences and sometimes very painful and difficult experiences. It's, it's, you know, it requires you to think very carefully about how you present yourself, how you present your project, you know, so in Israel, it was a bit, well, with certain people, it was a bit easier because I could present myself as Israeli, as an Israeli man, as an Israeli gay man, so that got me access to certain communities of people. But then at the same time, doing that was problematic, for example, within Israeli lesbian communities, because they're, you know, particularly at the time when I was doing this work, there was still a great deal of tension between gay, gay men's communities and lesbian communities of Israel. So when I wanted to get access to lesbian communities, it was actually better for me to present myself more as an American researcher, who was doing work on this in Israel, and then that, most of my participants then felt somewhat more comfortable with that, seeing me as kind of an outsider. So you kind of have to play with this insider outsider status. And then there are some communities that are just, you know, incredibly difficult to get access to, and I originally hope to be able to work with sort of religious non-heterosexual communities. I hesitate to use the word gay or lesbian because they don't identify necessarily as gay or lesbian, but, you know, people who are orthodox Jews in Israel and who engage in homosexual activities and homosexual sex in relationships. And that is a very, you know, closed community for understandable reasons. There's a great deal of fear about opening up to outsiders. There's a great deal of fear about being discovered, having their identities known. So I was only ever able to get access to sort of a handful of people, but never the sort of full ethnographic research that I would have liked to have done. And then I had similar kinds of experiences in other places, for example, in South Africa. I was also interested in working in communities in upper corners, so white upper corner communities, which also tend to be very, you know, traditional Christian conservative, and looking at people who were non-heterosexual in these spaces. And again, it's very difficult to get into these communities because of the sort of requirement of secrecy and the fear around being becoming visible. So I was only ever, once again, able to get access to handfuls of people at a time, but not a full sort of community that was willing to let me in. So yeah, it's always something that you kind of have to negotiate. Well, super very interesting. Picking up from Israel and identity, we're going to move on to national identity a little bit now because you've done a lot of writing and speaking about that topic as well. You've done a lot of work on Israel and Palestine. So can you tell us a little bit about that, what role language plays in people's political identities and how communities position themselves, anything you'd like to tell us about that I find it so interesting. Yeah, I mean, so it's going back to this question of sort of borders and the ways in which borders are maintained both externally and then also the ways in which people internalize these own ideas of borders and who gets to be a member of my community versus who doesn't get to be a member of my community. And I'm interested in how people how this gets signaled both in the ways that people talk and then how people talk about this as well. So among Jewish Israelis, my PhD was very much looking at how they vary these very subtle aspects of the speech signal. So I was looking mostly at prasodic features of its pitch and intonation and voice quality and how this kind of shows signals whether you sort of position yourself more in the left wing or more on the right wing. Where essentially what I found is that right wing people were talking in ways that were sort of in keeping with the dominant ideas of gender in Zionism. So men should talk like, you know, quote-unquote men and women should talk like quote-unquote women. Whether I'm gay or lesbian or not, that doesn't matter. It's really it's more important that I'm the man or a woman. Whereas people who were more on the left wing of Israeli politics and who's left wing politics, you know, included sort of anti-occupation pro-Palestinian politics, anti or or critical of Zionist politics. They also were then very critical of these gender norms that were part of Zionism. So they, you know, didn't feel the need to speak if you're a man to speak in a way that that sounds traditionally masculine or if you're a woman to sound in a to speak in a way that sounds traditionally feminine. To really see that that politics and gendered speech patterns were very much were very much connected. And then, you know, since that PhD work then I also began to work with my colleague Tomaz O'Millani and we began to work a great deal on Palestinian communities in Israel, Palestine, both within the occupied territories but also Palestinian citizens of Israel. So Palestinians living within the borders of the state of Israel. And there we're very interested in how they use, how they sort of move between Hebrew, Arabic and English when discussing issues of gender and sexuality. And we really find that, you know, sort of perhaps paradoxically Arabic is sort of seen among most of the Palestinians that we've been looking at is not the language in which one can do or talk about sort of queer or homosexual topics. For that, they switch either to Hebrew, which is, which is, you know, interesting because they're clearly very critical of the state of Israel and Zionism. But they nevertheless see Hebrew as a kind of language in which homosexuality is more possible than an Arabic or more and more switching to English, which is sort of seen by them and used by them as this kind of, you know, global language of sexual freedom in a sense. Well, and I was going to ask if you could give us an example, you give us a great one, that was so interesting. Very interesting. There's often talk about what's authentic national speech. What makes something authentic and who decides that at the end of the day? Yeah, that's an excellent question. I don't think there's a good answer for that, right? I mean, what's authentic and who decides? I mean, basically nothing is authentic, really. I mean, there's no one national speech that's any more authentic than other national speech other than it's become the sort of norm by which other people are judged. So it's decided by, you know, by people in power. It's decided by discourses and ideologies of nationhood that there is this particular way of speaking that we're going to consider the proper way of speaking. We see this even, you know, among Jewish Israeli populations, you know, when the state of Israel was formed and when Hebrew was was re-vernacularized and became, you know, went from being just a language of prayer and liturgy to a language of everyday life and everyday communication. There were very specific choices that were made about which variety of Hebrew were we going to use? Were we going to rely on a Hebrew that was more similar to what was spoken previously in Europe? Or were we going to use one that was more similar to what was spoken in in the Middle East and North Africa? And interestingly, the choice was made to move away from the European version and to rely more on a pronunciation model that's more similar to the Middle Eastern version, historically the Middle Eastern version. And that was done because Zionism was all about rejecting the sort of notion of European Judaism. It was all about this idea that Jews in Europe need to come back to the land of Palestine and create this new state. So you saw language being used as this way to create a distance between Europe and the Middle East and this was partially done through the adoption of a more Middle Eastern model of Hebrew. But even the not adoption was only partial because there's certain elements that even today of sort of Middle Eastern pronunciations of Hebrew that are heard as two Middle Eastern. And so those get pushed aside. And Israel's an interesting example because these were very conscious choices and there's, you know, writing, there's an official academy of the Hebrew language that makes these decisions about which pronunciation we should use, which word we should use. But when you look at the sort of politics behind those choices, you can really see that it's really about building a particular idea of the nation and using language as a way to do that as a kind of vehicle for the nation. Okay, so as I perceive it, they're doing this to bring it more local to the area. Like here we are. This is our location. We need to speak as they spoke always here. So this is why they reject the European heat rule. Exactly. Oh wow. So have you seen this in other areas too? Like in other places that the locale plays a role? Yeah, it definitely does. I mean it plays a role differently depending on where you are and the sort of specific local politics and who you're trying to differentiate yourself from. But you certainly see this kind of, it's always a battle of differentiation. So what does it mean to be a nation? Essentially it means we're a group of people that's different from this other group of people. And what counts as the homeland? I mean, you know, I have students who have studied pretty much exactly the same kinds of patterns as they operate in Greece, as they operate or have historically operated in Greece, how they, as they operate in Brazil, as they operate in Thailand. I mean, I think anytime we look at sort of contemporary nationalisms or any nationalism, really, we find this. I mean, even in the context in which I work now, this is not something I work on specifically, but, you know, I mean, Switzerland and in the German speaking part of Switzerland, and there's a huge discourse around the ways in which Swiss German needs to be differentiated from the German spoken in Germany and also the German spoken in Austria. So it's very much a national question of, you know, what kind of German do you speak in the ways in which then these values, these national values, these notions of belonging and pride and even aesthetic values like like beauty and things like that. Excuse me. Get sort of layered onto different ways of speaking. Can I ask you, what do you think about Swiss German? Because you're in the Swiss context. What do you think about it? I think it's a language. I think it's actually even multiple languages, right? You know, there are many, many Swiss Germans. Me too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's, so I've got a project, a new project now that's looking actually at, we're going to start looking at differences, the ways in which differences between varieties of German in Germany and Austria and in Switzerland are perceived. And what are the, in the sense, what are the origins of those perceptions? So why do people think, for example, that, you know, Bernie's German sounds warm and friendly and homely, whereas Zurich German sounds cold, but also very educated and sophisticated. So we're trying to understand where these ideologies came from. Oh, fantastic. Can I ask you, is it going to be a book or? I think it'll probably be a series of articles, yeah, that we're going to do, it's basically we're adopting, yeah, experimental, different experimental methods to try and get it at what are the origins of these associations that people have with these different varieties? Well, very interesting, because I really love anything that's about Swiss German. So I'm definitely going to read them. Fantastic. Do you have any other projects in the pipeline that you could share? Yeah, I'm still on this topic of sort of where, where these meanings come from. This is sort of one of the big things that I've always been curious about is how do people come to associate particular speech styles with different identity categories. I have a project with a colleague, Nikolai Faroe, in Copenhagen, where we've been working on the role that the body plays in how people come to associate meaning with speech. In particular, we're very interested in the ways in which not only do you get certain speech styles that are heard as sounding gay or masculine or whatever, but you also have different kinds of embodied postures, different ways of holding your head, holding your mouth, holding your shoulders, all these kinds of things. And we're curious about whether there's a connection between the two. So is there a particular way of holding your mouth in jaw that is seen as or perceived as being say very masculine? And if so, does that particular way of holding your mouth and jaw have particular kinds of specific linguistic effects that are also then seen heard as sounding masculine? So we're kind of interested in whether the body could be perhaps the origin of some of these meanings that we associate with language. So I guess video will be incorporated into this research as well. Yeah, yeah. So this, the project involves video when we're actually using, we're focusing specifically on the face and specifically on the jaw and the lips. And so we've been using this piece of software called face reader that essentially, while it's recording video, it identifies something like 480 points in the face and it tracks the real time so that we can very precisely measure sort of precise where is your jaw, where are your lips at any one moment. And we can then look at how that correlates with the speech that's actually coming out of your mouth. That's so interesting. I'm really looking forward to everything. You just told this. That's amazing. I had never thought of that like how you position your jaw in different sounds come out and how you sound more masculine or not. So I'm sure our listeners will be interested as well. That's fantastic. And it was so great having you as my guest today. Thank you, Randy. You've told this about so many things. I really appreciate it. And I hope to have you again someday. Yeah, I love that. Thank you. Thanks very much. Thank you very much. [BLANK_AUDIO] [MUSIC] Thank you for joining us on this enlightening journey into the world of social linguistics with Professor Eris Levin. If today's discussion sparked your interest, be sure to visit his website at erislevin.com to learn more about his research and publications. Don't forget to subscribe to linguistics now for more conversations that uncover the profound impact of language on society. Until next time, keep exploring the words and languages that connect us all. [MUSIC] Thank you for listening to another episode of linguistics now, which is available on all podcasting platforms. Please remember to subscribe to the podcast so you can receive notifications every time a new episode is available. For any comments or if you'd like to be one of my guests, please email me at Vicky Loras. That's V-I-C-K-Y-L-O-R-A-S at yahoo.ca. [MUSIC]