In this episode, Vera Gheno, noted Italian sociolinguist and public intellectual best known for her work on language and gender joins our host Matt Absalom to have a wide-ranging discussion that starts with Italian music and ends with the "death of alphabetical order" in the digital age.

In this series, Matt's Chitchats, part of The Secret Life of Language, our host Matt Absalom will talk to all sorts of different people about all sorts of different things relating to languages.

In this inaugural episode of Matt's Chitchats, Vera Gheno, begins in an unexpected place: the Italian music of the 1960s and 1970s which Vera admits to disliking, preferring English rock until her teenage daughter introduced her to the contemporary scene. They discuss how modern artists like Mahmood and Ghali are challenging the "purity" of the language by mixing Italian with Arabic and street slang, stretching grammar to its limits in ways that fascinate her as a linguist .

This leads to a deeper discussion on the history of Italian unity. Vera reminds us that Italian is a relatively young "language of culture" , noting that even literary giant Alessandro Manzoni spoke French with his friends, and that it took television to truly unify the language across the peninsula. We discuss the lingering effects of dubbing on Italian society, specifically how it has created an artificial or "constructed" Italian that differs significantly from the language people actually speak in their daily lives.

Finally, we touch on how technology is reshaping our cognitive habits. From the "death of the album" to the algorithmic discovery of K-Pop, we look at what happens when we stop browsing. Vera shares a striking observation from her work with university students: the loss of "alphabetical order" as a mental tool, simply because digital search bars have made the need to organise bibliographies or scan record shelves obsolete.

Matt's Chitchats is a mini-series of The Secret Life of Language, a podcast from the University of Melbourne’s School of Languages and Linguistics. The series is produced by Matt Absalom and Gavin Nebauer. Recorded and mixed by Gavin Nebauer at the Horwood Recording Studio, the University of Melbourne.

Music Recommendations from this episode

• tha Supreme - Bilico
• Subsonica - Radio Mogadiscio
• Mara Sattei

The Secret Life of Language is licensed under Creative Commons.