Behind The Language featuring Dr Edith Podovnik

A monthly conversation with the linguists of Substack.

The Strategic Linguist and Furensic Linguist Edith

Jun 24, 2026

Welcome to the first in this series. The first Edith-tion, as it were

I found Edith on Substack in the first few weeks I started. I was so excited to see another linguist outside of grad school, writing about linguistics on Substack so other people could learn about what we were clearly both passionate about.

Since then, Edith has been the first person to like any of my notes and posts nearly every time, and if you read my post yesterday on my One Year Anniversary reflections you’ll know that meant a lot. Her support is something I truly cherish. She’s been such a consistent source of encouragement.

She talks about cats, I talk about power, but we both talk about the analysis of language. I cannot wait to introduce you to Edith’s Behind the Language interview.

Who is Furensic Linguist Edith?

I love languages and I love cats. Combine those two loves and you’ll get me: a linguist who analyses cat-inspired online language variation.

In my Substack, I give you language insights that are purring with cattitude to make you smile.😸 You’ll learn about language and communication through the lens of a cat lover. 😻 I have a PhD in Dialectology and am the author of “Purrieties of Language. How We Talk about Cats Online”. 🐾

My handle says “Furensic Linguist” because that’s what I am: always analysing linguistic clues especially when they are cat-related.

Question #1

Most people couldn’t define linguistics if asked. What does the field actually study, and why is that so hard to summarise in a sentence?

Linguistics is the scientific study of language, that’s the main definition. It’s about how people communicate and the aspects that are involved. As a linguist, you develop a metalinguistic awareness of language, it’s the language about language, and that is hard to understand if you have never thought about language.

There is also a common misconception of the word linguist, who is often seen as someone who knows a lot of languages. While linguists may know languages, they are actually concerned with language and how it works.

Question #2

What pulled you into linguistics specifically — and was there a moment when the field stopped feeling like a subject and started feeling like a way of seeing?

I have always been interested in language and languages, especially the accents and dialects of English. At university, linguistics was part of my undergraduate degree, and I found it fascinating: the history of language and all the other aspects ranging from sounds to phrases and expressions. When I did a seminar on dialectology and sociolinguistics, I knew that I had found my calling: Listening to various accents, describing the different words and seeing the different grammatical constructions.

We hear a person’s accent and draw conclusions as to where this person is from in terms of region as well as of social standing. And that is something I can’t seem to switch off. People talk, say, on public transport, and I immediately want to analyse or categorise their way of talking.

Question #3

Your book analyses language variation through cat content online — memes, hashtags, LOLcats, pet accounts. What does that corpus reveal about how language actually works that a more conventional dataset simply wouldn’t show you?

The cat-inspired corpus shows the richness of language and how language is developing online. The language in cat-related digital spaces is so rich in linguistic features that I could give examples from it for a wide variety of linguistic fields: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics.

It’s a sociolinguistic treasure trove: People pretend to be cats and change their language accordingly. The material I collected online illustrates clearly the connection of language and identity. By using a cat dialect, which I call purrieties (purr varieties), we indicate to the others that we are cat lovers and/or are pretending to be our cats. We switch codes depending on who we are talking with and what we are talking about.

Question #4

What’s a mechanism in language that operates constantly in everyday life and that most people have no name for?

I think, it’s code-switching and register. We switch our language depending on who we are talking with and the situations we are in. People might feel that other people have a linguistic advantage because they are, let’s say, more fluent in a specific register.

Language is connected to identity. Language is identity, which is something people feel but cannot name. Identity is not fixed but created with other people in various situations all the time. Because, and this is connected to what I was saying before, we categorise and stereotype people based on the way they speak. We all do that.

Question #5

When people write as their cats online, they’re playfully performing an identity and following unwritten rules about how that language should sound. What does that tell us about how language variety forms?

There is a theory saying that, when a group of humans is large enough, speech communities will form. That happens with all the advantages (meaning is shared) and disadvantages (in-groups and out-groups).

People accommodate their speech in communication with others. That is the communication accommodation theory (usually abbreviated CAT), which says that people adapt their speech to that of their conversational partners to indicate that they share a goal: namely to make the conversation a successful one in the sense that they understand each other and that the meaning making is shared.

Question #6

What does it cost — socially, professionally, personally — when someone’s variety of language is treated as inferior to a dominant standard?

It affects your identity, which is your very being. If your language variety has an inferior status, you may automatically be seen as inferior. Again, this is the stereotyping at work. You are judged on the basis of your accent. People hear you and make snap judgements about where you are from regionally and socially without really knowing you. Especially if the dominant standard is basically a social accent as is the case in English. RP (Received Pronunciation) is a social accent indicating your higher social status and your education.

There is linguistically no reason why one language variety is worth more than another. It’s human interpretation.

Question #7

Which widely-held belief about language do you find yourself pushing back on most often, and why does it keep persisting?

I advocate for the “social equality” of accents and dialects. No accent is worth more than another. That is the dialectologist in me. In reality, people judge accents and dialects. There is also a sort of prescriptive view that the standard is the goal all people should aspire to. I am descriptive in my view: The standard is a dialect, too, just the one with the highest prestige.

What I am aiming at is that people should be accepting of their accents and see them as part of their identity.

Question #8

How has the rise of AI and large language models changed what questions your corner of the field needs to answer?

The LLMs do not take into account the language varieties. While they have been fed by large amounts of data, the data has not been diverse enough: different dialects or different situations have not been considered enough. Now what LLMs spit out is skewed and biased because of the input they have been trained on.

I would be interested in how people accommodate their language to that of the LLM and in how human-robot interaction are changing people’s way to communicate. Humans accommodate, LLMs imitate.

Question #9

LOLcat language has its own consistent grammar, vocabulary, and spelling conventions — ones that emerged spontaneously and spread globally. What does that process reveal about how language change actually happens?

Languages are living entities, they have always changed and they will continue to change. New words come into existence , words change their meaning. Grammar changes, spelling changes. It’s difficult to predict which changes will happen in language, which will stay, and so on.

LOLcat language is just one of the cat dialects that have emerged online. It depends on the community you are in which cat dialect you use. In the LOLcat community, you use LOLcat, in other communities you use meowlogisms. Linguistics refers to these communities as “communities of practice”. Each of those communities, of which many exist, develops their own community practices. I noticed different varieties on Twitter (X), Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. These were just the platforms I sampled. I am sure TikTok has its own varieties, and I noticed catstack on Substack but have not yet analysed it.

Question #10

What would change — in institutions, in public life, in how we build things — if linguistic analysis were treated as essential knowledge rather than niche expertise?

People would be more aware of how important language really is and how much of our identities are intertwined with language. People would be more aware of the forces of public discourse and its effects.

Words mean something, and words are important. People would think more about the fact that words matter. Language is more than a tool of getting things done, language is essential for humans in all its facets.