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Future Tongues
It has a life of its own, our propensity to talk: always evolving, pivoting in unexpected directions. The sentence that rolled off your tongue or departed your fingertips just a second ago — along with its tone, word choice, its construction — has something especially interesting to say about our world today and years from now. Join Aaron as he tries to better understand the marvel that is language!
Future Tongues
Speaking Your Identity (Kiezdeutsch pt. 2) | Heike Wiese
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Episode 2
Language isn't just a matter of cramming our ideas into a rigid grammar, vocalizing our words, and then voilà, meaning signaled, job done — no, not quite. More than just a convenient communication utility, language informs ourselves — and others — about who we are, a truth that is as existential as it is abstract, and one that Aaron examines in this episode with Heike Wiese, a professor of linguistics at Humboldt University of Berlin, who is among the world's leading researchers in Kiezdeutsch. The two discuss Germany's myth (and reality) of a "standard" national language, multilingualism in Germany, the culture around Kiezdeutsch, and how some Germans look at — or down on — the multiethnolect and its speakers.