Episode 41 - Johanna Gerwin and London English

Lexis

Show notes for Episode 41

Here are the show notes for Episode 41, in which Dan talks to Dr Johanna Gerwin, a sociolinguist at QMUL and DFG (German Research Foundation) post-doctoral researcher for the London Talks project about London English, including:

• The London Talks and Real Talk East projects

• What ‘enregisterment’ means and how language styles and varieties become enregistered

• ‘Metalinguistic’ discourses about London English - MLE, Cockney and Estuary

• The power of discourses around language

• Slang swag

Johanna’s QMUL staff page: https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sllf/linguistics/people/research-staff/profiles/johanna-gerwin.html

Johanna on Twitter: https://twitter.com/jo_gerw

The London Talks project website: https://londontalksresearch.co.uk/

Real Talk on Twitter: https://twitter.com/RealTalkEast

In our regular Lang in the News segment, Lisa, Jacky and Dan talk about ‘cis’ and how it’s been termed a slur by Elon Musk. We discuss where ‘cis’ comes from and all the related issues about language policing in a changing world.

Elon Musk claims ‘cis’ is a slur…

Elon Musk sparks outrage with threat to ban ‘cisgender’ as a ‘slur’ on Twitter | The Independent

Elon Musk claims use of 'cis' and 'cisgender' on Twitter is 'harassment', threatens to suspend users

Researcher who coined term 'cisgender' hits back at Elon Musk

Cisgender refers to people whose gender identity aligns with the one assigned at birth. The researcher who coined the term, Dana Defosse, first used the word in a 1994 post on an early internet forum, which Oxford English Dictionary cited when it added the term to the dictionary in 2015

No, Elon Musk, cis is not a slur | The Independent

OED update December 2015:

New words notes December 2015 | Oxford English Dictionary

“Another sign of our increasingly complex understanding of personal identity in the twenty-first century is the inclusion of a cluster of words beginning with the prefix cis–: cis, cisgender, cisgendered, and cissexual. Derived from the Latin preposition cis, meaning ‘on this side of’, until relatively recently this prefix was chiefly visible in English in the adjectives cisalpine and cismontane (‘on this side of the Alps/mountains’), and in the names of certain chemicals displaying a particular type of molecular symmetry. Since 1994 however, when the word cisgendered was used by an American academic appealing for help with a study of transgender issues, cis– has taken on a new lease of life in a group of words which provide a direct equivalent to identity terms such as transgender and transsexual when referring to people who are not trans, i.e., those whose sense of their own personal identity corresponds to their birth sex.”

What does 'cisgender' mean? | Merriam-Webster

Etymology of ‘cis’: The Word “Cisgender” Has Scientific Roots | Office for Science and Society - McGill University

And Jill is no longer part of the Lexis team - thanks to her for being involved and for all her contribution and insights!

Contributors

Lisa Casey

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton

blog: EngLangBlog & Twitter: EngLangBlog (@EngLangBlog)

BlueSky: @danc.bsky.social

Jacky Glancey

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Matthew Butler

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys

Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys