Latest news with #RunePedersen
SBS Australia
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- SBS Australia
How We Talk to Ourselves
LISTEN TO SBS Audio 10/07/2025 39:56 English Credits Host: Rune Pedersen joined by Stefan Delatovic Producers: Rune Pedersen at Onomato People, Stefan Delatovic Writers: Rune Pedersen and Stefan Delatovic Artwork: Wendy Tang Post production and sound design: Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY SBS Audio team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn Guests: Dr. Chris Cheers, Psychologist, Author & Educator. Corinne Ooms contestant on Alone Australia. Thabani Tshuma, Poet, Writer & Performer. Stefan How humans talk is an SBS podcast recorded on Wurundjeri country we pay our respects to the custodians of this land, which has been shaped by stories and language and love for generations. Stefan Rune, huge news. It's episode eight, the final episode of the season. We've looked at all kinds of ways that humans talk, and now I think it's time for the final frontier. How do humans talk to themselves? I think we should explore inner monologs, intrusive thoughts. We could look at wellness practices, look at ways that we, sort of, you know, use language in our own sense of self to form our identity. Because obviously, you know, you can't sort of look out onto the street before you tend your own garden. As it were… [fades out] Rune Pedersen I wonder, did I brush my teeth this morning? And why are my hands so sweaty? UGH! Oh, man, I forgot to listen. I can't ask him now what he's been talking about. He's been talking for way too long. I'm really in my head today for a guy hosting a podcast on communication. I really do spend a lot of time talking to myself. I wonder if that's normal, am I? Is that normal? Chris It's absolutely normal. Everyone has self talk, you know, because we all have thoughts, right? And effectively, when those thoughts become about ourselves, which everyone has thoughts about themselves. That's what we might call self talk. So we all do it, and we all just do it in different ways. Rune Pedersen Dr Chris Cheers is a psychologist, educator and author who focuses on mental health, gender affirmation and intimacy, and I just know from his work that he'll be able to shed some light on this whole talking-to-myself-business. Chris Some of them might, you know, some of us might say it out loud, but some of us it remains a very internal sort of process, but we all do it, and that's because it has an evolutionary advantage, right? Like self talk helps you make sense of yourself. It helps you make sense of the world around you, and it pretty much turns what is happening around you into language. And as soon as we do that, we make meaning of it. So if we don't self talk, it's really hard for us to make meaning of ourselves or the world around us. Rune Pedersen Actually, that's a little bit of a relief. Chris Good, good. I'm, I'm glad to relieve you so early. Rune Pedersen Yeah, because it's like, of course, like, it's, it can feel embarrassing. If I will, particularly have it if I've done something where I feel like, oh my god, that was embarrassing, and I'll chew myself up thinking about it for days and weeks, even years after, I'll find myself in a situation in the shower and reliving it and then just repeating that, trying to conquer the moment almost again. But it sounds like that, that is just normal. Chris It's normal. But what you're talking about there, it might be useful to bring up another term, rumination here. So it's good to actually differentiate between self talk and rumination. In the psychology research we normally, you know, separate between those two things. So self talk is normally about the present or the future. So and self talk is normally about motivating you to do something, or talk about the future or talk about what's happening right at this moment, or, you know, telling yourself that you can do it or you can't do it. But it's normally about the present or the future in terms of rumination, though, that's normally about the past. So if you are sort of going over things from the past and sort of in your head, kind of going over and over them, and telling yourself that you did bad or what you did bad in the past, that's less likely to be good. You know, that's less likely to be useful for your well being to kind of ruminate for days and days. A little bit of rumination can be useful to learn. But if that rumination is going over days and days, that that can have a negative impact on your well being, whereas positive self talk, that's normally about motivation for the future, can really have a positive impact on your well being. Rune Pedersen Well, that brings me, then, into the different ways that we talk to ourselves. Could you, yeah, could you elaborate a little bit on the different forms? Chris I would say the most useful thing to understand when we start thinking about self talk or or thoughts is to really just normalise that all of our brains are pretty anxious. All of our brains, from an evolution perspective are sort of set up to focus on the environment and to focus on threats to kind of keep us safe, right? So, from a, you know, if you think about evolution, the cave person who just thought about butterflies and good things all the time and just told themselves that they were going to be great, you know, are likely to be eaten by the lion, you know, the person who was, you know, look. Working out, where are the threats, where are the lines they're more likely to survive? So there is an evolutionary advantage to keeping this ability to focus on threat in our environment. So that's why, often our self talk can move to the threat. The issue is, when you're an environment that may be pretty safe, like if you've got good housing, or you don't have immediate threats in your environment. Over time, our brains have kind of developed this really annoying part in some ways, which is your frontal cortex, which is the part that's able to imagine and able to have abstract thought and all these wonderful creative things, but it's also the part of your brain that's able to imagine threats that aren't even there. And our brains are very good at doing this. They imagine threats are not here or talk to ourselves about like, if we had a dinner party last night. Our brains aren't built to think about all the positive aspects of that dinner party. Our brains are built to think, what did I do wrong? How can I learn from that or and that rumination can really be about thinking about threat or thinking about social threat in future environments. So it's really normal for all brains to focus on threat. So that's why our self talk can often go to the negative. And separating between, I guess helpful self talk and unhelpful self talk is probably a useful way to look at it. So it's very likely you might have unhelpful self talk that focuses on what we call self criticism. This is often called the critical inner voice, or self critical thoughts, or the inner saboteur. You know, we have all these terms for when our self talk becomes negative about ourselves, and that's really common, but that can be really unhelpful. Thinking about positive self talk is normally about, it motivates, it regulates or it causes us to take perspective. So they're kind of the three things that positive self talk tend to do. They tend to so if your self talk is about, you know, I can do this. Or for me, like Chris, you can do this because there's actually a lot of research that actually using your name in the third person, like Chris, you can do this, is more effective than just saying, I can do this okay. So that kind of positive self talk can be really useful. It can also regulate us to say, you know, we're going to be okay, or we've been through things like this before, you know, Chris, you'll be okay. That can regulate our emotions. And also when our self talk allows us to take another perspective, like, hang on, what would else? What would someone else think in this circumstance? You know that that sort of self talk could be really useful for our well being as well? Rune Pedersen Okay, well, I want to dive a little bit into, then, the negative aspects of it. I'm really curious about how self talk can contribute to an experience of anxiety in our lives. Chris I i think the negative aspects of self talk are all about when we are talking to ourselves in a way that's self critical, basically, or or we're focusing our self talk on only the negative aspects of of what has happened or what will happen, like our brain is very bad at predicting the future, and what it does is it tends to predict a bad future, especially when we're feeling anxious. And this is probably good to bring in that idea of that cognitive behavior therapy has really given us, which is the idea that our thoughts and our behavior and our feelings all relate to each other. So if we change our behavior, it can change the way we think and feel. If we change our thoughts, it can change the way we behave and way we feel. So if our thoughts are negative, it's very likely that we're going to have anxiety or negative emotions, and we're also probably going to behave in a way that's not very good for our well being, so avoidance or just not doing the things that we would normally enjoy. So that's why negative self talk can have a really negative impact on our mental health and wellbeing, because the way we think changes how we feel and changes how we behave. So in terms of negative self talk, it's it's good to notice that, you know, as I was talking about, because our brains are focused on threat and focused on anxiety, our negative self talk once it goes negative, once our self talk is about a threat, like once you leave a dinner party and your brain goes, I can't you said such stupid things and everyone hated you at that dinner and and then the brain tries to fix that problem. And unfortunately, the way it tries to fix it is to think about it in a way that if I just think about it enough, I'll be able to work it out, and I won't feel anxious anymore, when, in actual fact, it's quite the opposite. The more you think about it, if you're in that negative space, the more anxious you're gonna feel, because there's no answer to be found, because you can't change the past. So that's why it's really important to notice that your self talk when it's negative, if your body is going to react like it's a real threat, even though it's made up, even though your brain is just giving you thoughts. If we can catch that moment, if we can help you, catch that moment where you get to notice your self talk, and you get to notice that it's not necessarily true. True or that it's quite negative. If you can catch that moment, you can then really change the anxiety or the stress response that might come from that. Rune Pedersen How can we practice the catching of the light bulb moment, so to speak? Chris Well, journaling is a useful way to kind of first practice this. So when, if you as someone that tends to ruminate on past experiences, or tends to have anxious self talk or self critical self talk. Write it down, you know, write down some of some of your thoughts. Write down your self talk and start to notice it. And just even just that process of noticing your self talk, by writing it down, you will automatically start to evaluate it, because now it's written down in front of you. Now it's not just this thing in your head that feels real. Now it's this thing written down on the page. And as soon as the sentence is written down on the page, you're much more likely to be able to have perspective and to be able to have distance from that thought, to be able to go, oh, hang on, I'm only focusing on the negative here. Or hang on this thought is not necessarily true, or why all these thoughts are ignoring all the positive aspects of last night. So if we can first write down the thought, we can get distance from it, and then the next step, and this is where therapy comes in, is, how do we challenge some of that kind of negative self talk or and then how can we change it? So, but that process, if there's one, one skill that you can work on in life, and this is shown in the research, the main skill that improves your mental health and wellbeing from a self talk perspective, is the ability to notice it, because then that allows the rest of the process to challenge the thoughts, or, you know, to come up with different perspectives to start, but if you don't notice it, you really can't start the rest of the process. They might change it. Rune Pedersen I'm curious, then, how does self talk play a role in reframing your personal narrative? Chris Well, if we take a narrative therapy perspective, so narrative therapy is a type of therapy that works with the stories we tell ourselves about our lives and about you know ourselves and who we are and who we will be. Changing our stories can directly change our mental health and well being, because if we can start seeing a different future for ourselves, if we can start building a bit of a different narrative for ourselves, it can really change, I guess, our how our anxiety. Because if we can change the narrative, we can change what we think our future will be, and if we can make our future seem a little bit more positive, we're going to feel a little more positive right now as we're thinking about it. One way to think about this is, in childhood, you develop ways of looking at the world, and those lenses and schema therapy calls these schemas, right? So in childhood, you develop schemas which are like mindsets or way of looking at the world, and depending on your childhood, depending on your experiences, depending on how your needs were met and your emotional needs were met, those schemas could be quite negative. You know, those schemas could and quite negative itself. So, for example, I work a lot with with, you know, queer population, the transgender verse population, a lot of the time, their childhood and their teenage years have experienced homophobia, transphobia, or basically experiencing a culture or a family that is telling them there's something wrong with you, you know, there's this part of you that's wrong, and also that you're wrong, or you're what you believe. You know you're a sin, or you're evil or or just you're wrong. There's something wrong with you. And if you hear that message enough, you start to internalize that as, oh, there's something wrong with me. I'm faulty, I'm, you know, I'm not worthy. I'm, you know, I'm not good enough. I'm worthless. These schemas or these ways of looking at yourself really develop, and once those schemas have developed, it means that in your adult life, your self talk tends to be negative, because it your automatic negative thoughts or your self talk tends to come from those schemas. Tends to come from those those mindsets that developed in your childhood. So where therapy comes in is trying to first learn that and notice that and understand where did this negative self talk come from? It, it didn't just come from nowhere. Normally, that negative self talk, you can see how it relates to past, you know, negative experiences, or where needs weren't met as a child, or relates to some sort of core belief or or schema, the way of looking at the world. So that learning about that can be the first step to then trying to change it. You know, we kind of need to understand something before we can change it. And that process of and I've worked with clients where there's an amazing sense of validation that comes from the work we do together, for them to be able to say, Oh, hang on, I'm not faulty, you know, and there's not something wrong with me. I grew up in a system or a culture or a family that told me there was something wrong. With me, so then I internalise that belief. But that belief is not necessarily true, and this negative self talk is comes from that belief. So if we can challenge that belief, so people can believe I am worthy, I'm not faulty, it can really start to change that negative self talk. Rune Pedersen I've been thinking a lot about how how my child don't have a voice yet, so it's my role to give them a self loving voice. And I say that by when I say I love you, when I say jails, that's the Danish version. My thought with it is, yes, I I do, but I know you don't understand me, but my hope is that that, that I'm teaching the child that to say that to themselves, is that a meaningful exercise in this, in sort of self talk? Chris Yeah, that's beautiful to hear and to think about the impact that will have on the child's life. You know, as they, as they grow and become an adult, because I often say to parents, and I don't mean to terrify you, but you're having way more influence on this little person's life than you will ever be able to comprehend. Parents often focus a lot on what they're saying. Like to say the right thing, but it's a lot less about focusing on the words you say, and a lot more about focusing on who you are as a person around this child, because they are perceiving everything. They're perceiving your facial expressions, your tone of voice, your how you move through the world, how you treat every person that you're around. They're just these sponges, just taking it all in, and most importantly, they're working out how to view themselves through you, you know, and how to understand themselves through you. There's no greater impact on an adult than what their experiences were like as a child and especially how their needs were met by a caregiver, how that caregiver responded to them, or how much they were there for them, is when they start to internalise things. Because unfortunately for kids, until sort of later in life, like teenage years, really, your whole world is your parents or caregivers and your family. So when things go wrong, or when you, you know, sometimes I when I used to work with in family therapy when there was a divorce or a separation of parents, when kids are young, like, you know, I was working with 7,8,9, year olds, it was incredibly sad how often kids thought that divorce was their fault, because the only way they make sense of the world because they're quite egotistical. They haven't quite worked out how to take other perspectives or understand other other people's perspectives. Yet they just understand things through their little world, which is just them. So if something terrible happens, their only way of comprehending that is because it's something that I did. So those understanding as a parent, as a caregiver, that you're having a huge impact on how a kid sees themselves and and how they perceive themselves. So if, if, as long as you can get forward that idea that you are loved, you are good, yes, you do bad things. You know, this isn't about just accepting kids behaviors all the time, but it's that, that really hard thing, but that really important thing, of of how it is for you as a parent to stay regulated, to listen to your child and their needs, to to sit with them in their discomfort, and also when they do something bad or unsafe, that you're able to say that what you did was bad, but you are good. You know, because that message, what you did was bad, but you were good, turns into later in life. As an adult, the self talk of, I am worthy, I am good enough, verse, If what they just hear is, you know, I can't believe you've done this again, like you just do this every time. They're gonna grow up with that idea that I am bad and that becomes, then as an adult, I'm not worthy, I'm not good enough, I'm unlovable. And that becomes that negative self talk that that that adult may experience all the time. Rune Pedersen So we got some of the psychology down, the language of schemas and core beliefs and cognitive loops, and I'm very relieved to hear that talking to myself isn't a sign of madness, actually, if anything, it's just how we stay sane, although it can spiral a bit. So I really wonder what happens when you then strip away the noise of modern life, no screens, no one to talk to, and it's just you alone for 70 days, perhaps in the Tasmanian wildlife. That's exactly what Corinne Ooms did. She took part in the SBS Alone Australia, surviving completely on her own, far away from the rest of the world. So I caught up with her over the phone to hear her perspective. Corinne I don't think we realise how noisy our thoughts and our life is until we step out of it. But it's so difficult to step out of it, because our phone is just right there, and our emails is right there, and it's so easy if you're bored, rather than just sitting and sitting and being with yourself and connecting with yourself, it's so easy to distract yourself through Doom scrolling and just jump on social media and and distract yourself. And then with that, I think I didn't realise how much influence that had in my thoughts and my narratives. Like we're like a sponge, and despite our best efforts, we get influenced by all these different things, friends, families, social media, movies, telling you what you have to be and what to think and how to dress and how to act, and until it's like what's what is mine? What's my thoughts? What is my narrative? And what do I actually want out of my life for myself, not what's expected of me, and what's, you know, societal expectations. Rune Pedersen What did the process look like for your thoughts, then, from going from one narrative to the next narrative, like, how did you go from from the different narratives to then coming out on the other end? Was there a moment? Corinne It was more it was more like I was a slate, that was wiped clean. So I went out there full of distractions, full of noises, full of external pressures and external narratives, and then I went in there, and it took a while for that to just kind of empty away, and for those thought patterns and those thought habits to to break out of them, and it was almost like a reset. I was able to slowly rethink about what I did actually want in life, from a new almost like a blank slate. Rune Pedersen Did you have moments out there where, where you know you had to sort of give yourself an inner pep talk or similar, and, and how did that look like for you? Corinne Yeah, I wouldn't say I gave myself an inner pep talk, but I definitely did remember situations and scenarios from my past or how I wanted myself to be like I did visualise that. So for example, I would remember my mum a lot, and my mum died when she was 46 and she was ill most of her life, and she was an incredibly strong woman, and you wouldn't guess she was sick because she was, she hid it well. I would remember her, and I'd remember how she approached life and her, how she was playful and took joy out of the small things. And yeah, that that filled me with strength, without needing to pep talk myself, that just remembering that and imagining myself doing the same, you know, getting powering through and enduring the suffering to come out the other side with, with a smile and enjoying The small things again, and also i i know that pain is temporary, whatever I suffer, whatever suffering I was experiencing out there, I knew it was temporary, so I was able to look at myself almost as in a third person, and almost like a it was almost like an experiment, because I was experiencing feelings and thoughts and changes to my body that I had never experienced before. And that was fascinating. If you remove the me, the i from it, you know, and that the pain is happening to me. It was actually quite, really, quite interesting to observe. So, yeah, I started looking at the hard times as a, with curiosity and an interest and like hmm and wonder how far I could go? We're not designed to be alone. And even being an only child that grew up in the Highlands of Scotland with I spent most of my childhood playing alone. Even I got lonely out there and started creating imaginary friends with quals and and cameras were not designed to be alone, and that was part of my realisation when coming out there just how important community and friendship and connection is to me. And I think that's a really lovely takeaway to have. Rune Pedersen However compelling the thought most of us don't really have an option to retreat into the wilderness, not for an extended period at least, so instead of stepping away from the noise, what if we step directly into it, slow it down, shape it or even transform it into something beautiful, and that's exactly what Thabani Tshuma does. As a poet, writer and performer. Self talk is more than survival. It's where he finds his meaning. So I sat down with Thabani and slowed down time for just a moment. The podcast is about communications and how humans talk, and then this episode in particular is about how humans talk to themselves, and I would love to hear your take, you know, on being a writer and a performer in writing poetry, what kind of self talk you have in that process? What, how do you talk to yourself in that process? Thabani I think for me, a lot of, a lot of my poems are parts of me just chopped up and re-written into stanzas, and I think poetry does a really good job of like reflecting parts of you and showing them to other people. Rune Pedersen Writing poetry feels like a version of self talk, and you say, yeah, it's a chopped up version of yourself, Thabani yeah. And I guess it's about exploring kind of that inner dialog, poetry, for me has always been a really clear space and a really safe space where I can, just like, play with ideas and play with thoughts, play with feelings, see the different shapes that they can take. It's a little like sandbox environment for feelings and for kind of that inner narrative. And I think with self talk, it is. It's not something we're ever taught to articulate or even to like frame. It's like, where do we where do we learn how to talk to ourselves. It's never, there's never, like a formal instruction. We kind of just pick it up along the way. So I guess poetry has become my method of self talk, or I guess my method of understanding my internal dialogue. Rune Pedersen Great, let's say you're, you're writing on a particular topic that you're sort of working on. You're, you're working it through the poem. Do you change your perspective? Do you evolve somehow by going through that process? Thabani Yes, I think so. It depends on the poem and depends on the feeling. Because I think there is always a sense of discovery in the journey. I feel like it was a piece of writing advice that I got years ago. I can't remember who said it, but they said that you should always try to have your poem end somewhere different from where it began. And I think I. Taking that approach to writing a poem, for me, always creates a sense of discovery, because it's like, Okay, say I'm anxious about something, and I'm like, oh, I want to write a poem about this anxious feeling. I start in that space of anxiety, and then in the process of writing the poem, it's like, Okay, where is it gonna take me? And it's not necessarily, like, always a resolution of that feeling. Sometimes it's just like a reframing of the feeling. And then I think my favorite part is sharing the poem with someone else, because that always offers a new set of eyes, and that always leads to something that I wouldn't have seen or didn't see, and it's like, oh, I didn't think of it in that way, but now that you but now that you mention it, I intentionally wrote it that way because I'm a genius. Rune Pedersen Yeah, I think a lot about, you know, the sentence like, you know, don't talk. Just do like, you know, we live in a society that's like, very focused on on that. Like, you know, there's parts of me that's like that situationally as well, right? But for being a host on the podcast, it's about communication. I also just think that communication is action. Talking is action, right? Writing the words is, that's an action. That's an action? Yeah, Thabani 100% and I think that's why I find myself always returning to poetry, because I, I see that intrinsic value in words. And I'm like, how, how can you not see just how beautiful and like, magical this stuff can be? Rune Pedersen What's the magic of language? Thabani Everything? It's the the alchemy of it is words take an experience, a feeling, and they transmute it into something else, which like it's it can only be described as magic, like It blows my mind every time that like I'm taking something that happened to me, I'm turning it into a poem, and then speaking that poem, or sharing that poem. And then you are taking your experience, and your experience is blending with my experience through the poem, and that's creating a secret third experience that you know, neither of us would have experienced without that conduit of words or poetry that connected like our two distinct realities, and then words are the portals that break down the illusion of self and reveal to us that, oh, I'm just like You, and you're just like me and we're all just in this cosmic soup together. Rune Pedersen That was beautiful. It's really a very powerful thing. Thabani I think words and like communication is this powerful magic that we have access to but a lot of us aren't using it with intention and using it with care. I wish more people would see just how powerful it is, and I think that would really shift the way we not only talk to ourselves, but talk to each other, is in knowing like if you if we could fully see just what a magical thing we are wielding, we would use it with a lot more consideration and as an extension of that, we would do a lot more magical things and connect in a lot more magical ways, the way that we talk to ourselves and how that influences not only how we perceive the world, but how. How we behave in the world. It's like with self fulfilling prophecy. You know when, if you tell yourself you are this, then eventually you become that, just through affirming that narrative. Rune Pedersen Have you lived that yourself? Thabani Yeah, so I was addicted to various substances. A lot of the work that we do in recovery is about reframing your internal narratives and looking at what motivates your behaviors? Like a big question is like, what's the payoff? Over the years, I've learned to see addiction as a response, you know, it's a response to the problem. And for me, the problem was perception, my perception of self in the world. So as a response to that perception problem, I would use substances to try and solve that so in that journey, I went to rehab, which was the greatest thing I've ever done, not at the time, at the time, I hated it deeply, but coming out on the other side, I feel like I learned so much about myself, and to kind of bring it back to poetry, it's that freedom to explore all parts of myself without without any judgment, without any like labels or any any constraints. It's like a free space of self exploration, which I think is really cool. Rune Pedersen And the voice in your head, how did it sound? Sound pre rehab and post rehab? Thabani Pre rehab, absolute chaos. Just imagine like a loud, screaming child running around the room. And post it sounds more like I do now, calm, grounded, connected, a lot slower. I think, I think that's been one of the biggest takeaways, is I'm a lot more patient with myself, and the voice in my head is a lot more patient and a lot slower. If you think about it like from a fundamental like perspective. The world is shaped by language. It's shaped by how how we label things, how we categorise things, how we create processes, how we create like systems of functioning. It's all rooted in language and how we communicate those ideas to each other. Analogy, it's like we literally have the power to re-write our reality, and we just don't. Through language, through words, we can reshape and redefine what we collectively say is real, and in that, we can change our entire realities and change the way the world operates, in the way that we operate, which is just like infinite possibilities. Rune Pedersen How humans talk is produced and written by Rune Pedersen from Onomato People, and Stefan Delatovic. Post Production and Sound Design was done by Dom Evans and James Custer at Earsay. The SBS team is Joel supple, Max Gosford and Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn, and our artwork is by Wendy Tang. Follow and review us wherever you find your podcasts.
SBS Australia
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- SBS Australia
Speaking for Two: How Kids Navigate Heritage Language, Culture and Identity
LISTEN TO SBS Audio 26/06/2025 31:58 English Credits: Host: Rune Pedersen joined by Stefan Delatovic Producers: Rune Pedersen at Onomato People, Stefan Delatovic Writers: Rune Pedersen and Stefan Delatovic Artwork: Wendy Tang Post production and sound design: Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY SBS Audio team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn Guests: Pey Chi, Artist and Restaurateur. Jim Hlavac, Translator and Interpreter and adjunct senior research fellow at Monash University. Danny Tran, Journalist and Investigative reporter at the ABC. Stefan How humans talk is an SBS podcast recorded on Wurundjeri, country. We pay our respects to the custodians of this land, which has been shaped by stories and language and love for generations. Rune So the problem with doing this podcast is that I now see language phenomena everywhere and a thing I've been thinking a lot about lately is people navigating family, heritage, culture and languages, their first language being English, here in Australia, and their parents having another one. And it's not my experience, but it will be my son's experience. Stefan Well, it's funny, you bring this up. I have this friend, Paige chi, who's this wonderful artist, and recently she stepped away from her arts practice to go and work with her family, running their family restaurant. And I just, I don't know, I always felt like there's a story there that speaks to this phenomenon you're talking about. Rune P Stefan Rune Chapter One, the artist and the restaurant. Pey Chi I am Pey Chi, also known as Peggy. I've sort of got two two names, two lives, so mum's Hopkin and dad's haka. They're sort of like dialect slash people from China. So they both speak those languages, but they didn't speak that at home. They spoke Mandarin and they also spoke English. I think Mum spoke a lot of English to us, and then dad would speak Mandarin, but mostly I would say it's like an English speaking household when we Stefan were growing up, did you learn Mandarin and other Pey Chi We went to me and my sister and my brother would go to Chinese school every Saturday in Box Hill. It was awful. Why was it awful? Why would you want to be Chinese in White Australia? I just wanted to watch home. In a way. I wanted to be a white girl with blonde hair. I did not want to be at Chinese school writing like one word like 100 times. Stefan Is it the kind of experience where you look back on it now and you're glad you went through that? Or do you still like, oh man, Chinese school? Pey Chi No, I well, wish that. I actually. I feel like if I grew up in an environment, Pey Chi I was taught to love my heritage, then maybe I would have appreciated at the time, but at the time, I just didn't want to be there. Stefan How did you feel about the restaurant when you were a kid? Pey Chi It was just there. It wasn't like, I didn't think about it because I, I tried working here when I was in, like, primary school, yeah, but I mean, I would always get takeaway, yep. So I always call up, can I have honey chicken? That's my order. Yeah, honey chicken, Stefan Did your art practice engage with your heritage at all? Pey Chi I think I started off just looking at cute stuff. I think I was really cautious of Orientalizing myself, because I felt like I only enjoyed being Asian later in life. I would say, like, when I like, five years ago, yeah. So really quite fresh. Stefan Does you the artist, communicate differently than you the restaurant tour? Pey Chi Yes, I'm more conservative. Yeah, I feel it was. It's funny going into both spaces now. I don't sometimes I don't feel as politically engaged, because after a shift, I'm just tired, yep, I just want to look at stupid shit or watch like stuff on Netflix. I don't necessarily want to be politically engaged, which I had never thought that was a thing. Like I thought that people who didn't want to be politically engaged were just lazy or just didn't care about the world, but because now I like, understand that, like, Stefan It's hard when you step back into the art world. Like, do you notice that you're are you thinking? Talking differently, and I feel like I have to catch up. Pey Chi Yeah, yeah. I feel like I have to go into more of a politically engaged because my friends in the art world are like, super on top of things. They're doing great work, and I'm not engaged in that on day to day. So yeah, when I, like, when I hung out with them, I'm like, Oh, I just have to switch on a different part of the brain. Whereas here it's, it's not, I don't switch it on at all. It's just about meeting people where they're at, no matter what party, whoever they want to vote for conservative, whether they're white, old, Asian, young, disabled, whatever like. It's just meeting people where they're at, giving them, trying to be friendly, giving them, hopefully, really good service. That's my goal, making people feel comfortable so it's different. Stefan Do you feel more connected to your heritage? 100,000% Pey Chi I think like I only really started expressing my Asian culture when I started working here, I feel like I had to what's the phrase, like, own my chops or something, phrase that's like a biking phrase. That's definitely a thing people say, Okay, I don't know where it comes from. I feel like I have ownership over my heritage more so now I feel like I understand the bigger picture in terms of, like, the Malaysian Chinese diaspora, because my language gets tested all the time here, it also gets questioned a lot. Like aunties and uncles will be like, Why don't you know Hakka? Why don't you know Hopkin? Why don't you know Cantonese? I'm like, mate, I was born here. Like, they don't understand the struggle, right? Of like not wanting to be Asian, so I feel like I sort of have had to prove myself and learn language to understand everything better. Stefan It sounds like you're describing an experience where more regularly speaking that language and understanding the words that people are using connects you more deeply to that heritage. Pey Chi Yeah, yes. It's like, really empowering to like, like, I have this, I've got regulars, and it's really empowering to be like, to code switch and to be like, I don't think I can do it. I can't. It doesn't feel natural to fake it, but obviously it happens, right? We all code switch. My dad code switches. If he came out right now to say hello to you guys, he would be like, Hey mate. How do you know? But he does not talk like that. Yeah, I feel like I just, can you connect better? Because then, like, they see you, like, Code switching is like, sort of a means of, like, okay, like, you're a safe person. For me, I think that's how I perceive it when I use it, when I do code switch, when I do put on my Malaysian Chinese accent, it's saying, like, Oh, I see you. We're both from the same place. I think that's really special, that I get to, like, be in the same place with aunties and uncles and, like, young Asian people who also have Malaysian accents and that like, we get to, like, I get to meet them here and give them food and, like, see them every week or every two weeks. Rune As I was sitting there and eating my delicious food, listening to Stefan and Pei chi having a conversation, it was very clear to me that there is a lot of stuff happening for people navigating different languages and cultures at home andor at work. And when we dive into the language bits of that, it can get a little bit confusing. So before we go on, here is Stefan de ladovic in a bubble bath to explain, Stefan Basically translation, interpretation and language brokering are not the same thing, but most people lump them together like leftover dip at a party. So translation is written. You see it on websites, in contracts, manuals, when you see words jumping from one language to another on paper or screen. That's translation, interpretation, that's spoken, conferences, courtrooms, emergency rooms, it's live. It's real time, and if you mess up, someone might end up in the wrong jail cell or with the wrong medication. Both require accuracy and a code of ethics. It requires the person doing it to be impartial. And neutral. Less formally, we have code switching, like when you drop into a different tone of voice when your boss enters the room, and language brokering, Oh, baby, that's when maybe a kid translates for their parents at the bank, the doctor's office, or in the middle of a tense parent teacher meeting. It's messy, it's beautiful. It's not trained or certified, but it happens every single day. So whenever you hear translation, think text interpretation, think speech code switching. Think Superman changing in the phone booth and language brokering. Think life raw, unfiltered, unpaid and often underappreciated. Got it good. Now get out Rune Chapter two, the language expert train. Translating and Interpreting are obviously difficult and demanding jobs that you study for years to be able to do. I wonder what it's like for a kid to be doing that. I wanted to talk to an interpreter or translator to find out more. Jim I'm Jim Hlavac and I'm an interpreter and translator. Oh, convenient. What skills are children using to be good language brokers, Jim Mediation skills, how to interact, how to be the intermediary between people. That's what mediators do in in court, for example, in tribunal, hearings, etc, per hearing, they're working between two parties. The the interests that they're protecting are their parents, typically, and their own children have a sense of what they're doing, how they're doing it and and that what they do does not endanger or jeopardize their relationship with others. So they're developing really high level soft skills to interact with people. Yes, they're also developing their linguistic skills, because just because you're bilingual does not make you an automatic interpreter and translator. You actually have to practice and learn and perfect the skill of moving seamlessly from language, from one language into another without any thinking time. Virtually, they're also acquiring world knowledge, so they're actually exposed to interactions in scenarios which are typically only reserved for adults, and this can include, let's say, medical results. This can include discussions with a lawyer about if there's been a car accident or there's an insurance claim, etc. So you know, children, before their time, become exposed and have to be protagonists. They're speaking. They're interacting in these interactions in a way which lot of other children are spared. So it doesn't happen to other children who grow up, perhaps monolingually, that they're that they find themselves in these situations which are otherwise reserved for adults. Rune What kind of psychological or emotional effect can that have on on a child that younger or adult being the voice of their parents, Jim it varies on the child. There are lots of children who who do this easily. They don't think anything about it. They don't for them. It's no big deal if I have to do it, okay, whatever, and we'll get it over and done with. This is all part of me, being a member of the family. And so there are children who talk about they're actually feeling empowered. And they are empowered in that they occupy a role that children in monolingual families typically don't occupy. They become the go to person in the family for so many things. On the other hand, there are some children who don't like it, who feel uncomfortable, who don't like the emotional stress, who feel overwhelmed and like they don't know they honestly, they often don't know what to do. In some situations, when it's a jam, let's say there's a criminal charge against the father and there's a summons which arrives in the mail. They have to read it. They find out something which they probably didn't want to find out. They then have to side translate this to the parents or to whoever, and then they they might that might precipitate conversations between them and the parent about what happened, what's what's going to happen when if they approach a lawyer, what have you? So does put children in a situation where sometimes they don't feel so comfortable, and some people, some children also talk about, I simply don't have the linguistic skills to fully render this this complex, let's say insurance jargon. I'm. I just can't do this, so I'll just pick and choose certain certain points that I can convey, and that's all that I pass on, but that can have obviously dangerous consequences for for the parents, so it's a risky business as well. Rune Are there any sort of advice or guidelines for parents that who rely on children to do this, this interpretation to help keep the relationship and arrangement healthy Jim in the first place, they should be told that there are for lots of interactions. There are professional interpreters available, and they should be using those services if they go to hospital. Now it's hospital policy to not allow family members to broker, and instead, a professional interpreter is needed for many reasons, firstly, to make sure that there's accuracy. Brokers are not obliged to be accurate. As I said, they often don't. They don't do it. It's not that they intentionally want to be inaccurate, but they simply can't, or don't feel that they should convey what is being said by one person entirely to the other. They change things, they leave things out, what have you. Secondly, they can be in situations, particularly medical ones, when they're exposed to things that they should not be. If it's an intimate medical issue that one of their parents has. Then, is it their place to be there? That's the one piece of advice. The other thing is, though, these these linguistic skills, which brokers do display, qualify them well to well, we should encourage them to continue their acquisition of the what we call here in Australia, their heritage language fairly soon after starting school, English becomes their dominant language, and the other language doesn't develop at the same level, compared to, let's say, homeland speakers. So they need to be provided with encouragement, resources and to attend formal instruction in the language where that is possible because they have they're already developing a great set of linguistic skills. These need to be cultivated because they can actually have a profession that they could walk into later on after engaging in training and and so forth. So we squander our linguistic resources in this country by not enabling young children to take the acquisition and learning of their parents heritage language further, and not enabling them to become language teachers, translators, interpreters, and we perform so badly. Rune in this respect, internationally, Australian businesses, companies go overseas and don't even think of taking interpreters, translators with them. They don't even think of translating the taxation laws, the company licensing laws, etc. Rune Why do you think that is why do we squander those skills in Australia? Is it an attitude thing? Is it a funding thing? Jim English is the unquestioned number one language in the world. There are a lot of people in this country who think people should just speak English and everything will be easier. Look, all migrants to Australia know that they it's in their advantage, to their advantage, to acquire English, but speaking another language is an asset in many ways, cognitively, in terms of career options, where the proficiency in another language is an asset, which can be the difference between you getting a job mobility and also having points of reference to compare, let's say, English speaking Australian culture, with something else. If you have a point of reference, you're actually richer and more insightful human, human being, typically, because you've grown up with these, these two different ways of looking at things, of expressing things. Rune I'm already sensing now that my my Danish, is getting old. Oh, it's it's stuck in time in a weird way. And I haven't been out for that long. Could you speak to that topic? Because I know it's also a thing in Australia that you have people coming from one country, and then they carry over a language, and then you have new migrants arriving, and the languages are different, Jim that's right. So to give a case which has been well studied, there are lots of migrants from Italy who left in the 1950s and they might have only spoke spoken a dialect, or spoken a regional variety of Italian, and they've been here for 60 years, and there might be newcomers from that area, from Italy, who speak quite differently. They're more likely to speak a more standard variety of Italian. The dialect might. Dialects also change as well. They're not just fossilized, things that stay in the same way forever. They're also dynamic. There are lots of manners as. Lots of metaphors, lots of references to popular culture, TV shows, stars, music, etc, which you index, which you talk about all the time, because it's, it's, it's what your recollections from from that period were, and they're totally different from these more recent groups, as opposed to the the older ones. So that's it will get if you like rusty. But what that means, and I'm encouraging you to consider passing Danish onto your son, is the challenge is, is to keep up with media, with language resources for kids in Danish, or whichever language it is that the parents wish to, wish to, to pass on to their children, because it's important that the children receive a model of the language, which is not just an immigrant who departed 2030, years ago, but the language that they speak has a whole society where people speak it and what they're doing, and there's other people out there who speak this language, other than my parents, so that the parent the child can see that this has broader horizons than my my child parent relationship. So that's that's a challenge, though. It's not easy, particularly because Australia is geographically so far away from other places, it's not that easy to travel. But media has done, you know, electronic media has enabled us to to access television and videos and lots of all sorts of things, you know, kind of from overseas. So there are fewer obstacles now for you to keep up contemporary Danish. Rune Yeah. I Okay, yeah. Point taken. Chapter Three, the communicator. After talking to Jim about how language can get stuck in time, I wanted to hear from someone who's lived the experience. So I met up with Danny Tran an ABC investigative reporter who communicates for a living, but also grew up in Australia, navigating two worlds and two languages. Danny I, you know, as an adult, I've shown a little bit more interest in learning about Vietnamese. So it was at my, my wife's suggestion, that we get a tutor from Vietnam. She started at first her Vietnamese has become quite good, and mine is, mine isn't still not fantastic. But we got a tutor from Hanoi, and just having a chat to her, you realize how much language has developed over time. Because when the Vietnamese refugees came to Australia, their language stopped developing. So as a result, if you listen to, you know, for example, me Speak in Vietnamese. It sounds like, Hey, comrade, groovy. It's the language has stopped developing in the same way that the French in Canada, the COVID Choir is extremely old, because you're not really getting new media in that language, at least not for quite some time before the internet became a thing, right? So the materials that you have from quite some time ago, the speakers that you have learned Vietnamese or any other language at a certain point in time, and then they stopped speaking to new people and being involved in a society where the language was actively developing because the word that I called my father in Vietnamese Gul it's like, an extremely old fashioned word. It's sort of like, not really, dad. It's like, kind of like Uncle. And the difference, you know, normal young Vietnamese people in Vietnam would not call their parents this. And when my wife mentioned it to this tutor in Hanoi. She was just like, what word she use? She said it again. She was like, that word has was used by extremely wealthy families in literally, the 40s and the 50s. Like that word is not used even the word for like Asia, right? So the word for Asia that we've always used growing up here was agile, and it turns out that in the time since my parents got to Australia, decades ago, the word has been flipped around Vietnam. It's now Jo a I wouldn't have had any clue at all when you know the last time I visited Vietnam, I would have sounded insane, like an old timey monopoly man trying to get by the city being like, Excuse me, sir. Rune Yeah, I was thinking that before. When you said it like, paternalistic father. Danny I literally think it's kind of like, Papa, hello, Papa. That's fun. See, I mostly speak to people here, and I don't often. Can speak to someone with modern day Vietnamese other than this teacher. And she's very, she's very kind of, very gentle that I think she knows that the people who are seeking her out are speaking time capsule Vietnamese. So she's like, Oh, the word we actually use is this, or this is the modern word. And it's always so enlightening, because I'm like, Oh, so you flip these words around, or that this word doesn't exist anymore, or this word is now a slur. Rune Danny Yeah, you do. You do want to know that, and you don't realise also. The other thing is that when language is stuck, the ideas from that time are dragged forward, right? You 50s, when it was happening, it was completely fine to refer to that, and that's why you gotta really be careful, because there are all these political sensitivities the language has developed. So is the political situation, and so is the definitions of what's appropriate and what isn't appropriate, and when you're stuck unknowingly, and you go to another country and you try to use that language, that becomes really complex. Thankfully, I did not find to set myself in a position, and I try not to use slurs, but wow, okay, I wish I knew, and it's hard, because in when you're speaking your first language and you're fluent, there's really no excuse for that, right? Because culturally, you should understand the problems or the issues or the situation, and you're also fluent in that language, and there's nothing stopping you from researching library cards free, right? The internet is right. There you can go and work out exactly what you're saying, the means are which and the implications that you're making, but in when it's a second language, and you may not be attuned to that, you might be learning by yourself, or you might be relying on somebody else's interpretation, and culturally, you're not 100% there, but you're trying your best. That is a little bit more complex. I'm not saying it's an excuse, but it's certainly something that you should be aware of, what the words you're saying are actually meaning, because you are a language learner at the end of the day. Rune So growing up in Melbourne and being a child of immigrant parents, did you ever have to help your parents navigate the English speaking system? Danny My parents were both professionals, so less so, but my grandparents, yes, yeah. So my grandmother didn't speak English, but my grandfather did English lessons. When he came to Australia, he actually learned English by watching the ABC, and I still remember watching some of these shows with him, where he practiced. And I'm pretty sure that I also learned by watching the ABC as well. So it's a very nice full circle moment. But you know, sometimes it'd be difficult, because you'd be at school and he'd pick you up and they'd want to say something, you'd have to act as the go between. It was a lot of pressure for a kid, especially now in hindsight, when I realized my Vietnamese wasn't that good, and I can't really express what a translator would express, right? Because when it comes to translation, you have to be on the ball, right. You have to be really careful about how you convey meaning. And I suspect that I was my Vietnamese, and what the meanings that I were conveying were probably like 80 to 90% correct, but not fully. I suspect that I did because I wanted the interaction to be over, because I was embarrassed about being Vietnamese and being different. You want to speed it up, you want to get it over with? Rune Yeah, okay, because, okay, let's, let's not, let's not be different. Danny Yeah, let's not be different. Whereas I feel like these days it's less so, you know, they it's just the fact of the matter that you know a lot of people you know didn't grow up speaking English, and it's not that big of a deal. Whereas back then it was like, do I have to do this again? It didn't happen too often, but the times that it had happened, I can't remember the instances, but I remember the feeling that rose up with me, which was, Rune okay, yeah, could you expand on that? Like, what were you? Were you thinking and what we would you feel? Danny I think going back, do you sort of feel? You just feel incredibly self conscious about having to act as a go between having to act as a broker. Now, in hindsight, I realised that part of what I was feeling was also trepidation and not having the level correct level of Vietnamese. My English was fine at that point in time, but my Vietnamese had already started deteriorating, and not having the right thing, right level of Vietnamese being able to express that probably caused me, you know, a frustration that I couldn't articulate at the time, and also you were just conscious of being looked at. You know, this is, this is around the time that you know the phrase stop the Asian invasion was happening, and you know, you're a child, but you become conscious of that, Rune of course, so you're standing out on the street, right? Danny Like it would often be in some kind of semi public situations where you would have to to do this kind of other school on the street, or something like that. Or if it happened, if people count the door and it was just, it was just too much for a kid to handle, Rune What would you what would you say to someone, someone like yourself that's in a similar situation now that has to do this kind of brokering. Danny Everyone's trying their best, and so are you, and that's the most important thing here. You may not have the perfect level of language. You may not be able to say exactly what you want to say, but what you're doing is probably acting out of love, acting out of kindness, and just try your best. There's nothing to be embarrassed about that's just that. That's something don't let, don't let what happen. To me, be dragged into where you are at the moment. I know it feels that way, but you shouldn't be embarrassed about who you are. Your culture that does horrible damage to you. Rune How humans talk is produced and written by Rune Pedersen from Onomato People, and Stefan Delatovic. Post Production and Sound Design was done by Dom Evans and James Custer at Earsay. The SBS team is Joel supple, Max Gosford and Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn, and our artwork is by Wendy Tang. Follow and review us wherever you find your podcasts.
SBS Australia
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- SBS Australia
How Doctors Talk
SBS Audio 19/06/2025 35:41 Credits: Host: Rune Pedersen joined by Stefan Delatovic Producers: Rune Pedersen at Onomato People, Stefan Delatovic Writers: Rune Pedersen and Stefan Delatovic Artwork: Wendy Tang Post production and sound design: Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY SBS Audio team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn Guests: J. White, Director of Bedside Manners Pty Ltd. + Maria Dahm, Senior Lecturer at Deakin University.
SBS Australia
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- SBS Australia
How Voice Actors Talk
SBS Audio 12/06/2025 37:44 Host: Rune Pedersen joined by Stefan Delatovic Producers: Rune Pedersen at Onomato People, Stefan Delatovic Writers: Rune Pedersen and Stefan Delatovic Artwork: Wendy Tang Post production and sound design: Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY SBS Audio team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn Stefan: How humans talk is an SBS podcast recorded on Wurundjeri Country. We pay our respects to the custodians of this land, which has been shaped by stories and language and love for generations. Stefan: All right, we're almost halfway through the season of this podcast, and I think it's time that we really ramp up promotion. Rune: Yeah, let's get some listeners. Stefan: Okay, so how do we do this? I think we should focus on the benefits of listening and all the things that people can be learning Rune : Or hear me out. We could bring some drama. Rune: In a world where you're always listening and never sure why you bought that blender. This week on How humans Talk. I The Master Crafter, Rune Pedersen, dives deep into the shimmering, slippery world of voices on air. So what do you think? Well, I think we need to hear from a professional With radio Renegades Stefan Delatovic and the queen of vocal seduction herself, Abbe Holmes, we'll teach you how voice actors sell the things you don't need, with voices you wish you had. Rune Pedersen: [Laughter] Why do people, why do commercial radio sound kind of like this. I don't know how I did. Abbe: Yeah, that's right. That's right. In a world now, that's the guy. His name was, I can't remember, is an American guy. He died probably a decade ago. He was really, he was the big voice guy in America. He wouldn't he made a school in dollars. He was driven to the studios in a Rolls Royce, you know, had his own driver and everything. He was quite extraordinary. And many people have tried to emulate him. In fact, there is still that he's that big sort of, you know, movie voice, right, Rune Pedersen: 80s, 90s, movie voice, action hero voice, really, Abbe: that is the very first kind of voiceover used when radio first began. So in America and Europe, right when it began, it was the announcer voice. That was what it was termed, and that's because what the voiceover artist was actually doing was making an announcement, and they were mostly shows that were sponsored. So it was like, 'welcome to the velvet show. Get someone your body today', and then they would go to the show, right? So we still do that. We still have the announcer voice. So it's a very stylized way of writing, because you wouldn't say that in conversation. Welcome to, Oh, welcome to the Body show. Get someone your body tonight. It's not the way humans speak, if you know what I mean? Rune Pedersen: Yeah, no, I know because I look at the or I listen to Australian radio all the time when I drive the car, and then some once in a while when there's, like an announcement of a new show, a game show, or something like that, it can even slip into sort of more commercial stuff, where they're just trying to make it really exciting. Obviously, you don't see that exaggerated, but you do still see it. You still do still hear it. And I'm like, wow, it's like, so post-apocalyptic. Abbe: Absolutely! And they call that style promo style. And you hear it with all of the television stations, all of the network stations that do their own branding tonight, on seven you know, it's whatever they're saying. It's not the way we speak. It's designed to be to somehow pull us into whatever that program is going to be for them. And as you said, you know, it's something exciting, something great. It's going to be the best. Rune Pedersen: Hi, Abbe, could you tell the audience and myself who you are and what it is you do? Abbe: Well, I'm Abby Holmes, and I've been a voice over artist for over 50 years, and I know that's a lot of time, but I was kind of lucky back there in the 70s, before voice over and the landscape that it is now became that way. It was very small, mostly populated by very produced Male Announcer voices or rocky jockeys that worked on a radio station, and very few females. And if there were females, they would usually be speaking in what's called, and still called Australian theatrical standard where they had. A kind of a fey, slightly English style voice. If you were trained as an actor in those days, that's how you spoke. Everybody spoke like that on the stage, and that's what you heard. And so I hit a job in admin at a sound recording studio in Melbourne when I was 18, and I was in the right place at the right time for the new sweep of advertising that was beginning, which was, let's get real sounding people to do these jobs. We don't want announcers or, you know, we don't want, we want real people. And so I was just there with a very strange little voice that sounded a bit like this. So it was a high pitched voice. I still got work that I did back in those days, and I listened to and I think, Wow, isn't that amazing how the voice changes? But of course, that's what it had to do. It had to change. So I started out in commercial advertising, so I got a great deal of that work. So I learned how to behave in the studio. I learned microphone technique, and I started to understand, of course, I was working in a sound recording studio where a lot of the work was jingles for commercials. So back in the 70s and 80s, jingles were we'd have half and I worked in the music studio, we'd have half the MSO there. We'd have Billy hard drum clinic come up with a van full of percussion instruments. We'd have an eight piece vocal backing group and a lead singer, we'd have a horn player, we'd have a vibes player, we'd have violins. It was an incredible expense. That's where I got my experience. And when I left seven years after I'd started that job to become a voice over artist, I just thought, hmm, advertising is really changing, and that's growing as we became different kind of consumers. So I did things for Maya Miss shop and Big M, which was a milk and a Sports Girl and things like that. And then it grew and grew and grew and grew. So then I worked in animation in the 80s, and I also started to do what's now called non commercial work. Then it was called Corporate. So you would voice a video or a training film or a how to then I did some audio books. And really it's only been in the last half a dozen years that I've moved into adult titles for audio books now that we record them in Australia, because before that, audible didn't record Australian titles with Australian people. If they were in the UK or the states, they would record them there, but they had to be living there. So you get a lot of early titles that are done by New Zealanders or English people, or, for goodness sake, Americans, doing Australian accents. It just never works. It never works those Americans. So that's me. That's what I've been doing. And I coach too. Rune Pedersen: I mean, that's prompt several questions for me. In the last 50 years doing this work, you mentioned the different things you worked into. But how has the voice changed from you, like the commercial voice or the voice acting? What's your experience there? Abbe: Well, my really, I had that little voice, which was very popular. This little voice, I mean, very popular in voice over for the young things, right? Then I started to train as an actor in my 20s, and I would get work in my 20s, still looking fairly young, and I would get some work. And then in my 30s, I would still get auditions. And thankfully, one director gave me some feedback via my agent and said, We love Abby coming to audition for us, but she needs to know that the voice is not matching the body anymore. So I was rolling up auditioning for the role of a mum with a couple of little kids, but I sounded like a kid sister who was 16, and all of a sudden I went, Oh yes, it was like that real gotcha moments like, wow, I need to do something about that. So I was also working in theater, and I'd had young roles, but then I thought, well, this is my this is another place for me to start training my voice. How do I speak to an audience in a theater room that's very different from the work that I do as a voiceover artist, which is actually very intimate. The recording that you do as a voiceover artist is a bit like you're sitting next to a friend just having a chat one on one. And when I started to work in theater, that really changed it. And of course, I worked with voice coaches who it was all about the breath and about understanding how to carry, how the voice carries, although apparently I do have one of those voices that carries very well. It's like, you know, the kind of advertising that I do now, the voice jumps out of the television so much I do. Spotlight is one of my big regular clients. Now, people listening might go spotlight, but there's that really young girl, and it is really quite a young voice, one that I created 30 years ago when spotlight were looking for a brand voice, and so the reason I got it was that my voice, somebody's on television. In and the commercials come on and think, Oh, bloody commercials. I'm going to put the kettle on, but I'll follow them out of the room all the way to the kitchen, and they can still hear that bloody spotlight out, you know? And that's just, who knows? It's not something I'm doing, it's only something that is about the tone of my voice, or something about the way my voice resonates on that electronic, recorded medium, okay, okay, that makes sense. In my 30s, when I started to do more theater, my voice started to change. But there was something else that I'd been doing for a long time, too. I had been listening and capturing for my memories, my memory bag of voices, how people speak. You know, one of the first voices that I thought going on a tram from the city back to South Melbourne, there was a woman on the tram, and she was, you know, not much older woman, and I couldn't see her, but I could hear her, and she was down the back of the tram, you see, and she's chatting to a friend like this, and then, and she's talking about her little puppy dog and how it wasn't well, and all that sort of thing. And I'm thinking about this woman. I'm thinking, I thinking, She's the most fabulous voice I can see. That woman, I'm not looking at her, and I thought, well, that's how you create characters for animation. You have to it has to be a believable thing. Because it can't be just the words. It has to be the character, you know, and that's the same thing with any kind of voice over I do. I mean, I've got my Abbe Holmes way I speak, so I'm speaking like Abbe Holmes now. But if you listen to my work, you probably wouldn't hear this voice at all, because every script requires a different way of speaking, depending on who I'm talking to and what I'm trying to sell on behalf of the clients, not me selling it. I'm just the messenger. And, you know, what? What do they want? What, what, and what am I trying to convince them of? So, you know, that's how it really grew and changed. And all of a sudden I thought, oh, gosh, I've, I've got a bit of a career here doing this, and I love it. It's amazing. Rune Pedersen: It's definitely super interesting. It is, how do you create a character? Because I'm saying that because I've so I've done some theater and improv theater in my past, right? And I sort of, I'm not saying I'm great at it. I'm just saying I learned that. You know, to create characters on stage, there's a trick you could do, and that was to lead with a body part. So for example, now I can lead with my teeth here. And I don't know what's gonna come out, but I can. I'm leaning, leaning my head forward, my neck forward, and then suddenly my teeth are sitting here, now and now. Now, I'm talking a little bit like this, yes. So now I'm a character named I bend over forward, and suddenly I'm, I don't know now, I'm age, yeah, I'm different age now, right? And I'm this person, and my whole sort of body is changed. And, yeah, how do you go about? It's very Abbe: similar. Because, of course, it's different, if it's theater and it's the 100% you so it really is lead from the lead from the head, lead from the nose, lead from the chest. You know, it's all of those kinds of things are useful for creating a character. But when you get into into voice over, or animation, or anything like that, first of all, you know, in animation, you begin with a graphic of the character you're voicing. So a lot of the clues will come from the body or the face, especially the mouth, you know, like if you've got a little little, okay, so we've got a little old man, and he's just got a little, tiny, windy mouth, and he's just not very expressive, if you know what I mean. So that's the character. Then you capture the character the same with a girl who's got a big lips, big red cheeks, great big eyes. She's so bright. You know, you just can't, you just can't knock it. Really, she's so amazing. I see the character. So I look at the picture and I see the character, I think, well, what kind of voice am I going to create that is believably coming out of that mouth. But when you're doing a voiceover, where you're just the disembodied voice, you actually in the commercial world. I was slipped from animation to commercials. In the commercial world, it's your job to actually do all of the stuff that an a visual would do. You have to actually voice a visual, you know, and that's called voice that is voice acting. Voice over is just a voice over a commercial. Voice acting is done on probably only the key words and key phrases in that commercial. I'll give you an instance, right? I think of a line from a commercial. It's for a bank. I remember it because it's an existing commercial. First of all, read the line just as a voiceover. If you're feeling anxious about getting a home loan, that's just a part of it, right? That was me just just reading it. But there's a word in that line, anxious, and that's the emotional word, and so you feel it. So if you're being anxious about getting a home loan, then that's like the person out there listening on the other so the radio, yeah, that's me. I'm anxious about getting the right home loan, whereas before, if you're feeling anxious about getting the right home loan, there's not enough weight on the really important word that's going to engage the listener. So you know that's really what what we're doing in voiceover, because, of course, we're talking to in the commercial world, a half listening audience. Nobody wants to hear the commercials boring. They just tune out unless the voiceover artist can use the language, in a sense, a facsimile of the way they speak or the way they hear things, and capture their attention, because the advertiser is only interested in the people who are the commercial is for, you know. So we have to use that technique, and most scripts are written to capture us in the very first line. I call it the bait phrase, right? The very first line of a script where what you will hear is often who we are, who you're speaking from or behalf of, or this is in a kind of announcer style script. And then what the problem is, because there's a thing in advertising, there's a wonderful strategy. It's called the problem solution technique, right? And is, first of all, they present the problem, and then they they tell you the solution, and that's how they capture you. In 15 seconds. You want me to do you a version. I'll do an ad that I made up years ago. Yeah. Rune Pedersen: Oh, this is a made up one. Abbe: This is a made up it's not a real ad, but just just to show you, and this will be very recognisable to people. So this is, this is actually capturing the facsimiles of the way that we use language when we're feeling a certain way. And so commercials are written around that a lot. So the thing about the the way we we are in life is if we're feeling unhappy, we use a lot of downward inflections, like in an instant psycho Oh, hi. How are you? Oh, not too good. I actually slipped off the curb and I've broken my ankle. Downward inflection two weeks later. Oh, hi. How are you? Oh, yeah, great, great. I got the plaster off my ankle the other day. Upward inflection. So it's totally different thing. So problem, solution, that structure follows those same things. So here's a little pretending ad with a product. Do you suffer from dry, flaky skin, downward inflection? I do, and I have done for years, and I couldn't find anything to get rid of it all problem. Can you hear all those downward inflections? Yeah. Now if you suffer from dry, flaky skin, you will be listening now, yeah, that's Rune Pedersen: kind of neutral, almost right now, like now the announcer is almost neutral. Yeah, that's Abbe: right, exactly. Well, supposed to be natural. This is supposed to be conversational, rather than announcer. It's like a real person. Do you suffer from dry flaky skin? I do, and I have done for years, and I couldn't find anything to get rid of it. Solution. Then I discovered dry flaky skin off. I've been using it for two weeks, and my dry flaky skin is all gone. See how it goes from not only problem sad, I can hear and in and in advertising, it's like problem really, really sad and solution really, really happy. And so because you've got that half listening audience, you have to find a way to just go, yeah. And so they'll go, oh, dry, flaky, skin off. Must get some sold it. Yeah, so understanding that as a voice over artist is really important, because we are mimicking the way people actually behave in life. I think what voice Good, good voice over artists understand is that this is not about reading words. That's not the way we speak. So we have to find ways to get through the language and sort out which parts of that sentence are the most important parts, and we run things together. I mean, you could say things like, I'm going to the city today. Okay, I am going to the city today. That doesn't sound like a real person speaking. We don't speak like that. No, I am needs a contraction. That means it can become I'm that's natural. That's why we sit. We don't say I am going. We say I'm going, or I'm gone. I am going to the city today, to we don't say to in natural speak, I'm going to the city, to I'm going to the city, so it's very light. I'm going to the city just sounds like I'm speaking, and it sounds like everybody else speaking. So unless you can understand that, then you are not that is not how people speak. It's not how humans speak. Rune Pedersen: So what do you do then, as a voiceover artist, and a script lands on your desk, because I would imagine that you would have some poorly written scripts, yeah, what do you do? Abbe: Getting a bad script is difficult. It still happens to me. It doesn't. Come from commercial area. It comes from the non commercial area. So it will come from a small company doesn't have a budget very don't want to use a studio. Want to get a voice artist who can do it from their home studio, and just send it to them. And you will get the script you're saying, oh my goodness, it's full of work. It'll say, and whilst you are looking at our store, you will discover, you know, it's like, who says whilst anymore? So you'll get that kind of writing. You'll get ambiguity. It's like, well, what does that actually mean? It could mean two things. So also very long, and it's the words that you don't need. And as a writer, of course, that's one of my bents, going back to edit my writing and getting rid of all the words you don't need, and they'll look at a sentence and I'll take out six words that just superfluous. We don't just don't need them there for the message. And so that can be one of the really big problems with the script. And often you will get a client who says, no, no, just read it as it is. Boy, that's a hard one, because now I must make clunky language sound like that's absolutely natural to me, and this is actually the way I speak. Boring, yeah, so, and that can be really challenging. So those scripts can be very challenging for the the uninitiated of I guess I'll say that. I mean, I know how to look at a script, or also know how to say to that client, I do it. When I speak this line, I say, does that sound a bit clunky to you? There may be something to do with grammar. Now, grammar is a funny thing in voiceover, because there are grammar rules. Yeah, that's all fine, but sometimes the wrong piece of grammar will sound right. So sometimes you have to question, you know, I know this grammar is correct, but it's sounding wrong, or I know the grammar is wrong but it's sounding sounding Correct. You know, so little things like that. So you really have to work with somebody, because often they will have written the script and never heard it off the page. So now we'll talk about the conversion of written word into spoken word. So that's a very different thing. There's a huge gap between written word and spoken word. For one thing, written word is written with punctuation. You know, there are commas and full stops and all kinds of little things in there that you know, we have to have as all we use as a convention in written word, but when you're converting it to spoken word, we do not speak in punctuation. I mean, I just ignored a full stop. Can stop in the sentence whenever I want to. You know what? I mean, it's that kind of thing. Yeah. So that's hard to to follow. You never, ever follow punctuation or use punctuation to guide you. As a voiceover artist, you always question it. Oh, should that comma be there? Oh, no, I think it should be actually there. That makes more sense to pause it, or I need to add a pause there. So I'll put a comma there. You know, where you wouldn't have written it that way, but you need to perform it that way. As a voice artist, so Rune Pedersen: when you're done sitting with this commercial task and there, there might not be a character, right? Like, as in, when you're doing a voiceover for an animation that's already character, do you then create a character for the brand? Like, in, in your head, in a way, like, these are the values. This is how they look. This is the feel. Yeah, Abbe: That still occurs to me, but I've always done it any script. No, there are probably some scripts I don't which are much more announcer style, much more stylized writing, but if it is something very naturalistic and it's more like a conversation, then I will sometimes feel that I am. I'm actually looking at the script, and I'm reading through the words. I know the words, I'm familiar with them, but I'm looking at the words you never learn the lines and say them. You're always staying with the words. That's where your focus has to be. And in my head, I'm imagining the character who does not look like me. It's almost like I'm working a marionette or a puppet, right? So that is the character. And of course, the characters don't have to look anyway. Specifically, they just have to be not me. Rune Pedersen: And now a quick trip to the production booth where recordings, translations, deadlines and delusion often collide. Stefan: Here's your script. It's exactly 15 seconds. We don't have a budget to go over. Nothing complicated. Just translate it literally into Danish. Add Local charm, double the jokes, halve the words, and make it faster, but importantly, slower. Rune Pedersen: So, so you want me to you want me to translate this now that's going to be twice as long. Are you even paying me for this? Stefan: Mate, that's above my pay grade? Just make sure that Dutch will find it delicious. I need a mix and a master by the end of the day. Stefan: We're re recording sound sultry. Go. You. Abbe: It's a translation that runs over then because it because you are actually translating purely the language into the other language, and it runs too long. That is really about rewrite the script or or look at now what the script says in translated language and shrink that, you know? I mean, that's what has to happen. I would imagine I've done a lot of dubbing as a voiceover artist, done a lot of dubbing off foreign films where you're actually working in the studio and you can see the character, and it may be, a lot of Asian films get voiced in Australia for the American market. So we're often doing American accents, but what they do is, we use a tool, and as soon as the person starts speaking, you see the little little like a little red thing on the on the screen, because you're watching the person, and you've got your lines underneath it on on the screen, so you see them, so you're watching the person and how their mouth moves. I mean, I've seen some shows that have been dubbed into English, and it's amazing how succinct it all is, but if you listen to it without the translation, you'll get a very different reading and different language being used. Do you try Rune Pedersen: to emulate the mouth movements, well, as much Abbe: as you can. And that's what the translator has done. Has said, Well, I have to say, you know, I'm not going to get there. That's what the person is saying. I'm not going to get there. But she takes a long time to say I'm not going to get there in Korean. And what we have to say is I don't think I'm going to get there. You know what? I mean? There will have to be some other and you will look at the mouth, you will look at what works with it, and there's a lot of beats and pauses and breaths, so you have to kind of something will be sped up, and something will go a little slower. So there's that kind of work. So it's really finessing that Rune Pedersen: that speech, because it all has to fit into the character as well. Abbe: And of course, you have to be in character, yeah? So if it's a young girl, or it's a child, or it's a you know, I mean, you get that kind of work if you're versatile and you can handle multiple characters. And it's great. Works, really interesting. I like it because it's such a big challenge. It's a very challenging kind of work. Rune Pedersen: So when we when we talk about the power of ads, right, there's this seductive element to ads and the way you're talking, you could even call it manipulation, like, are you trying to make us want something, or what do you see a role? Abbe: Well, it's true, seduction and manipulation. I use that term a lot because that is actually what's happening with advertising. It is seduction and manipulation. I mean, the seduction is really in often, the choice of the voice. It is seductive for young girls to listen to a voice that sounds just like them. That's a seduction, okay, the manipulation is the purely the language that's used that actually will make you want something, because it says kind of like, if you get this, this will happen. It's that sort of, it's the language of manipulation, you know, wow. Okay, okay, so there's two separate things. So there is seduction and manipulation. They're both working in tandem, but they're sort of coming from different places. It's quite Rune Pedersen: interesting that the seduction is in the in the recognition of oneself. Abbe: We're thinking about it more of I'm I'm like, you way, so I'm pulling you into my gang. You are part of something that that you want to be or have or do, and that's really the way advertising works in that seductive way. Yeah. Rune Pedersen: Okay, okay, so when I hear you talk and you change over to these voices like you're sounding like very authentic. How do you do that as a voice actor when it's like, the 12th time you're doing it? Because I would imagine, like, you have to redo it again and again sometimes. Yeah, Abbe: so the idea is that the first time you do it, you get it off the page and you hear it, you start to it's really important that you develop an ear for what the sound of this language is, and always, always put another person in the room with you. So you're always talking to somebody. It's not about you. It's not about you know, you're delivering the message to an audience. The whole thing, the whole process, is a building thing. You build on, and you build it and you build it, and it's like, it's like every thing is almost like a rehearsal. Now you want to start just subtly bending parts of words, parts of the language, a line a little faster, an upward inflection, instead of a neutral inflection at the end of a line. I mean, in voiceover, there are three inflections, the upward inflection, the neutral inflection. And and the downward inflection, you see how different they are, and we use those in life all the time. They're the sort of but if, if it doesn't match in voiceover, it will sound wrong. We just won't, won't Rune Pedersen: to the ear. How can you carry those elements as a, as a, as a voice actor, into your natural speech in in in sort of spontaneous moment. I Abbe: think it really just does. It takes focus that that's what you want to do. You say, I recognize that this is kind of not working and sounding a little bit blah or a bit samey. You know, it's, it's about understanding that when you're 100% rune, when you're just 100% you, yeah, it's charming, charismatic, all that sort of stuff. No, it's not a problem, because I'm looking right at you, right? But when it is just your voice, you need to apply that. So in a sense, you have to put a performance cloak on. You know you are being a performer. So you have to find a way to perform more. You Rune Pedersen: Abby, when you're when you're handed a script for an ad, what's the first thing you look for? Abbe: So it's always about looking for what's important in this message. The message is full of a whole lot of words, so 15 seconds worth of words, not all of them are important. You know, the key words and key phrases is what you have to look for. So looking for those and working out how you're going to play them and what you're going to put under them, whether there's an attitude, you know, it's like that, that bank thing you're feeling anxious about getting the right home loan. It's that same thing. It's that same attention to just some words, you know, I mean, some scripts say it's seductive, or you wouldn't do the whole script in a seductive way, because that would sound like an 80s commercial, and we just don't do it like that anymore. But it might be that something in the commercial is going to feel seductive, and then you get on with the rest of the words, you know what? I mean, it's not, Rune Pedersen: yeah, that prompts me to say, like, perfume advertising, perfume, it's like, always so far out. They just, like, say random, disjointed words, yeah, yeah. And then just like, it's all like, select, like, sort of, kind of sexual. Abbe: that's right, yeah, very sexual, isn't it? And of course, car ads especially, do very random, especially television, or only on television, very random phrasing, you know, drive to delight. Drive to delight takes corners with a precision, unmeasured, you know, just weird, weird words, you know, and you see, because you it's a television commercial. So basically, it's the marriage of the visuals, the soundtrack and the voiceover on it, the voiceover which goes on last, always last. Yeah, it's sort of the ice, the icing on the cake. And so the voice artist doesn't have to do a lot of work. They just have to find a way to make it fit. And of course, when you get the television commercial, you get it all finished, so you hear the music bit. So you have to adjust your voice to work with the music, work with the tone of the music, work with sometimes flourishes in the music. I love doing that because it's like, Oh, if I'm just a little bit faster, I can get in just before that little hear that little zing flourish. I'm just going to go a little faster there. So get a fit. Oh, that's good. And then I pick it up again and go somewhere else. And then, amazing, yeah, it's all fun. Rune Pedersen: What would you hire me for with the way I speak, like, what's, what's, what kind of voice? Or is there no hope for me? Abbe: No, I give you a Volvo car ad, Rune Pedersen: oh, I always dreamed of a Volvo. Yeah, I got a Abbe: Volvo actually. Yeah, they're good cars, sexiest wagon on the road. But you know, you it's like you can't do Australian Boy Next Door, because that's not what your voice is, yeah? And for voiceover, it's what your your natural voice sounds like, is what they're buying, you know? I mean, it is we're trying to sound like who we're talking Rune Pedersen: to, yeah, and that's, and that's really interesting in the Australian context, right? Because obviously, like, we're super diverse, like, culture, right? Full of cultures within Yeah, and the way we speak is static, but has also changed, but it's this is such an interesting space, right? Because, like voice, voices are of representation, but voices are also, voices are also ideology, or voices are also fairy tale, they're all of the things, right? So I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Yeah, it's an interesting Abbe: question, because people you know who come to Australia, I mean, I most of the people I know who are not born here still carry the accent of their their ethnicity. Hmm. But when they go back to their ethnicity, to their home, people say, you sound like an Aussie, you know? And it's, it's that happens all the time. So there is that thing about wherever you, wherever you're living, you're taking on, you know, the way people speak from that place. And it will be small things that get in. It's just small, little nuance of phrasing, or a way that you introduce a word that you don't speak in your normal language. And it's very interesting, musicality, especially in different languages, is is different from different languages. I mean, Australians are kind of flat vow you know, it's all in the bottom of our mouth. And if you're in Queensland, it's nine and five and family and stuff like that. There's then there's a middle Australian, you know, which I have sort of, which is more, it's a rounder in the in the mouth. Phonetically, it's actually a bigger, round voice. And there's very, very few people who speak in that very intellectual way. Very few people left in Australia who speak like that, I'd say you couldn't even calculate it so small. Yeah, wow, but that's that they're the they are basically the three Australian accents. I Stefan: Okay, and we're back in the studio with your man. Rune. Rune, tell the audience what we've learned this week. Rune Pedersen: Thanks, Stefan, well, I learned that seduction means a lot more than I thought. But seriously, it turns out that the way we speak can be tuned to sell people on products and ideas, another Stefan: example of just how powerful our words can be. Rune Pedersen: Stefan, yep, I don't, I don't think this radio announcer thing is working out for us. Stefan: Oh, thank God. I thought my head was going to explode. Yeah, Rune Pedersen: I think we should just talk like our normal selves. Yep, strong agree. Let's just talk how we talk. Rune Pedersen: How Humans Talk, is produced and written by Stefan Delatovic and by me Rune Pedersen from Onomato People. Production and Sound Design for this series was done by Dom Evans and James Custer at Earsay. The SBS team is Joel supple and Max Gosford, and our artwork is by Wendy Tang. Follow and review us wherever you found this podcast.
SBS Australia
29-05-2025
- General
- SBS Australia
Why do we curse and swear: #!@*&% ?
Listen to learn how swearing can bond people together, how it changes across cultures and languages, and why some words just hit harder than others, especially in your first language. Together, we'll explore how bad words might not be so bad after all. SBS Audio 29/05/2025 32:36 Host: Rune Pedersen joined by Stefan Delatovic Producers: Rune Pedersen, Stefan Delatovic Writers: Rune Pedersen and Stefan Delatovic Artwork: Wendy Tang Post production and sound design: Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY SBS Audio team: Joel Supple, Max Gosford, Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn Guests: Professor Kate Burridge Stefan: How Humans Talk is an SBS podcast recorded on Wurundjeri country. We pay our respects to the custodians of this land, which has been shaped by stories and language and love for generations. The following episode contains swearing and bad language. So if you're listening with children, family, or friends, make sure they listen closely because studies show swearing might be good for your health and optimise your performance. Rune: But if you rather skip any coarse language. This might be a good episode to miss. Although we think you might miss out. Stefan: That little Danish. That's fun. What does that mean? Rune: Ah, it's just, uh, some, some friendly banter, like Aussie style banter. Oh, cool. What does it translate into? I think it's something like, um, you disgusting dick face. Stefan: Oh my God. Why would you call me that? Rune: I don't know. It's just like the, just what we say here, right? Like just. You dick face. Stefan: Oh, you are thinking of dickhead. Rune: Isn't that the same? Stefan: It's uh, similar. I dunno, for some reason when you call me a disgusting dick face, it feels more offensive than dickhead. But maybe that's just because I, I say dickhead all the time. Rune: Well, the head and the face is kind of connected. I don't quite get Aussie swear words are really, really confusing. But I, I'm so like intrigued and I wanna, I wanna Stefan: just learn them. Yeah. Okay. I mean, there's probably some safer ones. If you want to just sprinkle them in to sort of Aussie chat, please. Uh, there's some classics like Struth or Crikey. Yeah, those are some of the all time classics. You've got my all time favorite Fuckwit. My mom used to love that one. And that leads to, we got a lot of sort of sex ones, like, uh oh, bugger me or get rooted, or, oh, you're soft cock. And then obviously there's the C word, but, um, you know, a handle with care. Like, like what do you mean? Like, crap? No, no, not that one. But you just said cock, was it, is it cock? No, no, it's not cock like creepy cock. No, no. Not creepy Cock. Uh, I, yeah, I wouldn't feel comfortable saying it. Well, Rune: well what, what is it? Stefan: It's, uh, look, I actually think I'm not qualified to be teaching you this stuff. I think we need to find someone else. Rune: You. Creepy cock. Creepy cock is so upsetting. So off I went. On my merry way to meet none other than Kate Burridge, distinguished linguist professor at Monash University and a professional swearer. For someone like yourself who deals with language every day, what's your take on using language as a means of cursing? Kate: Well, it's the fallout of taboo, really. It's all part and parcel of it. Yes. These things that go bump in the nighters as sometimes describe it for society, whatever they be, uh, we, you know, I'm incredibly powerful and uh, Kate: I think even today, words have this power. Rune: Why do you think that? Kate: Oh, that's a, that's a really good question. Why? Why? Why is it? I think in the case of taboo, taboo words, people really do behave as if there is a very real connection between what the word means and how it sounds, you know? Linguist, bang on about the arbitrary nature of language, the fact that there's no necessary or natural connection between, I don't know, table, um, you know, what I'm looking at now and the word table. But in the case of taboo words, it's very, very different. People talk about these as, you know, ugly sounding and. Dirty words and parents even wash kids' mouths out with soap, you know, when they utter one of these words. Uh, so they, I think that is where the power comes from. And this, you know, is also power that's attached to names. Look at, you know, Rumpelstiltskin , which I think has parallels in many different, uh, cultures where, you know, learning the, the name of the little villain, uh, stripped him of his power, you know, so there's all sorts of examples of that. Rune: So it's, it's what humans attach to it. Hmm. It's the energy we put into it. Kate: Yes. I mean, when you think about it, these words are just assemblages of vowels and consonants. Uh, and they can easily be stripped of their power, and they are often over time. But, uh, people just have this. Reaction, and people talk about them as sort of raising goose flesh. And, and then there are scientific experiments to show that they do, uh, bring on, you know, larger, stronger galvanic skin responses. Uh, they, there's evidence that they're, if they're not stored differently in their brain, they're at least access differently. Some people lose all ability to, you know, to use language, accept the ability to use dirty words or swear words. This is. Fascinating. Really? Mm. Rune: So that's a different part of the brain. Kate: And that would only be possible if these words were well, if not stored differently, then certainly accessed differently. And people often, you know, I've heard a number of people describe the very distressing situation where, you know, older relatives. Experience this, and they, they suddenly start to, you know, swear like a trooper and they've never sworn all their life. So there are, there's something very special about these words. Rune: Yeah. So have we been able to then figure out if it's the intent and meaning of the words or if it's the sounds of the words or if it's a combination of both? Kate: Combination of both. I think. Because I think they're tied closely together. Yes. Some last for centuries and retain their slangs or their power, uh, others, peter out. And so what is it that allows these words to survive so well? Uh, so, and, and the sound, the aesthetics of words. That's a big part of it. Rune: Yeah. They feel good in your mouth. Rune: And I think it's interesting also being a, a non-native English speaking person, um, I'm very fond of saying, uh, the F word. Mm-hmm. Um, and I don't attach a great big deal to it. Kate: No. And that's the interesting thing because there have been many studies done on. Bilingual multilingual speakers. Um, and yes, certainly swear words in, let's say both languages. If we think of bilingual speakers, will, um, raise goose flesh if I put it loosely like that. So they will have a greater emotional reaction to, you know, the swear words in, in, um, in both languages. But, um, you know, in the first language, it's always much stronger in fact. Bilinguals often report that, you know, say the F word as you've just said, does nothing. It'll depend on, you know, when the second language was acquired. But it has to do with the very early experience. It has to, uh, swear words. I mean, kids learn the power of these words really very early on. Uh, you know, I've spoken to many traumatized Australians who have had their mouths washed out by soap. Usually older Australians now. Really? Yeah. Very traumatic experience for them. So. These, these, um, words will, will kind of enter the brain with a kind of linguistic health warning as, uh, the psycho linguist Timothy J put it, you know, these words come with with rewards. You know, kid drops one of these words and they get, you know, all the attention in the world. I. Uh, they also come with penalties, washing your mouth out with soap, uh, sent off to your room, whatever. Uh, so, and if you learn it later in life, you know, a swear word, then it's not going to have the same kind of cultural imprint of the forbidden. So it's, it's just not gonna have that sort of power. Rune: A lot of us had to adopt English as a second language. Um, there is this sort of. For lack of a better way of defining it, and maybe you can help me out here, but there's this sort of blue collar, larrikin Australian identity in terms of how we talk. Is that the case? Kate: Most certainly. And I think it goes back to the very early appearance of English in this country. And when you think of the, what went into that linguistic melting pot, it was, you know, the slang and cant of sailors and whalers and gold diggers and convicts of course. So a lot of underworld slang at that time, uh, there was a lot of early commentary around the fact that Australian English speakers swore a lot. Interestingly, and this goes to what you were saying, uh, a number of people commented that, you know, and nothing was meant much by this. So it's this idea of kind of solidarity. So yes, I think, uh, and that is a marked difference, I believe with Australian. English swearing and swearing elsewhere. You know, and Australians might be disappointed to know that. Uh, we're not the top when it comes to vulgarity. Uh, we are third in fact, behind the US and behind the uk. But the big difference is that we wear these swear words. Uh. Along with the kind of nicknames and the shortenings and the insults, a bit like emblems on a t-shirt. You know, they define us, they're important part of our Australian ness, the kind of mythic friendliness and you know, that's how we like to imagine ourselves anyway, the larrikin. Rune: And so, so from someone who's coming to Australia and also want to, to fit in, like how can I navigate, how can I navigate swearing to a degree where I fit in? Um, but I also don't offend. Kate: Hmm. 'cause 'cause these words still can offend. Of course they can. Yeah. Rune: And I, I know it's context based of course. Right. But yes. Is that the, is that the answer to it? I think the, the Kate: only thing to do is to watch and learn, which is obviously what you've been doing. Uh, there are always, um. Camouflage words, remodelings, linguistic fig leaves to use. Uh, you know, society recognizes that you might have the inner urge to swear, but it may not be appropriate. So you've got this out in the way of these kind of remodeled swear words. And Australian English is full of those two, like crikey and cripes and all those, you Butte Aussie lingo words from way back, uh, they still trotted out. Uh, so yeah, there's, there's a way, but it is a very hard part to learn. I mean, it's a bit like the, those what are sometimes called discourse markers, the little words that we pop in our conversations like the, your nose and the likes. And I mean, and I think, and yeah, no, and. Uh, they're hard, but they take a long time. But they are important part of full competence of a language like the swearing. I mean, there are some key expressions and bloody would be one of them. You know, the so-called great Australian adjective. I mean, it isn't an adjective, as I'm sure you probably aware, adjectives will describe nouns. You know, the, the bloody door would be a door that has blood smeared all over it, but, you know, shut the bloody door. That bloody there just smears the sentiment all over the entire sentence. Mm. Uh but it's, um, that's an important part of Australian English, you know? 'cause we just love the vernacular language. Uh, so little words like that are important probably. Yeah. Two years Rune: I think. So. I think, uh, it's a. Because you stand out when you use them incorrectly. Mm-hmm. Um, Kate: and they are complex. I mean, you know, depending on the li the, the situation, depending on the linguistic context, what's the bloody, you know, nestled up against a whole lot of different meanings. Rune: Could you help us define what makes a swear word? Kate: I suppose we still have the earlier understanding of swearing, you know, um, where you make a solemn oath, I swear by almighty God to tell the truth, et cetera. That's the sort of early understanding of swearing. So profane, swearing in that early period would've been irreligious language. So language that's not respectful of the deity. And then I. From there, it just broadened to encompass whatever was taboo at the time. So these days you could think of swearing as being the emotional use of. Of a taboo word? Well, for a number of purposes, it could be to let off steam. It could be to insult somebody. It could be to show surprise or excitement. It could be as a bit of verbal cuddling, you know, to show your good mates, uh, whole lot of different functions for swearing. And it's, I think, important to think of those different functions. Rune: And how is wearing then different than saying other taboo words? Uh, taboo phenomenons like a euphemism. Kate: Uh, so yes. So it won't learn. I mean, if I, if I can use a swear word, shit, for example. Uh, it's not gonna cut it. If you say excrement, if you use a, uh, a Latin based. Euphemistic term. Um, of course, you know, Latin and French have been deodorizing English for a long time and we have a vast array. And what you will find with taboo is that you'll typically get a incredible richness of vocabulary. As of course, euphemisms wear out and become themselves taboo or just simply disappear and then have to be replaced. So they just don't cut it. They don't, 'cause what gives you that emotional release is the breaking of the taboo. So. You might think, well, there have been studies done, for example, to show how swearing will alleviate pain. Famous experiment by Professor Stevens. In England and uh, participants were had to plunge their arm into ice cold water and they were given a swear word of their choice and then they had to do it again. I'm not sure how we got ethics approval for this. It's not very nice. Plunging your arm into ice cold water. But anyway, then they were, had to repeat the experiment with, uh, just an ordinary word, like table or whatever. And of course they could keep their. In the water longer, um, with a swear word. Kate: Um, than without. So, you know, there's pretty robust evidence. There are plenty of other experimental, um, or other experimental evidence to show that swearing can alleviate pain. It has that power to do that. Only, you know, plenty of studies coming out of maternity wards to, to see, you know, the air blue with language and it does help to, so, you know, it shares that with other, I suppose. Mostly involuntary. Um. Noises that we make, like laughter, like screaming, like, um, those sorts of crying, you know, that, that it will help you cope with a stressful, painful situation. It will help you to focus, uh, it'll make you feel better. There's always something good about bad language, whatever that bad language is. And of course, you know, there's a whole lot of things that people will brand with the label. Bad language, you know? Yeah. Whether we're talking about pronunciation features or lousy grammar or whatever Rune: we often call swearing. Bad language. Bad, bad thing to do, but yeah. And you kind of answered it now, but can swearing be good? Kate: Yes. Absolutely. I shouldn't use the word. Absolutely. I'm sure many people would brand that, that emphatic use of absolutely as a swear word, as probably more so than bugger or shit. But anyway, I'll stop using. Absolutely. Most certainly indeed. Uh, it, uh, it has, uh, a lot of therapeutic benefits. So alleviating pain, Stevens went on to do another. Well, a number of experiments. In fact, one, to show that, uh, people who sort of curse their way through a half a minute bike exercise on a, on an exercise bike could, I think it was, raise their power. I think something like 24 watts or something like that. Mm-hmm. Uh, a hand grip, uh, exercise and gripping this, I quite can't, there is a term for it. I can't think of it now. Um, their strength was increased by over two kilos if they were allowed to swear. There have been studies where people have been put in stressful situations and been told they can't swear. I mean, I think there is good evidence that swearers will lead less stressful, you know, lives. Kate: But I should add to this, and this will again, interest you because of the power of words. Uh, the effects in all areas as far as I know, will diminish if you're an habitual swearer. Kate: of these words will diminish with use. Rune: Okay. That's good advice then. Yes. Kate: So if, yeah, so don't overdo it Rune: Now. Choose your swear words Kate: carefully. Mm-hmm. Gordon Ramsey would be well advised to. Uh, in fact, I often think that there's a lot in common between language and food. You know, that, uh, as my cookbook, I've got one cookbook that says, you know, a flavor repeated too often, it becomes tiresome. And what is interesting too is that many studies, and these are studies going back to the 1930s, show that when things get really, really stressful, the swearing cuts out. There was a study done by the, um, Australian lexicographer. Partridge, Eric Partridge of swearing amongst World War I soldiers. And again, when things got really stressful, the swearing diminished. Uh, it was a study, one of the very famous early studies done in 1960. A woman looked at, um, swearing amongst zoologists in the Norwegian arctic periods of, you know, total darkness. And again, when things got very stressful, swearing diminished. Psychiatric Ward sa, same study. I've looked at black boxes from, you know, when aircraft crashes. Awful stuff, swearing while it's, you know, dreadful things are happening. But as soon as it's clear that the plane is gonna crash, then the swear words cut out. Kate: I'm not sure to be honest why, why that is, why that would be why. You know, when things get really, really ful, well, there's often just silence. I think people are literally lost for words. Rune: You're getting closer to a a almost, if you're in that belief system. Mm-hmm. If you believe of something like that, then you're getting close to it. Then it's really quite interesting. Mm-hmm. That if we, if we say that swearing in its initial form was. Uh, cussing off, you know, the deity. Rune: Then when we are now getting really close to it in a serious situation, we actually stopped doing it. There's something there that's giving me actual goosebumps. Interesting. Yes, yes, Rune: And I know this is just me speculating, right. But of course, if you've been in a really tragic situation, you also just know you're lost for words. Kate: Yes, exactly. It could be as simple as that. So you kind of wonder whether, uh, one of these remodeled swear words would have the same effect as. Sort of like fiddle fat or that's a cute one, but you know, there are sugar, shoot, shucks, all these, there, there are hundreds of these remodel swear words. Would they have the same effect? I suspect not because the effects comes from that, you know, violating a taboo that's gives you the emotional release. Rune: Could you, yeah. Could you expand on that for me? What it means to, to violate the taboo or to break the taboo? I. Kate: By actually saying the taboo word. Kate: So if you use one of these linguistic fig leaves, you're not actually saying the word. And yes, it will give you. The same release. You know, let's say you hit your thumb with a hammer, uh, you can say ow or you can say a whole lot of much stronger words. Mm. I don't know yet of a study that's done comparing those. I think that would be very, very interesting. Rune: Can you, in a short amount of time, take a word and then make it into a swear word even without it being a taboo? Kate: Now it has to arise out of those things that are difficult for society, you know? So ma, in an early times it was, you know, God and supernatural and. Body parts, particularly the body, body parts, the, sometimes it was dangerous animals, sometimes, you know, uh, bodily functions. And these days, you know what really packs a punch, of course, is what my colleague Keith Allen describes is Easter language. So racist, sexist, ageist, religionist. Language, you know, language that's deemed discriminatory in some way. Mm. They, so these have legal restraints now, whereas, you know, the, the legal restraints around other types of swearing have been lifted. And what is also interesting is that whenever there have been, you know, periods of censorship or oppression, it doesn't matter whether it's just social niceties or whether it's been in a full-blown laws. I mean, the first laws in English were in the Renaissance period. It was laws against, um, blasphemous language on the stage. Did people stop using that language? Well, no. They just got really inventive, and that's where you got some of these curious remodelings, like Zunes or Zs as sometimes pronounced God's wounds, swot. Every part of God's anatomy was sworn upon, but always in heavy disguise. Mm-hmm. You know, and again, when you come to the Vic. Victorian era. There was all this squeamishness about sex and body parts and bodily flu and bodily functions. And anyway, did they, you know, periods of great social nicety swearing didn't stop. Of course it didn't. And it was a Victorian era that gave us these great dictionaries of vulgar language. They, they came outta that time. Um, Rune: yeah, it's funny. It's almost like it's, it's, it's almost a futile exercise. Kate: It is a futile, so it's, you know, it's, it's not like trying to get people to stop biting their nails or stop smoking, you know, there's something, and it. Goes to this idea that there is always something good about bad language. Our brain swear for, for very, very good reasons. I always love that image of, um, Shakespeare's, you know, the worm in the bud. It's as if you've got this kind of offensive little worm feeding on the sort of bud, the rose bud of social nicety. Kate: It's, it just seems to, any sort of periods of, of repression seem to bring about even greater creativity of swearing. Kate: I've greater flourishing of it anyway, so I've probably gone off on tangents. I feed that you Rune: can kind of, I'm feeding you. Yeah, Kate: you are feeding me, uh, you are leading me down the garden pathway, right? Yeah, exactly. Rune: Yeah. Um, imagine me being a little, little thick worm. Is there a, this is quite linguistic question, but is there like a consistent linguistic formula that makes a word a taboo? Or is it purely the sort of the cultural context? Kate: Um, I love the description once of a, a mother of a child who had Tourette syndrome and she said, as she put it, society shapes the noise that is made. So she made the point that if I think if wish whistling the national anthem was the greatest obscenity, her daughter would be doing it there as a tick. Is how she put it. So, and, but I thought her description of society shaping the noise that is made is, is perfect because it is exactly that, you know, so you will find that taboo is dynamic. Uh, it will change over time. It will change from place to place. Uh, it will change, you know, even within the different English speaking communities. If I give an example, like, screw you or fuck you, or something like that. These are probably the only structures that my students of English grammar will remember, because we looked at the interesting grammar around these. So you look at screw you, you think, okay, what is that verb? You know who, who, what's the subject of that verb? It doesn't make sense. It's not a command. It's who's, who's the subject. Then when you look at earlier expressions like, damn you, or Bless you, if it could be something positive, of course there's God, God damn, you. Um, and God gets deleted because of euphemistic reasons. So it's just damn you. And then you just put it with the modern idiom. Mm-hmm. Um, screw you the more sexually, physically based verb. So it's a bit like, you know, new wine in old bottles. So you've got the linguistic bottle and you, you just put the modern idiom. Into that bottle. Rune: Wow. So, so, so the, so the sort of, the, the, the blasphemy energy is retained in that structure? Rune: But we, we just use new words. Rune: That's fascinating. Kate: And presumably that will change again, and you see it also the way that. Taboos will change. Is that in that curious expression? Pot calling Kettle black in English. So you know where you um, say someone is guilty of doing whatever they're accusing. Someone else of doing pot calling Kettle Black. You know that used to be pot calling Kettle black ass. In the Victorian era. So you've gotta think of kettles and pots on a fire and they're black and bottoms from the fire. And the kettle is saying to the pot, you've got a black ass just like I have. Mm. You know? And then of course the Victorians got a bit queasy about ass. So Ass was dropped. Pot calling Kettle Black. These days there's a lot of discussion on the internet about the racist nature of that word. So what happens now is that black gets dropped and so it's pot calling Kettle. It's all about pots and kettles. I've heard someone say so that that model, that that expression just kind of adapts as it Yeah. Moves through time. Rune: Okay. Interesting. Yeah. 'cause I. Uh, we don't have the same expression in, in Danish, but I've, uh, I heard it in English and understand it, but I always just like imagine, oh, I guess, I guess all puddles and ke kettles were black, but I never thought it was the actual burnt bottom. Kate: Burnt bottom. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Rune: Okay. Because I'm just like, oh, it's cast iron because, so knowing that swearing can be actually good sometimes, can swearing also connect people? Kate: That's the most usual function for swearing in. All the studies will show that, that it's the social. Social side of swearing, the, the use of swearing for friendly banter or to show mateship or solidarity or, you know, particularly when directed against outsiders, you know, it's kind of defines the gang. Kate: So that's where you might use a, a swear word, but not with any hostility. And then, you know, it might be thrown back at you. I could, I could call you a silly bugger and you. Hurler, you know, an insult back at me. But it's, it's all meant, you know, it's all signaling great friendship. Uh, and, and this has been the case for a long, long time. In fact, if you go back early enough in English, and you certainly get this in the Scandinavian languages, there's something called flighting, which is what, what was it defined as? The fine art of the savage insult. This is basically where the players, and we are looking at, you know, we're thinking of old Norse literature here. So it's embedded in exquisite literature of the time where the players will hurl abuse terms at each other. You know, really offensive terms, and it comes as quite a shock when you encounter these, um, examples. But it's, it's, um, it's not meant to be negative. It can turn nasty, but, and it, it's some, you know, that I suppose you get echoes of flighting as it's called in, um, in the kind of modern rap battles where you exchange these insults with rap. So, you know, it does have its modern appearances as well. Rune: Yeah, yeah. But it is Kate: something called flighting, Rune: and this is a really sensitive topic. Then when we are navigating all, a lot of people living together with different beliefs as well because it's like, how do you navigate this Kate: language? It's like anything in life, you know, you wouldn't use a knife to eat peas, um, because it's not the right tool and it's the same with language. Kate: There's a time and a place, you know. There's no point in washing kids' mouths out with soap. You're just giving those words extra power and fascination for kids. But it's good to have a good discussion with kids about these words. Rune: Yeah. It's quite interesting that action in itself is empowering the word. Kate: Mm. I mean, it's a, it's a striking, a literal, you know, that dirt metaphor? Uh, we talk about them as dirty words. I mean, they're poor little things. They're just words. Rune: Is there a common myth about swearing you would like to debunk? Kate: I suppose the idea that you can stamp it out well, that I would like to get that message across for all bad language, really, uh, that it's not intrinsically bad, uh, and there are positive aspects to it, and that indeed, as I've mentioned earlier. History shows that periods of censorship and repression just simply coincide with a, a greater flourishing of swear words. Mm. It just seems to provide more fertile soil for the swear words to thrive. Uh, so that was, you know, I, I think that's right. Rune: Okay. So last question. What does swearing say about how humans communicate? Kate: What's wearing says for me, and I suppose it's vernacular language generally, or what it drives home to me, is just this extraordinary creativity of ordinary language users. You know, the sorts of poetic language metaphors that. That come up in this sort of language are, are, are amazing. And you see it also in the remodelings, we talked about the remodel swear words. So you know everything from sort of holy moly to drought, to suffering, sache to yes, just having fun really. Stefan: So swearing feels good because it let us play around with taboos. Yeah. And like everything we're looking at, it's got all this sort of unexamined importance baked into it. Like Kate, I thought. I had a really great point about how you can use swearing to find the sore points in a culture like. It used to be blasphemy and now it's the stuff that people say that's really cooked is all about prejudice and inequality and those current preoccupations and you know, still sex stuff. Rune: Still sex stuff. So when we try to hold this down, right, like we try stopping people from swearing, it just gets stronger and it just builds and we can't really stop it. And I thought that was such an important point. Swearing still feels like blasphemy, but I thought it was so interesting that when we are truly looking at guard and we are meeting a daily and we're in a desperate situation, humans just stop swearing and it's just funny how that all binds us together. Yeah. Wow. Kate was really smart. Very smart. We should find a way of recognizing her. Could we make a new swear word in her honor? Yeah. Like what? So what's the recipe then for creating a good swear word Kate: sound? I. Mm. And shortness if it's gonna be a good expletive. I think so. Thinking of the, oh, no second, where you, you know, where you think of pressing that key and dispatching the email to your work, the entire workplace instead of your mate, what word bubbles up then? It's usually a short, sharp, for English anyway. Word. And Rune: I guess that depends then on the phonetics of a particular link, which, what's Kate: yes. Yes. I think in the case of swear words, you've got, um, in English anyway, the sort of recipe would be single syllable, low vowel and stopped consonants. So like, shit, you know, ends in a, a strong stopped consonant. Fuck. Interestingly, they're the same characteristics of the quintessential male name in, in English like Jack, you know? Kate: But I mean, it doesn't go across the board, and that's always the way with sound symbolism. So my own name, Kate, ought to be a very good swear word, but Rune: maybe that will be the new swear word. Kate: that's right. That's Rune: right. Thank you very much, Kate. I really appreciate it. That's my pleasure. Rune: you. Ah, okay, so that's the recipe for, for a good swear word. What do we, what do, what should we do? I. I Stefan: dunno, what should we do? You're sick, Kate. Rune: How Humans Talk is produced and written by Stefan Delatovic and by me Rune Pedersen from Onomato People. Post-production and sound design for the series was done by Dom Evans and James Coster at EARSAY. The SBS team is Joel Supple and Max Gosford, and our artwork is by Wendy Tang. Rune: And just to be clear, any swearing in this episode was done with a lot of love. But if we raised your goose flesh, tell us off wherever you found this podcast.
