The Strategic Linguist Podcast

At some point, someone told you to stop hedging.
Maybe it was feedback after a presentation. Maybe it was a manager preparing you for a senior stakeholder meeting, or a coach working on executive presence, or a well-meaning colleague who noticed that you kept softening your statements before you made them. The advice probably felt consistent across whoever gave it: drop the I thinks. Speak declaratively. Don’t qualify everything. Project certainty.
Most people who receive this advice take it. They work on it. They monitor themselves in meetings, catch themselves before they hedge, and gradually train the qualifiers out of their speech. Some of them get promoted. The advice appears to have worked.
It is worth asking, though, what that advice was actually measuring — and what it was claiming to improve.
What Hedging Is (1.25)
Not All Hedging Is The Same (5.18)
What The Modals are Actually Doing (9.51)
Three Things We Collapsed into One (13.07)
The Quality Maxim (16.47)
Discourse Markers (19.01)
The Information Gap (24.17)
What The Standard is Measuring (27.04)
The question is not whether you hedge too much and whether you should stop. It is what information disappears when the hedging does stop — and what it means that we have built environments in which that disappearance is not only tolerated but rewarded.
Next in this series: why hedging is often not about epistemic uncertainty at all — but about reading a room, navigating a hierarchy, and the rational decision to protect your face before you protect your point.



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Thank you Jen Benford, Mother Hood, Claire Machado, Stephen Scheidell, and many others for tuning into my live video with Anna | how to boss AI and Cristina!
Accent, Identity, and the Cost of Linguistic Performance
With Anna from Anna | how to boss AI and Cristina from Cristina
This week I sat down with Anna and Cristina — two non-native English speakers working in professional environments — to talk about something the research names but rarely makes personal: what it actually costs to perform your language at work every day.
We covered a few things.
The invisible tax. The monitoring, adjusting, and self-editing that non-native speakers do constantly — often invisibly to the people around them..
Why the system produces this. What linguistics calls prestige dialect bias, indexicality, and linguistic capital — kept brief, because the point is what it does to people, not what it’s called.
AI as an accessibility tool. Anna and Cristina’s argument — which I find persuasive — is that AI isn’t just a productivity tool for non-native speakers. It’s an accessibility tool. That reframe matters. So does the question it opens up: whose standard is AI helping people conform to? The concept of slowing down and taking control of how we interact was very much a reflection of us all being BIG fans of #SlowAI Dr Sam Illingworth
The recording is above. Anna and Cristina’s original piece is linked below — it’s worth reading alongside.


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There’s a good chance someone, at some point, stood in front of you with a PowerPoint slide and declared with absolute confidence:
“93% of all communication is nonverbal.”
What Mehrabian Actually Said (01.55)
The Slide Always Wins (06.08)
What the Misquote Actually Taught People (10.35)
What Linguistics Actually Says (13.24)
The 38% Problem (16.13)
Two Stories Running at Once (19.48)
The World This Creates (25.13)
Let’s Start Again (29.27)
And when you see the pie chart - because you will see the pie chart - remember that the man whose name is on it spent decades trying to correct it, on a website that didn’t travel, in a format that didn’t spread, with caveats that didn’t fit on a slide.
The correction was always there. The format just couldn’t carry it.



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Welcome to my second episode of Linguistic Unscripted where I go off script and discuss topics from my posts that didn’t quite fit on the page. Today, we’re talking about accents.
I talk about my experiences in my phonetics and phonology classes, why I love accents and a defining moment in my teaching career teaching accent reduction at call centres in Sri Lanka.
We get into some interesting consonents in the phonemic chart (see below). Lori does a fantastic job at recording how some of these sounds come together (it’s way more complicated than you’d think) as well as how phonemes, intonation and word stress creates accents. Meow Factor by Edith is the real expert here as a dialectologist - I hope she will forgive me for my aging knowledge!
I use two of my favourite Bollywood actresses to explain how code switching works, how you’re often made to choose who you are depending on who you’re talking to - and how much criticism comes with it. Both beautiful, famous women, have been harassed and hounded online for their accents.
Speakers face the authenticity paradox: maintain your accent and risk professional marginalisation, or modify it and face accusations of inauthenticity, of abandoning your roots, of “talking white” or “putting on airs.” For many, there is no comfortable middle ground, only a series of calculated choices about which version of yourself to present in which context, knowing that each choice carries consequences for how you’re perceived both professionally and within your own community.

Videos about Priyanka Chopra’s accent in the media
Videos about Deepika Pudokone’s accent in the media
^^ Fahah Khan, the director for Deepika’s debut in Om Shanti Om explaing in an interview how she didn’t like Deepika’s south Indian accent and listened to her audition tape with the sound off because she was “disturbed” by her voice 😳
These complexities reveal that accent isn’t simply something speakers “have” - it’s something they perform, negotiate, and strategically deploy. The question isn’t whether people can or should change their accents. The question is why some accents require changing in the first place, and what it costs individuals to constantly navigate between linguistic authenticity and professional acceptance. The burden of adaptation falls disproportionately on those whose voices already carry less institutional power, creating yet another invisible tax on belonging.
With AI, there is a way for us to include identity and language and accents without appropriating or flattening language to reduce it to something that is “accessible” in some ways but aligned to the majority in its essence.
For me, language is about expressing yourself, in the ways you can preserve who you are, regardless of how you sound what you say and where youre from.
These two use cases show how accents are so fluid, misunderstood but above all - apart of who we are.


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A note before we begin: This piece examines how linguistic authority operates in online platforms, with particular focus on Substack as a case study. It draws on sociolinguistic research into computer-mediated communication, stance, and algorithmic systems. The analysis focuses on specific patterns rather than offering comprehensive coverage of all digital linguistic phenomena.
I also want to make clear (because words matter) that there is an important distinction and difference between authority - what I talk about in this series - and trust. Building trust online is a very different piece to what is here.
Authority may command attention; trust has to be earned.
When you publish on Substack, your authority doesn’t come from your voice, your office, or the institution listed on your business card. There’s no accent to mark your class background, no pitch to signal your gender, no physical presence to command attention. Yet somehow, certain writers dominate the conversation while others remain invisible, regardless of the quality of their ideas.
Online, authority gets constructed through language choices, platform mechanics, and algorithmic systems that amplify some voices while silencing others. The performance of credibility has replaced the presumption of authority, and the rules of this performance favor particular linguistic styles while marginalising others.
If accent marks the body in offline interaction, online language marks position, and on platforms like Substack, where writers compete for attention in an oversaturated information economy, understanding how linguistic authority operates has never been more critical.
It’s also not so straight-forward, as we’ll see. There’s a lot of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” moments that come with navigating authentic communication online where we try to be the same person IRL as we do online. Digital platforms haven't eliminated hierarchies of voice and authority, they've relocated them from embodied markers (like accent, institutional position) to linguistic performance and algorithmic reward systems.
Until we confront how these systems privilege particular voices, we'll keep replicating offline hierarchies in digital spaces with new mechanisms and justifications.
From Embodied to Discursive Authority (3.42)
How Substack’s Design Shapes Authority (15.08)
Stance, Voice, and the Performance of Credibility (20.46)
Algorithms as Linguistic Gatekeepers (23.51)
Who Gets Heard—and Who Doesn’t (26.43)
Beyond Substack: Patterns Across Platforms (29.42)
The Substack Specific: What Makes This Platform Different (32.01)
What This Means for Writers (and Readers) (35.30)
The Question of Confidence (38.07)



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