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The Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice (PLEJ) aims to place socio-cultural linguistic research at the centre among the interdisciplinary areas of enquiry with social impact at SSEES, UCL, and beyond. Among the questions that stand at the heart of PLEJ’s explorations are: How are forms of domination and resistance conveyed through discourse and multi-modal forms of interaction? How can we address the impact of uneven local and global power dynamics? In the PLEJ Podcast series, Student Associate Hayley Anderson speaks to UCL’s students and early career researchers who strive to address these questions across disciplines, geographical and educational spaces, and time.
Hayley: Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Platform for Linguistic and Epistemic Justice, or PLEJ for short. My name is Hayley Anderson and I'm the student associate here at PLEJ. I'll give a little more background on the centre shortly, but first I would love to give the warmest welcome to our guest, Christopher Philippe-Rodriguez. Thank you
so much for joining us today.
Christpher: Thank you, Hayley.
Hayley: So, before we jump into our conversation about how you've engaged with issues surrounding language in your research or everyday experiences, I'll provide a brief introduction to PLEJ and the Centre's aims and purposes. PLEJ was established in 2024 by three principal investigators at SSEES, Dr. Riitta Valijarvi, Dr. Jelena Calic, and Dr. Eszter Tarsoly. The platform engages with sociolinguistic research and themes relating to languages in practice, including minoritization, linguistic diversity and endangerment, and marginalization in social and linguistic forms. If you've ever wondered why some languages and forms of expertise gain precedence over others, and how we can best highlight the languages and their speakers who are often overshadowed, PLEJ is interested in exploring these questions. So, as we move into our conversation, Christopher, would you be able to introduce yourself and your research interests and maybe give us a bit of an insight into what led you to this topic?
Christopher: Of course. So I'm Christopher Philippe-Rodriguez. I'm currently a master's student at University College London in philosophy.
I recently accepted an offer for their MPhil programme in philosophy as well so I'll be continuing my studies here. My primary research interests are in the philosophy of language I'm doing my dissertation on that. And I'm also interested in the philosophy of perception, political philosophy, jurisprudence, and other related issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. So those are my primary research interests. From my background, I'm Mexican-American. I come from a border city between the United States and Mexico. And that's one of the reasons why I'm interested in linguistics and the philosophy of language.
Hayley: Lovely. And congratulations on the MPhil.
Christopher: Thank you very much.
Hayley: So, among other topics, PLEJ engages with the ways in which language has been used as a tool of oppression to perpetuate systems of domination, but also how language has the potential to enhance the social and democratic participation of oppressed and marginalized groups. Why do these themes matter to you and how have you encountered them in your research so far?
Christopher: Right, so my research deals with translation. Especially when it comes to philosophy. And so, I think that if you can establish some kind of philosophical, basis for being able to translate between
different concepts, different ideas in different languages, then I think it can make people, more open to the idea of, communicating in different languages, kind of removing the stigmas around various sociolinguistic groups or features in a language that, might otherwise lead to some kind of discrimination. And so, I think that even on a theoretical level, you can have arguments that actually lead to more social openness and lead to a greater understanding of other people's languages.
Hayley: Lovely. And what are those theoretical arguments that you've encountered so far? I know we talked briefly about the different schools of thought that you include in your research when it comes to philosophy
and linguistics and where there is overlap. Would you be able to give maybe a bit of an overview into that?
Christopher: Sure. So, this is basically heavily related to my dissertation topic. So, I primarily work on a concept called radical
interpretation. So radical interpretation was coined by the American philosopher Donald Davidson in his 1973 paper, Radical Interpretation. But the ideas for that, you know, have historical precedents. So, the tradition that this idea came about in is known in philosophy as the Anglo-American tradition or analytic tradition, in contrast to, and I'll mention this later, the more continentally inspired or continental European school of thought, simply known in philosophy usually as the continental tradition. And so, this Anglo-American tradition kind of had its roots, or at least the roots of radical interpretation, had its
beginnings with W.V.O. Quine. And he was a professor at Harvard. And in 1960, he published this work called Word and Object. And in Word and Object, he had this kind of broad project. And this project is called naturalization, or epistemological naturalization. And so, Quine, you know, there's this other kind of current in philosophy prior to Quine
where, you’re trying to get rid of metaphysics, right? You're trying to get rid of all this, sort of metaphysical stuff regarding language, like meanings and everything and so you just wanted to have like a parsimonious, sort of logically inspired system of philosophy. And, in that way, you could kind of reframe philosophical problems in
terms of language rather than, some kind of metaphysical thing. And so Quine wanted to take that a step further. He argued, well, you know, why don't we make things like knowledge and language and, all these traditionally mental things into something resembling like scientific inquiry? So that's why the project is called Naturalization. He
wanted to naturalize or make natural, you know, these things, which typically we took to be kind of, you know, out of this realm, right? That traditionally wouldn't have been ascribed to the physical.
And so he did this by attempting to naturalize language. So, he
wanted to reduce, he kind of had a reductionist project, like
Davidson described Quine as kind of a reductionist, right, in a somewhat
derogatory fashion. But essentially, Quine wanted to say, okay,
well, language or meaning, you know, is just kind of stimulus-based. So, for example, I can come to know like the beliefs and attitudes of others, through simple causal inference, right? Like I was mentioning this to you earlier, when someone walks in front of like a red object and I see that they see the red object in front of them, I can kind of immediately intimate or infer that based on the fact that they see the red object, they probably take the proposition that object in front of me is red to be true, right? And so the stimulus, the light that's hitting their eye prompts them, to have that belief or, utter that belief if they say it explicitly. And so, in that way, you can come to know the beliefs and attitudes of others through their utterances. And so, Quine gave this really famous example, the gavagai example. So you have this linguist, this American linguist who's English speaking, and he goes to some remote part of some country and there's like an uncontacted tribe there. And his task was to, you know, translate that tribe's language into English. And,
you know, he sees the chieftain and a rabbit runs in front of the chieftain. And the chieftain exclaims, gavagai, when the rabbit runs by. And so then, based on Quine's project in naturalization, the linguist's task is not to, you know, assign some kind of, you know, meaning, but rather, you know, deduce, what the utterance could have meant, right, given the environmental conditions surrounding the chieftain. And so gavagai could mean rabbit, but, you know, based on the inscrutability of reference, it could also mean something like running or something like ear or some part of the rabbit. You don't really know. And so Quine's kind of central insight is that you can actually kind of narrow down that meaning, you know, by, presenting the chieftain with certain images or, you know, confronting him with certain questions and then having him answer, you know, in the affirmative or negative, whether he
would shout gavagai, whether he would utter gavagai in the appropriate
environment, right? And so that was Quine's major contribution. Like he wanted to naturalize the world of language and mind. And Davidson kind of, you know, and I should mention that kind of process that I was just talking about, that Quine had, he called radical translation. So with no prior knowledge of each other's languages, how can you, or it should be possible to translate between those languages, even if you have no prior knowledge. So based on this kind of inductive sort of process. Just a stimulus response sort of reasoning. And so Davidson wanted to take that a step further. And he kind of, he was a bit of a weaker naturalist than Quine. Like he still wanted to inject meaning into the equation, but he still thought that, you know, these surface irritations, as Quine called them, you know, the immediate sensory promptings that cause people to utter certain phrases or sentences, those are still very important. And so Davidson kind of reappropriated the term radical translation into what he called radical interpretation, right? So, he wanted to emphasize the semantic aspect. The more like sort of meaningful aspect. And I won't go into it here, but Davidson's kind of project of, you know, radical interpretation, like the kind of meaning, theory of meaning that he has is very thin. There's not really much to it. in simple terms, it's just the truth conditions on each of the sentences that you utter that counts as a kind of meaningful content. But in reality, it's very thin. It's still there though. And so he, when he coined radical interpretation, he wanted to kind of draw attention to the more semantic side of things. Now, my research concerns kind of reconciling that tradition's sort of thoughts on translation, at least with regard to Quine and Davidson, especially Davidson, and more continental thought. So, I mentioned earlier that continental thought primarily stems from continental Europe. And so, in philosophy, you have these big figures like Edmund Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, all in the school of phenomenology, who I think, said similar things to Davidson, but they haven't been formally organized yet. And I think that, those conclusions can actually be argued for in a formal sense. And so, I wanted to kind of consolidate the phenomenologist views on translation, since they seem to say many of the same things like, they think that, the body is like an object of behaviour. I think Merleau-Ponty said people are patterns of
behaviour, right? So the body is, something that we can observe and that we can, infer, but not just infer, actually a kind of live through, right? It's not just this inert thing. Merleau-Ponty calls it the body of natural science, but rather, you know, it's something that we live through and engage with, you know, as a kind of like a real thing. And so, I think that those kinds of arguments can actually kind of be reconciled with Davidson. But I think that the phenomenologists have something a bit more fundamental going on because of that whole bodiliness thing. And my research is basically going to attempt to reconcile those two notions of translation and eventually argue that the
bodily view kind of comes out on top. So I think the phenomenological view is a bit more compelling, but that is to say that, you know, the Anglo-American tradition kind of got it right in the original formulation, they just needed to go a step further.
Hayley: Yeah, that's super interesting. And I think for me, as someone who's interested in linguistics, I rarely think to tie it in with philosophy. So, I think the fact that you're creating a bridge between these seemingly different disciplines is super interesting. Is there, I guess, what was the impetus to connect those interests for you? How can your study of linguistics be strengthened and made more nuanced through the study of philosophy?
Christoper: Right, so I think my primary motivation, I mean, I was interested in language for a long time, but not explicitly the
philosophy of language. So there is like, there is kind of a distinction between, linguistics, the philosophy of language, and philosophy of linguistics. So all those things are considered like vaguely separate things. So, I was interested in linguistics from a pretty
like early stage in my academic career. In my undergraduate degree, I did
actually, didn't have that much exposure to, you know, philosophy of language stuff. I got my bachelor's degree in philosophy, but you know, I wasn't exposed to, you know, like a lot of, formal, rigorous philosophy of language stuff. But nonetheless, I was so interested in linguistics. I loved studying the Romance languages. I'm a Spanish speaker, so it was especially interesting for me to, you know, see the connections, you know, do the comparative method, do all this like classically, you know, Grimm's Law, all this, sort of classical linguistic stuff. I thought that was really fun. But my first exposure to the philosophy of language was because of this undergraduate professor I had. His name was Dr. Jeff Morrissey. And we were taking an early modern philosophy class. And, you know, we had like the general sort of curriculum. We had Descartes, we had Hobbes, we had those kinds of people. But instead of Kant, you know, usually in philosophy, Kant is considered, you know, the main sort of like modern philosopher, right? Like he was like the seminal sort of enlightenment philosopher. Instead of having Kant, he had us read an Italian philosopher, Giambattista Vico. And so Vico is, at least like this philosopher, Isaiah Berlin, he characterized Vico as kind of counter-enlightenment, which I find interesting. And so, like when I first saw that, you know, we were going to study him, I was like, oh, well, that's interesting, that's kind of a break from the norm. But, you know, fascinatingly, Vico had a lot to say about language. He had a lot to say about poetry, how language developed over time, how your epistemology develops in relation to the kind of language that you speak, how the first humans, didn't have like linguistic signification, and how we eventually came to have linguistic signification. He thought it was because of the idea of God, right? So he thought that, the first word was pa, when, some great event happens and you're like, pa, you exclaim, and then that's the first word. So hence pater or petros, you know, in Proto Indo-European, I forgot the exact root, but he argues that was the first word for God. And so I thought that was just fascinating. And I thought, well, hey, here's someone who's doing a philological sort of exploration of language. Like he's fusing philosophy, history, and, you know, linguistics all together. And he's presenting this, you know, coherent sort of theory of how mind developed and how language developed. And I was just completely awestruck. And so I worked with that professor on a
paper on Giambattista Vico's theory of mind. And ever since then, I
kind of became ingrained in philosophy and linguistics as, sort of intertwined disciplines. And so, I think linguists and philosophers have a lot to learn from each other. And I think, well, that, I don't know if that may have been the case, you know, a while ago, that still
probably was the case. And you had people like Noam Chomsky, especially who worked within both analytic philosophy and linguistics, and he was pretty famous for developing the universal grammar. But even though you had people like that, I think there should be a much broader sort of collaboration between the two disciplines, because language is just probably one of the most philosophically interesting things. It is
what allows us to articulate things in the first place, and it is what allows us to pose philosophical problems in the first place. And so, I think at least philosophy should have some degree of linguistic involvement, even if you're not going to study it. Undergraduates should be encouraged to at least take some kind of interest in language and linguistics, because, it is central to even practicing the discipline of philosophy. So I think they have a lot to learn from each other. And I think from my initial sort of exposure to linguistics as an undergraduate, through someone like Giambattista Vico, it was all the more apparent to me, that philosophy and linguistics could work together. I never had any doubts in my mind, you know, going into graduate school, like with regard to whether philosophy and linguistics could work together, because I always just assumed they were two sides of the same coin.
Hayley: I mean, I agree. I think that there is so many connections and overlap to the point where you can kind of analyse specific topics from the perspective of both, that you're not looking at one or the other, but rather together, in collaboration. When it comes to, let's say, when we're looking and analysing groups that have been marginalized or excluded, particularly in these social or linguistic settings, do you think that the study of philosophy can help understand their situations and maybe even help benefit the situations that these people are going through?
Christopher: Yes, so I actually have a published article on this. So my original sort of area of interest was epistemic injustice along the sort of Frikarian lines. So Miranda Fricker was the one who kind of pioneered this field. And I had the pleasure of meeting her in a conference during my first term at UCL. That was awesome. But yes, like I think that from a philosophical perspective, in fact, it's actually very well suited to describe and help remedy the injustices that have been posed, especially in the modern world. And so my published article also deals with phenomenology. So, I basically attempted to, like within the phenomenological framework, attempt to identify instances of phenomenological epistemic injustices and put those, or at least analyse those within a legal perspective. So, it's also a jurisprudential work. And so, I argued that, you know, there may be a failure of recognition when it comes to, like finding otherness in another person, right? Or there might be actually a higher degree of otherness when you when you have an injustice committed by someone. And so my basic theory was that there's this kind of like process of recognition that goes on phenomenologically. So, you recognize the other as the other, because they're distinct from you. So there's like a here, that's you, that's situated within your own body. And with reference to that, you know, that's serves as kind of like the anchor point for every other sort of, you know, like bodily coordinate around you. So like Merleau-Ponty would describe it sort of that way. There are lines of force, he says, that kind of pervade like your bodily space. And so other people also are permeated by those lines of force. But I think there can be some instances in which instead of appearing like other people to you, they actually appear ontologically as if they're objects. So for example, in the case of slavery, it's not just that people were treated like objects, but that they literally appeared as objects to the slave owner. So that's a kind of phenomenological claim, right? So it's not as if, you know, they were like human beings. And then, or at least from the perspective of the oppressor, right? They weren't, they didn't appear as if they were human beings, but they literally just appeared as if they were objects. right? So they were treated as such. And so that's a phenomenological claim. And so I argue that when that happens in legal situations, right?So when people are treated as objects in that way, by definition, from the perspective of the oppressor, they cannot give valuable testimony. So their epistemic capacities are completely rendered moot. Right. So because to the oppressor's eyes, they literally appear as objects. They cannot give testimony. It's as if like my table tried to give testimony. So that's essentially the mechanism I think that was going on there. And so in legal context, especially that's damning, because that means that, unless you remove those biases from within the legal system, then there's absolutely no way to remedy it. You can't give that person, more concessions, you can't just tell this person to speak up more. It literally has to do with the fact that the oppressor has a completely different perspective phenomenologically from the oppressed. And so while the oppressed is usually more open, in fact, to receiving other cultures and perspectives and epistemological items, the oppressor has closed themselves off to the oppressed. So they think that the oppressed can't give any testimony. And so the shift that has to happen has to occur on the part of the oppressor. And so I think that's what makes the problem, at least phenomenologically, like pretty intractable, right? Because you have to have a complete sort of paradigm shift in how people think of others in a legal context when it comes
to testimony. I think philosophy, because I primarily worked on this from a phenomenological perspective, but this is also an idea that had its
roots in analytic philosophy and analytic epistemology, so, I think all sides of the field have the resources and the tools necessary to identify and correct, and at least hopefully correct, these injustices that are happening because you actually need praxis in order to get those things done. But I think when it comes to the theoretical framework, I think philosophy is one of the, if not the best field to identify those kinds of injustices based on its propensity to, you know, look at epistemological issues. Like issues of, you know, how other people perceive others and how others give testimony and things like that.
Hayley: Certainly and I guess the first step to remedying the problem, the issue, is to identify it and it seems as though philosophy can act as the framework to be able to do exactly that.
Christopher: Precisely.
Hayley: That's a really harrowing account in a lot of ways. It makes you
really think about these different things that I think we take for granted. We have a lot of respect towards legal systems, but again, it all falls apart a bit when you start to consider the fact that if we're not even viewing the other person as human, but rather as an object, well, exactly, it does fall apart.
Christopher: Right.
Hayley: More generally, what do you think the impact and relevance of
your research can be and what gaps does your research specifically fill in this area? And, particularly if we take into account the uneven power
dynamics or the history of this kind of Anglocentric centring in the study of linguistics, but also philosophy.
Christopher: Right, so I originally went into my project thinking that, this is just a purely theoretical contribution. Like, it's just kind of a, it's a cool argument, it's a cool conclusion. And like, I can't be
certain that it actually works, but I can at least be certain that, at least there's some, cool like elements involved and the argument is cool. So I originally went into it just thinking that, but as I thought about it more, and at least like the practical applications of this kind of research, I realized, and I guess for some background, one of the things that Davidson claims in order to make his case for radical interpretation is the fact that, or at least the idea that the conceptual scheme, empirical content distinction has to be collapsed. So what does that mean? So the conceptual scheme, empirical content distinction is a traditional division within philosophy between your, basically like the empirical contents of the world, just like physical things in the world, like my ordinary, laptop or mouse or book or pen or whatever, and the mental structures that I use to organize those things, right? So,
some theorists would say that, you know, this pen that I'm holding in my hand, you know, it appears to me in a certain sense. It does actually exist. But in order for it to appear to me in a certain sense, my mind has to structure it so that it's intelligible to me. Otherwise, I'm just receiving, the sense data. So just like colour information or like tactile information, how it feels, or factory information, how it smells. And so I just received that kind of jumble of information. And then in my mind, it kind of organizes that for me. So like the paradigm thinker for that view is Kant. So he thinks that we receive a sensory manifold of empirical contents, which is then ordered according to our intuition. So our intuition places it in space and time. And then our understanding kind of like weaves it all together into an intelligible object for our minds to receive. And so Davidson thinks that with regard to language, that actually can't be, that's an untenable conclusion, because he argues that insofar as you have different conceptual schemes, right? So, if like different people or different cultures or different historical periods have different conceptual schemes, and if conceptual schemes are identical with language, right, because you know, you use concepts to communicate, right? Or at least if it's identical with mutually translatable sets of languages, then it's logically possible for, two groups or two entities with different conceptual schemes to have completely untranslatable languages, right? So if my conceptual scheme is completely different from yours, then that means that logically, you know, it's possible for us to have completely different, you know, languages and we can't translate any one of our concepts into yours, right? And so Davidson saw that was untenable. And so in Davidson, seeing that was untenable, he argued that there can be no such thing as an untranslatable language. Language in every instance has to be translatable. And so I was kind of thinking about the practical applications of that conclusion, and I realized like, hey, a lot of people think that conceptual relativism is the way to go, right, that we should be accepting of all these other conceptual schemes and whatnot. But Davidson has shown here, at least if you find the argument convincing, Davidson has shown here that sort of conceptual framework about thinking, for thinking about language and thinking about other people's minds is actually not a very good framework, right? And so I think that actually kind of opens us up. Right? Imagine knowing that other people's languages are accessible to you, with enough time and enough effort. And you can actually access those worlds without any sort of intractable barrier between you and them. And so I think conceptual scheme talk, you know, may have actually, you know, exacerbated, you know, things like colonial sort of sentiments because, oh, well, the Africans' conceptual schemes are so far removed from ours, and ours are so much better and much more refined. Such that, we have this sort of moral right to go ahead and civilize them. And so that's the kind of thing that I was thinking about. It seems as if conceptual schemes, by placing a barrier between, you know, group A and group B, actually serves to reinforce the differences rather than make us accept them for what they are and, you know, what language they speak, what kind of culture they have, what kind of practices they engage in. And so, I think by breaking down, this epistemological barrier, right, between the contents of the world and how we order them, we actually just receive the contents of the world. And I think that that's kind of a beautiful idea. Like you receive things for how they are. And by extension and by corollary, you receive people for how they are. So you get access to their language and their entire world without having this sort of barrier. And so, if I can establish a phenomenological argument for that same conclusion, right, if I can say that, you know, there's a kind of bodily element involved, something that we all have, because we're all embodied creatures, then, you know, that conclusion can be made even more potent, right? Imagine knowing that your ability to understand someone else or your ability to even, you know, communicate in the 1st place is predicated upon something so fundamental as your body. Like, that's very powerful. So I think, if anything, I want my research to, at least at some point, show that, that's the kind of thing that we can do just with epistemology, like just with, the kinds of philosophical tools you have at our disposal. We can, like, just based on those simple premises. And this kind of mirrors Davidson's own methodology, because he was kind of famous for
squeezing water out of stone. It's like having really grand conclusions out of very simple premises. So in that kind of spirit, it would
be really cool to be able to demonstrate that, hey, just based on these simple facts, you can have this entire world open to you and be able
to make bonds and have interactions with people that are completely different from you. And that's made possible by very simple facts about
you as a human being.
Hayley: I mean, you mentioned the word powerful there, and I think that really sums it up perfectly, that this has the potential to be so
Powerful, that it's about recognizing that there is this initial barrier almost to entry of information, but once that is overcome, then you are able to encompass so much, you're able to gain and engage with so much. And I think that that is, like you said, a really beautiful thing. As we draw to the end of this podcast, and you've touched on this a bit already, but what is next for you in regards to future research or
engagement with language? Which direction are you planning to take things with your MPhil and beyond?
Christopher: So, I still want to work on issues within language. So, I am planning on carrying this research over into my MPhil, but I'm also working on some other issues within the philosophy of language. I recently had a paper for one of my courses on sociolinguistic variation. So, Ethan Nowak has a forthcoming paper sociolinguistic variations and slurs. And so he argues that, the standard theory or what he calls standard theory of the philosophy of language, which he characterizes as being characterized by, you know, propositional exchanges of information. So, a proposition is just a statement that's either true or false. So
the standard theory just deals with propositional stuff. For
example, if I say, you know, the earth is round, that's a proposition. The earth is either round or it isn't. And so the standard theory is uniquely equipped to deal with those kinds of things, right? But Nowak argues that certain sociolinguistic features, such as sociolinguistic variations, actually can't be accounted for by the standard theory. And he argues that in order to account for those kinds of variations,
you needed like an extra layer. So, he says that you need metadata, right? So metadata is, just generally in information science, it's data about data, right? Hence the Greek prefix. And so metadata in language is just, you know, data about the lexical, the lexical items in a language, And so for example, the word cat, I use this in my paper, the word cat has, you know, a specific meaning, refers to a kind of feline mammal within a certain, you know, genus or a certain family of, I don't know my taxonomy. But a cat is a certain, species of animal. But there's also metadata associated with the word cat. So like how many people use it, how many times it's used, you know, in which situations the word is used, and things of that sort. And so, Noak argues that sort of, you know, that different sort of realm of language that pertains to metadata can't be accounted for by the standard theory. But then, you know, in my paper, I pose the question, well, if metadata is still a type of data at the end of the day, what says it still can't be subsumed into the framework of the standard theory? Like what if metadata is just comprised of that propositional information? And, Nowak is actually, just prolonging the inevitable, subsuming everything into propositional descriptors, right? And so in that paper, I asked that question. And, I plan on carrying that research over. Like, I am interested in things like sociolinguistic variation, you know, how the same sort of phrase or what we call extensional equivalency, like things that mean the same thing, but that are expressed differently, right? So for example, you know, I can say, I haven't seen Greg today, but I can also say I ain't seen Greg today, in some Southern dialects of the United States, you might say that. What difference is there exactly, if there is any, between those phrases? Because one seems to convey a different sense than the other, even though they mean the same thing, right? And so that kind of relationship is very intriguing. And although I don't think it'll be like my main focus, because I still want my main focus to be the sort of, Davidsonian, this Davidson, Continental sort of bridging the gap project, I still am interested in, you know, these broader sort of more linguistically or like proper linguistics oriented questions, especially as they concern, you know, kind of weird instances of language use. Like poetry also is very interesting. Where does poetry stand? What distinguishes poetry from prose in some instances? Or, like what distinguishes music from poetry?
Because I don't think there's that many differences between them. So those kinds of like incidental questions, I think could probably be, you know, like wrapped together in some sort of substantial research topic. I'm not sure what that might be. But those kinds of questions I
could see myself working on in the future.
Hayley: That's super interesting too, because it almost looks at the
non-standard forms of a single language rather than translating between different languages, looking, delving within one language and deciding, well, what is the standard form? What are deviations from it? And defining those different characteristics. I mean, super interesting all around. And on that note, thank you so much for joining us today,
Christopher, and for giving us an insight into your fascinating research. I'm really looking forward to hear what papers are to come and what
research you do next. And yeah, you can find the platform for linguistic and epistemic justice on the SSEES website and stay for more episodes of the podcast coming soon.