Lexis Episode 41 - Johanna Gerwin and London English
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