My guest is Kapitolina Fedorova, a professor of Russian Studies from Tallinn University, a specialist in sociolinguistics. Yes, it is exactly that: two women speaking English with an accent discuss how we/they are perceived from the outside.

Doing this for ourselves and for everybody out there communicating in their non-native language. There’s some bad news: accent does matter and good news - we, humans, can reflect upon our own perceptions.

We discuss accents and languages hierarchy, the hidden perception biases and the open prejudice and whether moral judgment based on the language abilities helps us get along with different people or ourselves.

And also:

 * Who speaks a better language - women or men?
 * Can your pronunciation be too good for an occasion?
 * Is cooing around baby’s toesy-woesies actually stupid? (Fat spoiler in case you don’t have time to listen - NO. This is a part of a very fine-tuned mechanism for language learning, never laugh at a babbling parent)

If you’ve got this far, please drop me a line at beholdtheduckpodcast@gmail.com - I’ll be happy to hear from you!

Speaking and sounding foreign: the sociolinguistic reality of accents

Behold the duck.
It does not cluck.
A cluck it lacks.
It quacks.

I am a linguist and an anthropologist interested in clucking and quacking, talking teapots, smiling robots, babbling kids and all things communication, language and conversation - so this is what this podcast is about. Also it's about the modern technologies that facilitate our efforts to reach out to other humans (or non-humans, or whatever).