A Computational Linguist with HOPE

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In late February 2020, I found myself sitting at a table in the Interacting Minds Center with a diverse group of Aarhus University researchers discussing how to research the social and behavioural aspects of the emerging Covid-19 epidemic. The expertise of the other researchers spanned media and information studies, anthropology and ethnography, religious studies, political science, and computer science. I represented linguistics. At the time, Covid-19 had not (to our knowledge) reached Denmark, and it was still at least a week before the WHO would officially designate it a global pandemic. We suspected that this virus might have significant consequences for our lives, but we could never have imagined how much and how quickly.

Just weeks later, …

Does he say he twice as often as she? Women, men and language

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Hvem sa hva? Kvinner, menn og språk” (English translation of the title: ”Who said what? Women, men and language”) by Helene Uri was published in Norway in 2018 and won the prestigious Brage Prize the same year. The book is about gender differences in language and language use, but it is just as much about the differential treatment and outright discrimination of primarily women, which most of the gender differences are a result of. The book is a mixed bag of observations, but still represents one of the best Scandinavian books on the topic.

Helene Uri (b. 1964) is a Norwegian linguist and author. In her 2008 novel “De besste blant os” (English translation of the …