synticity

[synticity]

you know what bothers me a lot about the zeitgeist. posts where a pet addresses their owner as "hooman"

[synticity]

So the "don't call trans women dude" discourse is back on my dash, and I just read something that might explain why it's such a frustrating argument for everyone involved.

TLDR: There's gender-cultural differences that explain why people are arguing about this- and a reason it hurts trans women more than you might think if you were raised on the other side of the cultural divide.

I'll admit, I used to be very much on team "I won't call you 'dude' if it feels like misgendering, but also I don't really grok why it feels like I'm misgendering you, especially if I'm not addressing you directly." But then I read an academic paper that really unpicked how people used the word 'dude' (it's Kiesling (2004) if you're curious) and I realized that the way I was taught to use the word was different from the way most trans women were taught.

... So the thing about the word 'dude' that's really interesting is that it's used differently a) by people of different genders and b) across gender lines. This study is, obviously, 20 years old, but a lot of the conclusions hold up. The gist is, there's ~5 different ways that people use the word "dude":

marking discourse structure- AKA separating thoughts. You can use the word 'dude' to signal that you're changing the subject or going on a different train of thought.

exclamation. You can use the word "dude" the way you'd use another interjection like "oh my god" or "god damn".

confrontational stance mitigation. When you're getting in an argument with someone, you can address them as 'dude' to de-escalate. If you're both the same gender, it's homosocial bonding. If you're different genders, it's an attempt to weaken the gender-related power dynamic.

marking affiliation and connection. Kiesling calls this 'cool solidarity'- the idea is, "I'm a dude, you're a dude. We're just guys being dudes." This is often a greeting or a form of address (aka directly calling someone dude).

signaling agreement. "Dude, you are soooo right", kind of deal.

Now, here's the important part.

When [cis] men use the word 'dude', they are overwhelmingly using it as a form of address to mark affiliation and connection- "hey, we're all bros here, dude"- to mitigate a confrontational stance, or to signal agreement.

When [cis] women use the word 'dude', they're often commiserating about something bad (and marking affiliation/connection), mitigating a confrontational stance, or giving someone a direct order. (Anecdotally, I'd guess cis women also use it as an exclamation - this is how I most often use it.)

Cis men use the word 'dude' to say 'we're all guys here'. It is a direct form of male bonding. If a cis man uses the word 'dude' in your presence, he is generally calling you one of the guys.

Cis women use the word 'dude' to say 'we're on the same level as you; we're peers'- especially to de-escalate an argument with a cis man. Between women, it's an expression of ~cool solidarity~; when a woman's addressing a man, it's a way to say 'I'm as good as you, knock it off'.

So you've got this cultural difference, depending on how you were raised and where you spent time in your formative years. If you were assigned female at birth, you're probably used to thinking of the word 'dude' as something that isn't a direct form of address- and, if you're addressing it to someone you see as a girl, you're probably thinking of it as 'cool solidarity'! You're not trying to tell the person you're talking to that they're a man- you're trying to convey that they're a cool person that you relate to as a peer.

Meanwhile, if you were assigned male at birth and spent your teens surrounded by cis guys, you're used to thinking of 'dude' as an expression of "we're all guys here", and specifically as homosocial male bonding. Someone using the word 'dude' extensively in your presence, even if they're not calling you 'dude' directly, feels like they're trying to put you in the Man Box, regardless of how they mean it.*

So what you get is this horrible, neverending argument, where everyone's lightly triggered and no one's happy.

The takeaway here: Obviously, don't call people things they don't want to be called, regardless of gender! But no one in this argument is coming to it in bad faith.

If you were raised as a cis woman and you're using the word the way a cis woman is, it is a gender-neutral term for you (with some subconscious gendered connotations you might not have realized). But if you were raised as a cis man and you're using the word the way a cis man uses it, the word dude is inherently gendered.

Don't pick this fight; it's as pointless as a French person and an American person arguing whether cheek kisses are an acceptable greeting. To one person, they might be. To another person, they aren't. Accept that your worldview is different, move on, and again, don't call people things they don't want to be called.

*(There is, of course, also the secret third thing, where someone who is trying to misgender a trans woman uses the word 'dude' to a trans woman the way they'd use it to a man. This absolutely happens. But I think the other dynamic is the reason we keep having this argument.)

[synticity]

okay sorry hi I am back with links!

Signaling without Saying: the semantics and pragmatics of dogwhistles by McCready and Henderson, 2024. Check for online access here.*

Dude in the journal American Speech (a sociolinguistics journal) by Scott Kiesling, 2004. From the abstract, I think Kiesling puts it pretty well: "Dude indexes a stance of cool solidarity, a stance which is especially valuable for young men as they navigate cultural Discourses of young masculinity, which simultaneously demand masculine solidarity, strict heterosexuality, and nonconformity."

I did a quick backwards citation search on Kiesling 2004 to see what's been written more recently and found this fun 2019 paper, Brocatives: Self-reported use of masculine nominal vocatives in Manitoba (Canada) by Matthew Urichuk and Verónica Loureiro-Rodríguez, who found that again it's very tied up in masculinity in interaction.

Anyways, all this to say that OP has a very good handle on this: the linguistic research all suggests that 1.) "dude" and "bro" are stoichastically gendered, and are mostly used by men to demonstrate solidarity with other men, meaning that 2.) when people other than men use these (or when people use them with non-men) they're still drawing on men's ways of signaling masculine solidarity with each other, which 3.) is necessarily going to make a lot of trans women feel misgendered and is a rude and presumptuous thing to do to someone you don't know really well. Which is why I think that the dogwhistles book is a really good framework for understanding how people use terms like this to get away with covert transmisogyny - there's the plausible deniability there, but it sucks, you know?

*I know this book is expensive! - try to see if you can get this book through your library or university, or ask a friend who's in university if you can. (Academic books are priced that way because they're anticipating it's gonna sell, like, 4 copies ever. It sucks for a lot of reasons.) This has a really unflinching treatment of transphobic dogwhistles that is kinda rare in mainstream linguistics, especially formal fields like semantics.

Side note: I did not do a deep dive in the linguistics literature so I don't know if someone's already done a good writeup of the specific transmisogyny in the metalinguistic discourse around these terms - if you know of a paper or write such a paper, please tell me, I will read and promote the shit out of it!!

finding a synthesis on the dude-misgendering discourse. it feels disingenuous to imply that these generic terms are always gendered in every context, you're never going to take the "you guys" out of certain dialects. people aren't lying when they say guy or bro or dude is gender neutral, or else they wouldn't still be saying it. however, in my mind, there is never *not* going to be a double take when I am casually called dude or bro, because it is also the language of casual plausibly deniable misgendering. It's not that I have a trauma response, i just literally cannot know for sure. Especially if you're a stranger on one of my posts, the best case scenario is that you are being overly familiar in a presumptuous and condescending way. Don't call trans women dude.

[synticity]

congratulations to people who are good at performing conversations and social interactions. did you take a class or is it just like genetics or whatever

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elin mcready and robert hendersen have a book about dogwhistles that gives a very good framework for thinking about this in linguistic terms. not being able to know for sure is a feature that bad actors can and do exploit, which kinda poisons the well for everyone. (i gotta see if scott kiesling's work on dude talks about this lately. if it doesnt ill see if i can nerdsnipe someone into writing it up, bc op has put this very well and it deserves linguistics papers)

finding a synthesis on the dude-misgendering discourse. it feels disingenuous to imply that these generic terms are always gendered in every context, you're never going to take the "you guys" out of certain dialects. people aren't lying when they say guy or bro or dude is gender neutral, or else they wouldn't still be saying it. however, in my mind, there is never *not* going to be a double take when I am casually called dude or bro, because it is also the language of casual plausibly deniable misgendering. It's not that I have a trauma response, i just literally cannot know for sure. Especially if you're a stranger on one of my posts, the best case scenario is that you are being overly familiar in a presumptuous and condescending way. Don't call trans women dude.

[synticity]

boy are you a latin noun because im gonna have to decline you

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why do we call them nouns and not substantives like everyone* else

i am having some kind of reaction to this ask that i am gonna go examine and do a dbt worksheet about lol. but okay i have some various responses

who's "we"? like... english speakers? linguists? me and my friends?

sometimes - actually especially when I'm teaching introductory syntax - I actually don't call them nouns, and kinda ban my students from calling them nouns. i'm like "call them flurms or whatever" because i am trying to get my students to stop relying on the schoolhouse rock definition that relies on semantics, and start actually looking at the morphology and syntactic distribution of the things they've been calling nouns. so like, i recommend that

from etymonline, "in grammar, "a name; word that denotes a thing (material or immaterial)," late 14c., from Anglo-French noun "name, noun," from Old French nom, non (Modern French nom), from Latin nomen "name, noun" (from PIE root *no-men- "name"). Old English used name to mean "noun." In old use also including adjectives (as noun adjective). Related: Nounal."

i'm intrigued by "substantives" - who calls them that? I've never seen that in any english sources but would totally buy that that's a (cognate) term in nearby languages. i think it has a similar problem of implying "person place or thing" type semantic criteria that really don't align with my morphosyntactic definition for what a noun is. (events and actions can be nouns all the time! "destruction" or "orgasm" or "morning.")

different people use terms (like "noun") very differently. the thing i'm talking about when i'm talking about "nouns" in a syntax class is so so different than what a lot of people mean when they use that word. i mean something that's doing a very specific syntactic job - "noun" is a position that stuff can find itself in, whereupon nounful phenomena can happen to it. i don't think "words" can "be" nouns. this is not what most people mean! so my question then is what "everyone else" "means" when they are using a word like "substantives" - are they using the same technical definition as me? i can't know until i talk to someone who uses this word, which as i say, i have not encountered!

anyways sorry that's more questions than answers and i hope it doesn't come off as super defensive. i do genuinely want to know more about what you mean!

[synticity]

I feel like the thing thats really different about the polish trans experience is that because the language is heavily gendered and asking about a persons gender is very much not normalized, now that my body looks mostly androgynous people started referring to me with grammatical forms that have never been uttered by human tongue before. Last week a woman couldn’t decide what gender I was so after trying several she settled on speaking to me in plural and infinitive

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linguistics study: genderqueer / nonbinary Arabic speakers wanted!

Do you speak Arabic? Are you trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, gender fluid, or otherwise gender non-conforming?

Please consider taking this 9-question survey to help us create free materials for teaching Arabic.

Please share widely 💜 (Note from synticity: I'm sharing this survey from Kris Knisely on bsky!)

[synticity]

Here’s how to tell if a language is easy to learn

None of them are easy

They’re all stupid and terrible and will kick you in the nuts

That being said

Languages similar to ones you already speak

Languages you have a lot of motivation to learn

Languages that have a lot of resources and media to watch and/or listen to and/or read

So, if you’re reading this with relative ease (aka you speak English fluently) probably French or Spanish

Do whatever you want though idk

Don’t just choose a language based on how easy it is

Unless that’s what it takes to keep you motivated idk

Go learn Frisian or something

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i and manyyyy linguists are also autistic and tbh i think a lot of us are drawn to linguistics because it is soothing and a relief to be able to study human behavior in a rigorous and scientific way, even if we are not using that information to mask / appear more allistic.

it is so nice for me to be able to at least be able to figure out WHY i'm struggling to communicate with allists, even if i can't or don't want to change my own communication style or behavior.

i really like Gemma Williams' paper in Pragmatics about how communication difficulties between autistic and allistic people are not necessarily a sign that the autistic people are bad communicators -- sometimes the issue is allistic people refusing to do linguistic accommodation back to us!

anyways, understanding how and why people have different communication norms does not mean that some people are doing it "right" and other people are doing it "wrong," and one of the reasons i love linguistics is because it brings me a lot of comfort to just understand what's happening and why. improving my linguistic awareness is part of that.

Williams, G. L. (2021). Theory of autistic mind: A renewed relevance theoretic perspective on so-called autistic pragmatic ‘impairment’. Journal of Pragmatics, 180, 121-130.

if you feel like you're always getting talked over, or if you feel like you're always accidentally interrupting people, you should consider looking into some of the linguistics research about conversation style and turn-taking. lingthusiasm podcast has a great episode called "how to rebalance a lopsided conversation" that goes over some of this research in a really accessible way; Deborah Tannen's book You just don't understand is an early book¹ that's aimed at general audiences on the same topic.

the thing is, when there's conflict in how a conversation flows, often what's going on is a mismatch in norms or expectations -- not that one person is necessarily acting "wrong" and the other person is "right." the mismatches in norms/expectations can and do align with existing power structures in society, but being more aware of them can really help you as an individual trying to navigate them.

you can train your brain for more linguistic awareness! start listening for pauses, intakes of breath, or back-channeling that's meant to support, not interrupt. try it out!

¹ I am linking to the wikipedia page for the book rather than a link to buy the book because it's kind of outdated and the criticism section on the wiki page is pretty reasonable. If you do read this book, be prepared for uhhhh period-typical gender essentialism that, to my knowledge, Tannen has not particularly updated her views on in the intervening time. But it is an influential and important book, just read it skeptically imo

[synticity]

Here’s how to tell if a language is easy to learn

None of them are easy

They’re all stupid and terrible and will kick you in the nuts

That being said

Languages similar to ones you already speak

Languages you have a lot of motivation to learn

Languages that have a lot of resources and media to watch and/or listen to and/or read

So, if you’re reading this with relative ease (aka you speak English fluently) probably French or Spanish

Do whatever you want though idk

Don’t just choose a language based on how easy it is

Unless that’s what it takes to keep you motivated idk

Go learn Frisian or something

[synticity]

The four horseman of the "don't call trans women dude" post

Well I'm from Northsouth Caliyorktana and we use Dude gender neutrally so like. i dont have to change anything about myself. surely OP couldnt possibly be aware of the unique and arcane culture of Major US Cities.

Oh my god i am SO SORRY im SO SORRY I CALLED A TRANS WOMAN DUDE ONCE can you please EXECUTE ME ON THE SPOT how will i EVER MAKE UP FOR THIS i am SO SORRY

Try cool fun gender neutral terms like Y'all! Comrade! Friendaroni! Call everyone Swashbuckler! This is definitely an actionable alternative! Bucko! My Fellow Possums!

Haha yeah no I use guy gender neutrally but if you ask i'll stop for you specifically. pinky promise.

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can you do a 3 papers to read on indigenous languages?

this is another huge topic so I'm gonna err on the side of "these are just three really cool papers" rather than "this is representative of the entire linguistic field"

Riestenberg, Freemond, Lillehaugen, Washington. Prioritizing Community Partners’ Goals in Projects to Support Indigenous Language Revitalization. In: Decolonizing Linguistics. Ed. Anne H. Charity Hudley, Christine Mallinson, and Mary Bucholtz, Oxford University Press. doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197755259.003.0019, and the PDF is here.

Junker, M. O. (2018). Participatory action research for Indigenous linguistics in the digital age. Insights from practices in community-based research: From theory to practice around the globe, 164175. doi.org/10.1515/9783110527018-009, pdf on the author's website here.

Leonard, W. Y. (2021). Toward an anti‐racist linguistic anthropology: An Indigenous response to white supremacy. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 31(2), 218-237. pdf is here.

(TBH you could just sit down and read the entire Decolonizing Linguistics book, it's like 500 pages/20 chapters by a huge community of authors. It's open access!)

I realize that none of these links are actually describing the linguistic properties of indigenous languages directly, and are more about how and whether non-indigenous linguists should go about doing that. But all of the authors listed above also do linguistic description and analysis, so after you've read some of these pieces you can go look more into their other work.

[synticity]

any chance you have any recommendations for entry point resources for learning about early childhood developmental linguistics?

Sorry, I've been sitting on this ask for aaaaages. Work got busy lol. Anyways, this is far enough outside my field that I'm also going to give some general pointers on places to start finding information in linguistics on any given topic.

Language and Linguistics Compass is a journal that publishes a lot of fantastic review articles, which summarize previous research on a topic. Here's an LLC article on how hearing kids perceive and learn from phonetic input that they hear.

Academic presses like Oxford, Cambridge, and Wiley often publish what they call "handbooks" on topics where each chapter is written by a different expert in the field who reviews the previous research. For example, there's the Wiley Handbook of Child Language, and there's also the Cambridge Handbook of Child Language. I recommend not trying to sit and read a whole handbook, but approaching each chapter as if it was a standalone article.

Sometimes introductory textbooks can be a good place to start! I really like Essentials of Linguistics because it's free, open access, and online. Their chapter on Child Language Acquisition is a great overview of the research, and can help you choose where you want to go next to read more deeply.

If there's an article that's not open access, I recommend asking your nearest college student or grad student friend to see if they can get access through their university library's online sign-on.

You're also asking about a very big field with a lot of research, so don't feel like you have to get through everything I link here - just pick a couple things and start reading slowly. If you can get through an article or two every month, that's awesome! This can be a fun excuse to organize a reading club with friends/classmates/colleagues, and discussing stuff as you read will help you learn and retain stuff, too.

Hope that helps!

[synticity]

if you feel like you're always getting talked over, or if you feel like you're always accidentally interrupting people, you should consider looking into some of the linguistics research about conversation style and turn-taking. lingthusiasm podcast has a great episode called "how to rebalance a lopsided conversation" that goes over some of this research in a really accessible way; Deborah Tannen's book You just don't understand is an early book¹ that's aimed at general audiences on the same topic.

the thing is, when there's conflict in how a conversation flows, often what's going on is a mismatch in norms or expectations -- not that one person is necessarily acting "wrong" and the other person is "right." the mismatches in norms/expectations can and do align with existing power structures in society, but being more aware of them can really help you as an individual trying to navigate them.

you can train your brain for more linguistic awareness! start listening for pauses, intakes of breath, or back-channeling that's meant to support, not interrupt. try it out!

¹ I am linking to the wikipedia page for the book rather than a link to buy the book because it's kind of outdated and the criticism section on the wiki page is pretty reasonable. If you do read this book, be prepared for uhhhh period-typical gender essentialism that, to my knowledge, Tannen has not particularly updated her views on in the intervening time. But it is an influential and important book, just read it skeptically imo

[synticity]

any chance you have any recommendations for entry point resources for learning about early childhood developmental linguistics?

Sorry, I've been sitting on this ask for aaaaages. Work got busy lol. Anyways, this is far enough outside my field that I'm also going to give some general pointers on places to start finding information in linguistics on any given topic.

Language and Linguistics Compass is a journal that publishes a lot of fantastic review articles, which summarize previous research on a topic. Here's an LLC article on how hearing kids perceive and learn from phonetic input that they hear.

Academic presses like Oxford, Cambridge, and Wiley often publish what they call "handbooks" on topics where each chapter is written by a different expert in the field who reviews the previous research. For example, there's the Wiley Handbook of Child Language, and there's also the Cambridge Handbook of Child Language. I recommend not trying to sit and read a whole handbook, but approaching each chapter as if it was a standalone article.

Sometimes introductory textbooks can be a good place to start! I really like Essentials of Linguistics because it's free, open access, and online. Their chapter on Child Language Acquisition is a great overview of the research, and can help you choose where you want to go next to read more deeply.

If there's an article that's not open access, I recommend asking your nearest college student or grad student friend to see if they can get access through their university library's online sign-on.

You're also asking about a very big field with a lot of research, so don't feel like you have to get through everything I link here - just pick a couple things and start reading slowly. If you can get through an article or two every month, that's awesome! This can be a fun excuse to organize a reading club with friends/classmates/colleagues, and discussing stuff as you read will help you learn and retain stuff, too.

Hope that helps!